Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
(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.