Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

I was with Cisco for 20+ years and find the last 10+ years of “cost reducing the workforce” with young graduates as the pivot point for it.

Cisco was gone completely bonkers with Woke ideology, promoting unqualified people and putting them in leadership positions...

I was a customer in the first half of the 1990s and every major release of software had to be rolled back almost immediately after being fielded, and that's after a lot of lab testing. Well before woke. Well before DEI. Well before we had international links fast enough to make international development as fluid as local development. I also know the quality metrics of code before the downfall in 2001 after 27% were laid off and all the abuse between people and teams that resulted from all the successive layoffs started. This idea that things suddenly got bad recently, particularly from diversity, is a farce.

Even though Cisco declared to follow diversity principles, in reality 95% of workers are from India.

When I worked there that was the distribution for the hundreds of people under my SJ director. Guess who trained them? On the whole I never found any culture to be significantly better or worse than any other. The sad reality is people work to the metrics and the dashboards reward all kinds of stupid so everyone around the world works to produce that kind of stupid. Those that know something about management would know this as Goodhart's law.

Take out hundreds of white veteran sales people who know their customers and business… and replace them with DEI college graduates with degrees in basket weaving. Put them into “Cisco sales boot camp” then turn them out to their new customers. Chuck is able to save 50% in salary costs, and 100% in commissions - these kids can’t sell. But boy does it look good on the SEC filings to see bottom line reductions.

Been here for decades. Always get great performance reviews. I was asked a few years ago to provide input on 4 new hires. My reviews were: 1 rock star, 1 needs work, 2 let them go and get new blood. The 2 could not do basic tasks, even after a year of training. I was told that they could not be let go. Any of you care to venture a guess why? High tech was great for many decades, now it's virtually getting destroyed.

The cloud ki-led Cisco.

Listening to Chuck try to present anything technical is painful

and the ELT? This guy Jeetu that they brought it - single handedly destroyed Security and Collab, absolutely no substance - spends his time on linkedin posting to boost his fragile ego. how will Cisco ever recover. Yes it's not guys like Jeetu who are at fault. It's Chuck who brought such people in and let them thrive. RIP Cisco!

The demise of the borg has been a longtime coming. I was with Cisco for 20+ years and find the last 10+ years of “cost reducing the workforce” with young graduates as the pivot point for it. Young, inexperienced, comfort focused, and conflict averse to the core. That’s not the Cisco I grew up with.
It was a skilled, smart, humble, hardworking brethren on a global scale. Worthy of the title of 800lb gorilla.
Now it’s more like an 800lb diaper.

Veteran at Cisco for more than 20 years. Over the years it has become a political mess. This is what happens when you bring or promote non technical people to lead the teams. They bring in more processes and policies for technical people to deal with rather than doing their work.
It's a great company to work with. But with very wrong leaders and fixing this will take years.
Gone are the days when leaders cared about their team and assisted them to grow. Now a days most of the leaders on an introduction calls introduce them as non technical leaders leading the technical team. Worst decision.
Cisco ELT needs to realize its a Technology Company..

Never worked in your industry. How ever, I invest (personally). A group of us yesterday agreed to sell off our long positions. Not sure why this came to me today. But there you go. Even stock holders are leaving. Hit the lights on the way out. Been a good run, but bye bye

They have the absolute worst leader. He has ZERO vision and cares about nothing other than Woke issues. Ask anyone who has worked there. 98% of National Sales meetings has nothing to do with actual business. He just talks about DEI.

Chuck and his ELT made a lot of money while doing absolutely nothing to ensure the long-term viability of Cisco.

It would be appropriate for investors to demand the Board claw back compensation provided to them over the last several years.

No way Gary can fix it. It’s an embedded and culturally sycophantic company from root to branch.

@1otm+1tLFExpy With decades of combat time, bro you make them pay you to leave. It’s very lucrative. After 18 years I got almost a year salary. Keep playing the long game.

If you’ve worked there for decades, and you’re doing the same thing? How do you know it’s still a great place to work? You haven’t been anywhere else! I can promise you, you’re making significantly less than if you had jumped to other companies and made strategic career moves outside of Cisco.

Everyone needs calm down, Gary is going to fix it. (Yeah right)

@1otm+1tLFExpy, no flame war. Respect your comment. You can feel whatever the way you want. However, it does appear that you have had too much Kool-Aid. I am also a veteran with more than 25 years under my belt. It is true that the Cisco you described once existed but that was long long time ago. Are you sure you are talking about Cisco not Sysco?

Ok so I've been at Cisco a couple decades, and still here for now, so can honestly say some of the comments are spot on, some are WAY off base and just untrue. I won't point out which are which because it'll just start a flame war. If you (really) know Cisco, then you know which are which. So like someone else said, this is a bi**h session so don't take it too seriously.

Despite our issues, it's (still) a great company to work for. I've had other external opportunities, although tempting, I simply did not have enough good reasons to voluntarily leave Cisco. Of course some of you might say "if you're there 20 years, you probably can't do anything else." Whatever, shut up, it's been solid and successful and I'm not doing the same thing I was 20 years ago. Others will say "you need good reasons, go read the comments." Again, some of the comments are untrue and despite the ones that are spot on, still not good enough reason to walk away, at least not yet.

We did lose a lot of great people in the last LR, some are now happily working at competitors and we know that, and it su-ks. But there are still a LOT of super talented people here who show up every day and keep kicking butt and delivering excellent solutions to customers of all sizes, across all verticals, in almost every country of the world.

Too big to fail? Nope. Multiple internal issues that need to be addressed ASAP? Yup. And I'm not drunk on the Kool-Aid, in fact I'm rather jaded after 20 years, yet I still believe (despite the onerous corporate bureaucracy of a 60 billion dollar company with over 80k employees but very middle-management heavy) Cisco has a solid long-term strategy to remain a top tech company for years to come.

Great post. Also Cisco Veteran, LR'd at 17 year mark. I know licensing better than most (helped develop many of the processes), and have made a career after Cisco, helping customers migrate away from Cisco. Most of my work is referral from prior customers.

Basically we go in and pull the contract details and compare that information to what is actually in the network. There has not been a network that we can immediately pretty much slash the licensing and coverage costs by at least 60%. Many networks see a 85% plus cost decrease, if we are doing a migration. A big part of the savings is to get rid of the cr@p like DNA and anything else above NBD. So many customers burnt by C4P, C2P train wrecks; clueless engineers and missed deliveries. Many engineers have not been able to actively communicate on critical outages.

So we strip off the extra fluff coverage and licensing, and set stuff up just enough to keep the bare minimum going while we migrate. In the background we then bring in the other OEM vendors (two main players, will not name them, but you can pretty much predict them), and work out the financials for migration. Usually the first item to go is the ASA or Firepower side. We do the initial legwork at helping the other vendor with simple stuff like IOS and base configs. Then the migration begins. Have done a good few dozen since I was LR'd; which is a shame because I would most likely still be at Cisco if they wanted me to stay. The account teams and account "management" nowadays are nice people, but candidly mostly don't know sh!t about anything beyond fluffy PowerPoints. A few of us ex-Cisco old-school folks have turned the above into good second careers. Really sad to see, because I used to LOVE working there long ago, and the upper echelons DESTROYED it all. Get out while you can, we are picking the last morsels off the Cisco carcass; as the numbers continue to show.

So many great posts and articles pointing to the slow demise of this once great company.

If only the ELT reads these posts and tries to turn this hulking tanker around but alas they're too busy lining their pockets and feathering their own agendas the decline will continue..

I was a 20-year Cisco veteran and high performer. I was let go 2 years ago. Luckily, I was able to find a new role paying almost double what I used to make at GR12. There is life after Cisco, don't be scared to jump ship. Hasta la vista babe.

Wow! Thanks for this post! I did not realize it was that bad; I feel even better about my decision to leave!

Glad to see the article AND the comments. SO many of the best and most talented people were part of the 2024 layoffs. It was a real head scratcher!! I’d hire any or all of them if I could.
This company needs a hard reversal and they appear to not have the right people driving the ship anymore. Sad, but the people in charge now will burn it to the ground just like the bad policies are burning California into the ground.
It will be a long and slow train wreck of a disaster, and will surely test the whole “too big to fail” chip on their shoulder.

Overlay: https://revenue-playbook.com/documentation/roles/overlay-specialists/

What is an overlay?

Even though Cisco declared to follow diversity principles, in reality 95% of workers are from India. Most of my teammates are lazy, incompetent and careless. Management is also Indians, covering their people, so one cannot do much to change status quo. This is one of the reasons Cisco is a sinking ship.

The 5000 VP comment made me chuckle. I've been complaining about that for 15 years. The VP's have little CV to back them up, and they don't even try to impress the little people (you know, the engineers with actual intelligence). They spend their days in meetings talking about spreadsheets, and how they can get more metrics into their spreadsheets. I'm most likely leaving so I have freedom to pursue my actually good AI ideas without giving Cisco ownership, because they don't have true incubation. If you want to incubate, you do it on your own time (it will destroy your personal metrics otherwise, which is the only thing most managers care about now thanks to one of our 10 SVPs and Maria. Tho I previously had an awesome manager who ran interference for my work on innovation.).

Also, this forum and site is just a bi--h fest mostly, so don't take it too seriously. Lol

Unfortunately, this is what happens when you promote a sales guy into the CEO role when the company is desperate to find a new technology growth space.

The organic cupboard has been bare for decades and all of the acquisition spending has amounted to zilch.

I can still hear Chambers saying that companies that can't compete will be gone. It turns out that was really prophetic.

The layoffs have intentionally targeted experienced personnel. The few of them that get replaced, get replaced with young inexperienced people who have been indoctrinated by the CSAP program to believe that Cisco products are great and that low salary is to be expected.

I cannot fathom why anyone would buy Cisco products at this point. This is a golden opportunity to replace their proprietary junk with open protocols.

Cisco was gone completely bonkers with Woke ideology, promoting unqualified people and putting them in leadership positions...even technical leadership positions for the sake of DEI while treating the more qualified older/experienced white males as second class citizens. This is what caused such a deterioration in TAC, Technical Sales and CX delivery. The recently departed Maria Martinez created a huge bureaucracy of multiple positions doing the same job.

All of this is tragic and true. We've lost the partners' mindshare -- and Cisco can't survive the implications of that. If anything, CSCO is a manufacturer completely reliant on a partner centered eco-system...that's what they built. Everything else has been an expensive thin veneer of marketing, and poor marketing at that.

Most Cisco partners switched from WebEx to Zoom and 12 Cisco overlay folks join on Zoom just so they can get commission check for logging in on mute

Chuck was always partner sales rep and has never sold directly to end users so he has no clue on the right way to do things which has caused the continued sad situation Cisco is in

My opex goes up significantly after every Cisco meeting
Why do I need 6 people there and the partner
The only conclusion is they are raiding customer's teas and coffees
Seriously from were I stand it feels like 1 person is capable the rest are perhaps on work experience or shadowing

Cisco's progressive and cutting edge AI Technology will solve all problems!!! ;-)
(At least that's what every of our estimated 5000 SVP/VP says.... )

As a customer of Cisco I concur with nearly all of the above. Cisco have gone from a position of trusted advisor to that of also ran. The one area where I do see a difference is in some personnel. The sales engineering team and product specialists we had were good, they have experience, knowledge and applied that knowledge to a customer requirement. After that, the wheels fell off, they were let down is in the sales back office and Cisco grasped defeat from the jaws of victory.

I concur
The Cisco bus of overlays that provides no value and do nothing is an embarrassment
First in line for credit nowhere to be seen for responsibility