I know some believe that there is still fat to be cut at Cisco and I believe there is but it's certainly not on my team. We are drowning. We keep losing people and we are getting no replacements and it's honestly becoming so overwhelming trying to stay on top of things that I'm considering walking out as well. Are they trying to work us to death?
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There is not an attrition problem. The people left don't have marketable skills and can't leave Cisco. Anyone with skills and self-esteem left after the 8th layoff.
But there is an attrition problem. Just because the people left don't have marketable skills and can't leave Cisco doesn't mean that they don't have value.
Cisco used to be full of home-grown solutions, tools and automation. There were things "that just worked" behind the scenes. Cisco's IT is very siloed. There is the networking team, the storage team, the backup team, the database team, the system admins, the security team, etc. People that work in that area become SME's in one area and the rest atrophy from lack of ability to use them because you're not on the other team(s) and don't have access/permissions to do the work outside your silo.
If you've been around Cisco for a while, you'll recall all the various wiki systems we had that got migrated from one to the next. There was something, then they moved to IWE, then some moved to Confluence wikis and some moved to that IBM appcenter whatever it was, and now has moved to SharePoint. So much data got lost with the migrations due to links taking you to the old sites that were decommissioned or people couldn't find the new locations.
I was LR'd in 2011. I came back in 2013 as a contractor on another team. My first quarter back, some datacenter host needed to be "refreshed" and replaced and IT reached out to me because I was still registered as the responsible IT sys admin for the host, why I don't know. But since it was more than 24 months since I'd supported that host, I had no idea if the team still used it or not, who used it and why. The manager who supported that team was gone and the new manager had no clue about the server. The teams that had originally used it had been shuffled around, there was no development team that claimed it or development managers who knew what it was. So the decision was made to decommission it instead of replacing it. Within a week, people started complaining about apps not getting data updates and acting funny. Turns out, there was a cr-p load of "automation" that handled back-end data processing between systems and it died when the host was turned off. Where was it? How did it work? Who was responsible for maintaining it? Those valuable people with years of corporate knowledge had either left, or like me had been LR'd, and no one was around to "fix" the problem. It was hilarious when they tried to come back to me and ask me about where the automation was that did the "jobs", but I was on another team and hadn't seen/used that server in several years and I was only the sys admin for it back then, not the "app admin" who created/maintained the "automation".
Over my years at Cisco between 2006 to present, I've seen more than a couple of teams be impacted by LR's and then when system upgrades and refreshes roll around, they look around and say "Where's Bob? He's the one that did it the last time. All his documentation was on IWE. Where did it move to? Does anyone have any of the emails from back then?" Suddenly, they really wished that "Bob" was still around. He wasn't as useless as they thought.
Anybody who doesn’t see the massive attrition problem is either lying or d-mb as a rock.
@OP are you in the wonderful world of customer support, once known as tac ? If so, don't expect it to get better for the long run.
There is not an attrition problem. The people left don't have marketable skills and can't leave Cisco. Anyone with skills and self-esteem left after the 8th layoff.
But Fran will tell you there is not an attrition problem.... Something major is going to break and soon.
It makes sense if you are a Director trying to obtain more power. Layoff a few experienced individual contributors and receive a generous stock grant.
It's because they LR'd the people like me that were doing the job for 18 years because we enjoyed the comradery, customer engagement, and challenging work; not primarily for the money.
I did ok at Cisco financially but was never a senior rank. I would have gladly cross-trained to another group.
Makes zero sense. Zero.
Death by attrition with no backfill, you must be with TAC? Hardly any fat here.