Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Future at CSCO? I'm afraid, and all my group now agree we don't have one. My senior director has just been reorganized into a very difficult position to succeed, my director is leaving, my manager is interviewing and so are most of my colleagues and people I work with. We have been re-orged top-to-bottom this week into a very disfuntional and confusing model. Much power seems to have been snatched by an extremely aggressive troll who's cherry picked the cushy roles for his cronies that he's bringing in. Meanwhile the rest of us really don't know how this is going to work (including the VP/GM who agreed he doesn't know either). Well, there goes the next 2 months. Having to figure out how to get our jobs done (and probably navigate an LR to take out the people that are replaced by cronies)

Well said to the last poster.

The days of doing nothing and being the 400K sales guy referenced in this string are long gone. The compensation package and the quota/goals are becoming unreachable. They believe that Cisco products sell themselves yet they are getting eaten alive by competitors. Just look at the negative growth in so many areas in the last earnings. Sales is being asked to do more with less and the same replacement program is going on - replace senior sales folks who are deemed expensive with Early in career "hungry" AM's...sorry this will end in disaster as decision makers are older and do not wish to hear "like" every other word. Training is zero, team building the same - when you have to have a "fun" fund you know something is drastically wrong

I believe the ELT realise the damage to morale they have done with this last LR. I think most roles will be safe until next August at least. However it is true that you have little control over your own destiny at Cisco and performance of an individual has little value in the grand scheme. My advice to anyone stuck in the Cisco bubble is to start talking to other companies now, even if you're not seriously about leaving, as you might be pleasantly surprised with what's out there.

Summary: Cisco is a scary place to be employed, a place where your contribution is irrelevant to your career success or even continued employment.

My honest view is simple: I like it here and want to do great work for Cisco. But it's obvious that the ELT team is winging it and waiting for an opportunity to cover their asses via an M&A or five -- I don't feel like it's an appropriate handling of my financial responsibility to my family to keep gambling that the knuckleheads at the top aren't going to LR us. This is coming from someone who survived the first cut in Biri's org -- the writing is on the wall for the rest of us, and it is not friendly. (I thought it was just us "Biri folks", but everyone I talk to under Rowan or David G. feels the same way.)

@KGB80Wk-3yrg, well said. That's why I left almost two years ago... N was getting high and it felt like my management was even higher.

I am somewhat senior and here is my take. If you are junior, and you stay less than 2-3 years, it is a good first job. Perfect? No. You will learn a lot about good and not so good practices. If you are senior, then it is fine. You are getting top of market pay, and if you navigate politics, you are generally treated perhaps too well.

The issue is if you are in the middle. There, because the company is not growing, your risk of RIF increases N% each year and your chance of promotion decreases by n%. This is true in all non growing companies. It is the rule of non growing public companies.

So, the question is, given the nature of the beast, why is there so much emotion about this. For me, it comes from what are essentially lies told from the top for years about how we were family. To me, that created false expectations about how we would be treated. I had a medical issue, and people were great. On the other side, I was told to show some face time sooner rather than later to avoid being a liability. Oddly, the family messaging seemed to catch with many folks until it did not. As many of you know, Brad Reese used to call Chambers teflon John. After I saw things with more open eyes and saw the carnage in 08, it is clear he is lying through his teeth John.

So, the net for me is that you have to have a strategy. Mine? I am finally, after seeing more lies and more things that don't reflect my core values, looking for something outside tech where I can add value and feel human. Trust me when I say this, the Cisco Board is the enabler of this and they should be held accountable.

I'm almost retired just trying to squeeze in another few dramatic Summers. Good luck trying to invent the next big thing 35 years in this industry almost signing off for good.

I find it so very sad that the company I loved so much has decomposed into the sorry state it is in now where people are only there to pick up a check. The soul has left the place. But hey, at least the balance sheets are looking better.

While some posts are obvious rants from disgruntled current/ex employees, there's a lot of truth shared, too. I appreciate hearing other Cisco perspectives, especially those who share thoughtful comments about what is happening throughout Cisco.

It's deplorable what Cisco is doing - culling higher pay grades/people 40+ and replacing them with noob talent as red badges. This is what happened to me.

You get what you pay for, Cisco.

Controversial enough OP?

I disagree with the part about hiring in RTP. RTP has seen their fair share of cuts too, especially in engineering.

If you were there in '08, then you know many jobs were cut in SJC and re-hired in RTP. Then, beginning in '11, RTP started suffering as many cuts as other places. Yes, Engineering took a lot of cuts in '11, '13 & '14 in RTP. I lost a lot of friends in those years until I got cut in '16.

Botttom line. Cisco once viewed employees as critical stakeholders. Now employees are viewed as disposable opex on a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet that is continually reviewed and driven by finance, hr and lawyers. If you think any differently you are kidding yourself......

That is so true. It really sums up what @1bnr was trying to say in way too many words.

I was a technical writer there, in the telepresence BU. Worked at Cisco for 15 yrars, in IOS documentation and in Cat6k. After Tandberg bought us, which is basically what happened to us, we went from 5 writers, to 3 writers, to me. S.K. got rid of all the original TelePresence magement, and I was LR'd in 2014. In 6 months, they tried to hire me back at 20% less pay because I "did such a great job there." They have decided to let all red badges do the tech writing now. It's not a good way to go, because the #1 rule of business is to not hire a bunch of junk and pay them accordingly. Last I heard, they were actually hiring writers in Oslo. I'm at a new company now and love it. I'd had forgotten what it's like to work for optimistic people who want to create good product. Getting the LR was the best thing that happened to me, and the entire experience was a net positive.

Is a great place if you are a power hungry women. Like most tech companies we are protected. I got to go elephant trekking and camping aspart of a fad IOT mission from uk all on company time....s---erz.

One must understand that people who post on this site may be a bit biased and may not be an accurate sampling of everyone at Cisco's feelings. Like my grandpa used to say - and he would probably have first hand knowledge of this- "You don't find many virgins in a biker bar."

Anyways, I worked for Cisco for 18 years before being LR'ed. Other than the constant threat of being laid off I was always treated fairly well. Product quality isn't as good as it should be and there is a lot of politics - like in any large organization. Depending on where you land you may run into some prejudice if you are like me and not of South Asian heritage.

At the end of the day you are not married to a job and can leave at any time. What you must ask yourself is what will I learn on this job that will help me outside of my current employer. Cisco is still by far the dominant player in the market and a job search with the keyword Cisco will bring up many more hits than let's say Brocade.

This site is not accurate !

@KGB80Wk-1lip absolutely nailed it. Especially the part about wage/age discrimination.

I've been at this place over a decade. There are some positives. The work-life balance can be very good and you're often free to make the right choices... Just hope you don't get on someone's bad side as those choices may come back and bite you.

Career progression is 100% reactive - if they think you're going to leave you get a payrise. If you're compliant and do your job, you don't. Thus you have to make a lot of noise if you want to get above grade 10 (squeaky wheel gets the grease). Whilst this is true anywhere, at Cisco it's basically the only tool they have for staff retention.

The product portfolio is crap and not very customer-relevant. For anyone in sales (especially SEs) this is a problem. The solution to this is to become totally inwardly-focussed. Anyone who develops skills beyond core is seen with suspicion and smacked down.

A lot of folk have worked at Cisco for a long time and arrived here as an ultimate career aspiration. These are the ones who don't know how good it is outside. They accepted all the little cuts and culture degradation over the years and can't quite remember what it's like to work somewhere rewarding.

Most folk in Europe are hoping they get some kind of LR. The payoff's good and it's a great market to be looking for a job!

It's accurate, and to suggest otherwise is arrogant and insulting. I'm guessing the OP is ELT/SLT looking for excuses to dismiss the negative feedback and go bury their heads in the sand for another 10 years.

This statement has zero credibility without supporting comments - "This site is not accurate.."

Do tell us how it is not accurate.

This site is not accurate..

@KGB80Wk-1xam: "Botttom line. Cisco once viewed employees as critical stakeholders. Now employees are viewed as disposable opex on a spreadsheet"

This is really the best summary. @KGB80Wk-1bnr had a very good post too, from the heart. I disagree with the part about hiring in RTP. RTP has seen their fair share of cuts too, especially in engineering.

I've been at the company for over 2 decades. I've seen it all. 2001-02 was a shock, but we got through it and rebuilt a lot of good will and culture. Over the next few years, however, there were warnings things were souring. I kept my head in the sand. Fool. That was the time to change.

From '08 and beyond, it has been nothing but steps down, especially for engineering. Compensation evaporates except for the few deemed top x%. We work as near robots in bullpens, monitored continuously. You'd think that would build team among the scrum, but it doesn't. There's too much other stuff going on that gets in the way.

Cisco is a great company , with a few talented people still there. If you are happy to work in a huge company where your contributions are overlooked and you are happy that you have a rolling 9 month contract , go for it. On the other hand if you want to build a career in this industry , you want your work to be appreciated and you want to grow as a person as well as technically/commercially there are much better places out there. Just think for one second why would any one want to move from Google/Facebook/.... to Cisco ? You cant? Well if a company can not attract such talent , sooner than later it will run out of steam. With over 50 Billion Dollars in the bank Cisco will continually buy its way out of trouble. So it depends what your goal is.

I will put it this way. I know a number of high talent and high performing employees who have found positions outside the company. At resignation the manager quite often attempts to retain them by asking "what can we do to keep you around?" The employee says "make it so I can still contribute at a high level and not have to worry about losing my position due to the whims of politics over the next 2 years." The manager no longer even attempts to convince the employee that is nothing to worry about. Instead the manager does nothing but say "we will miss you, good luck and let me know if they have any other positions."

Botttom line. Cisco once viewed employees as critical stakeholders. Now employees are viewed as disposable opex on a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet that is continually reviewed and driven by finance, hr and lawyers. If you think any differently you are kidding yourself......

I can understand the OP's question here. People tend to over emphasise the negatives when there is low morale, but not everything is all bad.

Cisco is still a huge company. Selling is easy as most business is just a refresh or the customer is asking for it. The only time selling is needed, is when the competition (there's not that much) has the customers ear. Often though the cost of change prevents the customer changing. If Cisco does get in to a serious competitive battle they normally lose due to poor selling. AM's can easily take home $400k a year servicing customers and doing no selling at all.

Cisco also has vast amounts of resources, that means it can make real moves in to new markets. It's not going bankrupt anytime soon.

The ability to work anywhere is a plus that most companies are yet to implement.

There are positives with Cisco, but as demonstrated by previous posts the bad parts are starting to outweigh the good. It's a great place to earn good money in sales if you can't sell, just make sure your telling everyone you're having chats at CxO level and management will put your name in lights, regardless that all your bookings are coming from the same sources as always. This is where staying at Cisco long term becomes a negative. Employers outside know it's easy and often don't respect someone from Cisco. In one interview I had I was told "you realise here you have to sell, no one's going to call you and say my switch is EoL and I need a new one.". The other negative I believe is you loose you ability to sell if you stay too long, which means when you do get a job elsewhere, you're probably not going to last long.

Lastly to new appraisal system is flawed and creates an environment of distrust as no one really knows how they are ranked. This combined with the annual LRs creates a strong feeling of insecurity in your job. People want jobs where they have power over their future, but at Cisco this is no longer the case.

No.. none of the the comments are true. Cisco is THE place to be.. LOL. ( rolling eyes)

There must be serious lapse in judgement, logic and analytical capabilities with the OP, in order to think, all these comments are not "honest". Cisco currently NEEDS people like you. Please join :)

@KGB80Wk-1bnr good post

OP, you want my real thoughts, here they are:

There are a lot of real, honest comments on this board. There are a lot of trolls/people making waves because it's an anonymous forum. It's pretty easy to tell the trolling & disgruntled employees from the honest comments, but the disgruntled employees are a sign that bad things are starting to happen at Cisco.

It no longer matters what color your badge is, every Aug you better be prepared for losing your job. The only difference the color makes is whether or not you get a severance package and whether you get paid when they do furloughs, i.e. the year-end mandatory PTO.

I joined Cisco in mid 2000 as a contractor. It had a great company culture & they were tool agnostic. Use whatever tool got the job done best, be it a Mac or PC or some particular software package. Then came the corporate initiatives to standardize everything and enforce security. Some of it was good, most of it if we're being honest, but it upset a lot of old timers because they liked the freedoms they were losing.

After becoming an employee, Cisco started to cut costs by furloughing contractors for a week or two in the summer and forcing all Cisco employees to take a week of PTO during Q4. The uproar was huge because of the short notice and poor planning. Then they went to a "year-end" mandatory PTO the following year and gave everyone plenty of notice. This was better, but they still had some additional contractor furloughs a couple of times during Q3 or Q4 to make the numbers look good for the earnings call.

There was a lay-off in 2008 or 2009 that cut a lot of jobs in SJC and re-hired in RTP due to lower costs. It was a small layoff and very unusual for Cisco at that time.

Then I was laid off in 2011. From what I could tell, it was performance based. Groups were letting go the people with the lowest ratings. As with any place, some teams screwed people who didn't kiss a$$ or had favorites, and some teams honestly got rid of the poor performers. While I wasn't a poor performer, I had a disagreement with management and was rated poorly and hence, let go. It was good for me because my job function within the team was going away anyway, but it pissed me off that rather than working with me to transfer me to a team who could use my skills, I was put on a performance improvement plan and prevented from transferring. That basically protected the teams favorites because if I was allowed to transfer, then someone else would have to be laid off. Good ol' politics. I get why they did it, and it s---ed to be me and the manager was only trying to protect his team using the long-term, big picture that he & management had that they weren't sharing with the masses.

I came back a year later for a team that needed my particular skills and had a great time. I thought we'd be pretty safe during the annual lay-offs as lightning kept striking other BU's. Three years later, lightning finally struck my team and again, I was laid off. This time, it was not performance related. My manager said it was by least impact to the team, but when I look at the ages of the people from our BU who were let go, it certainly looks very suspicious that it was more than just least impact. It was all people in higher pay grades, and people who were above the median for their pay grade. Well, who are the people in higher pay grades? Who are the people who make above the median for their pay grade? It's older people who've been there awhile and have received promotions and/or pay raises. So, was it age or was it cost? You can say cost all you want, but when it impacts all the old folks, then it's age discrimination.

I can't say how morale is now, because I'm gone. Before, when I first joined, you felt like a family. There were lots of holiday parties, summer parties, once a month after work socials on Friday, etc. Now, there is NO family. They've started having to have quarterly "fun events" to boost morale and some times the events are at the team level where the team choses what to do, and some are BU-wide mass parties. The big ones, many people show up, grab some food and leave. Others stay and socialize purely to not have to work and others purely to have face time with the BU leaders.

If you asked me if I'd go back to Cisco again, I'd have to think long and hard about it. The first time, I was entirely for going back. This time, I only want to go back so that if I get LR'd again, I'll have enough time in service and age to be eligible for the retiree medical access plan when I get terminated. Is the retiree medical coverage worth it? I don't know. But, I can say that both of my severance packages were far better than any other company who has laid me off along with hundreds or thousands of others, and for that, I'm very grateful to Cisco.

I thought I liked the new "people deal" because it--on the surface--got rid of the forced rankings and allowed managers to give everyone on the team a bonus without screwing someone out of their bonus to pay someone a higher than average bonus. But, as many people have said, there's no record of your performance and no way to tell why you did/did not get a bonus, pay raise or promotion.

All I can say, it's not the company that it once was. It's no longer trying to retain quality employees who work hard and genuinely cared about Cisco's success. It's all about the bottom line, cutting costs and maximizing profits at the cost of quality & customer service.

If you're prepared to accept the risk of being LR'd each year, and want to work in a high-tech, company with great benefits and industry average wages and grab some experience, go for it. I can't say that I agree with those that say staying too long is detrimental to your next job search, but I doubt people will be able to stay long any longer. The days of 10, 15, 20+ years at Cisco are gone and those that have 10+ are at the greatest risk of being cut as the company cuts costs every year.

The "negative controversial stuff" is the current reality in Cisco. The future of most Cisco employees is doomed.

This site is very accurate.

Believe what you read.

Ummmm I'm pretty sure you're hearing people's honest thoughts on Cisco. What a moronic thing to say.

Huh? You think all the previous comments were posted by people just trying to be negative and controversial? Is it not possible that the truth about Cisco employment is as ugly as the comments on this board?

Winter is coming