Just saw the first email from colleague in IT.
Good luck.
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What should Cisco focus on next month?
July is disability pride month!
How does Cisco feel about the recent India and Russia alliance?
A compromise is transitioning to contract workers or H1B visa employees in the United States. Senior leaders need to cut costs every quarter, and we can't do that by paying full-time American wages.
Yup, they go through that cycle all the time. H1B is more for development because Cisco has to prove they can't find those skills in the US. There's plenty of IT sys admins to do hardware support and pull cables. But contract workers is definitely the way they go. They have one or two Sr Admins who plan projects and dozens of contractors who execute the plans and/or do the day-to-day work. Then Cisco has to hire them or rotate them out because of the laws around keeping contractors instead of employees to avoid paying them benefits, so they either limit them to 18 months and rotate them out with new blood or they do it as a managed service. Any contractors who are lucky (ha-ha) to get converted immediately go onto the pool of hunger games fodder for LRs.
I've played that contractor->employee->restructured out->contractor game more than once. It's nice to get 6-mo severance, immediately find a new job, come back to Cisco for more $'s than when you left and do it all over again. I've banked a year's salary for no work, so Cisco has certainly boosted my retirement savings.
@1qga+1hhn4Ekm, yes I've heard of cloud computing. There is some stuff done at Cisco "in the cloud" with a lot of things moving to third-party cloud services: Office 365 (Outlook, SharePoint, shared docs edited via cloud-based Word/Excel/PowerPoint web versions), Service Now for help desk tickets & knowledge base articles, WorkDay for HR, the list goes on. Public data, or simple confidential data that doesn't have PII can certainly be done in "the cloud", be it AWS/GCP or Azure.
But stuff that's highly confidential, or restricted access, that will NEVER go in the cloud off-premises. Cisco has data centers to run that stuff. And, yes, they even do it "in the cloud" because they've "bought" or licensed OpenStack and OpenShift to run internal clouds on in their data centers. So, yes, there are still some people who do have to be available to go into a data center in CA, NC or TX, as well as in India, Israel, UK and other offshore sites.
Why did you bring up laptops? IT laptop help desks have been remote/outsourced for years. Cisco doesn't even do their own PC support, it's outsourced to IBM. AnyConnect, Webex, and other Cisco apps tend to be supported by India call centers. And you're right, if they can't tweak a setting, their usual answer is to re-image the laptop. If that doesn't fix it, then they swap out the hardware and someone repairs it for the next person with a hardware issue. If you're in India, you sure didn't have nice things to say about your co-workers since they can't fix simple PC issues. Which is it? Indians are great workers and a better value than US workers so Cisco is going to outsource everything to them or they're sh-t?
What am I going to do? Sit back and remote into servers and do monthly updates/security patching, occasionally go into a DC and replace hardware when it fails, and stream videos while drinking beer making twice your pay. Or is it 4x since it takes 4 Indians to do one US job?
"Those 4 IT dudes in India can't push the power button, add RAM or replace failed drives/RAM/motherboards/power supplies, or run new cables in US data centers from India.
Still need to have people in the US."
A compromise is transitioning to contract workers or H1B visa employees in the United States. Senior leaders need to cut costs every quarter, and we can't do that by paying full-time American wages.
Just need to focus on more social justice issues while we transition to quietly layoff more employees. G-ns, diversity, abortions, border walls? What should Cisco focus on next month?
IT can all be done from india. 1 IT dude in US cost = 4 IT dudes in india cost.
Not really. There's a lot of network latency pushing data halfway around the world and back, so you have to have data centers and labs in the US. Those 4 IT dudes in India can't push the power button, add RAM or replace failed drives/RAM/motherboards/power supplies, or run new cables in US data centers from India.
Still need to have people in the US.
It’s coming at Cisco U.K. too. As sure as clockwork. Wait for August .
" 1 IT dude in US cost = 4 IT dudes in india cost. "
Because it takes 4 of them to do the job of one in the US. Open a case and watch it bounce around India engineers for 3 weeks, then it's finally escalated to someone in the US to actually fix it in a day.
IT can all be done from india. 1 IT dude in US cost = 4 IT dudes in india cost.
Where is this?
If your position is also in India, your position will always be at risk. When it’s time to save money, I have seen the closest friends LR each other to save their skin. No one is safe.
Strength doesn't pay the mortgage or provide health insurance. It's always fun to be lowballed by recruiters after a layoff.
Very sorry to hear this. Wish you strength. This will be for the better! It is never nice to be laid off but there is a big wide world outside of Cisco which has wonderful opportunities. Stay strong!
All the best