As a software engineer, I just can’t take working at this place anymore. The layoff this past week put me over the edge and I’m totally over working for Cisco. Just so much disrespect from leadership. So if anyone else is in the same boat, I’m wishing you the best while polishing up your resume over the next few days. Cisco is not a serious competitor in the software space and they deserve the failure that is their business model. Acquire company, realize there are redundant roles, layoff, rinse and repeat.
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"I can’t take it anymore working in tech. It is BS."
This is exactly why I finally retired. It just wasn't fun anymore. Constant layoffs of great people has made this industry a cesspool of bad leadership.
Robbins set Cisco is on its way to the IT graveyard.
Chambers did this long before Chuck took over (stupid tablets, cameras, personal telepresence with absurd fees, etc...) All that's left is to milk the customers which Chuck has done despite engineering's inability to come up with a licensing implementation that doesn't require opening up Cisco's buggy software to the Internet and doesn't require the customer to work for free to keep feeding Cisco information they want to steal off the boxes.
No job in tech is safe, period. Learn to live with that reality. Every major tech company uses layoffs regardless of their growth. Things are worse at Cisco because it has lost any sense of technology vision and leadership. Robbins set Cisco is on its way to the IT graveyard. LRs are now a routine practice here to keep the balance sheet healthy. They carry a huge cost in terms of lost expertise and brand reputation for bright talent on the market. My 25 year old self would never join Cisco today.
last week a new hire asked me whether our jobs are safe, and since i thought this round was over i honestly said we probably are. now i feel like an a--hole.
It was covered both in the news media as well as multiple times on this website that Cisco had allocated $200M for restructuring costs this quarter as reported in the last earnings call. The fact that Cisco has many times in its past done quarterly layoffs should have also been considered.
There is life after Tasman Drive. Keep active in the industry external to Cisco as there is security in the industry and not at Cisco which conducts layoffs once / twice a year for the past twenty years. Robbins and the ELT have to be exited if the company is to have a chance to have revenue and stock growth.
Don't listen to the managers in your area on pay increase percentages and equity awards. Demand more and be prepared to exit on your own terms especially if you are male and over age 50 as you are primary for layoff.
Nope. Hoping to get a LR. I might start making comments to my boss about what I am not prepared to do to get myself LRd. Quite happy to work at Home Depot, Walmart or a gardening centre for a couple of years before I retire. 401k is good from making big payments these last few years and mortgage is gone and kids flown the nest. Just stack shelves and be rid of all the sh-t at Cisco. I can’t take it anymore working in tech. It is BS.
It’s good practice and frankly just common sense to continuously update your resume with any accomplishments and metrics even in good times without constant LR’s looming.
Stay in practice by applying for internal + external roles and interviewing for them.
Write an elevator pitch.
Prepare several cover letters geared towards different roles.
Stay up to date on certifications. Keep licenses active. Obtain new certifications.
You have to be your own best advocate. No one is going to protect you other than you.
@fbw+1nJlSrLM Sounds like the UK SED. Delightful to work for.
Well that’s great you think you know absolutely everything… @noa+1nJlSrLM
Only the lazy part-timers and those with second jobs stay at Cisco
Cisco is not a serious competitor in the software space...
I hope that Friday was your first day because this should have been obvious after looking at either the code or the output of a static analysis run for a short period of time. Do the same for code from decades ago and you'll come to the same conclusion.
Do the same for 90% of developers across all companies who only learned C and claim "C is easy!" and you'll find the same thing. There are times when you need to hyper-optimize critical hot spots but most of the time you need to work at different levels of abstraction and while C can be used to express very abstract concepts elegantly most who only use C have never learned to think in those terms.
Acquire company, realize there are redundant roles, layoff, rinse and repeat.
The fact that Cisco has been doing layoffs, sometimes quarterly, for more than two decades and acquiring for nearly three should have made this a not surprise as well.
Every round of layoffs one or two say the masses will wake up and leave Cisco. It's never happened. As long as Cisco is still generating 11 digits of revenue and worth 12 digits it's not going to happen, which it has been doing since the 1990s.
i’d love to spend the weekend fixing up my resume, but my power’s been out since thursday.
what am i worried about? not whether i get my power back, but whether i survive Q1 or even next week.
as soon as my power’s back i’m going to start looking, and i know the rest of my team is feeling the pressure, so i’ll probably take others with me.
last week a new hire asked me whether our jobs are safe, and since i thought this round was over i honestly said we probably are. now i feel like an a--hole.