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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!
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.
"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.
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...