Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Their whole motivation is to pay you the absolute minimum without you quitting in frustration.

The alternative is a runaway system with increasing wages chasing increasing costs. The world is trying the opposite and equally disastrous plan of infinite growth through infinite borrowing.

Put another way, how many of you would keep fixing bugs for Cisco if you suddenly had $10M in the bank?

Company loyalty should be completely ignored for mega corp public companies like Cisco. They have no loyalty to their employees and they will have ZERO issues firing and laying off people. Their whole motivation is to pay you the absolute minimum without you quitting in frustration.

Early in your career, never stay at a company more than 5 yrs. No more than 3 yrs if a start up....if the company has not gone public within 3 yrs probably never will.
Get 15%+ increase in comp with each move. Within 10-15 yrs of your target retirement date find work in a large public company like CSCO. Ride that dinosaur until you are ready to exit on your own terms.

As an ex-military service member entering the civilian workforce, I had thought I'd be a career loyalist, but I was quickly disabused of that attitude.

My first employer sold off the BU I was part of before I'd completed my new-hire 12-month agreement that stated I'd have to pay back my relocation costs if I quit in the first year. No prorated clause, no nothing. I was forced to watch all my co-workers quit and take all the local openings while I waited 6-mo for my 1-yr anniversary as the company gave us 9 months notice about the buy out and our severance date.

The next employer started doing layoffs here and there shortly after going public, so I quit before they could lay me off.

The next employer let a small # of people go (< 10), then another small # (< 10) which included me, and then 181 days later, they closed the office that now had 49 people left and avoided the WARN requirements.

After that, I turned from FTE work to contractor work, and even there, the consulting agencies had no loyalty to their employees. They all said they'd start looking for the next "gig" before the current one ended if the client decided not to renew, but somehow that never worked out. I'd end up out of work w/ no notice, no severance, etc. Every time I'd find the next contractor "gig" via some other consulting company.

After all that, I've learned that there is ZERO loyalty from ANY company towards it's employees and many companies will do the math to figure out how to get rid of employees as cheaply as possible, Once company only paid out their 401(k) matching at the end of the year to all current employees a/o Dec 31. When they laid me off, they gave me my 2-weeks' notice the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend, offered me an additional 2 weeks if I signed the agreement not to sue, and my employment ended on Dec 28th meaning that the 5% 401(k) matching did not have to be paid to me.

You've got to look out for yourself. If you're early in career or mid-career, you should be changing jobs, roles if not employers, every 3-5 yrs to get more experience, more responsibilities, and higher pay. Don''t burn bridges as you leave because you'll end up bumping into people you know or who knew you from those previous companies as you move to new ones and you don't want them saying bad things about you before or after your interview because you burned that bridge.

At my point in life, I probably won't "quit" Cisco because I don't know how potential new companies will treat me due to my age. But, if Cisco decides to let me go, the severance package is much better than the typical 2-weeks or 2-weeks plus 1 week/year of service packages I'd received in the late '90's & early '00's. It's good enough that I can/will be able to find the next role and I don't have to stay there too long because after a couple of years, I'll be at retirement age. So far, I've been getting above average bonuses based on my IPF, getting small raises, and getting RSU's, so why should I quit at this time?

I think my most recent previous employer before this round at Cisco didn't like my age. I came in as a Sr Tech Lead, and I spent a lot of time mentoring my team on how to use Unix and macOS since they were all Windows users but the company had to start creating iOS mobile apps because no one wants to buy a service that only supports Android users, but iOS apps have to be developed via Xcode on Macs. A director never seemed to be able to find a junior person on our team, so they'd stop at my desk, interrupt my work and tell me to complete this person's task "right now" and did this 2-3x per day. Since they tracked the time spent on all tasks and we had to "log" 38+ hrs of tasks, I had a significant amount of time logged to junior level tasks and my manager complained about it in my 1-yr performance review. Why not bring it up after the first few months since they created monthly reports on our logged work? I told the manger that if I wasn't performing up to my "job title", then neither was he as he wasn't "managing" me and was allowing the Director to "micromanage" so was he getting a poor performance review? Other than those tasks, I was formalizing/documenting troubleshooting steps for each client's services, automating the host build and deployment process, adding vulnerability/static analysis scans of releases before "releasing" products, etc., so I was doing tasks they should have had in place long before I was hired, but somehow all they could focus on was the junior level tasks I did at the Director's order. My review was just after my 1-yr service anniversary, so I interviewed w/ Cisco about 3-5 days after the performance review, got the offer a week later, and waited 2 weeks to give my 2 weeks notice such that my last day would be on Jan 3rd. Since they didn't rollover PTO or accrue it, I used all of my PTO through Dec 31, enjoyed Jan 1st as a holiday, came back to work on the 2nd and terminated on the 3rd. Play the game baby. As bad as Cisco is, it's still way better than some of the other companies and/or clients I've worked at. I've been lucky at Cisco and have worked on teams that have (or had) very little turnover on the teams while I was on them and all the employees were above-average performers. They rarely did direct-hire and usually started people out as contractors and quickly got rid of the ones that didn't perform or mesh w/ the team and then converted the ones who fit in and worked hard. Some of the stuff I read here just doesn't sound like the parts of Cisco I've been part of. Although, I do disagree w/ a lot of what the ELT says and how they've changed the LR process from announcing it ahead of time and publicly sharing the package details to announcing it during an earnings call & notifying employees the next day and only sharing the package details w/ the affected employees. That's not being transparent. Now it's all stealth.

Right now, I give "a day's work for a day's pay" and expect nothing more. I have my 180+ hrs of PTO banked and take 40 hrs here and there to keep from maxing it out and stop accruing PTO yet I have 4-5 weeks of "severance" regardless of whatever Cisco's package is. But I'm not "loyal" to Cisco. If things get "bad", I'm gone. As long as things are "OK", and I'm getting my bonus, then I'll hang around. I'm in a role where I'm not supporting legacy code and I get to work w/ current technology that makes my resume look good, so I'm not stagnating which is why I'm confident that I can find the next role when the LR kn--e finds my back.

1st 9.5 years loyal, led to burnout. Semi-loyal hopper the last 8 years which the market has rewarded. Market may be getting tougher but I believe hopping was the best for broadening my skills.