We need a hiring freeze and instead, all I'm seeing is new people joining Cisco. How is this going to prevent future layoffs? I thought it was determined we have too many employees. Adding more is certainly not going to solve that issue. Just pull the plug on hiring and let the employee number drop through attrition.
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The over hiring is to create chaos. Reorg, layoff, over hiring...
You think you're seeing a master plan of the dark lord when you're really looking at simple incompetence.
The over hiring is to create chaos. Reorg, layoff, over hiring...
It distracts from failed strategic initiatives.
They must have great skill before join Cisco.
Purge over 50 and hiring younger and d-mber.
Many of your over 50 haven't even mastered structured programming which in some cases is still older than they are. It's hard to find that in kids who never used a language with a goto so you have to take in brighter kids and train them to be stupid. Doing this is possibly Cisco's greatest skill.
The overall goals for Cisco hiring are fairly simple.
- Purge over 50 and hiring younger and d-mber.
- Indians
Isn't it supposed to be about making the company more profitable? And losing productivity affects the bottom line.
Nice idea, but it will never happen since they won’t or can’t measure it.
The overhiring is deliberate by managers who bring in friends and family and then when they need to downsize, get rid of who they want.
It's how one tribe has managed to take over Engineering so quickly.
I didn't say that there weren't leads that were not doing a competent job, and the leads that don't ensure that there's enough documentation around to support their stuff need to go.
But my point was more about how Cisco just looks at age and salary and NOT competency when it makes it's LR decisions and ignores the startup costs of not having someone to do the LR'd person's job, having to wait 6-mo or more before hiring a replacement because they said that person's job was redundant and not needed, then interviewing and finding a person, and then getting that person on-boarded and up to speed, all while someone else on that team has had to carry the burden w/o the benefits of the corporate "knowledge" of how/why things are the way they are. Maybe they can make things better, but most times they make mistakes due to not knowing something and gain important knowledge by having to figure out what they broke after making changes.
The whole trend of newer generations only staying around for 2-3 yrs in a job, and more so staying in the same company, is a real negative in my opinion. I'm not against promoting or moving into different roles every 2-3 yrs because people should advance and gain new skills, but it's better to keep them in-house so that the corporate knowledge doesn't leave the company. Let them work 50/50 between bringing their replacement up-to-speed while they're being brought up-to-speed in their new role within the company and it's a win-win for both the company and the employees moving upwards.
Isn't it supposed to be about making the company more profitable? And losing productivity affects the bottom line.
Keeping "leads" who stalled programs that should have generated hundreds of millions or more per year by years is the cost that justifies their removal, and a lot of the juniors who never worked at a competent company can't see why those leads were incompetent. Cisco really needs to replace far more people with "leadership" titles.
There's a big difference between the "development" or "engineering" leads like you described, and the leads in IT & EngIT who have to support the infrastructure that everything depends on. If EngIT and/or IT stalled programs for as long as you describe, we'd still be running on bare metal boxes running RedHat 4.
But Cisco's bean counters don't care about who needs to move on. They only care about costs and cut the expensive people who know what's going on like team leads, etc. and then hire 2 grade 6 kids looking for their second job out of college to replace them.
When you have projects go on for decades forked out to an absurd number of branches each you need documentation to keep everyone on the same page, otherwise it's a giant game of telephone. In the process of writing that documentation it forces you to form a clear and consistent view of what you're building and why, something that never existed at Cisco which is part of why the code is such garbage.
Keeping "leads" who stalled programs that should have generated hundreds of millions or more per year by years is the cost that justifies their removal, and a lot of the juniors who never worked at a competent company can't see why those leads were incompetent. Cisco really needs to replace far more people with "leadership" titles.
At Cisco the only thing that matters is this quarter.
The bad news is Cisco is extremely poor at figuring out who needs to move on. The good news is those that haven't lost all their talent by the time they're laid off have landed at other companies with far better opportunities to grow their skills and more money to go with it.
But Cisco's bean counters don't care about who needs to move on. They only care about costs and cut the expensive people who know what's going on like team leads, etc. and then hire 2 grade 6 kids looking for their second job out of college to replace them. With all the legacy stuff at Cisco, you need to keep someone around who has the corporate knowledge that knows how & why things work the way they do. I've seen too many instances where someone thinks some server serves no purpose and shuts it down and all he-l breaks loose.
The real mistake is not keeping your skills up to date and not leaving by your own choice when it's really time. Don't hand more control of your life to people who have no vested interest in it than you have to.
Bingo. The issue is that you can never get seniority anywhere because there are no more companies that invest in their employees or care about longevity. Why the bean counters don't factor in the cost of the work not getting done for the length of time it takes to replace that departing person, the costs associated with interrupting work to perform interviews, the cost of recruiting, and on-boarding someone who will just be gone in 12-36 months.
A long time ago I worked at company that had a 12-month on/90-day off policy for contractors after the Microsoft lawsuit of the early '90's. They decided that after a few years of having no one to support a project for 30-45 days while they searched for a new contractor, and then getting that contractor up to speed taking 60-90 days, and then they had to start looking for a planned replacement that they only really got 8-9 months of useful work out of that contractor if they found a good one. After about 6 yrs of that policy, they switched it to a 24-month on/45-day off policy. If they can see how much it costs to replace contractors every 24-months with a known exit date, why can't the bean counters see how much costs the company to replace people who quit without advanced notice of 2-weeks, if they even give it any more?
How is this going to prevent future layoffs?
What makes you think that is a goal? At the competitive tech companies the average tech person is gone at the two year mark. The non-competitive end up at legacy companies like Cisco and like the proverbial frog in a pot rot slowly with no awareness of what has happened to them, and there is always a need to move some of them on.
The bad news is Cisco is extremely poor at figuring out who needs to move on. The good news is those that haven't lost all their talent by the time they're laid off have landed at other companies with far better opportunities to grow their skills and more money to go with it.
The real mistake is not keeping your skills up to date and not leaving by your own choice when it's really time. Don't hand more control of your life to people who have no vested interest in it than you have to.
JP announced Cisco's intent to acquire yet another company. I lost the count of how many companies are in line for acquisition or have already been acquired for JP's BU (Security and Collab). There is no hope that man will ever stop or he'll ever be stopped doing all the damage in the BU.
We have a hiring freeze, yet again our head count keeps rising. We all know how it will end.
But we lack people to work.....
Dude, we're in the middle of a company-wide hiring freeze with certain exclusions that are very specific (like renewals, CSE roles, certain engineering and supply chain roles)...go look at the job board...the vast majority of reqs that were present just a few weeks ago have been wiped. They are canceling reqs, slow rolling reqs, etc. Things are not exactly peachy at Cisco right now...
hiring their own kind, family friends and old village buddies.
Same ol same ol hence the sinking ship.
What overhiring?’ There has been a hiring freeze across the company since the mandatory PTOs were announced. What is the OP smoking?!
Cisco is hiring cheaper workers will obey Cisco to replacing you, the typical old white men.
Cisco loves to hire people don't speak English to deliver core quality work at the same time obey their rules and policies, this is DNA of corporate America.
The constant hiring and firing of Cisco employees, with no actual decline in Cisco headcount, tells everyone all they need to know about the complete lack of a realistic business strategy from Chuck and the ELT.
Repeating the same mistakes over & over. Hire 3 for the price of thee and watch the remaining talent walk out the door.
What over-hiring?! There is a hiring freeze across Cisco since the mandatory PTO was announced. Grow up.