Yep. Costly limb. Fired a load of DEs, Fellows, etc. Cratered long term visions and planning.
What could go wrong? Nothing! We have smart-a-- 25 year olds to save us. They are smart (old people are dumb), they never need medical care, they will drool over a "Cisco Beat" T-shirt in lieu of a raise, and they'll work on IST even if they live in PDT.
Just follow Zuckerberg. He knows best.
For most sites the deadwood has been cut over the last five years of "restructuring". Now they are cutting off the costliest limb they think will cause the least amount of harm and replacing with cheap grads or Indians
I have started my bottom 5 list as a manager I don't want to lose my job because my reports are not doing their part. I created a short list of issues to look for.
A. Is the employee always late to work?
B. Do others complain about the employee?
C. Is the employee working only on easy projects?
D. Does the employee not volunteer to do more?
E. Is the employee always unavailable?
Don't lose your job over someone holding your team back. It's not worth it.
Allow me to correct you. I don't think deadwood is the problem. Rather, they are merely a symptom of the larger mess. Deadwood primarily exists, I think, due to people putting their heads down and desperately trying to just stay out of the way of the rabid bull running through the china shop. After all, what else can they do while everyone around them keeps taking sniper fire?
Leaders who aren't allowed to lead ( several managers who moved their people around to protect them from this last LR got tossed out, despite being actual rockstars ), so-called senior folk who don't know how to define requirements ( I can't begin to tell you how many times design handed me one or two sentences written on a napkin, called it a spec, and wanted an app built in a few weeks... and then complained about the magical pony feature we didn't build, or the font, after not showing up to story planning meetings ), the systemic breakdown of leadership at the highest levels ( both before and after Robbins, not to mention the "kill all the people 'deal'" ), the absolute sh--e way Cisco treats people who actually devoted themselves to that company ( no raises, no stock, and FU for asking ) ... are all going to end that company in spectacular fashion and are all reasons why I bailed for something better a long time ago.
Which s---s. Cisco was awesome back in the day, but as Jobs pointed out a long time ago; terrible things happen to tech companies when sales guys are put in charge. Innovation dies. Cost-cutting begins. They can't put someone's actual corporate value into a spreadsheet, hit a button, and expect to end-result with a winning team. They seem intent on managing talent by cost-evaluation, only.
Years of stack ranking resulted in most teams dropping both their worst ( fired ) and their best ( LR'd or if smart bailed ). They ended up with a lot of cheap, ok-but-not-great, people and a smattering of actual talent who were desperately trying to keep the ship from sinking. Meanwhile, the ok-but-not-great folk didn't hire good talent, they hired people who were worse so there'd always someone to throw under the bus come ranking day. Slowly, these long-time useless people rose up into senior positions, by virtue of s---ing just a little bit less than the truly awful folk they had helped bring aboard, and held the actual talent under water until the bubbles stopped.
Flash forward to today. Cisco is burning everyone, regardless. Dedicated yourself to the company? Actually provided value? Deadwood? Long-time-useless? Doesn't mean a thing. If you're there for more than four or five years now, it'll be "see-ya, so-long, and thanks for all the fish!". H1-B and college hires are the new normal at that place, and year after year or even quarter after quarter, they'll hit that spreadsheet again to see who else they can cut in a desperate attempt to cut their way to success. S---s for the workers, but the higher-ups still get their cash so, oh well.
Welcome to the commoditized workforce.
@JNJU47T-3ngj https://www.thelayoff.com/r/JNJU47T-3ngj wrote:
@ 3lok, they stopped cutting muscle ages ago. They've been cutting bone for a while now.
Both previous posters seem to think that the deadwood are the problem, but there are many people who are actively making things worse who are far more damaging than the deadwood who simply manage their investments without breaking anything and without preventing those who can do something useful from doing something useful. From the previous CEO on down threatening to fire people for helping team members (what do these people think "leadership" is?) to Principal Engineers with no exposure to concepts like "requirements" and "functional decomposition" the company has many systemic problems driven by "leadership" that have cost the company tens of billions over the past three decades. This is what happens when you Top 10 your Bottom 5++.
The fact that the same text is cut and pasted as a "new" topic over and over again is another classic Cisco problem ("deadwood still exist", "what will be the date and time of my next promotion", "how do I get RSUs", "my bonus wasn't good", "when are the next layoffs coming", "old people were laid off", "if there is a first layoff people will be sad and the company will fail", ...)
@ 3lok, they stopped cutting muscle ages ago. They've been cutting bone for a while now. Cisco's like an emotionally damaged teenager who has figured out that self-mutilation gets them attention and doesn't know when to stop cutting.
Agree with @2apo. Most of the folks that I see in the last LR was high grade, been with Cisco for a long time and 40+ easy. I see departure emails of 12+, 15+ and 18 years during the last LR. The folks that I saw was high 40s or slightly over 50. Lots of true good and hard working people with great institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced and very productive for the company. These folks do not play the political games, being old with higher pay/grade so lost their jobs. The last cut was to reduce cost from a payroll perspective and to bring in the younger lower cost generation. Not sure if that was good, but a terrible cut. Cutting into the muscle of the company. Should cut the fat (deadwood) to be lean, agile and strong, but that is not the case with the last LR.
To be honest, I would see redundancy as a blessing. Paid to leave a company with declining revenues that has lost its fun factor, at a point in time when the overall sector is booming, and to get another job with Cisco on your resume is as easy as submiting an application. Yes please.... Pick me!!!
@2apo - Someone should sue Cisco for the high percentage of older people, or people who were paid above the median for their paygrade, who were let go. In my BU, according to the over-40 paperwork they had to give me by law, it showed that there was only one person under 40 in my paygrade let go. There was only one person remaining in my paygrade over 40 left after the LR and happened to be the oldest person in that paygrade.
They let the token young person go and kept a token old person and canned the rest of us 40+ folks. It looks like age discrimination, but their high-paid lawyers will it was because we were all "over-paid" and they could hire younger, cheaper people to do the same work. Of course we're over-paid compared to someone 10-20 years younger. We've had 10-20 yrs of pay increases that younger person hasn't had that comes with experience.
Cisco tries to check your endurance. From day 1 when you join Cisco, Cisco is in Max out mood. Now you must think that when you will max out.
Next layoff should focus on H1Bs otherwise someone should sue Cisco
yep on Norwegian contracts....3 years salary on layoff isn't unheard of
OJ and team not going anywhere. They have all that offshore money, and they'll never pay the tax to bring it over. It's got to go somewhere. Also, it's way harder to lay off Norwegians.
get rid of that twat Rowan and those kiss-a-- losers like OJ & his Norwegian sheep
Needs to start from the top to reduce politics and bring the culture back. Needs managers that do not play politics or favoritism, sniff our the BS from deadwood and shield the workers from BS from above. Work this up the chain and we will bring the company culture back.
Beyond fixing the culture, politics and helps reduce distraction, Cisco needs to fix the LR process to be more surgical and strategic to the company's success. The last LR was atrocious.
The definition of insanity is doing something over and over again and expecting a different result. None of the prior LRs have reduced the deadwood so why would this last one, or the next, or the next, be any different? They've all gone after hard-working folk whose only real crime was dedicating their career to helping make Cisco a success.
LR will happen but not get rid of the deadwood but will target the last few hard working poeple...
And, most importantly, send all of the Indians here on H1Bs back home. Fill their positions with American citizens.
Remove the politics, deadwood that talks big and do nothing and provide no values, a.. kissers, one person managers, etc. Re-hire the hard working people that were LR-ed. Fix the core problems - culture, politics and productivity. Please add to the list of issues.
End of Q2 , your wish will be granted.