Cisco Exec: Turnover In Engineering No Problem

alphadogg (971356) writes The engineering reorganization currently underway at network giant Cisco Systems is intended to streamline product development and delivery to customers. That it is prompting some high profile departures is an expected byproduct of any realignment of this size, which affects 25,000 employees, says Cisco Executive Vice President Pankaj Patel, who is conducting the transformation. "People leave for personal business reasons," Patel said in an interview with Network World this week. "Similar transformations" among Cisco peers and customers "see personnel change of 30% to 50%."

Comments

we need the freshest talent!

[Anonymous Coward]

No old people, they have too much experience! We need to do things fast and poorly! So we can sell total crap to complete idiots!

Re:Engineers have no future.

[nucrash]

I can tell you from a company that continually recycles their talent that after a while, watching the talent go out the door and having new blood learn how to fix old problems all over again gets really old. A company that treats their engineers like second hand citizens is a company that I won't invest in. They won't have a future.

Re:Engineers have no future.

[tsotha]

That's my experience too. It's healthy for a company to lose a few percent of its people - after awhile you accumulate dead wood. But once you start treating your technical people like drop-in disposable parts, nobody actually cares if the company is successful. Why would they?

Re:Engineers have no future.

[silentbozo]

Agreed. A manager who says that turnover is not a problem is a manager that has no inkling of what engineers do, what exactly their company produces, or how badly they are in trouble when knowledge and experience walk out the door. Either that, or they're lying to your face.

There's that tipping point when the work gets harder, the code is even more rotted, the "process" is even more constricting, because they know something is wrong but they need to "measure" everything to figure out why. That's when people are running, not walking out the door.

Re:Engineers have no future.

[sjames]

Problem is, it's not the deadwood that leaves.

Re:Engineers have no future.

[Kylon99]

"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." - Red Adair

Personal and business reasons

[enriquevagu]

Personal and business reasons are actually opposite. These people are being fired.

The essence of enterprise

[golodh]

I fear that the negative reactions here indicate (once again) that Slashdot readership consists mainly of techies. And such people often have difficulties understanding understanding how society works (even if they tend to have vocal opinions on any subject that comes along). Let me try to bring some perspective into the discussion.

Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.

It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.

What this means is that all and any employees must (and this is essential) be plug-replaceable as a matter of policy. Those that aren't should either be unique individuals like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the actual owners of the company, or leaving.

That is one of the drivers (not the only one of course) behind the desire for standardisation of work procedures and documentation of ideas and knowledge.

The result of careful execution of such policy is a situation in which personnel really is replaceable. Even when it concerns 10%-30% of the employees. Which is what we are now seeing illustrated at Cisco.

So there's no need to be surprised. And no need to be disgruntled. It's simply the consequence of a certain feature of our society we collectively decided we want and actively maintain. And it has truly served us well for the past century and a half and its end-result is the envy of our neigbours.

Unfortunately the current economic tide makes the downsides (for such they are) of this state of affairs more visible: i.e. employees are just another commodity and any successful enterprise will treat them as such. . As a result, employees can get a rough deal (if they get any deal at all, i.e. if they are employed). Let's be clear about this: I don't know how to make those downsides go away without wrecking the competitiveness of enterprises. But I suspect it will involve a realignment in the balance of power between labour and capital.

One way of achieving this is through the use of force. Also known as "legislation". Fortunately we have a mechanism in place for effecting change. It's called Politics. But what actual policy should be enacted through Politics? If knew (and could prove it) I'd tell you, but I don't.

One of the problems is the constraints imposed on all of us through competition. I.e. if the policy we adopt is too disadvantagous for enterprises, they will simply take their capital, set up shop elsewhere, and drive the disadvantaged enterprises off the market.

So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.

Re:The essence of enterprise

[rtb61]

The insane idea that humanity exist to service corporations is, well, insane. Our society exists to service and support us, it has been corrupted by psychopaths to allow them to exploit us to service and support themselves only. The idea that competition is the ideal management solution is a direct measure of that insanity, real fairies at the bottom of the garden stuff. Competition as the solution means failure as a solution. That's was competition versus cooperation is about, competition is about using failure as a normal everyday occurrence and cooperation is about avoiding failure.

Examples of competition in business. Health insurance where people who paid premiums and when they need them the company fails after feeding huge amount of cash in management pockets now have no coverage. In schools it means failed schools put their students through a year of education for nothing, which now has to be repeated. Hospitals where patients suffer and die until they are shut down. Prison where recidivism is a desirable corporate objective, have to keep those prisoners coming back, until the governments that fund them finally shut them down as failures.

Competition is not a sound management principle, it is a psychopathic management principle because it is driven by failure. Even winning companies can still be bought out and mismanaged directly into failure, in fact it is historically inevitable.

Re:The essence of enterprise

[drinkypoo]

The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.

Well, let's look at how important the identity of the capital component can be: it can make or break a company. Depending on the identity of known major investors, you can attract or repel other major investors. So clearly you have agreed that the identity behind the labor component is critically important.

It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.

No. The only reason that is the case is because of mindless chasing of the bottom line. In the real world, we know that while individuals can be replaced, no individual is a perfect replacement for another. Even identical twins have their own unique proclivities, and the rest of us are less identical than they except by astounding happenstance which you statistically cannot depend upon.

The truth is that companies change (and sometimes fail) based on loss of specific talent. You don't tend to see the results instananeously because the failures are gradual and accumulative. Eventually they become too great, and they topple the organization. When you lose specific talent, you lose knowledge you didn't even know you were depending on in most cases, and you lose business-enabling shortcuts in the organizational structure which can take in some cases years to build.

So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.

Well, no. Everyone knows that shitting on employees and causing them to leave (or just firing them when they are necessary) produces inferior results. The actual problem is the chasing of short-term profit. A CEO can do something that they know will harm the company in the long term in order to produce a bump in profits in the short term, and moreover, their interchangeability means that they can do that and get away with it, come out looking like a winner to investors, and then move on and do it to another company. And this in turn is related to the modern idea that a corporation must serve the shareholders' every whim, but this is nonsense. The corporation must serve its charter, and shareholders who don't approve of that charter should invest elsewhere.

Of course, one way to stop this would be to institute better laws for protection of employees of absorbed corporations. That would make other corps less likely to cannibalize them, since their value in an acquisition falls sharply if you can't simply sack all the employees you don't like in short order.

A better way to stabilize society might be a COLA/MGI, which would eliminate people's need to go to work for corporations which should be allowed to fail anyway, either because they don't treat workers well or frankly for any other reason. Most corporations shouldn't exist, but in our modern make-work system we must preserve them so as to preserve jobs so as to preserve economic prosperity. Meanwhile, many are stacking up numbers in bank accounts which will remain untapped until their death. You can't take it with you, but you can deprive someone who needs it right now.

Re:The essence of enterprise

[drinkypoo]

Competition is not a sound management principle, it is a psychopathic management principle because it is driven by failure

Competition from competare, which I am probably misspelling, everyone running together to go faster. Competition is a sound management principle, but only if the penalties for failure do not include incarceration and death. And the risk of that goes way up if you fail in the corporate reality and become homeless. Then you get stigmatized, and society can do anything it likes to you. Ironically, only Utah seems to be figuring out a compassionate solution.

Competition helps us achieve more and helps us decide on the best solutions. But when you combine it with an artificial scarcity society (which is rapidly leading us down the path to a real one) then it becomes fear-driven, rather than the desire to excel, and fear makes us make poor and short-sighted decisions.

Re:The essence of enterprise

[bitingduck]

That seems grossly oversimplified. Like most things with humans, it isn't a dichotomy of 'exceptional' and 'ordinary'. Every worker usually has some amount of 'exceptional', and some amount that aligns with what you need them to do, and that amount might be more or less than others performing the same role. And engineering (which is encapsulated by the 'techie' group of Slashdot readers), a field where insight, clarity, work ethic, intelligence, and lateral thinking are major factors of job performance, that 'individual skills' factor matters at least as much as it does with scientists and inventors. Your posts indicate that you might fall into the category of people, as pointed out elsewhere, who don't actually understand what engineers do and instead confuse them with technicians.

Overall an excellent post-- too bad you posted anon so fewer will see it (I don't have mod points).

To expand on the quoted section-- good management of technical people is finding the areas where people are exceptional and putting them into positions where you can best use those skills, and avoiding forcing them into areas where they aren't particularly special or interested interested in becoming so (which will make them unexceptional).

I should also point out that there's a very fuzzy line between "engineer", "scientist", and "inventor" (which you sort of imply, but I'll come out and say it). A very substantial part of many science fields is engineering to make the observation that you're trying to make. And anybody can "invent" something that they need, but it usually takes a bunch of engineering to implement it, much of which gets done by the inventor. Even on a small scale, a significant fraction of engineers have to "invent" things on a small scale on a regular basis.