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Cisco Systems To Lay Off About 14,000 Employees, Representing 20% of Global Workforce (crn.com)
schwit1 writes from a report via CRN: Cisco Systems is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker's global workforce. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transitions from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. Cisco increasingly requires "different skill sets" for the "software-defined future" than it did in the past, as it pushes to capture a higher share of the addressable market and aims to boost its margins, the CRN report said citing a source familiar with the situation. "The company's headcount as of April 20, 2016, was 73,104," reports CRN. "Cutting 14,000 employees would be the single largest layoff in Cisco's 32-year history."
UPDATE 8/17/16: Cisco has reported its fourth-quarter 2016 earnings and they have exceeded analysts' expectations.
UPDATE 8/17/16: Cisco has reported its fourth-quarter 2016 earnings and they have exceeded analysts' expectations.
This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price. Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
I guess Cisco will be refocusing on their core competencies, like supplying surveillance equipment to repressive governments.
I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value. Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software and yet we will dump money into these programs to train the next generation, and hiring H1-B workers instead. You know these people are likely intelligent and could use the leg up to fill the gaps the company has, and instead it is just dump them on the street.
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own. It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained. It is not the kind of place you want to make a career out of unless it is your absolute passion, and even then you will be discouraged every day by things like this.
I mean, the replacements went to the free Billionaire Boot Camp, but they still need more training!
Maybe their balance sheet is being affected by the droves of people who are refusing to pay 30-40% of the device cost per year for Smartnet maintenance.
All I can say is we're seeing the beginning of the downfall of CISCO. Chucky will fuck this company up and he'll get his tens of millions with his walking papers and an otherwise profitable company will become like HP.
And thousands of qualified people are going to have a hard time getting jobs in the near future. Because regardless of your technical ability in this industry, if you're not an exact fit to the job description, you're "not qualified". Taking classes in something else doesn't matter because they won't have on the job experience of at least (insert number of years here).
>implying
I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value.
I have no argument against the logistics problems with teach-everyone-to-program and college-as-a-state-service; and these are different concerns than tech field workforce turn-over.
In this case, CISCO is essentially claiming they need fewer EEs, more CS. Hardware engineers are giving way to microcode, FPGA, and firmware; they've grown and resisted rounds of lay-offs and major shifts, and now they have to batch all that up. That means huge, impressive changes of staff instead of slow rounds of sending 15 people off here and hiring 10 there. It's really hard to change workforce without a definitive reorganization--not because of politics, but because your business needs a strong sense of direction to actually function--so these big lay-offs are the only way for it to happen.
In the general case, tech has been expanding. That doesn't mean CISCO gets bigger; it means *everyone* gets bigger. CISCO has competitors--FortiNet, Extreme Networks, Gigamon--and it's competing with cloud services which utilize their hardware infrastructures more-efficiently. Five companies with fifty switches and twenty IT people are now five companies outsourcing to a sixth company who runs all their stuff on twenty switches and two IT people. Even with the tech sector expanding, CISCO is no longer expanding at the same pace as the demand for IT.
So some other IT shop competing with CISCO gets 6,000 workers as they outpace CISCO; CISCO expanded in anticipation of being the market leader, and now has lost sales of products and services produced by 6,000 workers. CISCO makes 6,000 non-replaceable lay-offs. CISCO re-organizes and lays off a bunch of EEs, replaces them with a bunch of CSes. People look at CISCO and ignore the rest of the market.
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After years of fighting with Cisco garbage, we're replacing all of our Cisco equipment, and the last router goes tonight. Maybe their high end stuff was decent, but their low and mid end stuff is real junk. Won't ever use it again. Apparently, we're not the only ones who feel this way...
I don't respond to AC's.
Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software and yet we will dump money into these programs to train the next generation, and hiring H1-B workers instead.
Why do you presume they could or even would want to be trained to be software developers? Even if they could be trained (at substantial cost no doubt) that doesn't imply that they would be particularly competent. Just because someone works for a tech company doesn't mean they are an engineer. While Cisco no doubt has thousands of engineers they also have people who are accountants, marketing, sales, logistics, and every other task you can think of. It is doubtful that many of those people actually would want to become software developers.
You know these people are likely intelligent and could use the leg up to fill the gaps the company has, and instead it is just dump them on the street.
Why do you assume the company has 14,000 unfilled positions? If they are getting rid of that many people they don't have 14,000 economically valuable jobs available for them. Hiring people when you don't have a useful role for them is a one way ticket to bankruptcy. Even if Cisco wanted to train them, it usually takes YEARS to become competent in another line of work. You don't learn to be a good programmer or a good accountant or a good sales person in just 3 months.
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own.
You could say that about any profession. My wife is a physician and she tells people who say they want to be a doctor that "if you can imagine yourself doing anything else you probably should". That job is too hard and takes too much from you to bother with if it isn't a calling. Furthermore that pretty much contradicts your point above. If they don't have a passion for software development why are you pushing them into it if it isn't their thing? I'm an engineer and I've done enough programming to know that it isn't what I want to do for a living and also that I'm not particularly good at it.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained
It's adorable that you think companies ever did have loyalty to workers. Companies exist to make money. If loyalty to workers will most efficiently achieve that end then they will be loyal but it's unreasonable to expect such accommodation. People can be retrained but not necessarily for jobs the company has available. Frequently it is better in the long run for both the company and the worker to part ways. If my company came to me and said "you can keep your job if you retrain yourself to be a software engineer", I'd say thanks for the offer but I'll go succeed elsewhere because I have zero interest in doing that for a living.
This is the real tech world folks. Keep your kids out of it unless they absolutely love it on their own. It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all,
So, which industry can't be described with those words today?
Some industry that shows loyalty to workers long-term? Doesn't suffer from ageism?
14,000 new votes for Trump. Because why should you support the candidate that wants to expand joblessness and is the choice of heartless globalists? We're going to smooth out the poverty in the world until everyone has a standard of living that a Pakistani manual laborer would consider acceptable. We're with her!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
For many years there have been stories about bad management at Cisco. Here's one: Cisco: Bad Economy, or Bad Management? (August 15, 2013)
Quotes: Cisco is "a maze of barely related tech business"... "Aside from its network core, it has operations in data center management, video hardware and software, "collaboration" products, cloud computing and low-tech WiFi products. All of it together seems too much with too little connection."
Hope those impacted can bounce back quickly.
Normally I would agree, but not all hardware guys are re-trainable, if they're like the hardware networking guys where I work. I do agree that convincing kids to go into programming for a career is a bad idea, unless it's something they plan to do short-term while working on a MBA or some other finance related degree. That's where the money is.
This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price.
Or it's an actual business necessity to keep the company in good shape going forward. Sometimes layoffs are a business necessity. If Cisco is getting out of a line of business or the strategic direction has changed it would be idiotic to keep the people employed despite having nothing economically useful for them to do.
Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
Announcing mass layoffs is generally a very poor way to accomplish that. It usually results in short term reductions in profits, a near term drop in stock price, and substantial productivity and moral problems in the remaining workforce.
In this case, CISCO is essentially claiming they need fewer EEs, more CS.
I've met very few EEs who couldn't also code proficiently. Is the need for specialization really that great? To me it's baffling. Does Cisco see a global recession coming, and need to batten down the hatches? Or is there a deep unconscious need for the executive class to occasionally terrorize the nerds?
From this, I'm assuming that all of Cisco's hardware that's not been EOLed is upgradable, right? And so all they need are people who can upgrade their firmware. Need an IPv6 upgrade for some old router that doesn't have it? Ready to go, right? Need IPv6 acceleration on the router? No need to replace it, just reburn some FPGAs?
Or does Cisco think that this market can go to the likes of Juniper, Brocade & Foundry, and that they need to phase themselves into the Infrastructure Outsourcing business?
Hint: nobody has a 'career' - all jobs suck, anyone who says they love their job is lying
Speak for yourself. Some of us are wired differently, and it has to do more with who we are than what our current working environment is.
Nothing about your post is insightful. Should probably be modded "naive and reductive".
"Old man yells at systemd"
100% p\/\/|\|3|> by equation group
I am amazed at the number of layoffs in the tech industry these days, yet we continue to dump money into these code camp programs, and other STEM initiatives of dubious value. Here we have 14,000 tech workers who probably could be retrained to work with software,
According to the article: "The heavy cuts... stem from Cisco’s transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. "They need different skill sets for the software-defined future than they used to have". So, presumably, the software people are not the ones being laid off.
who probably could be retrained to work with software,
Why spend money, and time, to train office and hardware people to become beginner-level software workers when that isn't what they are interested in, instead of simply hiring software people who actually are good at code, write code, and are looking for jobs?
Ok no H1-B's for 4 years then
Nothing about your post is insightful. Should probably be modded "naive and reductive".
You're being sarcastic, right?
When I started in this business decades ago, when a company changed direction, we would be sent to classes to learn the new skills. We were a known variable - we had a work history with our employer and they knew we could do the job.
Then in the mid to late nineties that all changed. I for one trained a few H1-b replacements myself in the late 90s - it's been going on that long.. But, that BS was still in its infancy and there were other opportunities; so no worries.
Then the dot bomb crash and most us got canned. And companies did with what they had and they figured out that they can get their current workers to work twice as long and fill any gaps with H1-bs.
And its getting worse.
Software...which means they will contract with cheap foreign labor once again. Just click the mouse, and the software will be in the USA. Sad....not surprised, but sad workers in the USA are being cut, just to prop up a stock value.
You are wrong. They are laying off the hardware side, and hiring on the software side. The problem is that it doesn't require a workforce of 70,000 to do what Cisco does.
Because they will then turn around and say they can not find any software engineers, and then have to hire H1-B workers. The definition of an H1-B worker is pretty much a beginner-level software developer, if that. Having worked with many who claim 'senior level', I can state this as a generality. So instead invest in the workers you already have, who know your culture, and give them a chance. If they fail, so be it and part your ways. If they do not want to enter software at all, then again, they can leave and not even have to get a severance package.
It is about giving people opportunities and investing in people. May sound silly to many on this board, but I firmly believe in mentoring people. Give me someone who is the best coder in the world but has a crappy attitude vs someone who wants to learn and is passionate, but maybe has some what of a way to go, and I will take the passionate one.
Because it is better for company morale to at least offer re-training to those interested? Companies scream to the press about how their people are sooooo valuable, yet they do stupid things like not having a game plan for the future. If CISCO had such a game plan, they should have been re-training starting a few years ago. If they had one and didn't offer retraining, I think that says just about everything an employee there needs to know about how management feels about them. If they didn't have such a gameplan, the management should get the axe.
Because you still aren't wrapping your head around who they are teaching to code.
I am a mechanical engineer... that codes more or less full time for a living. I have had 3 actual classes in code: Matlab, Java and C/C++. My actual job isn't writing code it's something completely unrelated, code is just the tool I pick to do my job. Some people use Excel but that chokes on high sample rate data.
Do I do the proper O(n) format for getting something done? Nope. Is my program the most optimized best in the world? Nope. Would I consider 99% of what I write production code? Absolutely not. But like a good engineer I use my hammer to pound anything that looks like a nail and for the most part it works.
Dumping money into schools to train kids to code isn't going to lead to more salaried programmers. It's going to lead to more Engineers that can write code, more Doctors that can write code, more Accountants[0] that can code. Because when I need something coded engineering wise it's easier to teach an engineer to code than to teach a software tech worker engineering.
Tech workers need to understand that their 'profession' like every other profession that came before it is going to get simplified and handed off at a lower level to the next generation.
[0]. There are companies out there with accounting departments being run by Janice in accounting manually sorting Excel lists and manually removing duplicates. Manually doing table lookups. This generation is set to retire and for the next generation of accountants to be able to step up and cover her job and theirs they're going to have to code. No, they don't need a full blown programmer.
Somewhere in that 14,000 there is a person who wanted lots of kids and thought he had a good job with a leading tech company so they had lots of kids. So the next time some slashdotter asks 'if they have no money why did they have so many kids?', this is why. You can't plan and budget your life in this economy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Perhaps a blend of two stories.
Cisco has grown over the years with purchases.
They have a nice selection of entrepreneurs which were trapped in a big company structure.
Should make a bunch of new, hungry companies to compete with Cisco.
Young or old as long as they are motivated,
good folks can and do retrain themselves.
Others don't make such great products even on things they are 'expert' at.
I bet the new folks they hire have the same mix of this sort of good and not, except they will have less networking background.
Hint to Wall Street: This is likely going to hurt for a while.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained.
You're just describing the capitalist milieu circa 2016. This has nothing to do with tech.
Anyway, maybe 14,000 hardware engineers don't want to be "retrained to work with software" and would rather just find a job in hardware engineering at another company. Just because Cisco doesn't need them doesn't mean nobody else needs them. As Cisco plateaus, other companies grow. Tesla are hiring, for instance. They have 100s of openings for hardware engineers.
And yes, we put money into programs to train the next generation. That's because not doing so would be fucking stupid. Kids coming up the pipeline has no bearing whatsoever on redundancies today. They're not being replaced by kids or H1-Bs, they are redundant. Look the word up.
The problem is that a company that shows loyality to its workers can be sued by the shareholders. And many of those shareholders are big pension funds, so it is actually a battle between people who work and people who are retired about the profits of a company, which is kinda ironic. If you are retiring from a company and get payouts form your 401k, you are basicly taking money away from your former colleagues who are still working there.
Idi Amin, Mugabe, participants in the Rwanda genocide...? Those are demonstrably "better than him"?
Ezekiel 23:20
Yeah, no shit.
I love my current job. No micromanaging, total flexibility on how or what I code, very little pressure to resolve issues and a CEO that I routinely see in the warehouse helping out the employees when it gets busy out there.
It's made me work harder to get stuff done simply because we're a team fixed on growing the company. This is the fist job in the past couple of decades that I haven't taken a sick day and haven't even taken a vacation day yet in two years.
I am a lot more productive here, and plan on retiring from here in 15 or 20 years.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
...is lost on this bunch. Let them rail against CSCO then vote for Cankles and wonder why this keeps happening.
So instead invest in the workers you already have, who know your culture, and give them a chance. If they fail, so be it and part your ways. If they do not want to enter software at all, then again, they can leave and not even have to get a severance package.
Posting as AC to avoid burning moderation points. I made a very nice career out of being flexible, and not demanding that I was only given work that fit within some narrow self definition of what I do.
This meant a lot of side training - retraining is the wrong word - and in the end, an excellent lack of boredom and a lot of value as my "skill set" was very extensive.
My colleagues who considered that as being taken advantage of were the first ones to go when a workforce adjustment was needed.
It's a fine career for somebody who wants to make some relatively easy money. Somebody who gets their feelings hurt over "ageism" is going to get their feelings hurt in any industry.
I don't respond to AC's.
nice, could you tell the rest of us where to apply?
How can you assume anything about the layoffs?
As far as you know they could be janitors, salesman and call center employees.
It might be that these 20k people will find the same exact job they held at Cisco for some other non-tdech company.
Or not.
It's simple, since everyone is moving to cloud, nobody is buying hardware, except maybe amazon and azure... but eventually amazon and azure will move to cloud and they won't need hardware either! Cloud is magic! Cloud is life!
I work on side projects in almost all my spare time because I don't have a programming job and I like programming. No job I have ever applied for has ever been interested in experience I gained on the side, they only want to know what I have done in a corporate setting.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How much global CISCO market share has been lost due to fear of NSA backdoors?
Guess you're right there wanting to train your own H1B replacement for your own job.
Om, nomnomnom...
Hint: nobody has a 'career' - all jobs suck, anyone who says they love their job is lying. There is no "follow your dream", there is no ABC-afternoon-special. People work a job or a series of jobs, until they can retire on whatever they've scraped together.
Your level of pessimism is so excessive that you might want to seek professional help. I'm sure there are local therapists, psychiatrists, and/or clergy who would love to talk to you about your personal issues.
I've met very few EEs who couldn't also code proficiently.
I've met very few CSs who could code proficiently. The EEs / MEs I know who have the ability to code generally have a skill set similar to someone in academia. They can hack together some code to get something very specific done, but probably shouldn't be touching large scale production quality code. I don't mean that as an insult, since most software engineers can't do what EEs or CS researchers do either. But assuming you can take thousands of EEs and have them switch to being equally senior software engineers in a year or so seems silly.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Companies expect morale to be high just because they gave people a job.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Try smaller businesses. The place I'm working at has about ten office people, 15 - 60 warehouse people (depending on need).
And, the best part is they hire older folks rather than younger. the pay is better than what I was earning at the last Corp i was working at (and there all of the developers were stuck in a cube farm in the basement next to the maintenance area).
I drove past this place for almost 15 years never knowing that I could of been working here instead of at the big corp job I had less than half a mile from here. Now I'm here and building an EDI system. :)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
> these people are likely intelligent
Cisco.
Because I hear about all of those physician layoffs that are happening and how they are being replaced with over seas workers and young kids out of college.
There are substantial efforts to replace physicians with RNs and other lower paid workers. Some appropriate, others not so much. Some physician jobs like radiology face possible competition from off shore radiologists in places like India with lower wages since that job does not require the presence of the patient.
And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40...
Umm, that is a thing too. My wife works in a practice where the oldest doctor was trained in an earlier era and much of his training is not considered obsolete. And it shows in his work. Older doctors don't always do a great job of keeping up with best practices and the latest methods.
"Employees will please exit the premises at this time. *cough, cough* Cue the H1B's..."
Snarky blather aside, data centers moving to cloud services is a big part of Cisco's problem.
This. A million times, this. Granted, it would be nice to have something to show for it on GitHub, but if you've "been playing around with X", no recruiter will ever try to sell you with it, and no company seems willing to hear what you've learned about X.
Companies need to invest in their workers, not just dump them whenever they change direction. One of the reasons I work where I do, and get paid slightly less than market rate, is that they don't just throw people out. Layoffs are major events and don't happen often -- if a project/division goes away, the company just finds something else to place the technical workers on. I know that can change the second some hotshot MBA comes in and sees numbers on his spreadsheets that he doesn't like...but the work environment is good for now. Bottom line is that there are plenty of people over 40 who are totally retrainable and an asset to any company. Some sort of company loyalty needs to return to both sides of the employer/employee equation. Otherwise we're going to end up not being able to plan our lives around having stable employment. I'd even be in favor of a European style model where the company has to commit to an extended severance at the time of hire. Make companies think hard about who they hire, and make it expensive to just dump them whenever they want to juice the stock price.
I hate seeing big companies do this -- it really is the MBAs looking for a short term cash infusion the only way they know how. I saw an interesting post further up the thread saying essentially the MBAs are doing what's best for the company -- Anyone who has worked in a large company long enough sees how important internal tribal knowledge is. They're going to dump these 14,000 people, replace them with offshore or H-1B software developers to write SDN software, and lose all of this knowledge in the process. I've seen it happen many times working for large companies -- the offshore guys or H-1Bs come in, the "official" documentation on a process is 100% factually correct, but they have a very hard time making it work. So, it's not what's best for the company in the long run -- but I guess public companies don't care about the long run anyway.
I'm by no means entrepreneurial, but if I were I'd start a company called "Greybeards, Inc." or similar and go head to head with the offshore body shops, selling quality rather than quantity. It seems like a great business model - hire seasoned engineers/developers who have made all their mistakes, and sell fewer (or more higher-value) consulting hours and much lower chance of having to re-write everything 5 times before it works. If it were run like a partnership without execs getting paid millions, it could definitely work even with the labor cost difference. I've worked in systems integration for a long time, so I've seen tons of body shop monstrosities that go millions over budget and have to be scrapped and redone over and over because the offshore company doesn't understand the business or take the time to learn about it.
Cisco has screwed up their Ethernet switch business. Arista has shown that by concentrating on switching and good software that you can use merchant silicon to make a great adorable switch and you don't need to over-charge people $500 for SFPs. And with the newest merchant silicon, table sizes are getting big enough that switches can handle most router jobs as well.
Meanwhile Cisco is all over the place. They make routers, switches, videoconferencing systems, video compression systems, servers, etc. And they do crazy proprietary stuff like ACI instead of just doing OpenFlow or BGP controlled SDN. UCS instead of OpenStack. Etc.
Cisco really needs to decide what business it is in and stick to it.
I've seen trailer parks full of whites far worse than almost any black ghetto I've come across and I'm from NYC and have been to LA, New Orleans and others.
You're clearly complaining about a type of people and supposing that given your personal experience that it is entirely related to skin color or possibly even religion.
I live in an upper class neighborhood on the opposite side of a river from a predominantly immigrant neighborhood. The closer you get to my neighborhood, the higher the social class of the people populating the area.
That said, some of my closest friends who are immigrants or children of immigrants from around the worst places on earth grew up on that side of the river. They are the cream of the crop.
On the other hand, the majority of problems police deal with regularly is in their old neighborhoods. Police cars camp in the area and also near the border to consolidate the problems. That neighbor has all races and religions and from domestic violence to drugs and more the police frequent that area.
The issue is that all different types of people have their own assholes. I'm guessing you are like myself a Caucasian male. Based on the behavior you displayed on your posting, I would probably consider you to be a narrow minded idiot who is consuming air which we all must breath while providing nothing positive in return to humanity. I would suspect that your only valuable contribution to earth will be a rotten corpse acting as fertilizer for weeds at some point in the future.
I think that you believe that skin color or ancestry of a skin color dictates a person's likelihood to be a criminal. I however believe that as you have proven, skin color has little to do with such things as I certainly believe your attitude and behavior makes you a plague on humanity.
Please be well, eat heartily, live life to its fullest and do what you can to leave us early.
This is the real tech world folks.
Not quite. For every announced layoff by a tech company, many other tech companies are quietly hiring. Unemployment in Silicon Valley is very low these days.
It is an ageist world which has no loyalty to workers at all, and falsely believes that people can't be retrained.
Loyalty went out the door a long time ago. When I get a new job, I start thinking about my next job and what training I will need to acquire on my own. As a tech professional, you need to actively manage your career.
I would suspect that this is simply a culling to restructure. If you understand Cisco as a company, they are undergoing a huge paradigm shift at this time and they simply don't need those positions filled anymore and are still in the process of defining their new positions. Retraining is premature at this time since they still don't even know for sure what they will need down the road.
There is a strong possibility that instead of H1-B, they will simply shift operations to other countries for development and support. It's not even an issue of cost as much as the lack of need for local workers.
They can hack together some code to get something very specific done, but probably shouldn't be touching large scale production quality code.
Correct. That job is for the junior developers in India.
Just buy one, building one is a fool's errand.
Try smaller businesses.
My experiences have been the opposite, at companies of less than a hundred people there was even more drama and political BS than what I've dealt with at larger businesses.
And where do those 'cloud' servers get their networking gear to be connected 24/7 and readily accessible to their clients?
Actually that is only true for corporations, true small businesses generally do have loyalty to their employees, its hard not to when the owner knows the employees and their families.
I've spent the majority of my career working with small business. Sometimes the small business owners are loyal, sometimes not so much. I've seen extremes of both and everything in between. In many cases they have little choice but to be loyal because in a small company it can be hard to replace someone even if they are flawed somehow. I've also seen owners who would fire someone if they so much as looked at them cross-eyed.
There are companies out there with accounting departments being run by Janice in accounting manually sorting Excel lists and manually removing duplicates. Manually doing table lookups.
To expand on that, I know someone who works in HR for a certain company. They were asked to cover payroll duties, and discovered that the usual person handled it predominantly by hand in Excel. They combined their knowledge of the HR system with a few coding skills picked up from the IT department and now a large chunk of what used to take a week to do manually is done in about five minutes by a script.
We may not need a whole load more software engineers with advanced coding skills, but having a whole load more people in other fields with basic coding skills can achieve quite a lot.
There is a limit of what you can do. I have always worked on almost any assignment I was given even if I did not have a clue what was the subject. I learned that I can learn fast - this is a skill in itself. I also learned that there are limits to what you can do too.
And then there are situations where so called normal stuff needs to be done in a 9-16 5x7 sort of work. If managers are efficient at doing it you may find out that you are just kept running in a treadmill just below level where you would give up. They do that for a year or two and if you happen to have kids etc you will see that you have no time to learn new stuff.
This is not to say it is impossible, but you must be aware that this may be.
I've met very few programmers who can write production quality code. It's all like a bird's nest.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The large companies like Amazon will develop their own networking gear eventually.
yeah - we acquired a new product last year - I was told I couldn't do it because I had no background in the space.
3 months later I was the company expert in the product - no one understands how. "Because I get technology and work hard" - something they don't understand.
I would have to agree.
It really doesn't matter how hard the US tries to educate its up and coming workers, or existing workers.
The decision will continue to be made by management to off shore those jobs.
People today who want a long term career today need to look at things that can't be off shored like health care, the building trades, etc;
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I know EE's who can design elaborate circuits in their sleep but could not assemble a simple JK flip-flop circuit from discrete components. Their brains are so higher function they struggle with simple ideas. It's kinda like asking a professional weightlifter to compete in a 440K. Both require athletic ability but one doesn't necessarily qualify you for the other.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
"My experiences have been the opposite, at companies of less than a hundred people there was even more drama and political BS than what I've dealt with at larger businesses."
Correct. Medium sized companies don't have as much of this. Small companies are usually dominated by an egomaniac owner and the owner's family. The more you're insulated from the "brilliant entrepreneur, who built this business form nothing, and who you should be grateful to work for," the better the work situation. In small companies, you're almost always treated like the help.
OTOH, having a competent older doc around is often a life saver. Experience counts in this field.
Sometimes true, sometimes not so much. Experience only helps if it is a good practice and relevant. I've seen first hand older doctors who haven't done a good job keeping up with the state of the art in their specialty. My wife's sub-specialty didn't even exist until about 20-30 years ago. Doctors over the age of 60 do not have any special certifications or training in it and there has been considerable advancement since they received their training. I can tell you from first hand observations that not all of them have done a good job keeping up with current best practices.
Same as in engineering. It's useful to have an adult in the room at times.
Sometimes the "adult" is the one who is younger in years.
Cisco often buys into and then drops out of markets. For example they used to offer a load-balancer product, the "Cisco Ace". It was decent enough, but I believe they purchased the core tech from another company. In the last several years, the older Ace has been discontinued, and there is no successor product as Cisco apparently decided to get out of balancing. I'd imagine there are whole divisions of support and development that go out in this case.
A lot of big companies are like this. They buy out smaller innovative companies, use their tech, grab some patents and then dump them. That's good for the shareholders and sometimes management in the smaller company as they can get a big payout, but not so good for the workers who can suddenly go from having a good gig at an innovative company to being big corporate and then unemployed. In other industries such as gaming, companies like EA have pretty much been legendary for the "Buy, milk sequels, dump" cycle, and certainly it's a well-known trend with Microsoft etc too.
The stuff I have taught myself at home has long surpassed anything I will ever be offered in my day job, yet no one is interested in hearing about any of this stuff.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The cloud data centers (public or private) need simple programmable switches/routers and all the smarts are done by proprietary infrastructure software that configures things on the fly.
The cloud guys develop and standardize their own hardware (contracted to network gear manufacturers) that works well with their infrastructure management software. Network gear manufacturers are relegated to makers of dumb hardware.
I work with engineers too, and they can get their programs to run fine.
Error handling?
Forget it.
Documentation?
Forget it.
Testing?
Forget it.
Robust?
Forget it.
Reusable?
Forget it.
UI compatible? Intuitive? Balanced? Scaleable?
Maintainable by someone else?
Not a fucking snowball's chance in hell - it's a bloody minefield of beginner's errors.
Attending a code course is of marginal use, and you end up with a company being dependent on uncertified, unproven code bases.
It's a bad idea to leave your company's data in the hands of amateurs, even if those amateurs are expensive, experienced engineers.
It's especially dangerous to encourage engineers to code without supervision, if their end products are of any criticality at all. Who do you want to certify the reliability of engine components on your 747?
I think people are confused as to what "production quality code" actually means...
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
When I was a new EE graduate some years ago, interviewing with a Southern California computer manufacturer (no, not that one, and no, not that one either) I was asked to construct a full adder from NAND gates on the whiteboard. After I did it, the interviewer said "pretty good, you only made one mistake" and pointed out my mistake.
Believe it or not, that was the only technical question I was ever asked during any of the interviews I went to. They offered me the job, but I ended up going to work for another company after interviewing with them later.
He (or she) really sounds like someone who got a degree in something they didn't like because they thought they could make money, but found that without the passion for the field it was always a "chore" to do anything.
My job is not always wine and roses, and it's very difficult and taxing at times, but it's also very rewarding ultimately, and I do get the respect of my coworkers and management (and it's typically mutual). We make a great product, and I'm often excited to get busy on the next project.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Please clarify instead of making a vague innuendo.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From what I have heard of cisco. It sounds like the whole thing is H1B anyway. So they are probably getting rid of what 1 or 2 americans and those were contract guys anyway?
401k != pension. 401k is yours, you invested (and maybe got matching), and it is what it is when you retire. Pensions are the pyramid schemes, not 401k.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I know someone who works for a mature large company and people have done all this kind of scripting all over the place, mostly in visual basic and excel macros. They'll get calls because script MashIncomingWithOutgoingAndPrint.vbs no longer works. The breakage of the script brings the work that the group does to a halt and the person that wrote it three years ago left. As a corporation, it is a very very bad idea to let people do coding here and there.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
If it looks stupid but it works, it's not stupid.
Look at how engineering has developed over the last 200 years. People lost arms to early automation in farm fields. Some bad code is a pittance to what used to be actually dangerous.
Who do you want to certify the reliability of engine components on your 747?
I'll let the engineers make the simulink and the Simulink can certify itself for flight.
The reason corporations fire American employees has always been replacing them with overseas or imported contract workers that they are not required to give any benefits nor wages commensurate to those of actual citizens.
I do wonder how many US workers phased-out because of healthcare costs still praise Jesus that America doesn't have nationalized health insurance.
A Trump presidency will be the best thing to happen to the American legal minority population since the Civil Rights Act was passed. They will certainly fare a lot better with him then they did with Obama.
Of course they are having reductions external customers no longer trust them to have secure products Thanks NSA.
People who build real big data centers are usually too smart to buy Cisco. For the last 10 years, people buy Cisco for the name, not for the product. Cisco does not perform as well, they cost more, and they are harder to use than products from their competitors. They also like to do things their own ways -- which makes compatibility issues a real deal when you try to work with other vendors.
Cisco's deal was to talk to the CEOs, sell them over a nice steak and not consider tech specs. For a SMB or medium sized business, that was easy to do. Large technology firms, like data centers, actually pay attention to what they are buying.
What, you mean there aren't oodles of professional athletes who can run 273 miles?
As a corporation, it is a very very bad idea to let people do coding here and there.
Actually we can just show the opposite. I was in the same position and what I did? Fixed the code, because I know how. Experts who can do little quickly become quite useless in a world where people need to be able to solve a bit of everything.
Every company somewhere has some vb script doing something, or a complicated excel spreadsheet. The answer is not to ban it because the result of that is either a large expense for a very expensive piece of software (sledge hammer to hit a construction nail into a wooden frame), a large expense for some expert to properly solve this solution once (nail gun to put a single construction nail into a wooden frame), when really the receptionist should just get her old rusty hammer out of that bottom draw and hit the damn thing.
The great thing about MashIncomingWithOutgoingAndPrint.vbs is that it's normally simple enough that anyone with rudimentary coding experience and Google can figure out what's wrong with it, but doing so requires at least the basic understanding of a variable, assignment, comparators, looping and branching.
Or you can sit and waste time doing the same scriptable task over and over and over again.
I should have been clearer in stating I know an equal number of EE's who are adept at a wide range of disciplines. I was pointing out there are those for whom transitioning to another skillset would be traumatic.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Few facts to know:
- Cisco is laying off 20% of the global workforce. Not US workforce.
- A lot of my friends are at Cisco. Their teams have around 90% people on H1Bs.. the case was similar for other teams. Any layoffs in Cisco will affect H1Bs disproportionately.
- During layoffs, the first people to go are the contractors (which Cisco and any other company has lots of).
- Typically Cisco lays off the product team that is not performing well (remember flip) or doesn't fit in their long term roadmap. The folks being laid off are given a fair chance to interview with other teams (and preferred over external candidates), just as other companies.
Let's get the facts on the actual jobs lost and demographics of the layoffs before making any blanket statements.
Regarding retraining the employees, well, that is a pipe dream. Cisco is primarily a hardware company, that is getting cannibalized by software. In the days of white box switching, SDN, NFV and IoT, the need for custom asic is much less than what it was. There are tons of startups that can put together a networking device with just off the shelf components and networking/netconf stacks from tons of other providers. If Cisco has to stay relevant, it needs to cut down dead weight. They are going through the same phase that IBM went through few years ago.
There's good money to be made maintaining and fixing technical debt.
I'm sure all the cuts will come from engineering, R&D, systems, and other back-end places that aren't as public-facing - surely sales, management, and the C-suite types will be untouched.
(This model works great until you hit the point where everything breaks and you realize you've cut all the people who know how to fix it.)
I"m tempted to game the system by creating mini-startups under a larger umbrella and building projects and just not telling them what the company truly is.
"Oh, yeah, I built the backend for a rudimentary blogging site called Ratikal Blogger, they folded 2 years ago as they couldn't get any funding. Then I worked on a MEAN stack project for a secure messaging startup called ShutTheFrontDoor, but while my part was fine, they also failed to attract the funding they needed to continue..." etc etc.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
No, he or she is spot on. Whenever there's a pleasant working environment with decent pay and few stupid rules, some MBA will come along and see it as an opportunity to ruin things for everyone.
It happens everywhere, all the time. If it hasn't happened to you yet, it will.
Work doesn't have to suck, but it's made to suck by incompetent management types. Incompetent managers make up an even larger percentage of the management class than incompetent developers do in the developer class, and that is a difficult feat to accomplish--but MBA schools manage.
What you say would work IF every group in an organization mandates to hire people that can code. But then they'll back themselves into a corner finding a coder for every department in the organization. There are never going to be enough that can do it where you are just going to 'find' people. You would think they would have a team of gifted coders somewhere in the organization that can help but there isn't. The corporation as a whole doesn't want to pay for people with skills to code this stuff.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Remote areas of the country are often unwilling to pay the amounts that a new doctor needs to be able to pay off the high US education bill the doctor incurred. Isn't this just another case of want to bring in someone whose foreign-acquired education came at substantially lower cost so that you can pay them below the going US market rate?
I actually have business partners that built a company around my work. We're progressing quite well but we are still a work in progress. I'm not sure at what point a company name means something to these recruiters but we're not there yet.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I wonder what percent of the people to be laid off are Americans. And I wonder what percent of the new hires to replace them with "different skill sets" will not be Americans.
I have learned what is important is that you think your code is great, but that the poor bastard who inherits it does. Programming is about solving a problem and communicating the solution clearly.
Cisco spies are redundant now.
They will be able to meet their replacements when they apply for their licenses to sell.
LET'S GET IT ON!
Cisco is a big big global company. I've worked there and I'd bet it's mostly folks outside of the USA getting the hatchet. That and Cisco routinely fires their lowest performing staff.
Getting fired from Cisco can be a big win too, because having Cisco on your resume sells. That place is where dreams go to die anyhow.
This is standard operation for large multinationals as they move to 100% ODM for commoditized hardware. "Connecting the dots" is no longer an activity that requires engineering skill - any idiot can open up a datasheet and hook up pins on a processor. The money and skill are in software, and so naturally that is where they are going to focus their R&D budgets.
Hardware "engineers" should take note of this and start looking for other careers. I hear McDonalds is hiring.
There is an important statement in economics, the Mackenroth Theorem (which is suspiciously absent from public discussions in the anglophone world):
Now, the clear statement is true, that all social expenses must always be covered by the national income of the current period. There is no other source and there has never been another source for the social costs, there is no accumulation from period to period, there are no "savings" in the private sense, there is simply nothing else than the current national income as a source of the social costs ... Capital accumulation process and PAYG are therefore not that different in reality. Economically, there is only PAYG.
Gerhard Mackenrot: The reform of the social policy by a german social plan. Berlin 1952
The interest you get from your savings is generated by other people. The return on your investment is generated by other poeple. The dividend you get from your 401k is generated by other people. The payouts you get from Social Security stems from taxes of other people. Whenever you get something without working for it, someone else was working for it.
In Dec 1987 my boss called me in to his office. Starts out with, "your the highest paid technical employee I have." then goes on to say "Have you ever thought about going independent?"
;)
;) and does not acknowledge the time hanging out chatting about their weekends and getting paid. When your self employed and not doing billable work, your not getting paid!
;) Is infinitely better than a great day at work!
I said "Yes! In fact! Tell you what, I'm done!" I think he was going to propose a pay cut. But I will never know
In Feb 1988, I started my Computer Consulting and Programming business. Been good and bad times since then. Doing contract programming work is not for the part timer, 40 hour a week crowd that counts their sick and vacation days
Being self employed is a crazy up and down world of private victories and good/bad times. In fact most of my friends, have done better than me by staying in the corporate world. But even today I look back and would still make that spur of the moment decision.
Remember! A bad day fishing
So! Don't like current reality! What are YOU going to do about it!
Software still needs hardware to run on, right?
In other news, layoffs of this size baffle me. This, and the 12,000 from Intel a few months ago are almost too large to comprehend. And why so sudden? Have you ever woken up one day and decided that you didn't need 20% of your stuff? Is Cisco really so sure right this second that they need to change what they're doing so much that the only way to accomplish this change is to hack away a solid fifth of the company? And are they getting rid of 20% of their executive team as well? How many of these people will be looking for work in the near future? Out of those 60-odd people, I expect to see 12 of them out of a job. Right?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Not here.
CEO is a leader, not a Boss. There is one bad egg, but that ones been moved to the far end of the second warehouse so there's very little contact with said individual.
I hope others can find the same luck as I.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
what I did? Fixed the code, because I know how.
you *think* you know how. The problem is when your fix actually creates a more subtle bug that no one sees for a months. This is why you should have someone who's job is to maintain the ecosystem as a whole and continue to monitor it.
So far I got the 855,856,810, and 753's running good. In fact, the ASN's take just seconds to process now with a simple cut and paste of PO numbers ...
Was a bit of a learning curve but end of day it's just data.
EDIT:
Karma to burn, 15 mod points and I still have to wait 5 minutes to post a second post in a thread???
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
If you say so. I've been at my current job for over 21 years, so.... still waiting.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Investing == working for it. That's where your analysis goes wrong... nobody is "paying" for the increase in value of the stocks that I hold in my 401k, it's not a zero sum game.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The CRN article says,
[Editor's note: Cisco Wednesday disclosed plans to lay off up to 5,500 employees in a restructuring plan that it will implement this quarter. A Cisco spokesman said, "Today we disclosed the correct number and you’re off by 8,500 roles." He refused to answer the question of whether additional cuts are planned for the foreseeable future.]
Also a Wall Street Journal article says the number is 5,500.
Not everyone had a beard, let alone a grey one.
I'd apply!
There's an open source platform, BOTS, that you may want to look into before you get too far. http://bots.sourceforge.net/en... It has a bit of a learning curve, but we use it to send and receive tens of thousands of 214s a day. We also send and receive 204, 210, 990, 997, 850, 855 as well as invoking carrier-specific webservices. We also use BOTS for just FTPing files from here to there, because its self-monitoring with auto-retry. It's pretty much the only functional OSS EDI solution but its way better than rolling your own. The only real downside to it is its main processing engine is a singleton, but that wouldn't be an issue unless you were processing tremendous amounts of EDI. In any case, it's better than rolling your own solution.
What you say would work IF every group in an organization mandates to hire people that can code.
OR ... just hypothetically ... this may or may not have anything to do with this conversation (hint: very top post) ... everyone learns to code in school.
Guess who’s going to request 14,000 H-1Bs for next year.
Or, maybe they’ll just go in-country and build a development center in Bangalore.
We got an internet badass over here!
Thank you, I will look into it if I get mired.
I'm 6 months into the home grown and can handle the current workload. Course, they just signed someone new so I have 19 more trading partners to code for.
Don't be surprised if I message you for more info :)
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Lol, you think the programming learned in public school is going to be enough to open up a vbs script and start working on it? There is going to be a huge gap there, schools probably won't even mention virtual basic or anything that can be used to automate things in an office.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
meant visual basic
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I work on side projects in almost all my spare time because I don't have a programming job and I like programming. No job I have ever applied for has ever been interested in experience I gained on the side, they only want to know what I have done in a corporate setting.
I have asked nearly every candidate I have interviewed this question. And in my last two jobs, personal non-work experience with technology the companies were using featured prominently.
Recruiters don't know how to screen for this, and sometimes hiring managers are just looking for an experienced person to solve an immediate need, but good leads and managers are absolutely looking for passion and personal interests. I try to always have one inexperienced, smart, and passionate individual on my team. They learn a heck of a lot faster than people who "always wanted to try ___, but the company never used it..."
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Obama can't even talk about being black without white people shitting themselves. It was hard for him to address any "legal minority" issues.
It's hard to say what Trump will do, because his campaign is all bravado and no content. His supporters are racist, so I assume he would have similar problems too Obama.
Lol, you think the programming learned in public school is going to be enough to open up a vbs script and start working on it?
err yes. We learnt the basis in grade 9 with logo, and visual basic in grade 10. visual basic is the most accessible, and relevant training where all schools already have all required tools installed.
So yes. I would expect students to learn this over anything else like javascript or C.