Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Myself and my friend were both told that it "wasn't performance based but we were the least impact to the team". Sounds like a line pushed from HR.

"My manager said the same thing. I, however, don't think I was the highest pay rate in the group because there are members on the team who have been with Cisco for 10-15 yrs and on that team for more than 10 yrs. But I was the oldest person let go on my team and I was making above the median for my pay grade."

This is how it works: High pay-grade workers (who are usually older, but not always) are targeted to reduce labor costs and then they throw in a few mid and some lower pay grades to thwart any claims of age discrimination. The targets were always the higher pay grades; the rest are camouflage.

My manager apologized to me when he gave me the pink slip, "has nothing to do with your performance"

I know i had the highest pay rate in the group...

My manager said the same thing. I, however, don't think I was the highest pay rate in the group because there are members on the team who have been with Cisco for 10-15 yrs and on that team for more than 10 yrs. But I was the oldest person let go on my team and I was making above the median for my pay grade. My manager said my role was the least impact to the team and so was the other guy's role. Knowing what the product roadmap was, we were both in danger. The other guys supporting that product were key to the transition to a new product and therefore safe. I thought I was making progress at moving from a dead product to a current product, but not enough it appears.

"not due to performance" is standard boilerplate, they have to say that to everyone. Even if you suddenly got put onto a PIP a month or two before the layoff/redundancies were announced.

I know for sure that I wasn't the highest paid person in my group, in fact I was probably the cheapest due to also being the most junior.

I'm sorry to hear that you were that token young guy who got the boot to offset all us old guys. I'm not sure I agree with the standard boilerplate. The managers do have an HR approved/sanctioned boilerplate speech they have to read from for legal protection reasons, but I don't recall that "not due to performance" was part of that speech. My manager told me after the HR speech that it wasn't due to performance and that he was truly sad to see me go. I know the other guy was a "go-to" person for a lot of things, and I was also a "go-to" person so it definitely wasn't performance related.

A nice $30usd stock to be sure. Current employment employees riding the horse until the legs buckle....in sales. Easy money.

@3ify

"not due to performance" is standard boilerplate, they have to say that to everyone. Even if you suddenly got put onto a PIP a month or two before the layoff/redundancies were announced.

I know for sure that I wasn't the highest paid person in my group, in fact I was probably the cheapest due to also being the most junior.

Dear Deadwood: I get that you are jaded but c'MON... Have more respect for yourself!!! I worked my A-- off every day of the week (and many weekends, too). WHY? BC I am RESULTS-DRIVEN. If CSCO is your cash cow and after you get LR'd, you never have to work again... and right now you need 'somewhere to go to work'.... well goodie for you but you are doing CSCO harm. (Again, I 'get it' if you are jaded.) But you're also a result of the problem. The BIGGER problem is the air-filled self-congratulatory BS shared by the ELT and the CSCO C suite. It is THIS population that needs serious revisiting. Chuckie drank the higher stock value koolaid at ALL our expense.

And seasons beatings for all!! Mate, I'm going to work as little as possible myself so I can kick back and let my RSUs and dividends mature making me more money!

Yeah, that's a real smart plan. Sooner or later, someone will wake up and start letting people go who don't work instead of indiscriminately letting people go and then you'll lose those RSU & dividends. All of my stock options were "underwater" when I was laid off, so I let Cisco keep them. Even now that the current stock prices are above the option price, they're not high enough to make back what I'd have had to pay the difference between the selling price back then and the option price.

Get off your a$$ and get to work, or go somewhere else. I'm sure your team mates really love having you on the team. I know what my team & I used to say about slackers who didn't carry their own weight. Maybe you can get away with the bare minimum in sales, but engineers, developers, IT & support roles have to complete their assigned work and it's very obvious who's doing the work and who's not.

My manager apologized to me when he gave me the pink slip, "has nothing to do with your performance"

I know i had the highest pay rate in the group....

It has ethical options and the time to treat people like true stakeholders and assets. Forced ongoing layoffs are a chosen strategy for csco not a necessity. No amount of comparisons to,other companies can sugar coat that. People need to stop making excuses for the chosen strategy by csco in their relatively positive financial situation.

Oh, I'm not making excused for Cisco. They're either becoming cold-blooded, or they're so incompetent that they don't know how to do lay-offs. In previous rounds, they either let the bottom 5% go across the board or they targeted entire BU's or divisions. This time, it was not the poor performers and it wasn't an entire team (although they did gut some teams from what I heard) but instead targeted older workers using the excuse that we were "more expensive".

Keep posting snide remarks about cisco, but I bet if you worked for Juniper or Brocade, it would be no different. Actually, it would be worse.

What percentage of the management and technical leadership of these companies have Cisco on their resumes? The lack of development, systems and management skills here are unique in my experience but the tens of thousands laid off over the ages had to go somewhere.

I left Cisco a couple of years ago, and during that time I've completely divested my portfolio of Cisco stock. Too many talented people have been sacrificed to prop up that stock price. I couldn't stomach owning it anymore.

"Former Cisco employee" - I can appreciate what you are trying to do and the effort to look at the positives. In regards to the way the other companies you listed treated employees badly Let's not lose sight of the financial situations of those companies compared to csco. Csco is a cash flow positive company with billions in cash, and the highest debt rating possible. It has ethical options and the time to treat people like true stakeholders and assets. Forced ongoing layoffs are a chosen strategy for csco not a necessity. No amount of comparisons to,other companies can sugar coat that. People need to stop making excuses for the chosen strategy by csco in their relatively positive financial situation.

And seasons beatings for all!! Mate, I'm going to work as little as possible myself so I can kick back and let my RSUs and dividends mature making me more money!

Keep posting snide remarks about cisco, but I bet if you worked for Juniper or Brocade, it would be no different. Actually, it would be worse.

Maybe. In my experience, after a company has it's IPO and the larger it gets, the less employees matter and the sense of "family" is gone. The days of Cisco in the '90's is long gone. The early 2000's are a by-gone era too.

I don't know how CFO's and "bean counters" can live with themselves the way public companies will screw over it's assets: employees. I watched one company that just had it's IPO totally change what the business did and failed in it's transition from what it did best and made it successful into a total disaster in less than a year. They sold off the parts of the company that didn't do what they wanted to do and when the remaining parts couldn't deliver, they laid everyone off while the executive leaders and one admin moved into a small office space while the execs drained the remaining cash the company had raised. How can a public company do anything with no project managers, no developers, no sales team and only 5 or 6 execs and an admin and "run" the business for 9 months? I watched another company, within two years of their IPO decide to let go just enough employees Nov so that when they accepted the severance package--of a whole whopping 2 weeks on top of the 2 weeks pay in lieu of notice--their employment ended 3 days before the end of the year and the company didn't have to match their 401(k) contributions. Then one week after the period defined under the WARN act that would have included the first batch of employees terminated, they closed the entire site but didn't have to meet the requirements of the WARN act because they were ONE employee short of meeting the requirement. Talk about planning ahead. I wonder if the cost of keeping the office open for that additional period of time was cheaper than the 60-days notice the company would have had to provide under the WARN act.

I have found that, small to medium companies who are trying to succeed tend to treat their employees better to reward hard work even if their benefits are not as good because they can't leverage their size to get cost savings from group plan benefit providers. Once a company starts treating it's assets like resources, it's time to leave for a smaller company.

All I can say is, thank you for the generous severance package. While taking out the older staff under whatever terms you want to call it in order to hide age discrimination, you weren't completely cold blooded when you kicked us to the curb. Although, from reading some of the posts, there were cold-blooded managers who screwed people out of their year-end bonuses while others got the bonuses they deserved.

I don't know if Cisco is becoming more cold-blooded or just less competent in how they handle the LR's. In previous years, they told us it was coming, they shared the details of the packages, and when people were notified they were impacted, the HR support line already had a special option to direct impacted people to teams of HR support staff ready to answer their questions. The '16 round, there was no special option. There were no specially trained or dedicated HR staff to handle the volume of calls. Heck, even the info on the HR web site telling the impacted people where to go to meet with the out-sourced job search company had the wrong room listed for one site and no one was intelligent (or cared) enough to put a sign on the room door telling us where to go to find them. By now, Cisco should have this process down to a science with a checklist telling them what to do x days prior to telling the impacted employees.

Guess I've rambled on enough. I don't think I was being snide when I said I wished those remaining at Cisco the best. I used to be proud of working at/for Cisco. I don't want it to become tarnished, but that's out of my control and it looks like it won't be that "wow-factor" on a resume like it once was like Google, Facebook, Amazon are. Cisco is looking more like IBM and heading towards being a Yahoo or AltaVista and AOL. Everyone knows what it is, knew how much of a tech giant they were, but no longer are. I don't want to see that happen, but now's it up to the ELT and the workers that remain to see whether or not Cisco ends up where Yahoo is today, no longer able to do what it once did best.

Keep posting snide remarks about cisco, but I bet if you worked for Juniper or Brocade, it would be no different. Actually, it would be worse.

I wish Cisco all the best too. Best wishes to those that remain.

Work your a$$es off and keep the stock price up so I can make dividends off all my stock. :-)