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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.
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.
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.
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"....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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."
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.
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.
Enterprise class gear from Cisco is typically very robust. We've pulled gear out that has been running
for nearly TWENTY YEARS non-stop. Does it go down ? Sure it does. Nothing's perfect. But in a
network of ~8-10k devices, the number of them that die on us is pretty low. We have far more issues
with our non-Cisco products than anything else.
As a business, you probably shouldn't be running anything other than Enterprise Class gear anyway.
Trying to cut costs by buying cheaper products will always bite you in the ass in the end.
That said, I don't agree with how Cisco does their stupid maintenance agreements. How they nickel and
dime you to death on licenses and whatnot. The hardware lifespan of their Enterprise gear, however, is
pretty solid from my experience. ( ~17 years handling this network )
Ok no H1-B's for 4 years then
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.
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.
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.
The very first post on any thread about tech industry layoffs must contain "MBA". I'm glad this thread did not disappoint.
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.
How much global CISCO market share has been lost due to fear of NSA backdoors?
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!
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.
Somebody in senior management wants to make their bonus this year.
When I got laid off from Cisco in 2013, the CEO got a 60% raise despite having a lousy fiscal year. Rumor had it among the workers that he needed a new yacht to keep up with the other CEOs.
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?
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.
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?
"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.
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.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Why can't these 14,000 people be trained to write SDN software instead of designing mainboards for hardware?
Dilbert has the answer.
It amuses the hell out of me that this came up in the same search I did for "dilbert unclean" link that is oddly applicable as well.
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)
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.
Incompetent has zero to do with that. If you have excess people you have excess people. New profit centres don't magic themselves, if they did then the correct response would be to magic and then hire more people, not wait until one of your divisions is struggling.
I almost got laid off last year simply because I was the most expensive person on the team
If you can measure it, you can mismanage it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?