"It’s basically confirmed that this point. I heard from a contact in HR that the list was sourced before shutdown. If you are on the list, you are now referred to internally as a “Business Case”. HR and legal are now in the process of the reviewing the business cases and refining the list to reduce liability IE: removing people from the list that are likely to sue due to age, gender, etc. at some point final list is shared with decision makers, announcement is on earnings call and then the individual notifications go out throughout Feb based on local laws and regulations. My contact could not share info on numbers impacted, orgs or BU’s."
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Cisco was saying they needed to be a systems company, not a box company since at least 2000. They don't know systems and they don't know software. The culture that has held them back for nearly a quarter century can't be changed with training
This. Hearing it for 15 years. Sales know how to sell boxes to box buyers. They don't talk to the installers, the ops teams, etc. You didn't really need to. You'd got your $.
Now in subscription biz, that's not the case, and sales still don't get it. The stench of fear they have when their CX counterpart wants to bring them to talk to the customer ops team, is almost enough to make you choke.
Everyone must have seen this coming since the Splunk acquisition was announced. Cisco's got to recoup some change and eliminate role duplication.
Speaking with my previous manager who was let go in the last Rif, he said they knew who was going to be let go then. So there's been a few months to finalize the list, the last performance reviews (Jan) as basic as they were I think could be used to make decisions for those on the bubble.
There is some hope for Cisco in Security & Systems Observability, if they can get several of their acquisitions to work together to form solid solutions.
The layoff culture makes any overlapping BE's fight for territory though, so it's a heck of a puzzle getting the groups to connect. You really have to put all of the products under one leader and rename them into one service if you want the groups to work together. And give folks some measure of security in their job.
Cisco really should stop hiring from outside and shuffle inside employees to new roles when needed. It takes an employee about 3 years to get ramped up to how the culture works at Cisco (relationship based). New hires are lost for at least 6 months, semi-useful for the next two and a half years, and it ki-ls productivity.
There are job functions like IT or infrastructure who know how things work...
When I was at Cisco IT was every bit as sc--wed up as software. I'm not even talking about servers, Cisco couldn't even figure out how to deploy their own products correctly.
Astonishingly bad leadership has prevented Cisco from entering new markets and wasted shareholders' money...
So you list a bunch of areas where networking experience is required and note that Cisco has failed. If Cisco can't compete in the markets you listed in what new markets do you think they'd actually be capable of succeeding?
Cisco was saying they needed to be a systems company, not a box company since at least 2000. They don't know systems and they don't know software. The culture that has held them back for nearly a quarter century can't be changed with training and with 40 years of technical debt to overcome they'll never be able to hire enough of the quality of talent they'd need to both dig out from under this debt but really advance the company. As John Chambers, the person most responsible for this over the decades said repeatedly, "you have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be."
CR got it catastrophically wrong telling the market that Cisco is a "software company". If he had an ounce of technical acumen he would have known this. It is nothing of the sort and 99% of employees would have told him so. Senior leadership who did tell him such were fired. That will come back to haunt Cisco when the renewals do not happen in anything like the volume they now have to and the market demands.
The amount of money Cisco has spent in pursuing and, ultimately, failing in Software, Cloud, AI, and Security is staggering. Astonishingly bad leadership has prevented Cisco from entering new markets and wasted shareholders' money - all at the same time.
Frankly, the Board could've installed a monkey as the CEO if all it wanted to do was to watch Cisco's enterprise networking cash cow die a slow death.
"Cisco's senior leadership doesn't have a successful business strategy because it has no understanding of their customers' current/future needs and how Cisco could fulfill them."
Cisco sells & markets legacy network equipment, the company is in a managed decline and has been focused on reducing costs. A technology company focuses on future needs, we are a Sales/Marketing company. Cisco = Best Buy
Stock price is at $50 while we missed out on Software, Cloud, AI, and Security. I'd say the senior leadership has done well keeping the sinking ship afloat. Especially if people associate Cisco as a technology company.
"My contact could not share info on numbers impacted, orgs or BU’s.""
My highly reliable contact said the number will be over 19k but less than 20k emps. He/she also emphasized that this will be the biggest single LR in Cisco's history.
Cisco's senior leadership doesn't have a successful business strategy because it has no understanding of their customers' current/future needs and how Cisco could fulfill them. Senior leaders at Cisco are more focused on their fealty to Fran's progressive agenda in hopes they become one of "chosen ones" who are allowed to build their personal brand on Cisco's dime despite delivering no actual business success.
Once Cisco employees realize this, it becomes clear why their continued employment at Cisco is like playing roulette. Their abilities and their effort matter little because there is no direct connection between the work they're assigned and the future business success of the company.
Before the shut-down, VP has asked for a talent review and asked about 20% of staf that which are under-perfofming.
Not so sure about the doom mongers about a mass Feb LR. There will be a LR for sure but I think a more mass LR is more likely later this year when the Splunk merger completes.. So get saving, polish up your skills and get the 401k maxed whilst you can.
A well run company with hundreds of millions of lines of code developed over four decades would have sufficient documentation to tolerate a fairly high bus factor because many software careers won't even last 40 years. Cisco is not a well run company.
Not everything at Cisco is about the hundreds of millions of lines of legacy code. There are job functions like IT or infrastructure who know how things work and where the backend automated processes are that made the internal tools or processes "just work" and when they get LR'd, stuff suddenly breaks when a server gets replaced after 3-5 years of service or the OS get's a major upgrade by building a fresh machine and moving the application(s) to the new server, but the automation that made it work didn't get migrated.
Or some team was providing data to some network share and the person who knew "why" is LR'd and someone later comes around and says we don't need to do that anymore, no one is using that data and then bang, stuff stops working.
If you've been at Cisco, you know they change documentation systems every couple of years and migrate from one to the next. Stuff gets lost every migration, especially when the person that wrote it initially is now gone and their "replacement" didn't bother to look at it and keep it up to date and people think it's obsolete and unneeded because it hasn't been updated in a couple of years.
Been there; done that.
Cisco's metrics are based on what is easy to measure, not what serves its long term success and as a result they aren't laying off the right people, but the reality is many very senior people need to go.
True, but they're not the ones being let go, and people who need to stay are being let go.
I've seen too many competent people who were hard working people who enjoyed their roles at Cisco have to leave due to an LR and even though they handed off their responsibilities by letting the team know where the "documentation" was, when the people who had to pick up the pieces and had no clue how it worked, things turned into a dumpster fire because they didn't understand the documentation, ignored it and didn't keep it current as things changed, and completely lost track of it when the wiki system of the month migrated to some new system and the documentation got lost when it was migrated to an "orphaned" section because no one took ownership of it.
Getting rid of experienced people in key roles who have years of corporate knowledge and replacing them w/ one or two younger, less experienced people who have no experience w/ how things get done at Cisco is not "serving the shareholders".
A well run company with hundreds of millions of lines of code developed over four decades would have sufficient documentation to tolerate a fairly high bus factor because many software careers won't even last 40 years. Cisco is not a well run company.
"Getting rid of experienced people in key roles who have years of corporate knowledge and replacing them w/ one or two younger, less experienced people who have no experience w/ how things get done at Cisco is not "serving the shareholders"."
Serves the shareholders if it manufactures chaos and divides employees. Stop thinking like a Grade 8 Project Manager and strategize like a VP.
Getting rid of experienced people in key roles who have years of corporate knowledge and replacing them w/ one or two younger, less experienced people who have no experience w/ how things get done at Cisco is not "serving the shareholders".
I've got a long list of people in "key roles" who seriously sc--wed the company and should have been laid off but instead were promoted. Cisco's metrics are based on what is easy to measure, not what serves its long term success and as a result they aren't laying off the right people, but the reality is many very senior people need to go.
“list was sourced before shutdown”
I gave my initial list during shutdown and was still able to add to it last week.
Cuts are in orgs/roles that are OPEX...
Corporate America hiring is based on empire building. Never use logic or data to determine how strategic decisions are made by an executive with narcissistic personality disorder.
They thrive in chaos and have superficial charm.
Management and leadership incompetence. If Cisco's hiring was focused on right sizing, we would not need layoffs.
when will these layoffs start happening and why?
For the millionth time, publicly traded companies are legally required to serve only their shareholders, not their customers and not their employees.
But it's not serving their shareholders when you take short-term savings that have negative long-term impacts. Getting rid of experienced people in key roles who have years of corporate knowledge and replacing them w/ one or two younger, less experienced people who have no experience w/ how things get done at Cisco is not "serving the shareholders". Sure, it cuts costs in the immediate quarter after the severance package is paid out, but the loss in productivity caused by the vacuum of these missing people causes increasing costs in the long run.
I'm not saying that there's not people who can, or even should, be cut. But using the metric of how much they cost (which increases w/ seniority) to determine if they should be cut vs. the benefit of keeping them is stupid and short-sighted.
Maybe if the ELT wasn't paid 8-figure incomes then the employee opex cost wouldn't be so much. Somehow the executive pay scales in corporate America have gotten way out of line with that they do and the value they provide w/ their "leadership".
He didn’t look like someone who was going to effect thousands of people’s ability to pay their mortgages...
For the millionth time, publicly traded companies are legally required to serve only their shareholders, not their customers and not their employees. First level managers even at fast food restaurants have to fire employees, and handling that responsibility well is required to move up the ranks. At Cisco that could be 8-10 promotions before getting onto the "potentially the next CEO" list.
As for the ability to pay mortgages, everyone I knew who was competent over the past 23 years who was laid off from Cisco got a job well before the package ran out. Even in the 2008 recession people who weren't laid off from Cisco still quit for better jobs, and some of those took pay cuts because they hated working at Cisco that much.
@ofa+1qCdqYZd Nice try ELT!
I have heard the same. For those brave enough, search Sharepoint for “Business Case”. There is a sharepoint folder under the P&C team called “Opex Transformation team working docs”. I’m sure there is some nuggets in there for those that like taking risks.
he does not care. neither to the EVPS all of whom spends untold sums of money flying around on the corporate jets.
I’ve just seen CR doing an interview in Davos (I’m guessing it’s essential business travel).
He didn’t look like someone who was going to effect thousands of people’s ability to pay their mortgages, so I think all will be fine, maybe even pay rises all round for everyone?