Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

I stopped reading after #1. Every single profitable American IT firm has been laying off people this year.

...all I want is to feel secure about my job

The best job security is building real skills, knowing how to apply them and working somewhere you can keep getting better at both. Even if you do get laid off you'll have the ability and the confidence to get another job well before the package runs out.

On the software side many of us came to Cisco with the promise of development only to spend years moving from one team to the next to the next "just helping them over the hump." In that environment develop skills atrophy and as you adopt Cisco's practices your ability to apply those skills likewise atrophies. Cisco is a place to get worse at both.

The competent are far more willing to work at a good company with the risk of layoffs than a bad one that lets failure fester.

Tbh I need no google perks. I'm capable of buying food for myself, all I want is to feel secure about my job

Look, we get it, you want to work at Apple but lack any talent to get a job there

At least aim for Microsoft. With them you only need to turn it off and on again. With Apple you have to erase all mass storage and do a completely new install of the OS, all your applications on the subset of data that actually made it into iCloud.

Cisco needs to fire the current CEO and hire a technical CEO

You're the peasants at the back of the parade with the shovels and buckets cleaning up after the horses. No CEO is going to be able to change you into 85,000 Grand Marshals and if there was one person on earth who could do it they'd take a better job.

“Commitment to no layoffs”…..
Is OP dreaming ?

It’s not worth the effort to save. It’s too slow and big to make any kind of meaningful change.

“Commitment to no layoffs”…name one company where this exists? Must be a post from over the pond. You are living in a dream world.

"Great Place to work" is a very overrated concept in our industry if you ask me. People feel motivated if the company is growing and hot (that means their stocks value is getting up). Company will do more swaggers and freebie here/there to catch the momentum. Whether they treated people nicely? Not necessary - they may manage you out if you are not perform to "their" standard. That can also be very subjective. They can demand a lot from you - long hours/nightly calls with off-shore etc. But, people SK it up because they got paid. Growing company also tries to give good benefits package (aka they are willing to spend more). For example, AWS is a terrible place to work but people SK it up because it paid period.

If the company is not growing, then the people will turn into surviving mode - no matter what you are trying to do, there will be all kinds of Kissing, favoring, boasting, hiding, finger pointing, job hopping, lazy... The real competent people will not hand out too long. However, for the company size like CISCO, there will be pockets that people are motivated - either CISCO are pouring more money in or the technologies used there can make them hot commodities.

So, accepting the fact, if you are mediocre and in a so-so/not growing group - It is going to be what is. Not just CISCO, any other large companies will behave the same - Cut/Cut/Cut/Squeeze/Squeeze/Squeeze and in-fighting for survival.

Look, we get it, you want to work at Apple but lack any talent to get a job there

OP, you start off with:

#1 Commitment to no layoffs. That should not be that hard for a XX billion company.

And end with:

We would need to lay off 70% of our staff to make space for truly talented people, launch new, exciting products and then make Cisco the best place to work with steps #1 to #3.

How can you have a commitment to no layoffs and then layoff 70% of the staff!

(I cry every night when I think about how much my friends at other companies make).

If you're that unhappy, why the heck haven't you quit and gone to work at "other companies" your "friends" make? Can they not put a good word in for you to get you hired or are you part of the problems at Cisco?

Man up and take charge of your life. If you think Cisco doesn't pay a competitive wage, go to a company that does if you think you can cut it there. Otherwise, I have no sympathy for you. For my role, I get a competitive salary and Cisco has better benefits than the last few companies I've worked at.

Cisco needs to fire the current CEO and hire a technical CEO

Cisco is now DISCO: Disinformed Imbeciles Sacrificed for Cisco's Opex. It will never be a great place of work. The management will keep paying the likes of Forbes for that award year after year so that a bunch of Koolaid drinking, self-important, chronic onanists can go on LinkedIn and Whoop it up. Useless waste of time. Do what I am doing: Leave! There are LOTS of better companies out there with management that are actually competent.

We would need to lay off 70% of our staff to make space for truly talented people...

Congratulations on not reading the zillions of similar posts over the years before stating the same discredited nonsense. You are clearly part of that 70% that needs to go.

Companies rise and companies fall. It's investors want high margins and low risk. Looking at lists of the top ten technology companies by revenue Foxconn is the only one that I don't know for a fact is collecting an astronomical amount of customer data. The idea Cisco can create, manage, market and sell something completely new to generate another $50B/yr in revenue to get into that top 10 list while staving off competitors and maintaining high margins and low risk is at best far fetched.

Repeat after me: Legacy. Acquisitions. Technical debt. While they've put Cisco in the top 20 technical companies by revenue and by market value they also constrain its ability to grow in new directions. Like HP, IBM, Oracle and others Cisco will continue to plod along.

You speak of FAANG but for all the "own the box" kernel exploits from playing an audio file Apple's iOS should be renamed Flash. Google's YouTube has one of the worst search systems in the world and text translation is only available a small percentage of the time, two technologies Google itself is well known for. These are but a small taste of a worldwide buffet of reasons why you don't want most FAANG employees either.

Much too late to change. Culture is one of cult worship and sycophancy and no one can dare speak their mind in a culture of constant layoffs. That friends is the ultimate problem at Cisco and why the ship is holed beneath the waterline. It can’t be fixed now. Pity because there is some good stuff at Cisco but it is lost in a sea of junk and constantly changing focus. ELT have no engineering background and focus and JD is a yes man.

1. Put together a vision of the future that is realistic, contains no buzz words, and that everyone in the company can get behind - How about "We power the internet" and we focus on Security, AI search capability (because that's the future of search), better routing and switching (because that's our legacy), and cloud server space companies can actually understand and use.

2. Edit Layoffs. Celebrate people and help them find their next moves, rather than cutting them off and pretending they don't exist. Give them a decent golden parachute so we don't lose the last of the talent we have.

3. Stop acquiring junk and build a competent in-house development team. We have plenty of great product managers and business analysts brought in from other companies, and coders are cheap from Thailand and India.

4. Flatten the company. The hierarchical 9-10 layers up to the top and massive number of silos, makes it a land-grab/territory battle between leaders, rather than everyone focusing on making the company functional. Do a thoughtful reorganization that leaves 4 layers - the C level, the strategy level, the management level, and the worker bee level. And fix how you finance the teams. Rewarding people for hiding information from their co-workers, seems stupid.

5. Knock it off with politics. We aren't successful enough to be policy wh-or-es. Get some serious business acumen going, focus on being successful, then worry about what pronouns bobett uses. Ciscoites are well cultured for the most part, none of us are going around treating anyone in any way except how they prefer to be treated. 500 communist manifesto meetings a week doesn't exactly help productivity.

6. Be more thoughtful about layoffs. Managers just cut the people they don't like, there are no performance reviews, there is no feeling of solidity of teams or plans or vision. Everyone is just flailing around like windmill armed buffoons because everything changes every three months and there is no direction when teams change constantly. Set things up right once, and be done with it.

Not worth it. Better to start over from scratch at a new company.

Unfortunately, it's too late to transform legacy Cisco. Given the lack of innovation over the last decade, margins continue to decline and customers no longer view Cisco as being strategic to them which means the primary focus of the C-Suite is to lower costs to prop the stock up for as long as possible.

The Splunk acquisition is Chuck's Hail Mary to finally create a successful software business. He also acquired his replacement so he won't be around to see if the acquisition will ultimately be successful. He'll be counting his hundreds of millions on his Atlanta golf course.

Don't you know cisco has already been the greatest palce to work?