Cisco Systems To Lay Off About 14,000 Employees, Representing 20% of Global Workforce (crn.com) 239
schwit1 writes from a report via CRN: Cisco Systems is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker's global workforce. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transitions from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. Cisco increasingly requires "different skill sets" for the "software-defined future" than it did in the past, as it pushes to capture a higher share of the addressable market and aims to boost its margins, the CRN report said citing a source familiar with the situation. "The company's headcount as of April 20, 2016, was 73,104," reports CRN. "Cutting 14,000 employees would be the single largest layoff in Cisco's 32-year history."
UPDATE 8/17/16: Cisco has reported its fourth-quarter 2016 earnings and they have exceeded analysts' expectations.
UPDATE 8/17/16: Cisco has reported its fourth-quarter 2016 earnings and they have exceeded analysts' expectations.
And when do they start training their replacements (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own. It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained. It is not the kind of place you want to make a career out of unless it is your absolute passion, and even then you will be discouraged every day by things like this.
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I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value.
I have no argument against the logistics problems with teach-everyone-to-program and college-as-a-state-service; and these are different concerns than tech field workforce turn-over.
In this case, CISCO is essentially claiming they need fewer EEs, more CS. Hardware engineers are giving way to microcode, FPGA, and firmware; they've grown and resisted rounds of lay-offs and major shifts, and now they have to batch all that up. That means huge, impressive changes of staff instead of slow rounds of sending 1
Re:And when do they start training their replaceme (Score:5, Insightful)
I've met very few EEs who couldn't also code proficiently.
I've met very few CSs who could code proficiently. The EEs / MEs I know who have the ability to code generally have a skill set similar to someone in academia. They can hack together some code to get something very specific done, but probably shouldn't be touching large scale production quality code. I don't mean that as an insult, since most software engineers can't do what EEs or CS researchers do either. But assuming you can take thousands of EEs and have them switch to being equally senior software engineers in a year or so seems silly.
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I think people are confused as to what "production quality code" actually means...
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Sometimes a parting of ways is best (Score:5, Informative)
Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software and yet we will dump money into these programs to train the next generation, and hiring H1-B workers instead.
Why do you presume they could or even would want to be trained to be software developers? Even if they could be trained (at substantial cost no doubt) that doesn't imply that they would be particularly competent. Just because someone works for a tech company doesn't mean they are an engineer. While Cisco no doubt has thousands of engineers they also have people who are accountants, marketing, sales, logistics, and every other task you can think of. It is doubtful that many of those people actually would want to become software developers.
You know these people are likely intelligent and could use the leg up to fill the gaps the company has, and instead it is just dump them on the street.
Why do you assume the company has 14,000 unfilled positions? If they are getting rid of that many people they don't have 14,000 economically valuable jobs available for them. Hiring people when you don't have a useful role for them is a one way ticket to bankruptcy. Even if Cisco wanted to train them, it usually takes YEARS to become competent in another line of work. You don't learn to be a good programmer or a good accountant or a good sales person in just 3 months.
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own.
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained
It's adorable that you think companies ever did have loyalty to workers. Companies exist to make money. If loyalty to workers will most efficiently achieve that end then they will be loyal but it's unreasonable to expect such accommodation. People can be retrained but not necessarily for jobs the company has available. Frequently it is better in the long run for both the company and the worker to part ways. If my company came to me and said "you can keep your job if you retrain yourself to be a software engineer", I'd say thanks for the offer but I'll go succeed elsewhere because I have zero interest in doing that for a living.
Re:Sometimes a parting of ways is best (Score:5, Insightful)
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college. And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40.... Again, it is the crappy attitude of the industry I am talking about, and the sad state of the code. If you are really, really passionate about coding (such as I am) you can muddle your way through it, but you have to be ultra passionate. I think every professional career requires dedication, but most have a lot more longevity and actually respect people who have been at it for a bit.
Most jobs face cost pressures (Score:3)
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college.
There are substantial efforts to replace physicians with RNs and other lower paid workers. Some appropriate, others not so much. Some physician jobs like radiology face possible competition from off shore radiologists in places like India with lower wages since that job does not require the presence of the patient.
And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...
Umm, that is a thing too. My wife works in a practice where the oldest doctor was trained in an earlier era and much of his training is not considered obsolete. And it shows in his work. Olde
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THIS!
Specialization within industries requires constant education and training on new techniques. Every Industry that has specialists will require people to keep up with their continuing education. It isn't just IT, it is any technically advanced industry.
We just need to be aware that we need to keep training our workers, if we are going to stay competitive.
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Older doctors don't always do a great job [wsj.com] of keeping up with best practices and the latest methods.
OTOH, having a competent older doc around is often a life saver. Experience counts in this field.
Same as in engineering. It's useful to have an adult in the room at times.
Age versus experience (Score:2)
OTOH, having a competent older doc around is often a life saver. Experience counts in this field.
Sometimes true, sometimes not so much. Experience only helps if it is a good practice and relevant. I've seen first hand older doctors who haven't done a good job keeping up with the state of the art in their specialty. My wife's sub-specialty didn't even exist until about 20-30 years ago. Doctors over the age of 60 do not have any special certifications or training in it and there has been considerable advancement since they received their training. I can tell you from first hand observations that not
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Again, it is the crappy attitude of the industry I am talking about, and the sad state of the code. If you are really, really passionate about coding (such as I am) you can muddle your way through it, but you have to be ultra passionate. I think every professional career requires dedication, but most have a lot more longevity and actually respect people who have been at it for a bit.
This is completely opposite of my experience in software development. I do see other areas of IT forcing older people out and being difficult places to build a life-long career, but competent software engineers are in high demand and age doesn't seem to matter a bit. Older engineers are expected to have higher levels of competence than young ones, sure, commensurate with their higher salaries, but if you can do the job there are lots of jobs available.
Maybe my perspective is skewed because I'm looking at
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Yeah, well you're missing something. Physicians typically worked into their 70's (health permitting) because they liked what they did. Now, they're out as soon as the 401K hits a number they are comfortable with. Especially in primary care it is literally decimating the ranks.
Not to feel sorry for people in the top 3%, but I tell folks the same thing that sjibe's wife is saying - if you really like it, fine. Otherwise go into being a high voltage electrician (who get to work outside with wires that don'
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Some people don't remember that Cisco started manufacturing servers several years ago after getting snubbed on costs by a certain large maker of servers and cancelling their partnership.
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While Cisco no doubt has thousands of engineers they also have people who are accountants, marketing, sales, logistics, and every other task you can think of.
Its doubtful any of those positions would be let go because of the switch from hardware to software networking.
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You could say that about any profession.
This is an understatement. In the past 10 years we've seen the car industry up-end itself, stories of IT cuts (well this is a tech site), the finance industry imploded, primary resources are struggling due to the downturn in China, the oil price collapsed taking out that sector of resources, new regulations put pressure on international shipping, budget cuts are hitting health care, and all this together is not helping the consumer confidence which puts pressure on retail as well. Construction has always be
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It's adorable that you think companies ever did have loyalty to workers. Companies exist to make money. If loyalty to workers will most efficiently achieve that end then they will be loyal but it's unreasonable to expect such accommodation. People can be retrained but not necessarily for jobs the company has available. Frequently it is better in the long run for both the company and the worker to part ways. If my company came to me and said "you can keep your job if you retrain yourself to be a software engineer", I'd say thanks for the offer but I'll go succeed elsewhere because I have zero interest in doing that for a living.
Actually that is only true for corporations, true small businesses generally do have loyalty to their employees, its hard not to when the owner knows the employees and their families.
Small businesses aren't always loyal either (Score:2)
Actually that is only true for corporations, true small businesses generally do have loyalty to their employees, its hard not to when the owner knows the employees and their families.
I've spent the majority of my career working with small business. Sometimes the small business owners are loyal, sometimes not so much. I've seen extremes of both and everything in between. In many cases they have little choice but to be loyal because in a small company it can be hard to replace someone even if they are flawed somehow. I've also seen owners who would fire someone if they so much as looked at them cross-eyed.
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"My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling."
That's a really interesting statement. I've always looked at the medical profession as the model for a perfect employment situation:
- Physicians and to a lesser extent other health professionals have their interests protected by a very well funded lobbying group, which i
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- Physicians and to a lesser extent other health professionals have their interests protected by a very well funded lobbying group, which is way more effective than any union ever could be. There's no such thing as the H-1B or "train your replacement," for example.
I thought that this was one of the few areas where the use of H1Bs are legitimate. Usually, most doctors are unwilling to move to remote areas of the country, leaving there a deficit of good doctors. A foreign trained doctor who wants to move to the US is willing to settle in such places. Since the place in question can't get American doctors willing to move there, it's legitimate to tell the Department of Labor that H1Bs are needed. Here, the issue is not getting the people they want in the first place,
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This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own. It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all,
So, which industry can't be described with those words today?
Some industry that shows loyalty to workers long-term? Doesn't suffer from ageism?
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Nothing about your post is insightful. Should probably be modded "naive and reductive".
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Guess you're right there wanting to train your own H1B replacement for your own job.
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I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value. Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software,
According to the article: "The heavy cuts... stem from Cisco’s transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. "They need different skill sets for the software-defined future than they used to have". So, presumably, the software people are not the ones being laid off.
who probably could be retrained to work with software,
Why spend money, and time, to train office and hardware people to become beginner-level software workers when that isn't what they are interested in, instead of simply hiring software people who actually are goo
Re:And when do they start training their replaceme (Score:4, Interesting)
It is about giving people opportunities and investing in people. May sound silly to many on this board, but I firmly believe in mentoring people. Give me someone who is the best coder in the world but has a crappy attitude vs someone who wants to learn and is passionate, but maybe has some what of a way to go, and I will take the passionate one.
Re:And when do they start training their replaceme (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because it is better for company morale to at least offer re-training to those interested? Companies scream to the press about how their people are sooooo valuable, yet they do stupid things like not having a game plan for the future. If CISCO had such a game plan, they should have been re-training starting a few years ago. If they had one and didn't offer retraining, I think that says just about everything an employee there needs to know about how management feels about them. If they didn't have such a gam
Re:And when do they start training their replaceme (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:And when do they start training their replaceme (Score:5, Interesting)
Because you still aren't wrapping your head around who they are teaching to code.
I am a mechanical engineer... that codes more or less full time for a living. I have had 3 actual classes in code: Matlab, Java and C/C++. My actual job isn't writing code it's something completely unrelated, code is just the tool I pick to do my job. Some people use Excel but that chokes on high sample rate data.
Do I do the proper O(n) format for getting something done? Nope. Is my program the most optimized best in the world? Nope. Would I consider 99% of what I write production code? Absolutely not. But like a good engineer I use my hammer to pound anything that looks like a nail and for the most part it works.
Dumping money into schools to train kids to code isn't going to lead to more salaried programmers. It's going to lead to more Engineers that can write code, more Doctors that can write code, more Accountants[0] that can code. Because when I need something coded engineering wise it's easier to teach an engineer to code than to teach a software tech worker engineering.
Tech workers need to understand that their 'profession' like every other profession that came before it is going to get simplified and handed off at a lower level to the next generation.
[0]. There are companies out there with accounting departments being run by Janice in accounting manually sorting Excel lists and manually removing duplicates. Manually doing table lookups. This generation is set to retire and for the next generation of accountants to be able to step up and cover her job and theirs they're going to have to code. No, they don't need a full blown programmer.
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As a corporation, it is a very very bad idea to let people do coding here and there.
Actually we can just show the opposite. I was in the same position and what I did? Fixed the code, because I know how. Experts who can do little quickly become quite useless in a world where people need to be able to solve a bit of everything.
Every company somewhere has some vb script doing something, or a complicated excel spreadsheet. The answer is not to ban it because the result of that is either a large expense for a very expensive piece of software (sledge hammer to hit a construction nail into a wood
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If it looks stupid but it works, it's not stupid.
Look at how engineering has developed over the last 200 years. People lost arms to early automation in farm fields. Some bad code is a pittance to what used to be actually dangerous.
Who do you want to certify the reliability of engine components on your 747?
I'll let the engineers make the simulink and the Simulink can certify itself for flight.
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This is the real tech world folks.
Not quite. For every announced layoff by a tech company, many other tech companies are quietly hiring. Unemployment in Silicon Valley is very low these days.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained.
Loyalty went out the door a long time ago. When I get a new job, I start thinking about my next job and what training I will need to acquire on my own. As a tech professional, you need to actively manage your career.
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It really doesn't matter how hard the US tries to educate its up and coming workers, or existing workers.
The decision will continue to be made by management to off shore those jobs.
People today who want a long term career today need to look at things that can't be off shored like health care, the building trades, etc;
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Hint: nobody has a 'career' - all jobs suck, anyone who says they love their job is lying
Speak for yourself. Some of us are wired differently, and it has to do more with who we are than what our current working environment is.
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Yeah, no shit.
I love my current job. No micromanaging, total flexibility on how or what I code, very little pressure to resolve issues and a CEO that I routinely see in the warehouse helping out the employees when it gets busy out there.
It's made me work harder to get stuff done simply because we're a team fixed on growing the company. This is the fist job in the past couple of decades that I haven't taken a sick day and haven't even taken a vacation day yet in two years.
I am a lot more productive here, and
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Try smaller businesses. The place I'm working at has about ten office people, 15 - 60 warehouse people (depending on need).
And, the best part is they hire older folks rather than younger. the pay is better than what I was earning at the last Corp i was working at (and there all of the developers were stuck in a cube farm in the basement next to the maintenance area).
I drove past this place for almost 15 years never knowing that I could of been working here instead of at the big corp job I had less than half
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Hint: nobody has a 'career' - all jobs suck, anyone who says they love their job is lying. There is no "follow your dream", there is no ABC-afternoon-special. People work a job or a series of jobs, until they can retire on whatever they've scraped together.
Your level of pessimism is so excessive that you might want to seek professional help. I'm sure there are local therapists, psychiatrists, and/or clergy who would love to talk to you about your personal issues.
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He (or she) really sounds like someone who got a degree in something they didn't like because they thought they could make money, but found that without the passion for the field it was always a "chore" to do anything.
My job is not always wine and roses, and it's very difficult and taxing at times, but it's also very rewarding ultimately, and I do get the respect of my coworkers and management (and it's typically mutual). We make a great product, and I'm often excited to get busy on the next project.
Maintenance (Score:2, Informative)
Maybe their balance sheet is being affected by the droves of people who are refusing to pay 30-40% of the device cost per year for Smartnet maintenance.
Poor management (Score:5, Interesting)
Quotes: Cisco is "a maze of barely related tech business"... "Aside from its network core, it has operations in data center management, video hardware and software, "collaboration" products, cloud computing and low-tech WiFi products. All of it together seems too much with too little connection."
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Absolutely. Cisco has not kept up with the times. The Smartnet and overall licensing costs are ridiculous. There have been a lot of places that were Cisco only who have started replacing the 29xx series switches or 65xx series concentrators to much cheaper alternatives. In fact, I'm working on a proposal for a client to do just that and get quotes from other vendors to replace their core gear from Cisco to something else.
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Don't worry, they will make it up in volume..
Personally, I think they are loosing their shirts to two things. 1. There is lots of competition now in this area, Cisco used to be just about the only game in town and that's driving equipment and support costs down. 2. Their core competency of Routing and Switching has seen very little technical innovation over the last decade, so people are not needing to upgrade their equipment. Really, for most desktops 100BaseT is plenty fast enough. There has been some
Good! (Score:2)
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This has been true for years.
Compare a PIX (now ASA I guess) to a WatchGuard or a SonicWALL and you quickly see how other vendors have been eating Cisco's lunch for a while now.
When a used to do SOHO to medium size business support we dropped Cisco from our quotes in favor of Adtran for all router and switch requirements. Their support was top notch and their CLI was very similar to IOS syntax.
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Enterprise class gear from Cisco is typically very robust. We've pulled gear out that has been running
for nearly TWENTY YEARS non-stop. Does it go down ? Sure it does. Nothing's perfect. But in a
network of ~8-10k devices, the number of them that die on us is pretty low. We have far more issues
with our non-Cisco products than anything else.
As a business, you probably shouldn't be running anything other than Enterprise Class gear anyway.
Trying to cut costs by buying cheaper products will always bite you
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I don't know anything about networks of that size. Our is less than 100 devices, so spending many thousands on Cisco stuff doesn't make sense. Whatever level the product is, it should work. From our experience, none of the low-end Cisco works as advertised. IPSec VPN tunnels drop randomly. WAN connections drop randomly. SSL not handled correctly. VPN's occasionally handle through-traffic correctly. We've seen this consistent level of inconsistency across more than half a dozen Cisco routers (all of the Cisco routers we've ever used). We replaced ours with routers from Draytek, and have been very happy.
One of the things to remember is that the larger the company, the larger the discount rates that they can negotiate. This can bring Crisco pricing more inline with third-party options. However, for smaller companies, it definitely makes sense to look at other vendors.
As for IPSec, SSL, etc. I have never experienced problems with Cisco routers. Usually IPSec tunnel issues can be traced to problems with MTU settings, either locally or somewhere in the network path.
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In terms of reliability, these products all have a 3-ish start rating on most web
And in other news (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And in other news (Score:4, Interesting)
14,000 new votes for Trump.
A few weeks ago this thought may have scared me. Right now, well all of CISCO could go under and it won't change Trump's chances.
Don't mess with war vets. They are sacred, and the polling results show that quite clearly.
Ouch! (Score:2)
So now we buy hardware from....? (Score:3)
From this, I'm assuming that all of Cisco's hardware that's not been EOLed is upgradable, right? And so all they need are people who can upgrade their firmware. Need an IPv6 upgrade for some old router that doesn't have it? Ready to go, right? Need IPv6 acceleration on the router? No need to replace it, just reburn some FPGAs?
Or does Cisco think that this market can go to the likes of Juniper, Brocade & Foundry, and that they need to phase themselves into the Infrastructure Outsourcing business?
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Huwei. MAYBE with Cisco SDN control if Cisco play it perfectly.
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From this, I'm assuming that all of Cisco's hardware that's not been EOLed is upgradable, right? And so all they need are people who can upgrade their firmware. Need an IPv6 upgrade for some old router that doesn't have it? Ready to go, right? Need IPv6 acceleration on the router? No need to replace it, just reburn some FPGAs?
Or does Cisco think that this market can go to the likes of Juniper, Brocade & Foundry, and that they need to phase themselves into the Infrastructure Outsourcing business?
Cisco has been moving to VM's recently. You can run pretty much anything Cisco in a VM now. Its sloppy and the performance is often terrible but you can do it. Even their routers can be VM's.
The hardware isn't going away though. You can still get their hardware and the X series units are modular and can be upgraded or new modules added for additional functionality. Such as integrated IPS via their Snort aquisition.
My guess is most of these lay offs will be people from their recent aquisitions.
Ok no H1-B's for 4 years then (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok no H1-B's for 4 years then
5 kids (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good job NSA!!!! Make everyone fear CISCO! (Score:5, Informative)
How much global CISCO market share has been lost due to fear of NSA backdoors?
Retrain them, don't trash them! (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies need to invest in their workers, not just dump them whenever they change direction. One of the reasons I work where I do, and get paid slightly less than market rate, is that they don't just throw people out. Layoffs are major events and don't happen often -- if a project/division goes away, the company just finds something else to place the technical workers on. I know that can change the second some hotshot MBA comes in and sees numbers on his spreadsheets that he doesn't like...but the work environment is good for now. Bottom line is that there are plenty of people over 40 who are totally retrainable and an asset to any company. Some sort of company loyalty needs to return to both sides of the employer/employee equation. Otherwise we're going to end up not being able to plan our lives around having stable employment. I'd even be in favor of a European style model where the company has to commit to an extended severance at the time of hire. Make companies think hard about who they hire, and make it expensive to just dump them whenever they want to juice the stock price.
I hate seeing big companies do this -- it really is the MBAs looking for a short term cash infusion the only way they know how. I saw an interesting post further up the thread saying essentially the MBAs are doing what's best for the company -- Anyone who has worked in a large company long enough sees how important internal tribal knowledge is. They're going to dump these 14,000 people, replace them with offshore or H-1B software developers to write SDN software, and lose all of this knowledge in the process. I've seen it happen many times working for large companies -- the offshore guys or H-1Bs come in, the "official" documentation on a process is 100% factually correct, but they have a very hard time making it work. So, it's not what's best for the company in the long run -- but I guess public companies don't care about the long run anyway.
I'm by no means entrepreneurial, but if I were I'd start a company called "Greybeards, Inc." or similar and go head to head with the offshore body shops, selling quality rather than quantity. It seems like a great business model - hire seasoned engineers/developers who have made all their mistakes, and sell fewer (or more higher-value) consulting hours and much lower chance of having to re-write everything 5 times before it works. If it were run like a partnership without execs getting paid millions, it could definitely work even with the labor cost difference. I've worked in systems integration for a long time, so I've seen tons of body shop monstrosities that go millions over budget and have to be scrapped and redone over and over because the offshore company doesn't understand the business or take the time to learn about it.
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Companies need to invest in their workers, not just dump them whenever they change direction.
Not at Cisco. I worked there for nine months before I got caught up in the 2013 layoff. My boss told me he could train me but it would be a waste of his time since I could leave Cisco and get a better paying job at a competitor. Ironically, because of the lack of training, many employees train themselves in Cisco certifications and get a better paying job at a competitor.
Missing the point (Score:2)
I do wonder how many US workers phased-out because of healthcare costs still praise Jesus that America doesn't have nationalized health insurance.
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:5, Insightful)
This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price.
Sometimes a reduction in force is totally necessary. I worked for a company that halved it's work force between 2000 and 2005 and just missed getting de-listed from the exchange by 2 days because the stock price was too low. In this case, the MBA's where right and let half the work force walk because the other option was everybody walking when the creditors closed us down.
Now, I don't like the "bean counter" types any more than the next technically focused guy, but they are a necessary evil. You need somebody watching the money stacks to keep your paycheck from bouncing and making sure the company has the cash to pay the electric bill and rent. So, don't bad mouth them too much. They may not know very much about what you do, but I'm confident you don't know much about what they do either.
Reminds me of an old Dilbert... Where the PHB was coming up with a project plan. "I have to start with some assumptions.... So, I'll assume anything I don't understand is easy." He presents his project plan to Dilbert and it starts "Design a database to maintain the exact location of every object in the universe: Time allotted 2 hours"....
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:4, Insightful)
The very first post on any thread about tech industry layoffs must contain "MBA". I'm glad this thread did not disappoint.
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:4, Insightful)
And why are you so incompetent that you can't take people who already know how the company works and retrain them so that instead of shrinking the company, you create new profit centers?
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Incompetent has zero to do with that. If you have excess people you have excess people. New profit centres don't magic themselves, if they did then the correct response would be to magic and then hire more people, not wait until one of your divisions is struggling.
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Why do you need 70,000 people at a company like that?
I'm not sure you quite realise just how big CISCO is, just how much they do, and just how many people are required outside of core engineering to make a company work.
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The database design of that can easily be done in 2 hours. Filling that sucker, on the other hand...
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"Sometimes a reduction in force is totally necessary. I worked for a company that halved it's work force between 2000 and 2005 and just missed getting de-listed from the exchange by 2 days because the stock price was too low. In this case, the MBA's where right and let half the work force walk because the other option was everybody walking when the creditors closed us down. "
That's different. No one is going to close down Cisco. When you get big enough and are still providing an essential service, there's n
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I have is when the MBAs, who have absolutely no idea how the business they're running works, look at spreadsheets and say, "Oh, we don't need these people. ... without ... a good look at what those "expensive" workers are actually doing.
I almost got laid off last year simply because I was the most expensive person on the team -- even *after* my project manager even told the program manager that I had written 80% of the code. The only thing that saved me was the realization that I also charged time to another project - so was actually less expensive to the first project.
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I almost got laid off last year simply because I was the most expensive person on the team
If you can measure it, you can mismanage it.
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Why can't these 14,000 people be trained to write SDN software instead of designing mainboards for hardware?
Dilbert has the answer. [dilbert.com]
It amuses the hell out of me that this came up in the same search I did for "dilbert unclean" link [dilbert.com] that is oddly applicable as well.
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Yes but let's remember, Cisco has $60 billion cash on hand. That's "we could shut down the company for 10 years and pay everyone their full salary + benefits + annual raises & promotions" territory.
Layoffs are sometimes necessary (Score:3)
This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price.
Or it's an actual business necessity to keep the company in good shape going forward. Sometimes layoffs are a business necessity. If Cisco is getting out of a line of business or the strategic direction has changed it would be idiotic to keep the people employed despite having nothing economically useful for them to do.
Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
Announcing mass layoffs is generally a very poor way to accomplish that. It usually results in short term reductions in profits, a near term drop in stock price, and substantial productivi
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> Announcing mass layoffs is generally a very poor way to accomplish that. It usually results in short term reductions in profits
That's not true at all. The work that those people did will generate revenue for quarters to come but they no longer have to be paid. That's what makes layoffs so attractive to companies. The boost to the bottom line is immediate and the consequences are not.
Re: Layoffs are sometimes necessary (Score:3)
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Except for severance payments to laid off workers.
As a contractor who got laid off from Cisco in 2013, the only thing I got was a two-week notice. My boss wasn't thrilled that I spent those remaining two weeks having phone interviews with recruiters.
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Contractors don't get severance or benefits (and are generally compensated better), but employees most definitely do (particularly at companies like Cisco).
As a contractor at Cisco, I got benefits (health/dental/vision/401k) but no severance or stock options. Most contracting jobs these days offer benefits.
Re:Good news for their stock (Score:4, Informative)
Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
When I got laid off from Cisco in 2013, the CEO got a 60% raise despite having a lousy fiscal year. Rumor had it among the workers that he needed a new yacht to keep up with the other CEOs.
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That didn't work very well. Currently, CSCO 30.715 -0.405 (-1.3%). It was down almost 2.5% at one point. NASDAQ composite is only down 0.18%
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Should make a bunch of new, hungry companies to compete with Cisco.
That's the way capitalism is supposed to work, yes. But in real life, a company only lets people go when they know the barrier to entry is too great for it to come back and hurt them much. In a real capitalist environment, Cisco would be done right now and forced to sell the pieces off to those who are interested in building a new company to pick it back up.
Is it race or class you're bitching about? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've seen trailer parks full of whites far worse than almost any black ghetto I've come across and I'm from NYC and have been to LA, New Orleans and others.
You're clearly complaining about a type of people and supposing that given your personal experience that it is entirely related to skin color or possibly even religion.
I live in an upper class neighborhood on the opposite side of a river from a predominantly immigrant neighborhood. The closer you get to my neighborhood, the higher the social class of the
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The cloud guys develop and standardize their own hardware (contracted to network gear manufacturers) that works well with their infrastructure management software. Network gear manufacturers are relegated to makers of dumb hardware.
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People who build real big data centers are usually too smart to buy Cisco. For the last 10 years, people buy Cisco for the name, not for the product. Cisco does not perform as well, they cost more, and they are harder to use than products from their competitors. They also like to do things their own ways -- which makes compatibility issues a real deal when you try to work with other vendors.
Cisco's deal was to talk to the CEOs, sell them over a nice steak and not consider tech specs. For a SMB or medium
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