Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

@4ybe+1upjUU9k oh, you should watch induction training for newcomers, you will cry watching story about CR breastfeeding infants...

Cisco is a cult. You’re just paid to be in the cult. In every cult, the leaders repeat certain phrases over and over until the members start to believe them. The phrases may not even be true, but you will start to believe if you hear them enough. Well, that’s what you have with “Best Place to Work”. They repeat it all the time to beat it into your heads.

They even got tens of thousands of employees to be excited about an annual shutdown which was nothing more than forced PTO lol.

I could go on and on. If you want to still work at Cisco, I get it. But for crying out loud, stop drinking the Kool-aid. They do not care about you. It is not the “Best Place to Work”. And it’s not a matter of if you will be laid off, it’s a matter of when.

(MPLS, anyone?)

Yes, a set of non-standards that allowed for every possible solution to each decision point and mandated none of them so each vendor could make choices to insure zero interoperability. What was supposed to be an O(1) lookup ended up being slower that actual routing on some platforms. With IBM's help it strangled ATM but like ATM and later SDN never fully solved the dynamic traffic management problem.

Lerner and Bosack started Cisco in the 80s as a routing company. They built [stole the software and hardware designs from Stanford] and sold what was effectively a "TCP/IP routing box".

FTFY.

Chambers went on a shopping spree...

Arguably the best thing he did. As a customer in the 1990s Cisco couldn't write working software to save their lives and by buying their way into every niche they starved out their major competitors at the time.

The biggest mistake he made was never creating a development organization ("we need to be a systems company, not a box company. DO YOU WANT TO BUY A BOX? HAHAHA!") and suddenly Cisco had four routing/switching operating systems, each with far too many branches and far too much cut and pasted code so what should have been one bug could become thousands. Management was too busy trying to increase KLOCs to learn phrases like "technical debt" and "refactoring."

But, by the mid- 2000s Cisco was back and riding high [in the head part of the head and shoulders pattern before dropping below $14/share again].

FTFY.

Cisco missed cloud and they missed SDN .

Cisco didn't miss the cloud. Unlike companies like IBM and Oracle with large scale build out experience and actual applications which customers could use in the cloud Cisco couldn't even make their own plumbing parts work in house, and IBM and Oracle are both extremely tiny parts of the cloud. Even Google built on massive world wide server farms is only a touch over 10%.

Part of "Cisco couldn't even make their own plumbing parts work in house" was the fact they knew nothing about managing networks, which put them at a severe disadvantage in SDN. I moved up the stack a long time ago but I haven't heard of a universal management interface to all of Cisco's boxes beyond read-only SNMP. The CLI wasn't even consistent from one card to the next on the same OS version in the same chassis.

...and now they missed AI.

The demo I saw of Juniper's Mist was just grepping logs for errors and warnings then pretty printing them. If that's the state of the art Cisco has time. In networking I'm betting it will be the next attempt from ATM to MPLS to SDN to AI hoping to make dynamic traffic management effective, but I'm not holding my breath for interoperable standards. The first time such a system goes wildly non-deterministic I'm sure we'll all be hearing about it in the news.

I've watched Cisco folks fight, on customer calls...

Different teams have been doing that in person for decades, and in front of customers who knew Cisco's products present and future well enough to know how extreme the lies being told to them were.

I've worked for multiple "top" companies and it was never "them doing the best that could be done," it was "their competitors messing up even worse." Cisco has been sc--wing up for 40 years but many of their competitors did far worse which is why Cisco is still one of the biggest tech companies in the world. Large legacy companies like Cisco, GE, HPQ, IBM and Oracle are in the $50B-$70B revenue range and all continue to plod along despite colorful histories.

Things won't get better until RTP closes.

Cisco has never innovated.

"Great Place to Work" is a scam.

I am not just speculating, I was at Great Place to Work. Cisco pays a lot of money to GPTW. They pay to be "certified", they pay to have GPTW people come in and literally work with HR. The surveys are real but the results are 80% fake. It's a classic case of lying with statistics. They still use Excel to take the raw data from the surveys and sp-t out what they want. It is an opaque model because it has to be. sunlight would cause it to come crashing down. There is no overt bribery but the whole thing is sus. It's pay to play.

HR at Cisco is not concerned with your wellbeing, HR is 100% numbers driven and most concerned with being #1 on the list.

Just ask yourself this:

Does unlimited PTO make Cisco a great place to work?
Does a round of layoffs every 6 months make Cisco a great place to work?
Does a poorly announced layoff and then a full month of torture, stress and hunger games make Cisco a great place to work?

Ironically, Cisco used to be a pretty good place to work.

TLDR ; live in the present.

Interesting perspective, a lot rings true. Thanks for sharing.

Lots of people have lots of perspectives about the "transformation" from winner to has-been for Cisco. For me the beginning of the end began when I was performing Data Center technology training and was told by non-technical management that I had to position ACI "solution" as better than Nexus switching... That was 10+ years ago.

That was my first indicator that politics had become more important than the technology. My last indicator was 10+ years later as I was working on the leading project for the hottest technology at that time (ML/AI).

But none of that matters now. I got LR notice along with a very talented and tenured team (10-15-20 years). LR choices were made by management teams with less than 2 years at Cisco. Many CCIEs, a whole lot of experience, some very cool innovation projects, and years of customer relationships shown the door.

Cisco leadership is orchestrating its own downfall by providing motivated talent, experience, and contact lists to competitors.

Will you be my mentor, OP?

Current employees won't recognize the company in 5 years.

Like a girlfriend from 20 years ago, I won't want to.

Cisco's underlying flaw after the tech bust in 2000 was that its strategy was simply to put more products into the account managers' sales bag. The products were often not related to one another, and they certainly didn't integrate together. They had multiple operating systems and multiple management platforms.

There was no one considering the complexity being created for the customer base because decisions were being made by former sales guys who just wanted more stuff for the sales teams to sell. Customers revolted and started Software Defined Networking (SDN) as an alternative to the Cisco Frankenstein portfolio.

Cisco's portfolio is now impossible to integrate given the divergence of R&D investments that have been made for decades. Given the commoditization of networking technology, it's too expensive to attempt to converge the networking portfolio. This is why Robbins has been so focused on attempting to create a software business that isn't tied to Cisco's legacy networking business.

It's still up in the air as to whether Cisco can make this transition. The reality is that the legacy networking business is going to undergo massive restructuring as the focus shifts to the independent software business. Current employees won't recognize the company in 5 years.

how much of that revenue is linked to blank check Government contracts

Spot the dude that has no idea how govt contracts work.

A set top box company

That was Scientific Atlanta - they also did serious content server platforms.

Another point. ELT Bad hires and bad promotions. Wim Elfrink in APAC with his elephant parties and dozens of signed MOUs that didn't amount to any revenue. Padmasree Warrior, destroyer of the razor at Motorola, candidate for US CTO, was jealousy stolen away by JC to work the cloud initiative at Cisco. There are a ton more,

Good write up. I would like to add a couple failed acquisitions. NDS, I remember it was 5 Billion. A set top box company, 7 Billion. And linksys, can not say it is a failed acquisition, but it is not able to integrate smoothly.

You forgot how Cisco hasn’t technically integrated any of the acquired technology so it’s unified. Too much swivel chair to operate Cisco products. This also makes it difficult to buy from Cisco if customers are buying multi architecture because they have to do separate POs, separate contracts, separate management that all are costs for the customer to purchase from us.

Well written, appreciate the perspective!

But remember they didn’t have J2 before. Now they will go grow by leaps and bounds with a unified strategy under J2 !

Great summary, OP. Over the years, Cisco has become a jack of all trades but a master of none.

This is so nicely written, thanks op.

"And yet, they sell 50 billion every year. I think there is less than 100 companies in the US that have 50 billion in revenue."

I'd love to know how much of that revenue is linked to blank check Government contracts where Cisco doesn't have to compete. Or the amount of revenue linked to overpaying for an acquisition to boost revenue temporarily.

And yet, they sell 50 billion every year. I think there is less than 100 companies in the US that have 50 billion in revenue. Cisco is and will continue to be a tech giant for some time to come.

ouch! true but ouch!