Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Sometimes it's not about 20 yrs of making the same mistakes, but it's about knowing how the system works w/out having to RTFM.

When my first training session in the door was "we developed 20 different IPC mechanisms above what the underlying OS provided and no one knows what each is capable of or when you should use one over the other" it was clear the entire collection of business units developing the PI and PD code bases for all the products running that code don't know how the system worked and there was no FMTR. This is but one of a seemingly endless list of examples.

You're talking about you and a junior engineer. I'm talking about coming into Cisco at a high level and working almost exclusively with hundreds of Technical Leaders on up. I've been through every major routing and switching code base from a quality perspective. The people demonstrated a lack of the most basic engineering skills and the code bases reflected those lack of skills in spectacular ways. Look at what Cisco spends on customer found defects each year and compare it to the annual revenue of some of Cisco's smaller competitors.

My original post was talking about one specific company which had mediocre senior people and they hired a large batch of really capable aggressive kids straight out of college and we delivered. I'd take 90% of their mediocre senior people over 90% of Cisco's senior people because most were still net positive. You have less to worry about from the kids Cisco can hire because most aren't going to look at a legacy business as the best launch point for a high velocity career. A few great ones mistakenly walk through the door and they either leave in the first few months or they rot on the vine because they didn't have another reference point to know how good teams perform.

At my first job out of college many of us "junior" engineers objectively demonstrated how we outperformed our "senior" counterparts in development time, functionality, quality and maintainability. 20 years of making the same mistakes is not "experience."

Maybe so. I watched how objectively a "junior" person couldn't cut it after a more senior person was laid off on a team. I took a lateral transfer to another team not long after the tech lead on a "farm" of servers were refreshed after being in use for 3-5 yrs was let go about 18 months after the refresh. When the next refresh round came along, they couldn't contact the original tech lead because he was gone, but the junior guy never updated the host/application owner contact info. I had been listed as an alternate POC, so I was contacted and I had to refer them back to da-new-guy. He couldn't find jack sh-t for the documentation, and didn't have a clue about how these servers worked, other than they just did the job they needed to.

IT cut over the new replacement systems and nothing worked. They reach out to me AGAIN in the middle of the night wanting me to help trouble shoot why the new servers didn't work. I had to guide the guy to the old documentation because Cisco likes to migrate between wiki systems about as often as we replace servers. They cancelled the replacement cutover and turned the old systems back on, let the guy study the old documentation, then try to figure out what changed he'd made, but not documented since the documentation was last updated by the terminated senior guy left. After a month of not getting it to work, the old boss had to beg my manager to allow me to come work on their team for a month to manage the farm refresh. Sometimes it's not about 20 yrs of making the same mistakes, but it's about knowing how the system works w/out having to RTFM. Institutional knowledge, or "history" is a big part of "experience". The problem was that there were a lot of automated jobs/processes that "just worked" that people had forgotten about, didn't realize they were there or what they did on the backend, so when the "farm" moved, the processes were not updated to provide the new "farm" the data/info/licenses that were needed to work. I had it figured out in 2-3 days working on it part-time while doing my reg job when da-new-guy couldn't figure it out in 30 days with the original documentation he'd ignored for 2 yrs. But, sure, you can kid yourself that he was "objectively" better than someone with over twice his experience.

I'm sure there are people younger than I that have more technical skills than I do. They understand the newer technologies and newer programming practices with less effort than I do because it's what they're starting off with. But in my experience, in my role, all they know is programming and not how client/server applications work and how network connectivity between the two impact the application. Great, you made the logic more efficient, but now you're trying to send too large a data block between the two and you start exceeding a connection timer and having your connection terminated and have no idea why it doesn't work and have no idea how to troubleshoot the issue. Or some other similar issue. I ran into this issue in just the past couple of months. We had to adjust the timeout setting on a web server for certain types of connections because the query and data transfer exceeded the default limits.

Each generation brings value. What makes a winning team is respecting one another.

It's not the "generation" that "brings value," it's the individual. Individuals who went well above and beyond in their free time in college to learn and to build that which would withstand the test of time rather than a single 0.1 second run in an automatic grading tool represent a very small percentage of people and are far more capable out of the gate than most of their peers. They are the ones that kept learning and excelling throughout their career, they've earned the highest respect at every age, and they don't stay at companies like Cisco which constrain their growth.

What makes a "winning team" is one that can deliver functionality, performance and quality on budget and on time release after release after release. When Cisco plans to spend 1 1/2 engineering years on a project and it's still can't meet the quality gate to ship after 30 engineering years, instead of firing everyone up through the VP it's bonuses and promotions time because everyone failed in ways which made the dash board lights green the entire time. In the mean time not only have they not developed any new skills but skills they had atrophied. This deserves disrespect. Companies that are good at development don't spend the majority of their development budget on bug fixing.

Before the usual suspects reply "but that's because of the ELT's leadership," no, it's because Cisco engineers consciously made a choice to do a poor job as well as to do nothing to improve their own situation. In a market where Cisco couldn't get any price they asked and where there were any viable competitors the whole thing would collapse. Thank all the generations of your ELT for acquiring your way to the top.

On a tangent, one of the advantages of a good university in the 1980s is you had access to a far more diverse set of technologies than most in industry would be able to access because everything cost a fortune back then, and there were many different competing technologies to explore. It's a 64-bit, little endian, POSIX or Windows with a POSIX subsystem world now so a few hundred bucks in the used market will get you access to almost any important software technology at a very small scale. With some bachelors level engineering degrees heading towards $300,000 the fact that few take advantage of this throughout their career is depressing.

— At my first job out of college many of us "junior" engineers objectively demonstrated how we outperformed our "senior" counterparts in development time, functionality, quality and maintainability. 20 years of making the same mistakes is not "experience."—
Each generation brings value. What makes a winning team is respecting one another. Not doing so only shows a lack of professional maturity - whether you are senior or junior.

You can't expect to pay someone w/ 20 yrs experience the same pay as some new person w/ only 5 yrs experience. If you think that less experienced person can do the same work as me, then fine.

In the late 1970s they taught function decomposition and refactoring in BASIC using subroutines without scoping and without separate compilation, so you are using technologies that predate structured and modular programming. Compare and contrast to the early 2000s era 11,000 line hwidb and similar sized functions with endless nesting, gotos and a decade of DDTs' filed against them as they never fully worked, along with cutting and pasting which at its most extreme was done a thousand files at a time.

Hit college in 1980 and you learn structured and modular programming in your freshman year along with why and how you provide substitutability through APIs (on big iron where CPU time was hundreds of dollars an hour one linked in CPU optimized implementations, and on small boxes one linked in memory optimized implementations.) You learned the what and why of minimizing coupling and maximizing cohesion.

In your sophomore year you take "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" and one of the first things you learn is the Pigeonhole Principal which turns out to be a great way to prove how a poorly thought out design won't scale. You should also have a data structures course under your belt so you can build up and tear down complex structures deterministically.

In your junior year you take a software engineering course where you learn the difference between requirements, design and implementation so your SFS, SDS and test plans can be more than the template where the only changes are adding an author and title and your code may complete the nightly build more than once or twice a month.

In your senior year you can take what were graduate level electives where you learn OS internals, concurrent programming, etc... - things that eluded many in Cisco's own OS groups decades later.

I'll save the encyclopedia sized post about how so many of Cisco's most senior people failed to demonstrate basic knowledge of any of the above, all of which I and many others had under our belts when we graduated college decades ago. At my first job out of college many of us "junior" engineers objectively demonstrated how we outperformed our "senior" counterparts in development time, functionality, quality and maintainability. 20 years of making the same mistakes is not "experience."

Honestly, Cisco was the worst company I ever worked for. I’m so happy they laid me off and I’m with such a better company. Cisco is extremely toxic, and full of bad behavior.

"You can't expect to pay someone w/ 20 yrs experience the same pay as some new person w/ only 5 yrs experience. If you think that less experienced person can do the same work as me, then fine."

You are thinking logically. Most VPs and Senior Director would be classified and narcissists and/or psychopaths. They thrive in chaotic environments and use layoffs as a method to succeed and deflect attention.

Most layoffs aren't about cost cutting or performance but has to deal with undiagnosed mental health issues at the VP level.

LR'd people be salty

With good reason, given that LR's are not performance based and are "cost" related. It's one thing to be in a BU that's being cut across the board for being too costly, not making a profit, etc., but it's another thing to be cut just because you are "too expensive". I wasn't too expensive when you hired me or too expensive when you gave me that promotion or raise, so why am I too expensive now? You can't expect to pay someone w/ 20 yrs experience the same pay as some new person w/ only 5 yrs experience. If you think that less experienced person can do the same work as me, then fine.

Not everyone deserves to work for the best company :P

Yeah, back in the JC days, they let the bottom 5% go annually via performance improvement plans (PIPs) instead of mass lay-offs that are not performance based, but are instead based on age and wages. If you're old, and have experience and/or seniority that has resulted in raises over the years, you're now more expensive than younger workers who have enough experience to figure it out eventually instead of knowing what is the likely cause of the problems, so you're cut in order to bring in the younger, less experience people.

Now it's all about being "yes" men instead of talented workers. Wups, my age is showing. I should have said "yes people".

LR'd people be salty

This was only true 19 years ago, shame on Fortune… SHAME!

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Cisco is the best of the best, period.

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Yes. We change the way people work, play, live, and love! Go Cisco!!

Not everyone deserves to work for the best company :P