Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

All your jobs are all going to ONE country, guess where? 75% of H1Bs are from there, Guess where gain?

Age discrimination is common in high tech industry. If you are 50 or above, you have to prove that you are good and why you are qualified for the senior position and pay. Cisco reinvent itself through acquisition since the early day. Reinvent inside is sort of incremental thing, it only works for existing products. Take a look of Cisco internal award, it is a joke with tons of cheerleaders. It is the reason why Cisco cloud fails in the past.. It doesn't have the right talents to build it. What Cisco should do is a deep cleanup and rehire the right talents. A small 9% cut is not enough. It should be 30% and more, especially the management layers. Too many VP will only create more politics, it won't help the customer or generate more revenue. Transition or transformation of Cisco is painful, just like cancer cell, you better do a one deep cleaning, cut it many times won't work.

IF offered OCP and signed, can we receive unemployment in california?

Layed off today, no warning, midwest :(

Cisco lie. I have written evidence of Cisco execs lying during a legal process, HR execs, making serious allegations against an employee without any evidence, breaches of personal data, discrimination. I accept companies need to change but the methods used by Cisco of victimisation are abhorrent. What makes it worse is Cisco preach their ethics when Their actions are actually the opposite and indeed are even prepared not to admit anything and fail in their duty of care. Cisco please feel free to comment and allow me to present the evidence

I have just been made redundant after 5 years, the micro manager based off shore made every effort to smite my productivity, super customer service & great track record, even after making a complaint about his immaturity & bullying they chose not to act, but instead I was rewarded with redundancy. Middle management at Cisco is a shocker. Applying for a new role internally is a nightmare they keep employing their mates.

The problem with the LR, the 'problem child' remains at Cisco while the talented ones take the package. The people accepted the package because they can easily find better jobs elsewhere. It's those who refuse to leave that need to get rid of so Cisco has hope.
The people who are there for a long time, who refuse to change or get updated, need to be removed from management positions.

20% could easily be taken from middle management.

Or better upper middle management. Flatten out the org chart.

I would hold out on signing the LR contracts. There is no reason to take the lowball offer they give, the longer you hold out the better the counter offer will be.

You obviously don't work at Cisco or work in an "at will" state. There are no counter offers, much less better ones.

Usually, you get LR'd and it's final. This year they're offering to let people voluntarily leave with a better offer and will force you out with a worse package if you didn't voluntarily leave. It's a PR stunt to say we tried to take care of people by letting them choose to go and get better offers so we wouldn't have to suddenly force as many people out.

Cisco is just like HPE. It is heading south. The last few years I see many of the top engineers and even directors or VPs leaving for Google , Amazon and many other companies. Where they enjoy higher pay (at least no pay cut or layoff) and higher job satisfaction. Folk keep saying that Cisco has life and work balance. If you get cut, the balance make no sense at all. Cisco is hitting to the point that we didn't compensate the top talents good enough with lousy CPF of 0.72 (Cisco Piss off Factor). At the same time, we didn't provide enough job security for many. The worst time hasn't come. After LR those you don't like, then very soon Cisco can't keep those they like very long. I don't see anyway to save Cisco from the path HPE is heading for.

The following is happening:

LR/ER of the top 20% salaried engineers
Hiring early career "talent" to (not) replace that
LR of 10-20% non-technical and management

Another pretend re-structure, where long term strategy, product maturity and career development rot. Yet another year of lack of leadership.

1B lost revenue last quarter, inexperienced leadership looking to "cover up" the projected 1B loss forcast this quarter through skilled workforce reduction.

Year over year 15% loss of recurring revenue, increasing.

20% could easily be taken from middle management.

20% opex target cuts given to most teams for LR. RB cuts imminent to save BB FTE’s. This is a downward spiral now.

I would hold out on signing the LR contracts. There is no reason to take the lowball offer they give, the longer you hold out the better the counter offer will be.

Just want to pass this information along incase it’s beneficial to anyone.
There’s a new clinic called Freedom2caredpc.com opened in the Cary,NC area. For a low monthly fee, families get unlimited office visits without co-pay. You don’t need insurance for this affordable health plan. I know this pandemic and the layoffs are putting a lot of pressure on families.

Jeff C not keeping training protected??

After Twenty years, and loving it at Cisco I took a long time to consider the ER, but I'm out! We were a strong training group for so many years; I felt we were the best of the best. However, the lack of any reviews or direct feedback for over three years, I'm confident the LR will go deep with no regard to performance or talent. I wish those deciding to stay all the best!

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/08/17/cisco-to-lay-off-5-500-employees
Sounds like the same scale as the 2017 layoff.
It seems to me that Chuck is a LR CEO.
Every few years, he layoff thousands of engineers and give himself a big chunk of RSU worth tens of million.
Good to be a big company CEO. Doesn't matter what the future of the company is.

I predict 5,000-7,000 will be laid off by Cisco in October/November. Merry Christmas!

Cisco should have consolidated the switch and router groups together to share the same OS, chip set and code base. Having different BUs or groups working more or less the same thing, it increases the cost and lower the margin. It is very painful to eliminate the overhead but it is the only way to make the investors and customers happier. The saved head count could be used to invest on newer technology and moving Cisco more to software and cloud. Today, even some of the BUs are merged together logically. But physically they are still isolated because of the political boundaries created by the management layers. Please collapse or eliminate some of the management roadblock. It is scary to see 7 or 8 layers of hierarchy between engineers and CEO. Time to clean it up in the right direction. Cleaning up the engineers, the doers, won't help the company much because the rotten part is in the management layers.

Cisco secretly (or maybe not so much ) does not care to keep older and higher salary individuals and needs a way to move them out legally to replace them with cheaper Millennials and foreign workers.
Take a look around at all the long time Cisco folks that regularly disappear after years of service. I recommend that if you meet the age and service requirement, you take the 9 months and run before you get it during the reduced ER packages regardless of your performance rating.

In the old Cisco great years, performance rating meant everything. Today sadly it is a checkbox on the list of things HR has to administer every year.

The latest CEO stated that Cisco was a software company... this is close to HP saying that they don't make printers anymore = stupid. Someone asked about hardware concentration, I believe this is done because each different type of hardware takes much investment, time, and multiple teams to support. If multiple product lines can use similar hardware, then overall costs can theoretically be lowered considerably. This might ironically help Cisco, because it has a long history of internal sabotage of even superior hardware to help what is believed to be the "correct" path for the company instead of letting the end users determine which BU or hardware should win.

Cisco has filed tons of patents and being one of the top patents holders in US. Why many of my friends don't see Cisco as a technology leader. Why so many young engineers considered working for Cisco is inferior than working for the FAANG companies. Cisco is very famous to reinvent itself via acquisition. Why the stock goes down and revenue goes down. How come some folk keeps saying that the Webex (like IE explorer) is getting 300% jump in revenue and why it is a big deal. I thought that Webex is kind of old legacy application from last century. I don't see any thing cool from Webex (or WebWorst). Cisco talks about cloud. I know about AWS, Azure, GCP but not Cisco cloud. May be the cloud (Internet) thing I know about is the VPN client. Even more interestingly that Cisco wants to get into Chips. That part I am totally lost. Try to compete with NVIDA. I am lost.

Cisco lost it's way a while ago. Lack of innovation and shifted focus on "refresh" sales cycles with limited or no added value. Essentially offering the same cr@p in a different wrapper.
Messaging moved from meaningful technical dominance to marketing fluff.
The sales team moved from adding real value to hamstringing customers into buying a tech they didn't need or want by packaging it with ongoing support and the handful of tech they actually needed.
The culture is a disaster internally.
If they wanted to right the ship, drop +50% of middle and upper management.
Let the field and support act in the best interest of the customer instead of assisting the execs manage the stock price and their own bonus plans.

A lot of politics and fiction among different BU. Slow to adapt to the change. Customer wants SD-WAN + security + more in boxes but Cisco delivers many boxes and expensive solution to them. The corresponding BUs has to work closely together and the major roadblock is how to split the revenue of the new products and who will be the VP or SVP for it. Cisco has many layers of management hierarchy. Under Chuck, there comes, EVP, then SVP, then another SVP, then VP and then VP, then senior directory, etc. It is worse than the hierarchy I had in IBM. PLEASE CUT HALF of the executives and consolidate things together.

Do we get unemployment in California if I take the elect? Nobody can answer this question

Cisco Elect Program is 9-10 mo salary + 9-10 mo health insurance premiums depending on grade. One extra week per year over 10 then two weeks per year over 20. Only a few RSUs vest (through Feb) the rest, you lose.

How is the Cisco ER (Earlier Retirement) program. It was very generous in 2010. 1 year salary + 2 year of health insurance + extra week per every year service above 10 years. Is it still the case?

Cisco should report the layoff statistics on how many go for ER, those layoff what are the age profiles. What percentage of the layoff is in US vs other countries. After the layoff, what percentage of the workers are on H1 visa before and after layoff. Such that we can know more whether the company has any bias on layoff. In the past, during the layoff,

When a company has annual layoff ritual and every 4 years it has a huge layoff. It is clear that some thing seriously wrong with the company. In order to cut cost, it hires tons of H1 visa engineers to replace older engineers or US citizens. Since the upper management in Cisco is mainly Indian, they are very good at playing politics, promoting their own loyal people, only allowing their own people to file patents, working on key projects. At the same time, they are good at, creating many internal events to give out awards to their people to increase their visibility and claims that how innovative Cisco is. Fortunately, Cisco is still monopoly in the networking area. However, after COVID-19, the situation is different. The IT budget will be reallocated more to the cloud. This trend may impact Cisco business in the long run.

Now that Cisco is trying to redefine itself as a software and services company expect more layoffs in the future. It has nothing to do with Covid19. They just don't need as many employees, especially if the software is written and supported in India.

Few years back... a reduction in Directors, VPs happened...
Now back to same same... increasing Directors with only one level reporting....

Layoffs are coming. Announced today.

Guess we will find out something tomorrow.
Good luck all!

why they don't start with top level management, as most of vps & managers don't do anything other than webex, travelling at company's risk, staying in grand hotels, and waste cisco's money to left others to suffer?

Any actual news on when the blue badge purge is going to happen?

2 red badges cut today in my team. last day is this friday. damn, that's cold

Not as cold as being informed at 1PM last Friday that you're being terminated effective immediately. Recall that last Friday was Cisco's "Day for Me" free PTO for both red & blue badges. It was a co-worker I worked with previously who moved to a new team. I have no idea if he was the only one on that team or if they let others go. I'm watching his manager's direct reports page in the directory waiting for his account to be deactivated to see how many people the manager loses.

2 red badges cut today in my team. last day is this friday. damn, that's cold

Folks, I have been in the industry for close to 20 years having worked for several fortune-50 organizations. Worked in this organization for close to 2 years and was LR'ed in late February. It was a blessing in disguise honestly. The legacy codebase had become literally unreadable. As an engineer i don't know what one can do, if the codebase is itself unreadable. Compromised code review process (treated as favors to be exchanged) , compromised regression/sanity process were mostly factors responsible for this. On top of this, sh–ty politics within a small team of 10-12 people made things worse for me. Also, Managers played the cover-up game to save their assess through various political means. Honestly Cisco doesn't deserve this for the culture and values the organization have promoted are well meaning and well intentioned. For example, I was sincerely impressed with Organization keeping the LR employees till July24. Hence, such leaders and managers who play sh–ty political games actually end up spoiling the otherwise well intentioned culture and values. If HR folks read this forum, i sincerely ask them to answer for themselves why every LR has mostly engineers and few managers loosing their job. Are engineers not becoming scapegoats? For leaders are the one spreading toxicity in the organization.

No lay off news heard in China so far