Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Morale on the Edge

Working in sales at Cisco comes with its unique set of challenges, but perhaps the most daunting of these is the quarterly imposition of LRs (Layoffs). The unsettling reality is that performance often plays second fiddle to where you stand within your team or your rapport with your manager. It’s a harsh truth that even top performers aren’t immune if they find themselves on the wrong side of these factors.

This constant threat hanging over our heads every quarter has taken a significant toll on morale. The pervasive worry about facing redundancy is not just a background concern; it’s forefront in everyone’s minds, overshadowing our ability to focus on our core responsibilities. Conversations with resellers, partners, and distributors invariably veer into discussions about job security, reflecting a widespread concern that transcends our internal team dynamics.

The impact of this uncertainty on mental health and morale cannot be overstated. When the fear of losing your job becomes as much a part of your work life as your actual job duties, it’s clear that the environment is far from conducive to productivity or well-being. This culture of fear stifles innovation, collaboration, and the overall spirit of our workplace, making it an urgent issue that needs to be addressed for the sake of our team’s future and the company’s success.

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Post ID: @OP+1r01Ncbv

9 replies (most recent on top)

So true about morale and sales. We've got Maria Martinez to thank for the morale at Cisco. She's the worst leader Cisco's ever had. She's the leader of the Sales Prevention Team - Fewer salespeople, more Customer Experience. Her CX initiative was the growth engine for Cisco. It's increased costs significantly, and customers see less value. However, it keeps doubling down, increasing CX, and reducing Sales.

It's not just her but also her sycophants, Alistair Wildman, Thimaya Subaiya, Harry Caldwell, and Jason Mclaren, to name just a few. These leaders are so bad no sales teams want them near their customers. Thimaya has been working on the transformation organization (no one knows what it is) - from GCAB a couple of years ago, All the customers told their sales teams he was a worthless bag of hot air.

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Post ID: @aen+1r01Ncbv

I loved the comment about Team Space. It's the most important metric in Cisco. Fill it out, and then your manager can better talk to you about what you put in there and determine if you put enough detail in. Then, comment virtually on your comments. So, employees spend time making up BS to put into team space. Don't waste time on customer needs; work on your Team Space.

It's the metric driving Cisco. It's the most important: customers and revenue don't matter. If you fill out your team space every week and respond to the quarterly surveys only positively, not truthfully, revenue will grow, and customers will see value in Cisco if you use Team Space!!!

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Post ID: @krz+1r01Ncbv

I'm not going to lift a finger until the dust settles. The customers can all go on auto-pilot. But the important thing is I will update Teamspace this week.

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Post ID: @uit+1r01Ncbv

The field is now being led by people who think data and metrics can bring results if we just follow the process...MEDDPPIC, C4L, notes in SFDC..they forget that people buy from people, and restricting the salespeople from doing so by cutting expenses wont bring the results they want. One particular upper exec is to blame and his world is about to come crashing down.

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Post ID: @kjl+1r01Ncbv

_.c should be platform_feature.c. Go undocumented formatting!

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Post ID: @noi+1r01Ncbv
It’s a harsh truth that even top performers aren’t immune if they find themselves on the wrong side of these factors...

Cisco has incredibly bad metrics and many held up as "top performers" really can't perform at any level in their profession and really need to go. The Engineer 1s at systems houses I've worked at will easily destroy every Principal Engineer I worked with at Cisco. It turns out that plagiarizing bits into incorrect and self contradictory white papers doesn't generate revenue.

This culture of fear stifles innovation, collaboration, and the overall spirit of our workplace...

I was there before the first layoff and on the software side the work was still mostly maintenance with no innovation or collaboration. 100 people write different broken versions of the same solution in isolation then the rest cut and paste those solutions throughout the code bases, then the code bases get forked endlessly. The cost of maintaining this was already choking Cisco's budgets back before 2001. If Cisco had any systems engineering skills there would have been one copy that was seriously tested and hardened so no one needed to go back to it freeing everyone else to do something useful. Even in a single platform on a single branch there were multiple different large blocks of code to implement the same feature with no indication that all but one had no linkage. That one was never in the file _.c where people went by default to understand how the feature worked.

Refactoring up to 40 years of technical debt and four routing/switching operating systems into one working product really is beyond Cisco's managerial and technical leadership, and the failed culture they perpetuate rots the worker bees in the process. The constant layoffs for 23 years are merely a side effect of this because as long as these problems exist Cisco will never be able to move forward effectively. As customers we still get "releases" which got through development and testing where whole subsystems don't come up which is Short Bus Development 001. Figure it out already.

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Post ID: @rde+1r01Ncbv

@OP+1r01Ncbv "The unsettling reality is that performance often plays second fiddle to where you stand within your team or your rapport with your manager. It’s a harsh truth that even top performers aren’t immune if they find themselves on the wrong side of these factors....The impact of this uncertainty on mental health and morale cannot be overstated.... This culture of fear stifles innovation, collaboration, and the overall spirit of our workplace, making it an urgent issue that needs to be addressed for the sake of our team’s future and the company’s success."

So very well said! Insightful. A good friend and now ex-colleague of mine had exactly this happen to him. His newish manager called a meeting with him for his "career development" out of the blue and told him that promoting him or his career has nothing to do with deserving it, but with her priority. I personally know that he went into a massive period of stress trying to move internally which he could not two years ago due to hiring freezes. Then he left just before the announcement of the mass layoffs in Nov 2022.
To unnecessarily subject top performing people to such mental agony for no fault of their own is just evil. I decided to stay back and got LRed few months later. This is Cisco UKI.

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Post ID: @yjq+1r01Ncbv

By default, isn't sales stressful? It is a shame that these thoughts constantly invade your mind, but I am sure your talents can be applicable at other tech companies. I hope you aren't impacted, but be confident in your abilities- their loss if you are impacted.

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Post ID: @xio+1r01Ncbv

just keep listning to david oggins : who's gonna carry the boats?

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Post ID: @gbp+1r01Ncbv

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