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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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. . . .