Will it be after the “unofficial LR”?
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In my experience of nearly 15 years at Cisco…
The hiring freeze usually precedes the LR by 3-5 months, which is followed by 6 months of a “just be happy you have a job” phase that flows through a time when raises/bonuses are given. The “just be happy you have a job” phase is used as an excuse for lack of promotions and salary bumps.
Cisco crunched the numbers... even with 4-6 months of wasted bureaucracy, the financial benefits are EXTREMELY beneficial to continue with this dysfunctional red badge system.
Can someone w/ an accounting degree or executive management experience tell me how it's EXTREMELY beneficial?
In overall dollars, it's not cheaper. Sure, you can hire and fire them very easily, but you have to waste people hours having some project manager calculate the number of billable hours there are in each quarter, calculate the contract cost based on the billing rate times the number of billable hours, legal review contracts, finance approve the dollar amounts, etc. The vendor is paying the worker the same as Cisco would pay an employee, if not more, and they have to make a profit on the worker, so they're billing 30-50% over that. The vendor has to pay all the FICA and Social Security taxes that Cisco would pay an employee, so that's built into the billing rate. About the only parts of the "total compensation" package that the vendor doesn't pass on to Cisco is the employer portion of health benefits and 401(k) since they don't (usually) provide that to their employees.
I can guarantee that the total cost, even counting 20 days of PTO & company holidays, 401(k) matching, and the employee portion of benefits contributions, Cisco was paying more to my vendor when I was a red badge than they are paying for me as an employee. That 30-50% markup of the wages that the vendor keeps as profits per vendor adds up over the course of 18 months or longer.
Yet, their fiefdom is bigger than ever and they very rarely cut their own people during the past LRs or WFRs. As a result, HR, legal, and finance have become gigantic and way over-bloated.
It takes a lot of people to calculate all the $'s due each person being LR'd, generate the paperwork, send it to the appropriate reporting manager, have people to answer employee's questions, etc.
And, yeah, a lot of that is done by outsourced HR (Xerox) workers. BTW, when the he-l did Xerox become an HR services company instead of a copier machine maker?
Perhaps they should consider slimming down HR and some of the non-revenue generating departments. Honestly, other than ramming WOKE down our throats, what exactly are they doing now a days? They outsourced the handling of benefits to a third party. Payroll and taxes are done by ADP. Most the HR functions are handled by Workday. Yet, their fiefdom is bigger than ever and they very rarely cut their own people during the past LRs or WFRs. As a result, HR, legal, and finance have become gigantic and way over-bloated.
Cisco crunched the numbers... even with 4-6 months of wasted bureaucracy, the financial benefits are EXTREMELY beneficial to continue with this dysfunctional red badge system. This is how Directors become Sr. Directors and Sr. Directors become VPs
There are tons of teams out there that hired/have red badges that are doing necessary work, but will soon be coming up on their 18-mo limit and have to be replaced with new red badges who will have to be on-boarded, then brought up to speed on how Cisco does stuff and taught how to do their job/function within Cisco's bureaucracy/red tape, etc. That's a good 4-6 months wasted so you only get a year out of them and have to do it all over again.
When will Cisco get smart and actually hire/convert those that do the necessary grunt work? I sure as he-l don't want to do it and it sux to have to train these guys every 18 months as it takes time away from doing the higher level project work I need to get done.
Does it affect all teams? Including new ones?
Finish the qtr, wait for the next LR bo-b to hit. Reqs were getting COMPLETELY out of control. Every initiative or solution seems to want their own fiefdom. Not efficient at all. 8k reqs? Really?
The last comms where it lasts 30 days, so still about two and a half weeks to go or so. What we heard it is supposed to prevent any kind of lr.