Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

It is only a matter of time until we see a class action lawsuit where every LRed employee gets a settlement!

And everyone will get a unicorn to ride their own personal rainbow! The job for life thing ended 40 years ago and Cisco doesn't have to give anyone dirt. The severance Cisco pays out is a major bonus to the good who get hired quickly, and sufficient for many mediocre to get a job not far from when the money runs out.

But first we need to sc--w another few thousand good folks due to the Splunk agreement.

At least in software Cisco doesn't have a "thousand good folks" and the layoffs would be occurring even if Cisco didn't purchase Splunk just as they have for decades. Splunk had layoffs before joining Cisco and they'll have more soon enough.

Splunk employees are protected from the Cisco LR insanity, so get ready Cisco employees to be impacted. Those nearing retirement are at a high risk too, as Cisco loves destroying people's retirement plans!!! I know so many that were impacted 1-2 years before retirement. We stabbed those fine people in the back!! So sad when it could have been the highlight of their career.

When is the worst place to work vote coming up? Cisco is at the top of the list!!!

Cisco Legal & HR thinks they are the experts and know all the LR loopholes to legally sc--w people, and in many ways they are, but someday they will get caught up in the stream of lies of Chuck and Scott to the shareholders!!!!

It is only a matter of time until we see a class action lawsuit where every LRed employee gets a settlement! But first we need to sc--w another few thousand good folks due to the Splunk agreement. We all know that's coming!!!

Sooo stupid trolling attempt… try a little harder next time dope…. Btw, wishing you back karma on trying to stir folks fear and being a id--t sadist…

@dmvq+1rTKuR0S tl;dr

This guy is going around in every thread and trolling with incessant Chat GPT diarrhea. Someone give him/her a pill.

Cisco is up $10B in the last decade but how much have we spent on acquisitions and how much of the $10B is from them?

Revenue is money coming in in a given year. Cisco's growth wasn't linear, but pretending you start at 0 and add one unit to get to 10 units of revenue ten years later you're getting 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 for a total of 55 units of additional revenue, not 10. There is a non-zero chance that whatever the shape of that curve Cisco's additional revenue exceeded the total revenue collected by some of its competitors over that same time period.

Before Splunk Cisco's total cash far exceeded total debt where competitors like HPE and Juniper have it the other way around. As noted in other threads here, not even adjusting for inflation Cisco has spent far more than $100B in acquisitions over 30 years.

I bet much of it so not only has Cisco not grown, it seems our Core from ten years ago may even be shrinking.

Once upon a time Apple was spending $1,000 per Macintosh on advertising. Now they make Macs which sell for under $600 so obviously something had to change, Like Cisco they had a collection of doomed operating systems in house, but unlike Cisco they were able to buy a company with one working OS that now runs on computers, phones, tablets, watches, streaming devices and anything else I'm forgetting. Their core shifted because markets always shift, and in Apple's case there were adjacent markets for them to leverage what they already had.

Way to catch the transitions John, oh, i mean Chuck.

Catching what transitions? They've bled market share over decades to competitors because they're choking on their own technical debt. Network management and security have been issues for decades in which Cisco continues to flounder. Google, IBM and Oracle are bit players in cloud and they provide services the customer touches, not the plumbing in the walls so that wasn't a missed transition, it was an uncrossable chasm. AI is a class of technologies, not a product to solve a customer's problem. Many of Cisco's competitors have revenues just over 10% of Cisco's, so adding 10% to Cisco's revenue is like growing a multi-decade competitor from scratch in far less time.

What "transition" could Cisco have actually executed on that would have resulted in dramatically higher growth?

If departure of Barger is an indicator then hope they clean the Management in the UKI. Please, please, pretty please!!

Gotta break down the castles. Zero accounts at JD/J2 level for any of our products to actually work together. We would be a FORCE if there was competitive differentiation but alas we are 40 companies sharing a common ticker symbol 😩

Cisco is up $10B in the last decade but how much have we spent on acquisitions and how much of the $10B is from them? I bet much of it so not only has Cisco not grown, it seems our Core from ten years ago may even be shrinking. Way to catch the transitions John, oh, i mean Chuck.

Too many VP's with no accountability
Too many Sr. Directors with no accountability
Too many CX Directors

Remove all clowns and no business impact, finance would be happy

First off, how many jumped into Cisco during the post covid fear of getting employees craze? People that were making $50k a year just threw resumes around and got offers over $100k just because a fear of shortage. Now that people see the economy has su-ked for 3 years, they see they are severely overpaying for employees.

The simple fact is that a lot of people were taking advantage of the situation. The climate has changed drastically. The job market absolutely su-ks. If you are out of work or about to be, you are getting in line with 1000s of people looking for the same jobs. The fact is you are going to be facing a massive pay cut in this market. If you over extended yourself financially, then it is your fault. Plan to be unemployed for a long time especially with an election year.

If you really have been at Cisco for 23 years and do not recognise what’s happening as destruction in comparison to what the company was 23 years ago...

It's the same drip of water eroding the same rock. Cisco had layoffs, as often as quarterly the entire time. On the large programs it wasn't uncommon for Directors to hold daily world wide beatings, screaming threats of firing people right in the meeting as well as putting everyone else "on notice." My favorite was making people swear they'd never follow ISO9000 process as it took too long to commit code which was one of the only things the dashboards measured, and the dashboards not being green threatened everyone up through many layers of management. We were constantly reminded management didn't know what we did and didn't want to, so they did everything on "feel." If you helped someone and they "felt" that person was better you were going to be fired, so don't do anything to help anyone. There were the technical and managerial "leaders'" violent outbursts, jumping up and down with their arms and legs flailing as they screamed profanity. I was on a number of "hot" projects where failing teams would contact our team saying "we've been assigned this project, so if you could just hand over everything and change the permissions so only we can work on it that would be great!" They weren't and we didn't, but it tells you what Cisco's hunger games ethics were back in the 2000 aughts. Plagiarism was well rewarded, as was all manner of lying at every level. We went through Chambers' rank-and-yank where a bottom 5% person on a team of top performers who could easily outperform the top 5% on weak teams was fired. Wage freezes even for promotions added to the fun. Like RSUs today, options had a vesting schedule and disappeared with a layoff. Unlike RSUs, a lot of the options were under water from before first vesting to expiration.

By 2008 I knew a lot of people who were not laid off who took a 30-40% pay cut to take a job outside Cisco because the place was intolerably bad. I waited a few years for the market to get better to jump for more money, and I used that time to recreate skills that almost died at Cisco. I worked on many high level PI and PD projects and after 2001 it was all death march all the time. Unless the violent conniptions are now violence against other employees I'm having a hard time seeing how things got so much worse, and I have yet to read anything posted here to change my opinion.

RIP out the deadwood who have grown roots and kick them out of their aura of entitlement .

If you look just at contribution, you have contributors adding positive value, deadwood adding zero value, and a significant number of people breaking more than they fix adding negative value. A significant percentage of people in software at Cisco are in the negative value group, as is a significant percentage of management. If you had a clue you'd know deadwood should not be Cisco's first priority.

Hello Mr CTO/SE Director, UKI. Good to see you here.

I'm a US engineer who was there for the downfall and the decade that followed, complete with a spell checker showing the quote at the top of this post misspelled "recognise."

Really! Can't believe it. We haven't finished the Feb round yet

@3lhx+1rTKuR0S

Cisco still can't develop software

• This is somewhat mitigated by growing by acquisition, however .... Integrating the technology and teams together is another thing which leads to your point below

Political infighting, sometimes in front of major customers, has further hurt Cisco's focus

• Teams are not compensated on winning a competitor owned account evenly, and teams are not properly integrated.

Take an SDWAN deal the viptela and Meraki specialist will be at eachother's throats, or even now Umbrella and Secure connect the in fighting is embarrassing and you can only blame leadership for not having a clear strategy and focusing on creating a healthy culture

If you factor in inflation and rising prices the growth seems less healthy, rather than revenue growing from market share, revenue is growing from inflation

Tricks like stock buy backs helped the stock price.

On the flip side:

• Moore's law should have dropped the price of Cisco's GigE ports by a factor of 16,384
• 2.5Gb/s was approved 8 years ago and is just starting to see some adoption
• That implies resistance in access networking yesterday and service provider tomorrow when 1Gb/s to both end points and the premises will likely be "enough" for homes and some small businesses until "the next big thing" arrives
• NVIDIA has NVlink at 800Gb/s which is designed to make the most of their newest AI chips. Their work in processors, Ethernet and InfiniBand will also accelerate their role in data center
• The dwarfs have been eating market share from Cisco, but because the market is growing so fast Cisco can lose share while still increasing revenue, for now
• Cisco's technical debt across four routing/switching operating systems has been choking their develop budget for ages
• Cisco still can't develop software
• Political infighting, sometimes in front of major customers, has further hurt Cisco's focus

As bad as these might seem for Cisco they don't speak well for its competitors either. Don't get me started on IPv6. This is one seriously dysfunctional industry.

@2qyg+1rTKuR0S
I really like your analysis
Arista are a huge threat and Fortinet as well these companies whilst not having the same magnitude of revenue as Cisco have the right structure costs and messaging and are clearly taking market share

Looking at revenue in 2014 it was $47,142B
Revenue in 2023 was $56,998B
Source https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CSCO/cisco/revenue#:~:text=Cisco%20revenue%20for%20the%20twelve,a%203.49%25%20increase%20from%202021.

If you factor in inflation and rising prices the growth seems less healthy, rather than revenue growing from market share, revenue is growing from inflation

My friend look at what Jeff Sharitts said in Vegas
Cisco has grown 0.7% in 10 years

A cursory check shows revenues going from roughly $47B to $57B which would be an average annual growth rate of 1.95% or a total growth of 21.3%. Looking at it by stock price Cisco went from $23.11 on April 1, 2014 to $48.55 right now, which would be an average annual growth rate of 7.71% or a total growth of 110%. Cisco has also paid out dividends increasing the returns over that time.

Dare I say the addressable market has grown at least 50 times more that Cisco in the same time period

Since you've chosen a ten year window show us how Cisco could be generating $500B (50 times ($57B-$47B)) more annual revenue today than it had in 2014. Microsoft's revenues(ttm) are almost $228B, Apple's are almost $386B, Alphabet is a little over $307B, and Meta is almost $135B. The remaining pure tech companies in the top 10 most valuable companies generate far less revenue.

If you think the company isn't being destroyed my man you are an ostrich and must have your head in the sand

As a company that's acquired rather than developed for 30 years I'm amazed Cisco still exists at all. Cisco is definitely drifting down, but looking into the numbers at the likes of HPE and Juniper which seems to be the team worshiped most by the current Cisco crowd here Cisco is outperforming both significantly financially.

Arista on the other hand is nearing half of Cisco's market value with little more than 1/10th the revenue with seriously impressive operating margins, and with a great revenue growth curve they've still only increased revenues by a factor of 10 over the past ten years, starting at $584M which left far more headroom than the established players had. If Cisco stays flat and Arista grows at the same rate it will be nearly ten more years before Arista exceeds Cisco's revenue.

@1nhw+1rTKuR0S
My friend look at what Jeff Sharitts said in Vegas
Cisco has grown 0.7% in 10 years
Dare I say the addressable market has grown at least 50 times more that Cisco in the same time period

If you think the company isn't being destroyed my man you are an ostrich and must have your head in the sand

“ They've been trying for 23 years without success with people making the same claims all along the way. What is the imaginary difference this time?”. @1nhw+1rTKuR0S

Hello Mr CTO/SE Director, UKI. Good to see you here.

@1nhw+1rTKuR0S If you really have been at Cisco for 23 years and do not recognise what’s happening as destruction in comparison to what the company was 23 years ago, then you are part of the problem and should be LRed immediately! RIP out the deadwood who have grown roots and kick them out of their aura of entitlement . Welcome to reality, Baby.

They are going to literally destroy the company with panic and uncertainty.

They've been trying for 23 years without success with people making the same claims all along the way. What is the imaginary difference this time? Don't say they're quarterly because those at lesser sites saw this for years at a time back in the Chambers era.

Lost job is no joke especially at this job market at 2024. Health insurance alone is $2600/month. Doesn't matter how broken Cisco leadership, they can ki-l your career with one check mark. Please stay low, don't raise your voice.
I used feel it is disgusting when seen peoples' flatting words shooting into the chat window during all hands meeting. After been LR'd, I will do the same if I can get a job again.

Failure leadership but blame to engineers.

Similar layoffs? Similar in what way?

No wonder they rushed the Splunk acquisition. How many are we looking at this time?

$800m covers these all. This time is all managers and directors.

Cisco said they'd be laying off people in Q3FY2024, Q4FY2024 (now) and Q1FY2025. They gave a price and body count for the whole endeavor. This isn't exactly news.

Try harder next time, troll.

When is this one getting triggered? They are going to literally destroy the company with panic and uncertainty.