Dear friends in the UK
I understand it is likely you were notified today my thoughts and prayers
Please remember this is not on you as an individual, you sadly are the victim of ineptitude in SF
28 replies (most recent on top)
iejc+1rJFXhal what did people get
@iejc+1rJFXhal Bottom line is employees ended up with no job and a sh!tty deal. Reflection of the quality of the UK Management. Courtesy of DEI recruitment and promotions. They have destroyed sales and SE teams with no jets at the top hired for their ethnicity and gender rather than their efficiency and experience. Classic MBA case study of how a thriving business unit can be demolished within 4 years by putting emphasis on marketing and self-promotion over getting actual work done.
Did the UK consultation process do a shockingly bad job of negotiation on behalf of affected employees or is Cisco being less generous with severance? Spoken to many people affected with under ten years of service who are offered way less than other countries around the world. Example is the £500 Inc Vat towards legal costs when they know that is absolute minimum you will pay excluding VAT.
When MPLS left the company so too did the beating heart of innovation which was cisco.
Having had to follow that collection of horses with a shovel and a bucket I was far less impressed. If they were any good they would have done the work correctly on their own within the confines of Cisco but they failed at both. Chambers overpaid for many companies because he never could build an effective development organization and MPLS added significantly to those problems.
Find me a CEO who could build that effective development organization now and clear out the technical debt along the way and I'll show you someone who would never take the job. Integration of acquisitions large enough to move the needle are now at the scale where they are full development efforts. Complain as everyone here does about Chuck, Chambers dug the pit so deep that I doubt Cisco will ever be able to climb out of it.
Im on the latest LR myself, and I've had years of the hunger games, watching often talented people get chopped has been truly depressing, but its part of Silicon Valley.
Still didnt make it any easier when it happened to me...
Yet, Look I'd say overall they've been a great employer, its just that they've missed too many technology transitions that I couldnt even count them...
The end result of that is a cycle of expensive late in tech cycle acquisitions (with some really notable exceptions like Meraki) and subsequent layoffs to pay for the mistaken largess...no escaping it... But seriously $36B for Splunk...!??
Part of that I think is that engineering teams / talent that want to take risks and innovate arent nurtured, resourced or rewarded; so would you take your $Mor even $1B earth shattering idea to management and get a $50 reward token (yes seriously, I've seen those discussions internally), or go to a startup and get rewarded properly..? Bit of a no brainer I'd say...
But yes, the tone deaf 'Secure Your Spring, Change is in the air' post on the same day as laying off almost 1/6th of your employees is pretty wild... but Snr leadership sadly set the bar for that with one of their famous quips about 'well we'd never layoff ourselves, ha!' on an employee call.. owch..!
Apparently we have had a few smaller layoffs over the last year, and another one coming later... yeiks...good luck!
Work-hard, (show-off harder!) and polish your skills and resume boys..!
Later - The Boyz!
Agree. Unfortunately this is neither the time nor the market to look for a job in the UK. For every open position there are over 400 applicants in 24 hrs as per LinkedIn. You don’t have a hope of getting even an interview unless you know someone , no matter how good you are.
It’s so disheartening to read these messages. It really was once an amazing place to work. The challenges the company has are way beyond just the UK business sadly and so for all of these local organisations things are just going to get harder from here. When MPLS left the company so too did the beating heart of innovation which was cisco. They together had anticipated and even created market transitions before they occurred and engineered leading solutions to address these transitions. John always said that to win you had to be number one or two in a market to compete effectively and they enabled that to happen. John always knew that they were the intellectual stardust the company possessed. Having spent time with Chuck I think is a sincere and kind man but he sadly lacked the experience to know that he had to keep them or find stellar talent to succeed them. David G was a disaster, Rowan T another disaster, then Todd to try to ‘merakify’ global networks but that didn’t work. Tech companies MUST make cool tech to be relevant, to compete and to grow. I left Cisco as I could see that they weren’t able to make the transition and I’ve since worked for the mag 7. These companies are relentless in their engineering innovation culture, are trillions of dollars in valuation and are growing at double digit levels. I’m afraid for you individually it’s a tough but necessary choice. Staying at a company that makes technology for an old world that is desperately now trying to buy its way to relevance (splunk $26bn!!!!) or leave to join somewhere that is building new technology that is doing what cisco used to do…shaping how the world lives, works and plays.
Too many experienced people “retired” in 2020-2021. DEI hiring drive from DM pushed them out. The SED became the only director for commercial, ENT and PubSec for the entire region. I still remember the speech where he said it’s a “pilot” model for other regions.
I never really had any issues with the SED myself but, have heard horror stories. Now, how much of that is fact and how much fact+interpretation I don’t know. I have thankfully moved away from that org for couple of years now. Reality is, there were no quality work there. Longer I stayed, more stagnated my career would become. Where I am now is not much better but the quality of admin, decision making and general office politics is not predictably as poor as in the UKI. Small victory.
The UKI rot set in under Phil when he started to spend more time working on his side projects than day-day Cisco work.
The decline accelerated under Scot, partly because Phil was still there in the background but mostly because of some extremely dubious promotions to his SLT, people that ticked the various DEI boxes but had limited experience.
This was compounded by a significant market shift, UKI was built on Financial Services and Public Sector. When both sectors headed down the cloud-first route the rug was well and truly pulled from under UKI’s sales pipeline. That led to a number of highly competent people leaving, further eroding the skills base.
A shame, but there you are.
DM inherited a basket case and has been unable to turn the ship with the resources left to him. Personally, I’ve never had any issues with the SED, I’ve always found him reasonable but I accept that’s not a universally held view.
It's a vicious, self-destructive cycle. The current management in the UKI does not care about business - that much is clear from their actions through last 4 odd years. They are trying to muzzle the voice of employees through quiet intimidation enforced via HR and a constant implied threat of "PIP if you don't obey". At the same time business is dying, no one is interested or motivated to work any more and revenue is suffering. People cannot work in a motivated manner with any respect for the management if they have to worry about keeping their jobs every couple of months. In the meanwhile, management is gaslighting the employees voicing concerns, while, at the same time, "managing upwards" to secure their own positions. But the VP, SSED et al. do not talk to customers, do nothing to generate any business at all. That's why business is suffering and suffering badly. Soon, it will just be the few people at the upper management left at London and Bedfont Lakes to switch off the lights.
The farce was good till it lasted. Now things are getting too bitter for my taste. Hasta La Vista Cisco UK.
As someone else pointed out the SE team management was celebrating spring and positive change the day after they took away the livelihood of so many people here. That should tell you something about the quality of management or empathy towards employees this management has. They are not your friend. Psychopaths are running this org. Business has been ground to dust since 2021.
I still don’t know the exact number or percentage of people affected and they won’t tell us. As someone else said in this thread: the UK HR are not your friends - that is very true. Please practice caution. Cisco UKI org is death warmed up. It’s a fiefdom run by you know who.
I’d say the UKI management started to reek of toxic waste as of late 2019. That’s when the DEI started as did the steady decline. The general sales and especially SE Team has gone to dogs. Both orgs now circling the drain.
True that many high performing people were either pushed out, sacked or left because of the incessant nonsense. A search in LinkedIn will tell you how many since mid-2020.
There are still several good people who live in the UK and work for Cisco but most don’t work in the UKI org. They moved to EMEA or Cisco global or some other org away from the toxic wasteland as did I.
Horrible local management for the last 4 odd years, since 2013.
Counting back from 2024 the last four odd years would be 2023, 2021, 2019 and 2017. If you meant "4-odd" as in "approximately four" that only gets you to approximately 2020. Arguably there have been more than four strange years since 2013 so even that doesn't get you all the way back to 2013. What was this supposed to say?
Management by fear.
Fear is just one way to abuse other employees. If you don't have a list of horrors you've seen at high tech companies you've lived a charmed life. There is a reason the phrase "prairie-dogging" has existed for decades.
Anyone who was any good in the UKI theatre has either left or have now been part of LR.
So everyone who still works at Cisco in the UKI theatre is apparently not in "any way good."
@3idp+1rJFXhal
Horrible local management for the last 4 odd years, since 2013. Several actually productive, proven people have need laid off, some others pushed out, some left. Unbelievably psychotic management, both VP and SSED. Management by fear. Reports of bullying are rampant. HR and management both impotent if not complicit.
Anyone who was any good in the UKI theatre has either left or have now been part of LR.
Wow, that's horrible ! I'm really sorry to hear that.
I don't understand why UK was so heavily impacted ? Is it a fallout from Brexit, or something else specific to the country ?
Source?
14% of the UK workforce was let go ... let that sink in
Interesting that you say “in your case it was a cop out”. I get that and Cisco also threaten the restrictive covenants. I hope it works out for you. For me the behaviour of Cisco was bordering on criminal. Initially they backed the exec, then for a settlement they said they don’t associate the accusations made by the exec, this was a second tribunal. In other words an exec targeted you, we backed them and you paid for reporting his actions in an ethics case.
Maybe your case wasn’t a cop out maybe someone is saying things about you and sc--wing your career behind your back.
For me I had to take Cisco to tribunal to get them to admit the accusations against me were false and that is at the highest level. If anyone at Cisco ever says anything within Cisco or externally, they will have the strongest legal action possible taken against them. I might raise a GDPR just to check.
Apart from the personal accusations by the exec I still don’t know why Cisco backed him. My record was good oh and the exec we later found out had behaved the same at a previous company. That company fired him. It says a lot about the real Cisco.
I got a raise and promotion today am I the only one ?
never liked english accent anyways. smell ya later!
While UK reels from layoffs, people lose their livelihoods courtesy of a moribund culture enforced by a horrid local management, the SE Supreme Leader, in his public blog, welcomes “change”. Nero complex to the max. As Cisco burns, the management celebrates.
“ As Spring breaks up and down the country - there's a palpable sense of change in the air – and the tech landscape is no exception.
Exciting developments and innovations are sprouting up. Cisco has acquired Splunk which you’ll hear more about below.
Let’s go! “
Read more, in full detail:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/secure-your-spring-chintan-patel-nezyf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via
Yeah, the 'business rational' was a cop out I think in my case. But Cisco have done this exercise so many times are they not well aligned with presenting any challenges as legal?
If you wait for the consultation to near end (and anyway) and not signing the doc that's supposed to get Cisco 'out of jail', you risk not getting any ex-gracia payment, right? So you may scare the cr@p out them, but to what end game? An out of court settement?
If you are impacted and concerned about the LR in the UK, be aware of HR, they are not your friend. Also bear in mind Cisco are in a terrible state so there are genuine redundancies.
However if you believe you have been targeted, ask for the business case to make your role redundant. It should be available otherwise you should not have been put at risk.
Also wait for the consultation to near completion, at the last meeting submit a GDPR request. If possible ask a solicitor to raise it and make them specify that if any personal data is not available then specify the reason why and if as usual they hide behind legal privilege ask them exactly why it is legal privilege.
You have legal rights. 2010 equality act and the 1974 health and safety act section 2 usually scare the cr-p out of them
It seems all plp impacted were notified yesterday there may be exceptions. Many teams affected.
Is it continuing today? Which teams are impacted?
Virtual channel team was heavily impacted today we love you and miss you guys
Yep! Saw the Supreme Leader of the SE team walking around all important and busy. Next, probably a VP position for him.
This is true and happening from today