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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.
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."
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?
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
14,000 new votes for Trump.
A few weeks ago this thought may have scared me. Right now, well all of CISCO could go under and it won't change Trump's chances.
Don't mess with war vets. They are sacred, and the polling results show that quite clearly.