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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%."
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!
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.
Place something witty here
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?
Anyone who can get another job elsewhere leaves. Anyone who is really good gets head hunted or starts their own business. What are you left with?
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.
So they are down to developing customer centric solutions while leveraging their key synergies. Anything better than riding the corporate wave?
Society use your Sciences
Problem is, it's not the deadwood that leaves.
I may just be interpretting this discussion different than everyone else here, but assuming every developer is happy with company, and company decides to implement a new development philosophy or production model (for strategic / financial / etc..) reasons, wouldn't it be sensible and actually expected that a non-trivial number of developers won't be happy with said changes?
For example, If my company went from Dev and IT groups to merging them into devops, some people are going to be rocking the idea, and a shit ton may be unhappy about the change and decide to move on. DevOps isn't any more or any less better for an employee, but it means a different set of tasks for that developer to live in. Maybe this change will significantly improve workplace productivity and the change isn't only merited, but essential for the company's survival. Same with, say dropping support for Windows/Linux/Mac/etcc OS's and just supporting a smaller set of OS's. Some would say there are valid reasons to adopt the standard (less IT burdens), and others who use said dropped OS's will be more willing to leave.
To assume that the company simply doesn't care about its developers walking out is a little bit of an overstatement. Many won't like a change (regardless of what it is), and if you're going to leave, you might as well leave when you perceive a negative change in your job.
Bye!
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." - Red Adair
Not sure how many employees Cisco has left (didn't RTFA), but a quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that they still probably have more than 50K employees. Of course not all of them are engineers, but I have worked in organizations of that size before. If my experience is common (and I believe it is), they have already gone well pas the point you indicate. Even if they only have 5,000 engineers, it is practically impossible to hire anywhere near that many good people. You are stuffed to the rafters with dead wood. Not only that, but quite a lot of that dead wood will have made it up to management level -- the engineering and political skill sets are orthogonal, and people who are good at politics get promoted.
This means that the management probably has absolutely no idea how to separate the good engineers from the bad. In other words, just by growing the company to the size that they have, they are in a position where they can't evaluate talent. A 30-50% turnover rate is another way of saying 2-3 year attrition rate. I agree with the manager. This is common in large companies. Because they are unable to distinguish good from bad, they simply cycle through the available talent in a random fashion. They have chosen to go with quantity over quality and his statement makes absolute sense.
I don't think it is possible to do (for a variety of political reasons), but lets pretend that a company of 5000 engineers could cut back to their top 10% of talant. You'd end up with a solid core of 500 good engineers. Then, let's pretend that you knew how to do whatever it took to keep that talent for 10 year. Would the company be better off? I'm not so sure. I work in a former start up that is trying to scale itself up now. Since I'm fairly senior (possibly indicating I'm better at politics than engineering??? ;-) ) I'm exposed to more of the business end of the company. The CEO is demanding that we double our development group. He knows that this will throw the group into chaos, but he also sees a way to grow the revenue of the company by an order of magnitude if we can do some very specific work. Crucially, it doesn't really matter how badly we do it. It just needs to mostly work.
Which is better? Grow your revenue by an order of magnitude today and destroy your development team, or carefully grow your development team and trust that opportunities will show up when the team is able to handle them? It's a very difficult call. Personally, I can't fault companies who expand quickly (like Cisco did) and who take the opportunities that were presented. That's what the business guys are paid to do.
Luckily, the company I work for is wholly owned by the CEO and he has decided (for now anyway) to adopt a more sustainable growth for the company. Again, I am very lucky that our CEO views our team as being the engine of the company and values long term viability. He doesn't have investors trying to take their money out and has the ability to make the choice that leads to a very good place for me to work. Not every company has that luxury.
Personal and business reasons are actually opposite. These people are being fired.
He's pretty much required to downplay it, otherwise they would have to honestly state in their 10-K that turnover would affect future profits.
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.
It's interesting what Cisco is becoming.
A decade, even half a decade, ago, Cisco was greatly admired for their ability to acquire without attrition. When a company acquired another company, you usually saw 10-12% attrition in the first 6 months, after the pay-for-stay for key personnel expired, and another 8-10% at the end of 12 months. That meant that between 18% and 22% of what you just bought had walked out your door in your first year.
Cisco's numbers were 2% and 5% for 6 and 12 months, respectively. Cisco knew how to do an "acquihire", and keep the talent that it bought the company for, and in acquisitions which weren't simply talent plays, it knew how to do that too.
It seems that this expertise has been lost along the way, or that in one of these annual "transformations", something broke. Either way, with the way they are acting like IBM Global Services these days, or perhaps the post acquisition EDA or post-divestiture Agilent, they are unlikely to be able to repeat their past successes in acquisition, since the trust has been lost.
Which is really a shame, since they were the envy of the entire tech industry for their capability in this regard, not just Silicon Valley. We used to have meetings at IBM about how we could possibly do what they did, with the numbers they got, and thus avoid killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Similar meeting took place at Apple, particularly prior to the acquisition of P.A. Semi (and much of the team deserted Apple for places like Google anyway, after the lockout handcuffs were removed so that the people who were there prior to the acquisition could cash out and skedaddle.
It's interesting what they are becoming, because it's not the old Cisco; it most resembles, if I had to pick a company and an era, the post Carly Fiorina H.P.; here's hoping it doesn't turn out the same for them, and that they can correct their course before the rudder falls off entirely.
That's what is being taught in business school. Actually, it's a few things. "It's bad to have your company depending on a single person", which is true. "Standardizing jobs / positions makes it easier to shift people around, making you less dependent on any one of them, and makes recruitment and organizing the work easier if you do this in line with the rest of your industry", which is also true to a degree. Never mind the many negative effects of standardizing jobs; the message to take away from this is not that people are drop in replaceable parts. If you did all this correctly, it'll be easier to replace a leaver, but it doesn't mean that replacing one person doesn't come at a high cost, and doesn't mean that adding or replacing many people at once is still extremely hard to do without messing up the works.
Sadly I see my share of managers who do get the idea that people can be swapped in and out at no cost. Needless to say their teams are not the high performers.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
My company is "partnered" with Cisco to develop networking equipment for smart infrastructure. Working with them is impossible, and they are completely dysfunctional as an organization. The result is that their product is total shit and doesn't work, and their attitude is that it's our job to make our product work with it, despite the fact that their stuff does not comply with published networking standards.
They've been riding on their brand's coat tails for far too long... Hopefully a Ubiquiti or someone like them will step up and fill the hole that Cisco is digging itself into.
I started my company about 20 years ago on a simple principle. Only hire people that are worth keeping, and keep them.
I have never had anyone resign, and I have never laid anyone off - in 20 years.
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.
Oh god, the "metrics" thing. They did that at my last job, to the point it got ridiculous because you spent more time trying to update the 10 different 'tracking systems' than you did doing actual work. It even got to the point where to take a vacation day you had to update the group sharepoint calendar, plus two other systems, plus send email on it to 3 different people (any one of which could reject the request for whatever reason). It got to the point where I was *glad* when they laid me off because the technical part of the job (the 'interesting' part) was disappearing into a realm of spending 50%+ of your time updating the various systems for keeping track of the 'metrics' on what you were really supposed to be doing (or what I thought I should be doing - actual work not 'make work').
a 30-50 percent turnover rate is not sign a of a healthy company, normally companies that are doing that, had a massive downsizing and got rid of the wrong people. You don't lose half your companies employees if things are going well. I expect that hiring is way up at their Indian and Chinese design centers considering who they have in charge of their Engineering team.
"... deadwood that leaves ..."
Aha! I see what you did there.
They announced several thousand job cuts at the same time that every job board today lists hundreds and hundreds of 'openings' but when you apply for them you get a response that the job doesn't exist. And tomorrow is the same thing, and so on. Cisco is a half-tarded company like all the rest that doesn't know from one minute to the next what it's doing and none of the stove pipe orgs know what the other stove pipes are up to. Long story short they're going to appease institutional investors by massively cutting the US workforce and moving it to Asia. Quality will suffer and no one will care. Any day now Cisco will turn into IBM which is little more than an investment fund that buys and sells other companies.
Even if they only have 5,000 engineers, it is practically impossible to hire anywhere near that many good people.
1: Cisco didn't hire all the people who work for them. They made acquisitions.
2: How many good engineers do you think there are in the world, and how many of them do you believe is it feasible for Cisco to have hired? Because I'm suspecting a massive dose of arrogance on your part, here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Cisco was an innovative company that created huge market value. Now they're becoming "lean, agile" company with no real vision or future. They want to be "market focused" yet they're supposed to push the market to their view of technology and to create markets. When you lead from behind you certainly take on less risk but you sure don't create the profit margins and patent portfolio investors look for. Sell your shares now.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
That's a horrible oversimplification, but let's take it as read for the purposes of this discussion.
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.
Unfortunately, if you adopt that policy, you have immediately and severely restricted your ability both to hire and retain the most effective staff and to build the most productive teams.
It is obvious that HR would love for employees to be plug-replaceable in such a way, and it is obvious why. However, the reality is that in a creative industry, and particularly in one related to technology, no two employees offer exactly the same potential contributions. If as a matter of policy you won't hire or depend on anyone with unique contributions to offer, then almost by definition you're only going to have staff with typical combinations of widely available skills and no special experience or unique insights to draw upon.
However, given that the creative component of technology companies is often where much of their value comes from, a business that can't or won't hire the most creative people is always at risk of a competitor disrupting their business model with a new product, service, distribution model...
Moreover, technology can be a dramatic effectiveness multiplier. A single smart, creative person using the best technologies can sometimes outperform an entire team of mediocre people with average technologies. More importantly, in scalable fields like software and on-line services, a relatively small team of smart, creative people with complementary skill sets and the best technologies has the potential compete with a much larger organisation on raw effectiveness, before you even consider the overheads that the larger organisation must bear.
Finally, one of the major factors in maintaining productivity and developing existing technological assets and IP is keeping sufficient knowledge and expertise available within the development team. That can be done through good documentation, tools, processes and so on, but in reality this very rarely happens and word-of-mouth advice is a far more efficient and effective way to pass information around. Of course, if you treat everyone as replaceable you not only forego that most efficient mechanism but also incur the very substantial overheads of trying to use other documentation and tools to compensate. In short, high turnover is an efficiency killer in technical teams where shared knowledge is a vital asset.
If you think all of this is nonsense, you might consider that this is a discussion about Cisco, whose main business model is currently facing an existential threat from modern technologies like SDN. I'm guessing you're a business studies or MBA student, so you might like to consider the commercial relationships between Cisco and the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google as a case study for what can happen. Cisco's recurring model of spinning out and later buying up side companies to do the R&D for innovative technologies would also make an interesting case study.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And given in the field of "Hell Fighter" he basically INVENTED large chunks of the tools and protocols he knoweth of what he speaks.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
(Hey, someone has to put a MS spin on every story - now can I get a prize?)
Netcraft confims, you win a Beowulf cluster of internets.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Saturday afternoon mini-matinee
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Which is better? Grow your revenue by an order of magnitude today and destroy your development team, or carefully grow your development team and trust that opportunities will show up when the team is able to handle them? It's a very difficult call. Personally, I can't fault companies who expand quickly (like Cisco did) and who take the opportunities that were presented. That's what the business guys are paid to do.
Hey, it worked out great for NORTEL.
(or at least for the stockholders who managed to sell out before they went bankrupt)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Exactly so. And there's also this to consider:
Historically, there were two major changes in how people worked, in order to greatly increase productivity. The first was the transition from everybody-must-be-a-generalist (e.g. any subsistence culture) to specialization and trade in goods and services made or performed by experts. The second was industrialization. In the industrial society, most people are not experts at anything, but their work consists of doing one very small task repetitively.
In the technical workplace, a workgroup consisting entirely of (somewhat replaceable) generalists means that they never work on any one kind of problem long enough to become expert at it, unless it's very broadly defined like "coding a specified routine in Java according to company standards." Such people are replaceable because you can always hire competent Java programmers and teach them to code to company standards and understand how routines are specified in your workflow.
But you also need experts in defining what routines need to be coded and how they are supposed to interact to achieve big picture goals, and you need creative people to define what big picture goals should be and decide which are most worth pursuing. Those people are hard to develop and hard to replace.
Wow. Totally reminiscent of Digital in the late 1990s (and I did work for both Digital and Cisco).
The important thing is not to innovate, but to focus on V.next switches.
Cisco NEVER had any serious focus/commitment on security (I know - i worked for Okena, which was bought by Cisco, and then slowly killed over a couple of years). The corporate focus @ Cisco boils down to: If it isnt a bigger/faster router, it isn't interesting/relevant.
Wall St. already knows that Cisco is stagnant; this confession by Cisco execs overwhelmingly supports their lack of interest in much of anything except their own salaries.
I've been working with Cisco gear since 1992 or so, and I've seen a continuous drive to crap. Once rock solid products are now feature- and bug- bloated, impregnable silos exist between the product lines, support simply sucks on both an account team and TAC level... and every time Chambers puts forth a quarterly report he doesn't seem to have anything good to say. (Mind you, I appreciate honesty, but sometimes as CEO you have to sell the company a little).
Perhaps if they spent a little more time preventing the attrition of decent people they'd see some benefits.
But you also need experts in defining what routines need to be coded and how they are supposed to interact to achieve big picture goals, and you need creative people to define what big picture goals should be and decide which are most worth pursuing. Those people are hard to develop and hard to replace.
They get even harder to develop and replace when no one wants to invest in the development of such people. They generally don't just pop in fresh from a 4 year program.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Quote from a tv show?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Just today, I sat in on a lecture that basically said, engineers can expect about 2 years of work and then be put on the chopping block.
Did the lecturer say anything about jobs that require 5 years experience in order to be hired?
You don't ask.
I'll fill you in on some details. Since I worked (past tense) at Cisco, before they cut me, they had cut about 30% of the people I knew working for them. I was cut about two years ago. Since then, they've cut another 30% or more.
People aren't leaving Cisco for personal reasons. They are leaving because Cisco is offering them packages to leave, and if you don't take the package, you get to leave without it.
Considering that this "Cisco" manager seems oblivious to that basic fact, I doubt that anything else he says has any bearing on reality. So there's nothing to see here. Move along.
In 2009, Cisco cut 2,000 jobs
In 2011, Cisco cut 16% of it's workforce
In 2012, Cisco cut 2,000 jobs
In 2013, Cisco laid off 4,000 jobs
in 2014, Cisco is cutting 6,000 jobs
Cisco really doesn't hire anymore. They buy up companies and call the acquired employees "new hires". Then they cut. And cut, and cut.
That type of thinking drives prices up and makes a company suffer in the end. Most people want far greater pay for jobs that are not permanent in nature and they just might drag their feet or not care about a job that will let them go when a project ends. And it gets around that a company doesn't mind laying off workers. Toyota became a major company by making it next to impossible to get laid off by their company. They had a lot of loyal workers as a consequence and became a major company as a result. It also helps if a firm pays more than any other firm in the business. Frankly misuse of notions of economics points to an ignorant and ill willed management and ownership of a company. In the US we have not reached the point of dealing with the reality that capitalism is a losing notion and sort of evil as well. Wake up people and look at what has been happening. The US is the last industrialized, western nation to offer public health care and it is still too limited in scope. Germany offers to provide free college for US students as well as housing and in some cases food as well. The US has a totally out of control prison population and are sort of singular in applying the death sentence to anyone. The US now has a lower standard of living than many nations and on top of all of that we have lost the respect of the world by allowing torture of POWs. Are we the new N. Korea?
"Streamline product development reorganization byproduct realignment transformation" ..
In other words mass firings, the savings on the wages bill showing up in next years accounts as increased revenue. Followed by the company imploding in the following year. By which time the CEVPaCDO will have took his bonus and moved on elsewhere.
Instead of a handful of product managers, engineers and marketers working directly with those SVPs on a customer hardware/software solution, engineers are now split off into separate business units, making product development coordination more cumbersome and perhaps elongating development cycles.
from articles like NetworkWorld's Cisco reorgs trimming SVP ranks .
Separating engineering from marketing's' "Yes, we can - and by tomorrow night, too!" is far and away the best primer for a vaporware pump.
But hey...corporate longevity is as nothing compared to the need to provide current senior executives and large shareholders with maximum returns; somebody else can part out the wreckage.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
They get even harder to develop and replace when no one wants to invest in the development of such people.
When I worked at Cisco for nine months on contract, my boss explained to me that he couldn't train me since I'll get certified, leave Cisco and make more money elsewhere. Never mind that a lack of training caused many employees to train themselves, get certified and leave Cisco to make money elsewhere anyway.
I worked for Cisco in 2013. Just so happened that the quarterly renewal of my contract came up during the announced layoff period one year ago this month. My manager wanted to renew my contract but the HR system locked him out from doing that. I was laid off along with 300+ full-time employees from the business unit. My boss lost half of the contractors on his team for that year, forcing more work back on to the full-time employees. A screwy way to run a company.
new employees, even with years and years of experience, will typically earn less than employees in the same job but with that many years of experience at that same employer
As a contractor, I found that to be the opposite. I ran into an old coworker while interviewing for a job during the summer. We compared notes. He still has the same job at the same company and making the same amount of money that I did from nine years ago. Since tech companies have an annoying habit of letting me got every so often, I held multiple contract jobs and made 80% more money than he did.
If you stay at the same company for a long period of time, you're accepting less than 5% raises every year. If you want to make more money, you need to change jobs from time to time. As much as I would love a long-term job (my recent contracts have averaged nine months in duration), I don't want to miss out on making more money.