Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Most companies that are good do not want to go to Cisco anymore.

Even if you don't want to live in the center of the networking world there aren't many companies which can casually drop billions. I find myself thinking the better career targets are companies that specialize largely above the networking layer. Here are some thoughts on that for discussion:

• IPv4 is old hat

• IPv6 hasn't had a single standard approved in it's over 20 year lifespan

• Security standards in the network stack are still badly thought out and poorly implemented

• End-to-end encryption will starve out many network based security solutions

• If network management had been done correctly 20 years ago most of the forwarding world would have been commoditized long before now

• Most SDN solutions continue to be incorrectly done network management

• Third party SDN is limited to what you can control and poll about the proprietary state of each part of each box, further limited by speed and buffering on control interfaces

• Networking code (both open and closed source) tends to be poorly written in a legacy language

• The rest boils down to bigger/faster chips and more recursive encapsulations in the names of virtualization and mobility or more stripped down encapsulation for IoT

• The cloud will commoditize much of the enterprise market lowering margins, and giving far more power to government mandated monopolies in the service provider market will disincentivize further spending growth

The technology and politics of networking are as much a hindrance as a foundation for future growth for features built on top of it, and the largest potential growth is in the application layer (compute, storage, UI, services, apps, sensing and controlling, and so on) and associated hardware.

It's s sh-t place to work with dorks in mgt up to ceo. I'm a recent grad on my way out after 9 months. The hr org is horrific. Good luck

Acquisitions are getting very difficult as well. Most companies that are good do not want to go to Cisco anymore. The net is Cisco has to overpay.

How does Cisco fix retention issues? Hire college graduates that lack ambition, without marketable skills.

Do they come in as Principal Engineers now or do they have to produce a certain amount of carbon dioxide first? At least this reduces training costs!

Your senior people are unemployable elsewhere and the competent recent grads with PhDs are all out the door in less than a year when they realize they'll be maintaining legacy code from ancient acquisitions. Until you put competent leadership in place you'll never get anything brilliant from your staff and you'll never get competent leadership that does only maintenance which is why the company continues to acquire aggressively. Has any company this size ever successfully changed such a foundational part of its culture?

How does Cisco fix retention issues? Hire college graduates that lack ambition, without marketable skills.

Ouch. But they say the truth usually hurts.

If they'd kept their culture from the 90's & early 2000's, then maybe people wouldn't WANT to leave. Cisco is driving away the people they didn't kick out.

At least Cisco is hiring lower caliber university hires, the retention metrics have been rather embarrassing the last several years.

How does Cisco fix retention issues? Hire college graduates that lack ambition, without marketable skills.

The same story repeats every generation. When we were college grad new hires, similarly there were a bunch of old-timers in the mix. Nothing against college folk starting out. Glad actually to not have had to go through college recently, can't rationalize the increase in cost since 70s/80s/90s. Back then, you could have little to no college loan debt if one worked usually readily available full time summer jobs, and had a 15-hour a week or so job while on campus. It's the cycle of life. Hopefully a four year college degree won't get to be over $500,000 in the next 30 years. My undergrad was $4500 a year, including $300 a month to live in the dorm...including cafeteria meals!

i.e cheap