This occurred:
Impacted individual was told by the hiring manager that he was ready to give him an offer. They discussed and the hiring manager then told him that he could not make an offer after all because he was being pressured to bring in someone with less experience and younger. Pay was not the issue. Same pay. Different age.
Absolute age discrimination and the pressure was coming from high level Cisco leadership.
The quality of their work is horrible and I winded up cleaning it up.
This describes my job assignments when I joined Cisco in my 30s and why I ultimately left. The code was written by the over 40 set. In fairness some if it could have been written by younger people because most of the older people just cut and pasted broken code from one platform to the next. The cost of not understanding refactoring combined with excessive branching means each bug can become tens or hundreds. When you do have common code there is no internally documented behavior so when one branch changes that common code and over time breaks another branch through collapses and syncing the change will be reverted on the second branch, propagating to the branch that broke it where they will break it again, and that process will repeat forever. In the mean time releases with breakage on both sides will end up scr3wing the customer. And why is there a separate inconsistent CLI for cost reduced replacement cards with the same functionality? This stuff is Software Engineering 101.
seems from above, policy is to hire young blood, over-pay them and spend years and years grooming them so that once they gain experience, they can be fired.
"leadership is "strongly encouraging" younger less skilled candidates to be selected over qualified older candidates that are a better fit."
I cannot tell you how many times that I either training them (these young millennials or gen-X), do these people's jobs or prod them to finish their work. The quality of their work is horrible and I winded up cleaning it up. Why are these folks even being hired? Something that supposed to take half an hour winded up taking half or a full day sometimes. There are times where it took days and the results were incorrect. I winded up fixing and finishing it in half a day. Why do we even introduce inefficiencies? Cisco should look for the best candidate for performance, but I guess the company's branding (DEI, young, hip, etc.) is much more important these days.
@1czs+1lx921zs, you're only half right. I may not know everyone's circumstances, but I do know what it's like to be laid off. In fact, I've worked at companies that have been bought out and let go a yr after the buyout's terms said the buying company had to keep us & I've joined privately owned companies that underwent IPO's soon after and changed what they did based on corp boards' decisions that ruined the company and put them out of business. And I've been laid off from Cisco.
I think my personal experience gives me room to speak. Did you lose everything when you left Cisco? If all you can do is call people names, then maybe you didn't use what God gave you to make smart decisions.
Did you know that you can not only sue a company but the INDIVIDUALS involved?
Same goes for gov action. It's not just a sanction of the company, it's the people that do it.
Meaning, those that break the law will face personal consequences that the company can't shield them from.
and you'll never be employed again.
"I'm a hiring manager and this has been my experience with two recent req's. P&C and leadership is "strongly encouraging" younger less skilled candidates to be selected over qualified older candidates that are a better fit."
This is illegal. Following this direction is also illegal.
Time to be a whistleblower.
if you are a female minority , then you get the job no matter if you deserve it, if white male you have to be so overqualified and underpaid that they cant pass you up. Half of the new engineers are either from Mexico getting paid grade 4 money or new hires who only know what is on the CCNA, no wonder the customer is going to partner for services and resales, thats where all the good Cisco experience has gone. Wake up Cisco, being woke is going to come home sooner or later.
Let's just say if losing your job equals losing everything, you haven't planned as carefully you should have.
I'm a hiring manager and this has been my experience with two recent req's. P&C and leadership is "strongly encouraging" younger less skilled candidates to be selected over qualified older candidates that are a better fit. Black and female are specifically targeted as the highest preference to fill req's with by direct pressure from P&C despite lack of qualifications or team fit. It was specifically encouraged to locate the higher preference demographic in the directory and try and get them to apply when there was no "preferred" candidates that applied.
The real problem is: people take high paying tech jobs, are lulled into the repetitive spending of their higher wages on non-critical expenses. Add an overpriced house and car payments, and congratulations you now are a slave to the money, and now require a high-pay drama-ridden job to support your tech worker lifestyle.
The answer is financial discipline. If you live all along like you don't earn the big bucks; when you inevitably leave your job, you will always be able to live your life on what you need, not what you want.
Think about it.
You have no idea of other people's circumstances jerk.
Some people are losing everything and you make jokes.
How is losing a job "losing everything?" If they're employable, then they can find another job. Cisco provides a much better severance package than other companies I've worked at. Raytheon Systems provided 2 weeks plus 1 week for every year of service if you signed the agreement not to hold RSC liable.
If someone can't find new employment before the end of their severance package ends, they're either incompetent, suck at interviewing, or are over-exaggerating their skills. I think the longest I've ever been unemployed was 6 mo back in the dot com bust of 2000 and I only had a few years of experience, and I didn't have but a 3 week severance package. While it cost me a lot, I hardly "lost everything".
I get it, getting laid off sucks. But other companies treat their employees much worse when they're kicked to the curb.
"While age discrimination is real OP has put nothing on the table to prove it."
Sigh. Details identify people. Details are for other entities and private.
But you knew that already, shill.
While age discrimination is real OP has put nothing on the table to prove it.
As an old guy who learned things every decade of my career I got pulled into many fires where the solution was something I had learned before graduating in the 1970s that Cisco's most senior people not only didn't know but had a hard time learning once the answer was given to them.
That's the crux of the problem. Crack open a dictionary and you'll find "experience" is gained knowledge, not "number of years sitting in a cubical collecting a paycheck while making the same mistakes." OP's assertion of "...someone with less experience and younger..." without serious context is meaningless.
Welcome to Corporate America. Why is this a surprise?
Cisco is like the carousel in the film Logan’s Run. We live our careers at Cisco swallowing a whole ton of utter BS until such time your end is nigh. Then they sp-t you out.
Some people are losing everything and you make jokes.
This all happened 19 years ago, just seconds after RTP was shutdown.
You can't use people names on here.
Report incidents to the DOL, EEOC, ADA (in some cases), State orgs with the specific details.
To the DOL mo--n
Who should we cite as the victim?
“Some person”
Who should we cite as the offender?
“Some person influenced by leadership”