Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

I don't get paid for on-call but only have to do it very rarely; less than a handful of days every 6 months. That much i can cope with. Now don't get me wrong, I still hate giving up my time for free but having seen the devastation HR can bring to families of my colleagues going through LR so close to the holiday season I am glad not to be in their position this time.

I am also based in Europe. We get €30 a day to be on call. If you are called after 6pm you get time-and-a-half. If it's before 6pm you obviously get nothing as it's part of your core hours. That's before tax which takes about half of it.

Thanks 5wre. You DO get. Completely.

It is sad so many groups are asking people for on-call duty whilke skirting official policy.

I am based in Europe. We get very generous compensation for being available on-call in my country.

Our pager duty shifts last for a week, and each team member has one three or four times a year. We get seven(!) days of PTO as compensation for each shift, effectively giving us an extra month of vacation every year.

It's blatently obvious that's Cisco's prescribed oncall policy is not employed or indeed available universally. If management are dipping into CR funds to reimburse people it must be because the can't do it the 'correct' way for one reason or another. And yes, I concur that is not right. If you are in Europe and have a contract of employment that doesn't mention having to carry a pager as a core duty but have management imposing oncall on you then you are in very shady waters. Highlighting malpractice of management to HR or upper management tiers will get up LR'd at the earliest opportunity because if you think HR are on your side then you are deluded. If getting forced into something you believe you shouldn't be and that tugs at your morals then you have a decision to make. Proceed with caution.

Follow the sun? Many of the product specialists there are only 1-2. people left. You are expected to Webex with customers in all time zone and even on weekends where the customer has a workday (e.g. Sunday in the Middle East). This week, I had calls at 06:00 and yet regularly am asked to do calls at 10pm. Most of my "family time" of 4-9pm is on calls for out of time zones. This is all just expected as part of the job, and with all the LR is increasingly being done by only one person.

@4gof - I do get it. Some teams are better than others.

I worked on one team where most everyone--the ones the manager liked--had Cisco paid cellular service and data plans and a few did not even though they were "on call". Those few had to file for re-imbursement for minute or data usage if it exceeded their plans allotment or just not use their phone.

Then I worked on a team where everyone was treated equal and they used a UCM internal number that you had to forward to whatever number you cared to be reached at and no one had Cisco paid voice/data.

But Cisco does have a formal "on-call" process where everyone (at least in the same country) is paid the same amount for on-call work. In the US, it was something like $200 for being on stand-by for the week, some other $ amount for 1-x hours of actual work, and $750 for x-14 hours of work. I routinely got the $750 per week on my on-call week.

The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not it's worth opening an HR case to be added to the on-call eligibility so you can log the hours. If a manager is asking you to work on-call and has no budget for it and won't pay you for your time, then that's an ethics violation and should be reported. But are you willing to get LR'd the next year so that your peers can get $750 a week?

My impression from the OP's question was that there was no formal on-call process and there is. When my job title got changed due to a reclassification of titles to reduce the number of titles across Cisco, our team lost our on-call eligibility and the manager had to deal with HR to fix it for us.

In the US at least, there is no employment "contract" and managers can change your job duties at a whim. I was told that I needed to do more Project Management and to pick up a particular job skill because a co-worker left the team. No where in my job description did it say project management. But, if you read the details of the pay grade that I was in, it said that I should be able to take on new tasks with minimal supervision and that meant that I could be made to do project management.

Maybe you don't get it. They are not offering the $750 even. Just be on call and your normal paycheck is your reward.

They do try to follow the sun, but some customer site issues are "so important" that they need all hands on deck, all geographies.

I thought most groups were "global". Most, if not all, of the support groups have teams at all the major sites so support follows the sun and no one has to be on-call in the middle of the night.

Most of the engineering teams I supported were split between the US and India, if not UK and JRSM too. Why can't the engineering "on-call" follow the sun too?

For $750/week, I'll deal with a wake up call or two. I get back to sleep easy and given that I barely have to do more than get out of bed to work an issue and crawl back into bed when I'm done, it's not that bad. I remember the ole days of being on call when you had to get up, get dressed, drive into work, deal with whatever issue, drive back home, get undressed and then go back to bed.

Oh the good old days. Free broadband. Free fruit and confectionary. Free sodas. [But] above all that, people were pretty content coming to work. That's the big change in last 6 years.

Yep. Those days are gone, and more people are spending more time working from home to avoid the "open" collaborative work spaces. It's too hard to work on your resume, take calls from recruiters, search job boards or other job search related activities out in the open.

I once was proud to say I worked at Cisco. Now it's one of those companies that has outgrown what made it such a success and became all about the bottom line, not necessarily about making and selling the best products. "Changing the way people live, work, play and learn" is no longer the focus of the company.

Oh the good old days. Free broadband. Free fruit and confectionary. Free sodas. Buy above all that, people were pretty content coming to work. That's the big change in last 6 years

I remember the days where your cell phone service was paid for, and for some people data too, and your ISP service was re-imbursed. Back then, I felt obligated to be "online" 24x7 and checked my email at various times during the evenings and on weekends and handled "emergencies" as I saw them.

I never had an issue being told that being "on call" didn't apply to my job title or pay grade. It was expected that I'd be on-call as an employee. When I was a red badge (contractor), I wasn't allowed to be on-call or work outside of business hours or work beyond 40 hrs, but the reality was that business hours was a loose term. However, my management made sure we stuck to 40 hrs only until we converted to employees and then the fun really started.

Once Cisco started to fully embrace the whole BYOD or Bring-Your-Own-Device to work policy, they really cut who got voice & data services paid for and also cut the ISP re-imbursement back around 2010 or earlier. Teams started getting a Cisco internal number for "on call" and had the staff forward it to whatever number they could be reached at instead of using a pager number that could be rotated between team members' Cisco-paid mobile numbers. Every $ counted, but wasn't enough.

In the good ole days, you could bill 1 hr per day for shift hand-off to cover the 20 min you spent reading the notes the previous shift prepared and the 40 min you spent preparing the notes for your hand-off. Now you're on "stand-by" all week unless you actually get called and the on-call pay dropped.

Very interesting thread! We are in the exact same boat as many of the posters. (Also in EU). Managers fobbing us off saying they are working with HR to try and improve it but they are dragging their a.sses for well over a year now with no change to contracts and managers imposing this oncall BS on everyone. People too afraid to raise against the machine as it puts a target on your back for next LR. It's actually evolving into a dictatorship. I am actually one of the unlucky ones not to get an LR this time but hopefully next time. I won't give them the satisfaction of quitting but will do some courses, take some training, polish up the CV and keep taking salary and do what I can to attract that target onto my back. I never thought this is what I would be doing at a company I used to love so much and sunk my heart into for many years but seeing colleagues I value being discarded in Q1 LR just brought home the fact that you are nothing more than a line in a spreadsheet to these guys.

Re: s-ck it up... Yeah. We were told outright to be on call, and our remuneration? Your two week paycheck. That's right. We were told we're lucky to have jobs and get paid. So be on call.

We found the "on-call" pay thing in the policies and mgmt started making excuses that it doesn't apply to our job grade, etc.

Unethical BS.

In the "old days", everyone had equity in this company, and everyone could count on getting a CAP of some sort. Being on forced on call was never a problem because we all marched to that same equity prize. And management was happy to give everyone a CAP (pretty decent too) for this kind of thing.

Now, they took the CAP away from management, and only the lucky few get equity. These lucky few, BTW, can be a pain in the a-- because they look at the rest and start complaining they are not pulling their weight. Yeah, if someone dropped a 1000 RSU award to me, I might be willing to work an odd on-call too. But that's not part of the culture anymore. It is haves and have-nots.

Agree with the OP and other comments here with the use of CR to pay for 'on-call'. It actually is unethical and should not be tolerated. Cisco have an 'on-call' remuneration process so this should be used. I think the issue becomes messy when there are contracts involved. If being 'on-call' is not called out in your contract then of course you are not obliged to do it without a new contract and proper reimbursement of your time. For Managers and Directors trying to impose this on Engineering without following proper process then shame on you, but make no mistake, any resistance will put you on the naughty list for the next round of LR's. Maybe that's what you wanted all along? 😉. If you are in the United States, and don't have a contract, then as another commenter said, you gotta s--- it up I am afraid!

Yes using CR is wrong but it is happening. The last month of a quarter frequently has no CR money left.

It is a real mess. I just can't believe what engineering has become. Such a rich company, squandering it all. Squandering the future.

That's not what Connected Recognition awards are supposed to be for and using that fund to pay people for 'on-call' is downright wrong! I'll bet the same Managers that gave out these awards also disallowed the larger awards of over $20 between peers who were more deserving of them as they needed the funds to pay for 'on-call'!! I''ll bet these awards had to be vetted by Managers for merit because Managers didn't want to "waste" the fund for what it was designed for as they needed it to pay for 'on-call'. I'll bet the fund probably didn't last the quarter either and employees were told not to make any further Connected Recognition awards until next quarter? Again, because Managers needed it to pay for 'on-call'. My final bet is that these managers who abused the system were not LR'd. Instead they most likely promoted each other.

A bit like the original poster, It's great to upskill in the new technologies of the DevOps world and I'm really enjoying it, but if I wanted a job which demanded being on call or weekend work then that's what I'd have applied for in the first place. €30 a day to be available to take a call? Who here will give up their Saturday or Sunday for €30? This is what I'm getting. I do know that rates are much better in the US but even if the pay was insulting I'd still prefer to have my weekends free. I'm not great when our newborn wakes me at 3am but when some crappy commit broke a pipeline in the middle of the night then Im not a happy boy taking that page at that hour of the day.

Welcome to devops and agile and all-things-cloud, guys

No contracts in USA, but our management has been slowly imposing this crap on us too. It starts with a holiday here or there, and then an overnight request here or there, and then it escalates. We've boycotted much of it so they have to toss their hands up. Usually some scab will take the bait and fall on the sword for us and stay up all night babysitting. I suppose they got the RSUs. I don't care. Maybe the rest of us will all get LR'd. Might be sweet relief.

You must be in Europe OP? Things are different here in the states. I even hear that you guys are more difficult to LR with all the legal bullcrap that must be attended to.

There are of course contracts. It will state the hours you are expected to work every week - typically between 37.5 and 42hrs. It will state your core hours and most likely have a line in there saying you may, on rare occasion, be required to work more than your contract hours. If there is no mention of on call responsibility or pager duty at weekends then HR and legal have to sort that out as you have basically transitioned into a completely different role from that which you were hired. Being on call does not suit a lot of people. Some people have other commitments: families, kids, sport commitments, lives! Cisco cannot and should not force anybody to do it. They certainly shouldn't fire somebody for not taking a pager if it's not in their contract of work. Not everybody is prepared to give up their weekends for a pittance, but some are more than happy to. Thats our personal choice.

The expectation from management is that everybody must sign up to this pager duty process. For the first 6 months or so there wasn't even a formal remuneration for this work and instead Managers would use peer-to-peer awards to compensate people called at unholy hours, this, a practice I find bordering on unethical, but at least people were paid.

There is a formal remuneration process for "on-call" pay. If you look in the PTO tool, there is two different options. Not having access to the tool any longer, I can't provide the exact terms, but one was for "on-call" or "stand-by". The other was for hours of actual work performed while "on-call".

If you don't see these options, then your manager has not added you & your job roll into the system as being eligible for on-call pay. I'd work with my manager to ensure that I got "Connected Recognition" for any on-call work until I got added to the system. Or you can make the formal complaint to HR that your manager is requiring you to work on-call and not enabling you to submit your hours.

As of Q1 when I was terminated, I would submit 1 hour of "stand-by" on-call, typically for Monday and that paid me x dollars for the privilege of Cisco calling me at any time of the day or night for that week. You get a flat payment of x dollars. Then, if you were called and did any work, then you would log those additional hours worked as on-call work. They paid y dollars for anywhere between 1 - 11 hrs and z dollars for anything over 11 hours. IIRC, it was $200 for a week of stand-by, $750 for 1 - x hours, and some other amount for hours greater than x. We didn't budget for anyone working over the 11? hour mark and getting over $750 per week over-time/on-call pay.

All of this has happened without any new contracts or amendments. Nowhere in existing contracts does it say you will be obliged to be on pager duty one weekend out of five etc.

Cisco is an "at will" employer. There IS NO CONTRACT. They don't have to amend anything. You can quit at any time. They can let you go at any time. For no reason on your or their part.

I know of one guy who refused to carry a pager and was LR'd in Q1.

I know of many people who were LR'd in Q1 who DID carry a pager. I have no sympathy for the guy who refused to carry the pager. S--- it up. Cisco has an on-call pay schedule documented and you can submit your hours and get paid, or not work it and hope you don't get fired. They don't have to wait for a LR to get rid of anyone who refuses to do the work asked of them.

Can Cisco do that without modifying contracts or properly compensating people?

There are no contracts, so yes, you can be asked or ordered to work on-call. However, if you work the hours, Cisco HAS to pay you. But with any "at will" employer, especially in a "right-to-work" state, if you make waves, you can be terminated with no notice.

Many times, I worked "pseudo" on-call. The on-call person may not have been able to handle an issue and I or others on our team would get called to assist. The on-call person would get on-call pay and we'd get "comp time". Or we could add the hours to our week next time we were on call.