We're not even done laying people off and yet we're hiring. Great business strategy. A+
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And those same leaders who can't run projects and higher are the ones deciding who gets laid off. You're just saying the same thing I said, except from a different perspective.
No, I was talking of the technical staff. Massively incorrect decisions costing the company tens of millions at a time. No reading comprehension and no foundational knowledge to understand the bits they plagiarized into self contradictory and ultimately wrong "white papers." So many false starts with failed premises. So many SRS and SDS documents with nothing more than a title or an author. Code so buggy that Cisco spends most of their budget failing to fix it rather than having resources for new development. So many project overruns by a factor of more than an order or magnitude. All this on high end projects where most of the "lowest" people were at least Technical Leaders.
The reality is most of the problems weren't in the low level people but the "high" level people with no experience in systems and software and most of the projects I saw overran by double digits, which would have resulted in the cancellation of both the projects and their staff long before then at any well run company, directly because of failures on the part of senior people. Work at a company where people are competent then come back and look at Cisco's senior staff and you'll have a very different perspective than the one you have today.
And those same leaders who can't run projects and higher are the ones deciding who gets laid off. You're just saying the same thing I said, except from a different perspective.
They got rid of the bottom 5 or 10% [of the least politically connected] every year...
FTFY. If Cisco laid off based on performance the quality of the software at a "software company" wouldn't be so abysmal for at least 30 years and you wouldn't have at least four different routing and switching operating systems.
The LR's under Chuck Robbins have been more "targeted" and no longer hit the bottom of the rankings, but instead hit the top of the "cost" rankings irrespective of performance unless a VP or higher can justify keeping someone as "critical" and then has to cut enough people to equal that "expensive" critical person's "cost".
I was laid off under Chambers. Lower level people could apply elsewhere in the company but higher level people were out, so your assertion that this started with Chuck is false. The reality is most of the problems weren't in the low level people but the "high" level people with no experience in systems and software and most of the projects I saw overran by double digits, which would have resulted in the cancellation of both the projects and their staff long before then at any well run company, directly because of failures on the part of senior people. Work at a company where people are competent then come back and look at Cisco's senior staff and you'll have a very different perspective than the one you have today.
It's time for everyone to let go of your false god Chambers. He did everything everyone here accuses Chuck of doing. After the October 2013 results were posted Cisco's revenue started dropping and the stock price was a joke which is why Chambers was replaced by Chuck who managed to milk both more revenue and double the stock price. For all the easily debunked whining about cloud and AI Cisco was never going to compete there, and Cisco's leadership has no skills in Cisco's natural adjacencies of network management and security. Network management was never going to happen, but Cisco's stupidity acted as control rods for the few people who had massive security skills to insure Cisco never leveraged those skills well. Until Cisco replaces the entire culture of "we're the top 10% and only do the best that can be done, so everything is already as good as it can possibly be" that permeates every level of the company, Cisco may be up against its final wall.
Actions like layoffs and rank-an-yank were created by Jack Welch at GE in the first half of the 1980s and set the stage for what you are complaining about. His acolytes such as John Chambers, the previous CEO of Cisco, continued to implement those actions. Modern CEOs at the largest tech companies have taken this further by driving out the majority of their employees in under 2 years. These are simple facts. Why are so many of you unable to learn them?
@wfq+1rRLxSIb, Chuck has completely changed it from what Jack Welch and John Chambers used to do. You said it yourself, they liked the rank-an-yank process. They got rid of the bottom 5 or 10% every year & if managers didn't hire a sacrificial lamb to rank low, then they might lose a good performing employee if they managed to get to a great team because they had to rank someone at the bottom. I know managers who would rotate employees around from great to mediocre and mediocre to poor and vise versa so that no one had great rankings or low ranking back-to-back years and tried to make sure that the low rankings w/ no bonus were offset by great rankings with extra bonus while the rest of the team stayed in the middle with ave bonuses most years just so they wouldn't have to terminate someone once they had a great team collected. If someone left, it was hard for the new guy/gal to prove themselves good enough to make it into the "keeper" list and get protected by the rank shuffle.
The first couple of layoffs under John Chambers that were actually layoffs big enough to make the news/WARN reporting requirements, they were not called "limited restructuring", they were called Workforce Reductions or WFRs and were across the board company wide. The LR's under Chuck Robbins have been more "targeted" and no longer hit the bottom of the rankings, but instead hit the top of the "cost" rankings irrespective of performance unless a VP or higher can justify keeping someone as "critical" and then has to cut enough people to equal that "expensive" critical person's "cost".
But I agree that major tech companies are starting to decide that short-term tenures is better in the long run over developing a deep bench of people with enough corporate knowledge of how things work and who to work with to get things done. It's short-sighted and I hope it bites them in the a$$. Capital One, after the Microsoft contractor lawsuit, decided that they'd protect themselves by enforcing an 90-day break in employment of contractors after 12 months of working at CapOne as a contractor. They had to be hired or dropped for 90+ days. Many of the managers would keep lists of good contractors and since they'd backfill a departing contractor for 12 months, they'd share the list with other managers who would have a departing contractor in 3+ months so that the contractor could come back to a different manager in the same job role quickly. Some contractors made enough they'd just take a 90-day break. Others would take short-term 6-mo gigs and go back to CapOne for 12 more months and just keep doing that. CapOne then decided after about 5 yrs that the on-boarding/off-boarding processes, ordering and returning laptops and requesting/deactivating accounts, and time spent recruiting & performing background checks _again_ was just too expensive so they changed it to a 24 month "on" and the same 90-day "off" cycle. And in one job role, they had a vendor offer them "a discounted bill rate" in return for being the "sole vendor" supplying the contractors claiming that they could provide the same "caliber" of contractors at a lower cost by increasing the volume of contractors and taking a lower cut of the bill rate and keeping the contractors pay rates the same. What a lie. They managed to cut the bill rate to CapOne by 30% over the previous rates and then cut all their contractor's pay rates to the rate of someone that only had 2-3 yrs experience where most of them had 5, 10, or 15 yrs experience and were taking anything from a 20 - 50% pay cut. All the good talent quit and took jobs at competitors or other companies for their old pay or better and put CapOne and this vendor in their rearview mirror. CapOne had to demand the vendor start providing better caliber contractors or lose their sole vendor status, but in return ended up having to pay more which didn't end up saving them much because couldn't stay in business without keeping a higher percentage of the bill rate than what they told CapOne they could get by on.
It's like companies that decided that outsourcing to other countries would save money, but didn't. It's one thing to open offices in another country and move work there, but when you add in an external company like a managed service to do the work for you, it just doesn't save time and money.
Give it time and companies will discover that they need to keep employees more than 2-3 years.
Use Cisco or Cisco will use you. It has always been and will always remain so. True of most large companies. Woe unto the hapless souls who drink the Kool-Aid.
where's the hiring at? I don't see anything for Engineering besides the jobs in Bangladesh India. Big Surprise there.
The only “hiring” I’ve seen are contractors and even that is rare to find the budget.
Gotta hire more rubes for the next LR....
Backfilling the deadwood.
More like hoping not to get as much "worse than deadwood" that still can't comprehend negative numbers. As has repeatedly been said here, the bugs which eat the vast majority of the development budget weren't checked in by deadwood.
This is all the new normal at Cisco!
You're only 23 years late with this analysis.
Actions like layoffs and rank-an-yank were created by Jack Welch at GE in the first half of the 1980s and set the stage for what you are complaining about. His acolytes such as John Chambers, the previous CEO of Cisco, continued to implement those actions. Modern CEOs at the largest tech companies have taken this further by driving out the majority of their employees in under 2 years. These are simple facts. Why are so many of you unable to learn them?
Oh good. I’ll get hired back with a better salary, then laid off with another 6 mos pay. It’s lucrative to get laid off. Play the game.
I was laid off despite having applied for several roles I was clearly qualified for. Cisco just wants to bring in cheaper labor and avoid paying out RSUs. The fact that HR and my previous leadership (if I can even call them leaders) dragged their feet and didn't help me was not surprising! The said all the right things, and then did NOTHING! Cisco is actually getting passive aggressive and abusive to employees, and they do it with a big smile on their face like it is normal. Even folks at the Director level seem to have no backbone or say. This is all the new normal at Cisco! So sad!!!
As a follow-up to @xmx+1rRLxSIb, I should have said that I hate the optics of hiring during, or just after, an LR because many of those people were probably qualified to do the jobs that are trying to be filled. The question, as always, is whether or not they are worth keeping vs. hiring someone who doesn't know about Cisco's culture of annual LR's and will bail within a couple of yrs and have to be replaced yet again vs. keeping someone who has stayed w/ Cisco through thick and thin.
I'm not naive enough to think that everyone at Cisco is "dead wood" or incompetent due to aging skills, and I know that there are some really good, hardworking talented people being let go. I think the issue is that Cisco lets the "more expensive" people go and keeps the cheaper ones who happen to be less qualified, less driven people who've worked hard and gotten pay bumps, RSU's, etc. and the dead wood remains instead of being targeted for LRs.
So you don't believe the ELT when they say that the lay off was the result of "limited restructuring" to get rid of people in roles that are not needed and filling/expanding roles that are needed?
Go drink some kool-aid until you do.
But, honestly, my BU has way too many openings that we can't get filled. During past LR's, we've not lost any employees and had our most urgently needed openings exempted from the hiring freeze that usually happens along w/ the LR, so there are valid reasons for hiring during an LR.
Those are probably jobs for which Cisco has filed a permanent alien labor certification application with the Department of Labor.
Backfilling the deadwood.