Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The traditional model towards profitability was to sell more product, grow your operation, hire more workers and build more factories, wash-rinse-repeat.
Today it seems like the road to profitability is to not grow, increase short-term profits by downsizing, make existing workers do more work, wash-rinse-repeat.
That's great news if you're a CEO only concerned with the short-term profitability of your brief stint as CEO (before you bail out with your golden parachute). But it's pretty shitty news if you're a worker or a long-term investor in said company. And it's even worse news if you're out of work and looking for a job.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
imho, the main problem with cisco is their inability to have a decent price list that one can count on, all hardware is sold at a variable discount different for each customer, seemingly depending on the direction of the wind. Also the necessity of having an active support contract to get firmware upgrades including the ones that patch urgent security bugs is a turn off, in particular when one has payed 5 or 6 figures for a piece of equipment...
In the spirit of "sharing the pain" all groups were tagged with layoff requirements. This included lean teams doing critical operations in core businesses (routing, aggregation, security etc).
While the engineers are still excellent, Cisco is no longer a company run by skilled technical professionals focused on delivering quality products. Its an accounting operation infested with old-boys-clubs where decisions are primarily the result of office politics, not technical correctness. The smart people are leaving, the lucky ones are getting laid off with severance packages, the unfortunate are left holding the bag.
Just once, someone would read the article before making stupid comments like this. Here, from one of the linked articles from back in July:
The layoffs will eliminate about 9 percent of Cisco's regular, full-time workforce. In the ranks of vice president and above, Cisco said it will cut 15 percent of employees.
There, does that make you happy? Here's another one:
{Cisco} moved from a controversial collection of boards and councils managing the company to named individuals being responsible for product lines.
Sounds like administrative middle management being eliminated to me.
Also note that in the announcment in July, they talked about transferring a unit to Foxconn, saying:
No jobs will be lost in that transaction, but about 5,000 Cisco employees will be transferred to Foxconn
Read the articles and get that chip off of your shoulder.
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).
kind of hard to sell more routers and switches when your 10 year old products are more than enough for a lot of your customers
You could buy from a different vendor. There are lots of other manufactures that make great products -- most make products MUCH better than Cisco. Companies like Juniper, Extreme, Foundry, etc. all make products that end up being cheaper, more reliable and often faster than their Cisco counterpart.
Cisco lost a lof of their edge in the last 10 years when they stopped focusing on their core products. They only enhanced their products to make them work better with the products they were buying. Others have surpassed them in most products.
You have no idea how correct you are. As someone who has worked in the "core" areas, Cisco leadership now comprises of people who have stayed there due to various reasons like politics, visa issues etc etc. Most of the really smart people responsible for the networking boom in Cisco have left for greener ventures or they got tired of the politics/incompentency that is rampant in Cisco. Another example that is really close to my heart - The unit I worked for has around 500+ people out of which it is safe to say 450+ are Indians. It is safe to say the situation is the same in other units as well. The culture has become so Indianized that managers often talk in hindi and organize lunches to Indian places even if there is maybe 1 non-indian in the group (what will he do , quit ? ). The situation is so bad that even within Indians there is politics. My group that I worked on comprises of 5 people out of which 4 are from the same part of India. The 2nd level Manager only looks for people that are from the same part of India as he is. This is also visible in other groups across my BU. No problem against Indians for me, but these people brought with them a highly non-professional and obsolete management style consisting of manager-worship, no questions asked style of leadership and that was suffocating for me as a developer. Any average person like me in Cisco is bound to get frustrated and leave!. Most people there choose to stay because they have their green cards being processed and they cannot leave. The managers know that well and they try to exploit that in every way possible. The end result is an extremely mediocre management team that now faces competition from Huawei, Juniper, HP etc and has no clue how to go about it.