Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

We need to stop glorifying overworking

Too many people seem to think that working until you have no life outside of Cisco is the best way to show your dedication to the company, which will help with career progression. This needs to stop. This only helps the management since they get your extra work for nothing AND they can point to you as an example of an exceptional employee to all the "lazy" employees who are done when the workday is over. You, however, are more likely to get more work piled on rather than a promotion. This is not healthy and it's detrimental to most of your relationships. Glorification of such behavior only works in Cisco's favor.

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Post ID: @OP+1gZHFnAU

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Congratulations on your first day on planet Earth! Aside of a short experiment with social democracies after our World War II beating work out of the masses has defined the human experience during the rest of its modern existence. After another week or so you are going to experience a range of things that have devolved into religions.

As for Cisco, I would have loved to work with more lazy people so all the useful projects I worked on wouldn’t have been permanently stalled so entire teams could “just help someone else's project over the hump.” When your three month project has overrun by not only three years but your staff has increased by a factor of five where everyone put in a lot of overtime the entire leadership chain needs to be forcefully ejected and the rest need remedial training to insure they’ll never tolerate such stupidity again. By the five year mark it’s probably best just to close the entire facility.

Even when we spun out the same incompetent people into a different short bus then payed a fortune to buy back was we already owned the engineers who stayed at Cisco were asked to drop everything and work severe overtime with no payout to make what we overpaid for marginally work.

I’ve worked extreme overtime my whole career. I’ve had great opportunities to lead many generations of successful programs at well run companies. Some of those systems saved a lot of lives. All were profitable for myself and my companies. I’m proud of that. I’m not proud of anything I did at Cisco where my job was always to reduce impending losses caused by the “not lazy.” That profit number at the end of the year is customers severely overpaying for a lot of failure.

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Post ID: @7edt+1gZHFnAU

I’m sorry, I’m employed by Cisco, so you will have to define “overworking ” Never heard of it.

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Post ID: @2dth+1gZHFnAU

Sounds like IT, Supply Chain Ops, and TAC are all working like a perfect clock.

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Post ID: @1whf+1gZHFnAU

I don't want to share details, but something happened just before the 3-day US Holiday weekend.

Someone decided that MASSIVE changes had to be made starting Fri night of the weekend, but no advance notice was given out to the company at large. People making the changes were told to work, and apparently are having to work in shifts around the clock. Other people, who just manage stuff (applications, data centers, email, everything technical), are getting woken up in the middle of the night when everything suddenly fails, the monitoring systems light up like Christmas trees, and have NO F'ING clue why sh-t suddenly doesn't work, only to find out that MASSIVE changes are happening.

Now, the application owners and on-call people are suddenly having to work all F'ING weekend to fix the broken stuff "because we're salaried". I wasn't on-call, but the person on-call couldn't handle the outages, so it got escalated to me for my team/applications.
I'm already at 12 hrs between Sat AM, Sat afternoon and Sun. I better get on-call/holiday pay and a huge connected recognition. Don't say I can take "comp time" because, while the emergency work was done over the weekend, we'll be spending the next 4 days figuring out how to make our processes work with the new changes and all development is dead until we figure it out. And it's going to take additional time to try to rollout these new changes. I won't see comp time for weeks.

The team managing the massive changes and making emergency adjustments for critical processes/apps is pinging people every 2-4 hrs asking them to verify that their processes/apps are working again.

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Post ID: @irl+1gZHFnAU

work 25hrs per day and get paid really good plus a fat bonus of at least 150% per year no matter the economic situation. I have a family, a boat, paid off house, 3 cars, 2 kids in college with their tuition stashed away for their entire undergrad education. I get to go on a vacation every year to spend quality time with family and friends.

^^ this person needs to guide everyone on the art

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Post ID: @xdj+1gZHFnAU

Amen to that. I know many people who sacrificed their private lives or went the extra mile to save Cisco 20$ while on butts travel, only to get laid off a few months later. Don't fall for the ELT "do as I say don't do as I do" mantra. Your time will eventually be up and you won't have a hundredth of what ELT members are pocketing. Work smart, not hard.

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Post ID: @ukm+1gZHFnAU

I work 25hrs per day and get paid really good plus a fat bonus of at least 150% per year no matter the economic situation. I have a family, a boat, paid off house, 3 cars, 2 kids in college with their tuition stashed away for their entire undergrad education. I get to go on a vacation every year to spend quality time with family and friends. I hear the FAANGs like to hire low performing workers, maybe move there if Cisco is too much for ya!

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Post ID: @jnf+1gZHFnAU

But Cisco Favors going the extra mile, being on 24 hours plus calls with your customer. This is customer obsession as we in cx call it. It is our dna !

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Post ID: @ybo+1gZHFnAU

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