Even communist countries use money because you can’t have infinite consumption with zero production. Very few companies don’t experience large failures over time so “executives doing a great job” isn’t a realistic solution. If you don’t support layoffs propose a viable alternative that won’t still rile many employees.
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So it’s been over a week and there hasn’t been a single proposed alternative.
"clueless on how to demand high quality work"
Bingo. That's a huge part of engineering's culture. Ship anything as long as you hit totally bogus deadlines. Hide bugs under the rug, pat yourself on the back when releasing. Rinse and repeat.
The core reason is that they themselves were not a good engineers years back.
You mean decades back. Nearly 40 years ago the "founders" walked off with the work of others at Stanford and I've found no indication the quality of the work was good at any point since then. I encountered Cisco as a customer in the 1990s and it's been a continuous effort to work around problems that never should have escaped development.
...clueless on how to demand high quality work.
Demand all you want. The kind of people who can't correctly fix small bugs have no real development skills to produce that high quality work, and that's most of the software engineering staff in routing and switching. Scrum having marketing monkeys do both requirements and design to the point where a junior high school kid can code a unit in days is not going to grow those development skills.
As much as many here complain about Cisco as an engineering company, as a business it drowned most of it's competitors and the rest are still relatively tiny. Real growth is occurring well above Layer 4 where Cisco has no skills, and not just technical ones. I don't believe the best ELT in the world could fundamentally change that in house.
The fact that so many broken units here think that everything they think and do is
controlled entirely by the ELT and therefore they have no responsibility for their own
actions is staggering. The idea that you wrote 500 bugs in some low level code
unrelated to the cloud is caused by the ELT not navigating the cloud market well says
you're many beers short of a six pack.
I think the root of the problem is that ELT-> SVP -> VP -> Sr Dir -> some managers allowed this to happen and set low bar or are clueless on how to demand high quality work. The core reason is that they themselves were not a good engineers years back. They allowed the relationship/metrics driven to fake the picture. Therefore, some productive workers got frustrated and bailed out. If executives can only function as cheer leader, then of course, the thing you described are bound to happen. Those who added 500 bugs should be LRed or Fired. However, in CISCO, is that the case?
I think most of the workers from level 1 to like the first level Director, All those problems were not created by them...
I haven't worked there in ages but I thought Principal Engineer was a peer to Director and as such having worked in routing/switching software in many PI and PD groups I can say almost all the problems were created in the set of people you seem to think are blameless. Cisco is still shipping code which requires a truck roll to physically remove and reinsert modules before boxes can be returned to a usable state. So much for all the money spent on HA hardware. Having had to frequently roll back images in the 1990s after less than a day in service I can say software quality has always been poor.
It was directors saying "just start coding. If you want to read the actual standards or spend any time figuring out what you are going to code and how you will code it you will first have to write a complete analysis showing how many bugs you would not create this way." The irony is your ROI could only address the cost of the coding phase so when the programs overran by a factor of 10-20 by bug fixing code developed by Brownian Motion you couldn't take advantage of that to justify having at least some small clue as to what you were going to do up front. It was first and second level managers demanding people check in code that wouldn't compile even though it violated ISO9000 and caused branches to be broken for months at a time. Basic systems and software skills were absent from most of the development staff from Engineer 1 to Principal Engineer (try running an untweaked static analysis application on any branch of any Cisco developed switching/routing code base over the past 30 years.) The white papers of clueless rambling with the occasional lucid thought where you could Google a few keywords from the sane bits to see where they were plagiarized from is another sign.
The fact that so many broken units here think that everything they think and do is controlled entirely by the ELT and therefore they have no responsibility for their own actions is staggering. The idea that you wrote 500 bugs in some low level code unrelated to the cloud is caused by the ELT not navigating the cloud market well says you're many beers short of a six pack.
Absolute NO for me (if I am in one of those companies). I think most of the workers from level 1 to like the first level Director, All those problems were not created by them, and why would they collectively have to suffer? LR is part of the tech industry, like or not. That is why you want to keep yourself marketable and competitive. plus built your network. That is why you want to gamble on joining a startup for few years for a possible big reward. That is why you want to save for the raining days, and etc. etc. All those communism thinking will lower the productivity and soon the tech workers will be like a teacher unit. I probably will get a lot of down vote but that is what I see it.
One thing I would like to see is that Executives took more "real" consequence on failing to generate results. I have not yet seen they are willing to forfeit the stock comp. In stead, they are playing this base-pay BS. "I will ask my salary to be $1 till the company turns around..., btw, this dude got paid 50 mil on stocks..." or got LRed with standard package. The front line workers are not d-mb and they knew those BS. That is why majority of them did not pay any attention those BS in: all-hand, thoughts on executives, podcast, check-in, fireside-chat, bla, bla, bla. They work hard and do their best for their own pride and keep them marketable, period.
I think you mis-read. He was saying the ELT will benefit.
"LRs are required to improve profitability."
Says who? You're just a poor worker bee who gets a mere fraction of a crumb when you're lucky yet you propagate rethoric where your role is that of a replaceable pawn. What's it to you that your colleagues get laid off? You ain't getting rich and you ain't getting job security. Fu-k your profitability.
The amount of profit every year is largely irrelevant. It's the amount of profit vs what was forecast and vs competition that matters.
Cisco is a bloated legacy networking company and you could LR probably 20%-30% of the workforce with very little impact
"First, the more employees transitioned to contractor jobs the less institutional knowledge there is about processes and how things work."
We don't need 75,000 full-time employees with institutional knowledge to sell legacy network equipment. Maybe 5,000? Provide those 5,000 employees with huge stock grants, and let the other 70,000 employees fight over tiny raises and social justice issues.
LRs are required to improve profitability. ... The more employees we can quietly transition to contractor jobs = $$$ bonus for the ELT
That's a stupid statement.
First, the more employees transitioned to contractor jobs the less institutional knowledge there is about processes and how things work. Sure, you can document stuff until you're sick of writing documentation, but even if you manage to document _everything_, given how Cisco has changed from IWE, WebEx Social, Jive, ICX / IBM Employee Communities, Wiki and SharePoint. With all those transitions, how much data was lost due to not being transferred, or no one could find it post-transfer and then it definitely didn't get transferred to the next system.
Secondly, contractors tend to be short-term, 18 months at most, unless it's a managed service, so you spend more time getting the laptops, setting up accounts, bringing them up to speed on how stuff works at Cisco, and then a short time later they're gone and you're having to disable all those accounts, find a new contractor and go through the same old process over and over again. That affects productivity and the loss of productivity between the onboarding and training and the loss of institutional knowledge far outweighs the cost of providing benefits, especially when you do it on an 18 month basis.
LRs are required to improve profitability. Cisco employees are not entitled to job security or health/retirement benefits. The more employees we can quietly transition to contractor jobs = $$$ bonus for the ELT
How can you believe LRs are required? Do you not know how many billions of profit Cisco makes per year? Why a single LR?
Salaries at Cisco have lagged behind inflation for 12 years. Every year is a wage cut
@iiz+1kWIIn7I not really. That was another cause of a mass exodus of talented SEs.
SEs were forced into a pay cut back in 2019. We took it without so much as a whimper.
Wage cut = reapply as a contractor without benefits
Many older Cisco workers go the contracting route after a layoff.