Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

"There's no other way to absorb so much operational (payroll) expense and stay profitable."

Hahaha...yes there is. It's called due diligence and proper planning. If you can't acquire a company and keep the employees, then said company isn't making enough money. Oh..but I'm sorry....Cisco acquires most companies so that other companies can't have them, or to get further anchors into accounts Cisco doesn't have. The employees are just excess garbage.

No wonder we have annual LR's to get rid of 5-6K people every year.

Looking at the comments here on this board, who wouldn't want to get rid of most of us? :P

No place to grow a career. Cisco not interested in you and what you can bring to empower and innovate, despite what they may say. They want you to fit into a silo. Cisco is built out of silos with no one talking to anyone else. Collab, EN, DC, Security, Meraki....They are all silos. They are certainly not interested in any outside technical skills you may have acquired elsewhere. And they most dislike engineers. Engineers ask difficult questions - part of the mindset of being an engineer is to improve and fix things and make things better by analysis and asking questions. But that mindset is not welcome at Cisco - you are a trouble causer thinking like that and your days will be numbered.

Obedient employees are preferred because Cisco is about empire building and not performance.

APJ = Japan

Cisco in APJ is for the young with no or little skill/experience who can be obedient and meek who don't utter a word at meetings. That's a Cisco culture, and those people are preferred and get promoted and can survive at Cisco for decades.

Anyone who says any opinion is not preferred by his/her manager and the team. No question is welcomed.

If you have a solid professional career in the tech industry, you don't fit in Cisco. No past good experience or skill can be utilized at Cisco.

I would love to see the numbers on the people leaving because although 10 percent of new hires sounds much. If we have 15 percent of people leaving (do the math for your org), we just hire new talent and mix it with senior hires I guess (ymmv on the seniors depening on your org, and if people still want to join)

Another thing our new hire said, was that the slide that showed Cisco's development road map showed 6 areas of focus. They didn't remember them all, but develop was not on the list.

Buy, partner, co-develop, something and something else were the 5 areas. They then tried to brain wash the new hires with saying that "you" were the important 6th part that the other five resolved around.

I'm not sure how we can be important when you're buying innovation, partnering with someone else who's innovating, etc. We've lost the innovation skill internally.

The presenter showed a slide that listed all of Cisco's acquisitions. Seventy-five percent of the slide was dedicated to the last 10 yrs. Our new hire said acquisitions are great, but they wished that the onboarding team had emphasized the products that Cisco had come up with instead of all the things Cisco had bought. It's hard to be proud of the toys Mommy and Daddy bought you compared to the things you create yourself.

I don't mind at all. I about fell out of my chair when they said 1,900 per quarter onboarding on average. They did clarify that it was pre-pandemic, so maybe they haven't added as many new people in the past 18 months.

But still! That's way too much. It makes the statements I've read here about the ELT wanting to lower the average age of the employees by a decade make more sense.

Buy a company and steal, I mean acquire, their product, get some middle aged or younger people to add to the team as expansion then LR the older original team and bring in more early in career to replace them leaving the middle aged group to be the SME's. Wash, rinse and repeat.

There's no other way to absorb so much operational (payroll) expense and stay profitable.

I hope you don't mind me copying someone else's post here ( @4lhs+1dLZu2DK ), I found this statistic interesting.