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.

Comments

Good news for their stock

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Good news for their stock

[bobbied]

This is right from the MBA playbook for juicing your short term stock price.

Sometimes a reduction in force is totally necessary. I worked for a company that halved it's work force between 2000 and 2005 and just missed getting de-listed from the exchange by 2 days because the stock price was too low. In this case, the MBA's where right and let half the work force walk because the other option was everybody walking when the creditors closed us down.

Now, I don't like the "bean counter" types any more than the next technically focused guy, but they are a necessary evil. You need somebody watching the money stacks to keep your paycheck from bouncing and making sure the company has the cash to pay the electric bill and rent. So, don't bad mouth them too much. They may not know very much about what you do, but I'm confident you don't know much about what they do either.

Reminds me of an old Dilbert... Where the PHB was coming up with a project plan. "I have to start with some assumptions.... So, I'll assume anything I don't understand is easy." He presents his project plan to Dilbert and it starts "Design a database to maintain the exact location of every object in the universe: Time allotted 2 hours"....

Re:Good news for their stock

[110010001000]

The problem is that the MBAs should have prevented the company from getting to that point. Why do you have executives and managers that let a company get so bloated that you can cut by 50%? It should never get to that point in the first place, but the managers and execs like to hire people because it satisfies their ego to have that many people "report" to them.

Re:Good news for their stock

[tripleevenfall]

The very first post on any thread about tech industry layoffs must contain "MBA". I'm glad this thread did not disappoint.

Re:Good news for their stock

[110010001000]

That is because these types of layoffs are due to MBA style executive mismanagement. How do you suddenly lay off 20% of people? What kind of planning is that? How many years were these 14,000 people not needed? What are the other 70,000 people doing? Why do you need 70,000 people at a company like that?

Re:Good news for their stock

[Anonymous Coward]

And why are you so incompetent that you can't take people who already know how the company works and retrain them so that instead of shrinking the company, you create new profit centers?

Re:Good news for their stock

[ErichTheRed]

"Sometimes a reduction in force is totally necessary. I worked for a company that halved it's work force between 2000 and 2005 and just missed getting de-listed from the exchange by 2 days because the stock price was too low. In this case, the MBA's where right and let half the work force walk because the other option was everybody walking when the creditors closed us down. "

That's different. No one is going to close down Cisco. When you get big enough and are still providing an essential service, there's no way to fail so badly you shut down completely. There's just too much money sloshing around. Look at IBM -- the MBAs have been selling the company off in pieces, pinching pennies and offshoring their entire workforce for 15 years now, and the company is still alive. They've done everything in their power to kill it so the execs can walk away with the remaining money by cashing in their stock, and it's still here.

The problem I have is when the MBAs, who have absolutely no idea how the business they're running works, look at spreadsheets and say, "Oh, we don't need these people. Just send the jobs to India." without https://news.slashdot.org/stor... a good look at what those "expensive" workers are actually doing. Often, these people aren't even employees - they're management consultants who have been hired by the exec team to tell them what to do.

Why can't these 14,000 people be trained to write SDN software instead of designing mainboards for hardware? That would save Cisco the restructuring charges they'd have to take, and engender some company loyalty in the employee ranks, which counts for something. There's a lot to be said for the goodwill value that comes from your employees not feeling like you're a heartless asshat employer -- those same employees may even be willing to put in a little extra effort for you.

Re:Good news for their stock

[fahrbot-bot]

The problem I have is when the MBAs, who have absolutely no idea how the business they're running works, look at spreadsheets and say, "Oh, we don't need these people. ... without ... a good look at what those "expensive" workers are actually doing.

I almost got laid off last year simply because I was the most expensive person on the team -- even *after* my project manager even told the program manager that I had written 80% of the code. The only thing that saved me was the realization that I also charged time to another project - so was actually less expensive to the first project.

• Most expendable: The people in the spreadsheets.
• Less expendable: The people creating the spreadsheets.
• Not expendable: The people reading the spreadsheets.

And when do they start training their replacements

[clifwlkr]

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.

And in other news

[DNS-and-BIND]

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!

Re:And when do they start training their replaceme

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Ok no H1-B's for 4 years then

[Joe_Dragon]

Ok no H1-B's for 4 years then

5 kids

[fluffernutter]

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.

Re:Layoffs are sometimes necessary

[Anonymous Coward]

> Announcing mass layoffs is generally a very poor way to accomplish that. It usually results in short term reductions in profits

That's not true at all. The work that those people did will generate revenue for quarters to come but they no longer have to be paid. That's what makes layoffs so attractive to companies. The boost to the bottom line is immediate and the consequences are not.

Re:Sometimes a parting of ways is best

[clifwlkr]

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.

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. And I always hear about how older physicians can never learn and how they age out at 40.... Again, it is the crappy attitude of the industry I am talking about, and the sad state of the code. If you are really, really passionate about coding (such as I am) you can muddle your way through it, but you have to be ultra passionate. I think every professional career requires dedication, but most have a lot more longevity and actually respect people who have been at it for a bit.

Re:And when do they start training their replaceme

[ranton]

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.

Re:And when do they start training their replaceme

[fluffernutter]

Companies expect morale to be high just because they gave people a job.