So many companies that already laid off a whole bunch of people are having their second or even third wave of layoffs. Is that going to be us as well?
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Cisco will not take volunteers, they want to layoff the most expensive and older workers. No ER package either. Cisco is a horrible place to plan to retire from. Retirement parties are becoming a thing of the past as you are laid off first.
HR is about the only safe place to work anymore, and that team is huge!!! Cisco is among the best at saying how great they are and turning around and taking advantage of their employees!
It also is a way for them to legally hide age discrimination. Proof is I heard from a friend that got hit we don't offer ER any more.
When they did have ERs all the best ER eligible people took it and had great new jobs the following Monday and Cisco finally discovered that skimming the cream off the top wasn’t a good idea. I thought I heard they forgot this after some years and tried it again with exactly the same result.
As a politically incorrect old guy the phrase from decades ago was “you need more Indians than chiefs” which means there are going to be fewer positions available as you move up the ranks, and then the question becomes “what do you do with the masses not only unqualified to move up anymore but who aren’t keeping up with younger people at their same level?” Cisco tried to solve this by adding new ranks then adding numbers after them and giving fake promotions so you now have Principal Engineer 37s who can’t write a five line function on their own with a week to run it through a compiler so they present it in an all hands and the new kids call them out on their pure incompetence.
- Is it discrimination to get rid of the one who can’t do the job as well when that person is the old person, or is it good management?
- If you are actually competent at a lower level do you want your project driven off track by older fools simply because you don’t want to “discriminate” against the old who aren’t up to the task?
- If your old old person who is still an Engineer 4 at 60 and perform equivalently to the competitive kid three years out of college are you willing to accept the same pay as that kid so the company can keep some stability at that rank as the best of the best quickly pass on through?
- As a customer do you want to spend $1,000 on a phone well made by slaves warehoused by the millions contained by su----e nets or do you want a far inferior $2,000 phone shaped like a brick made out of Bondo with a black and white display and bits hanging out the side made by free range Americans?
While I think there is age discrimination born of the fact that management is too incompetent to know who can do what, there are legitimate reasons why older people aren’t competitive over time and either you get rid of them or keep them at a low level with low pay, and most older people who aren’t motivated to improve aren’t willing to accept either fallback position, yet as customers those same people won’t overpay for garbage just so everyone can be employed for life. The competent must acknowledge you can’t solve for everything. Something has to give.
I must have missed it. We had a layoff?
a big one on the way. banks are collapsing left 'n right, massive layoffs at Amazon/FB/Goog/MSFT, etc. Oh yeah, RTP will be shut for GOOD THIS TIME!
Contractors aren’t headcount.
Layoffs are in Cisco's blood, so expect more layoffs no matter what the state the company finances are or the stock price. This is an easy way for Cisco to save money by not paying out on the RSUs. It also is a way for them to legally hide age discrimination. Proof is I heard from a friend that got hit we don't offer ER any more.
As also stated, proof is also they have also been brainwashing us and our shareholders by calling it "rebalancing" or a "transition option". Just watch how they will spin this, or totally avoid it, in the next check-in. When someone in a family is impacted in some way, you remember them, and care for them. We lost 4000+ great folks from our Cisco family (mostly older and more senior people) and we won't even look back and learn from our mistakes.
So expect the insanity again! Until I see Chuck and Fran apologetic and crying on the check-in, saying they learned a lesson, I have lost all confidence in our Sr leadership.
Our company's real vision is to be a revenue machine, and we'll run over anyone that gets in our way. Analysts love it for now.
If your in collab you might want to prep your resume. I’m hearing about significant budget cuts with one of the option being headcount and not just the contractors
volunteer anyone?
Errrrr yes? It's a recurring theme with this "leadership". Cisco is plagued by "we've always done it this way" management. This isn't going to change.
It's been happening continuously in small and large batches since 2001. What has happened to lead you to believe this has suddenly changed?
So many companies that already laid off a whole bunch of people are having their second or even third wave of layoffs. Is that going to be us as well?
You don't know Cisco very well do you? Are you new here?
Companies that are in their second or third waves of layoffs are way behind Cisco. We've had annual layoff's since I joined Cisco in the mid 2000's. At first, they were via the rankings and they let go the bottom 5% every year and wasn't called a layoff. Manager's might protect people on their team by rotating the rankings around so that the same person didn't end up in the bottom 5% two years running. Then they had some small layoffs that mostly impacted the SJC-based teams and re-hired people to do those jobs in RTP (or India) at lower costs than SJC. Next Cisco called the second or third big reduction a "Workforce Reduction" or WFR in 2011. IIRC, that was the start of when Cisco started giving these layoff events a name. I think the first year Cisco didn't have a layoff was the year Chuck took over from John as CEO. After that, Cisco started calling them "Limited Restructuring" and saying they were focusing on Cloud, or Security, or some other area and needed to cut costs in other areas to increase the attention on their business priorities. That was fine, until like some politicians, when it came time to deliver results on their promises, future LR's would target those very same business priorities of just a year or two previously "because they over hired". Now, finally, they're saying that this most recent LR was not a cost-cutting effort and was truly a "limited restructuring" to cut out unnecessary roles.
Until these other companies get to their 10th or more layoff, Cisco isn't becoming like them, they're just following Cisco's footsteps.
yes
layoff never happen in Cisco. ....Only "rebalancing" exercise" :-P