Spoke with a Cisco rep recently about their layoff situation. He claimed "layoffs are a good thing for Cisco, and ideally we should be cutting the 'bottom' 15% of the workforce quarterly". Who the f-ck would work for a company with that mentality?
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On another website, Cisco workers were complaining how several of their colleagues don't even work and just show up for lunch and shamelessly disappear afterwards.
There's absolutely NO accountability for keeping six figure earning slackers accountable. Good workers are RIFFed while others shamelessly snake through proudly.
bad
@vua+13AcCVa2 Supposedly management was secretly ranking their people on a continuous basis but not revealing to their reports how they stood regarding the rankings.
I joined Cisco in 1996 and even then JC would lament, via e-mails to everybody at Cisco, that his managers were not more aggressive about eliminating the bottom 10% of employees. This was long before Cisco implemented the forced ranking BS.
I never liked the concept of cutting the bottom 10%, or whatever percentage you want. It's like grading on a curve.
Some teams have all exceptional people, and good people get cut. Other teams are full of worthless do-nothings and the majority of them stick around and you constantly swap out the bottom of the barrel. And if you get on someone's bad side, suddenly you're the one at the bottom.
If we truly cut the bottom X percent, that might be one thing, but it doesn't scale to the size of this company. You can't force bottom cuts from every team, you have to bring it up more to the BU level. Smaller, close-knit teams that perform well lose a lot of skills when you cut the bottom performer and no one wants to teach the new guy how to do the job for fear he'll be better than you and then you'll be gone.
There needs to be a minimum performance threshold that keeps you safe. The bottom performers that don't meet that minimum performance should be the ones targeted. If you're the worst on your team, but you're performing satisfactorily or better, why should you be let go just because you're the bottom?
And don't get me started on the good ol' boy / India family system. I was the Tech Lead on a project that ended on time, on budget, with no issues. I was in the bottom 10% because I "failed to manage the project to my manager's satisfaction." A Project Manager managed a different project that was behind schedule, over budget, only delivered a quarter of what they initially said it would, and now 9 yrs later STILL isn't off the ground was ranked in the top 5%. Guess who played golf with the boss and who didn't? How do you manage a project that basically fails to deliver and be a top performer? And why is a technical lead expected to "manage" a project when there's a project manager assigned to the project?
Cisco can cut the bottom 95% every quarter and nothing would happen.
I was there for ~20 years - asked John Chambers once how they can cut the 'bottom 10' (at that time it was 10%) quarterly without cutting talent. he danced - poorly and did not answer.
Previous poster does not seem to be aware of Cisco's friends and family system. ... but even if there were performance reviews the "objective" scores would just be the same as your friends and family score. Solution? Make sure you are in the same family as your VP and you will be fine. If not, no soup for you.
How can you cut the bottom 15% without performance reviews?