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Cisco Emerges From Restructuring 13,000 Employees Lighter
Joining the ranks of accepted submitters, Zibodiz writes with an article in PC World about Cisco restructuring. From the article: "Cisco Systems emerged from 150 days of restructuring on Tuesday ... The networking company started to streamline its operations and refocus itself on a few core businesses earlier this year after posting disappointing financial results. The subsequent restructuring shut down its Flip consumer camcorder unit and other businesses and eliminated 12,900 jobs, with almost 23,000 employees moved in the process. Executives laid out some more details on Tuesday at Cisco's annual financial analyst conference in San Jose, California. Cisco's five areas of focus now are its core routing and switching business, collaboration, data-center virtualization, video, and tying these elements together in an overall architecture."
Zibodiz further writes "Perhaps the most interesting thing to me is that Cisco had 12,900 employees that were doing things other than 'routing and switching, collaboration, virtualization, video, and ... architecture.'"
First Cisco offered an Early Retirement Package... this backfired since many of the senior technical folks, who would have no problems getting a job somewhere else took the package and immediately got a job at a competitor. Nothing like paying top talent to work somewhere else.
They as part of the layoffs they said that they would lay off 15% of all VP and higher folks. A few Distinguished Engineers were let go.
Then this morning they announced that FOUR new VPs were made Senior VPs.
Cisco's employee profile is shaped like an hour glass, you're either upper management or a grunt. There is no middle class here. I"ve also heard of this place like a upside down pyramid. Btw, VPs get a compensation that is orders of magnitude greater than any individual contributor (including Distinguished Engineers, for which there are 100 in the entire company).