Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

...poster has a point about IPv6...
...who doesnt understand how routing works...

Routing at least in the small isn't a problem. Either autoconfiguration or manually configuring an IP address and netmask along with a gateway will get an end node on the network. Routing in the large requires telcos to cooperate on address allocation and a routing architecture that didn't strive to become tables of /128s and telcos culturally are incapable of cooperation even when it benefits themselves more.

Some real problems: Hurricane Electric and Cogent Communications not peering. Comcast Business having three IPv6 capable routers including one from Cisco, none of which actually work. The need for a Comcast Business provided customer edge router because the provider edge can't be made to handle static routing (IPv4 or IPv6) correctly. Comcast Business not knowing the difference between "static" and "dynamic." Android not supporting DHCPv6. Cable modem standards requiring hardcoded /58 and /59 allocations when web based configuration was available in most every device. Allocations of /128 addresses or /64 subnets when even home routers would benefit from multiple subnets for things like guest VLANs. Leaking device identifiers and the failed attempts to work around this. I haven't even touched on "not invented here" errors changing IPv4 features for the worse for no actual benefit. It's all nearly 38 years of worldwide unforced errors.

The problem of IP being replaced in a way Cisco won't be a leader isn't an issue in the short or medium term. The fact that they haven't been eaten alive from below as minis ate mainframes and micros ate minis is more interesting, but somehow the low end player's quality and functionality remain far worse than Cisco's. Either way, Cisco can't shoot to take over the world and is instead playing for "milking their current customers for all they can get" and they seem to do that well.

Every business decision that fails or succeeds is a management decision...

Business decisions aren't like making Cisco's business critical applications like "flashlight" for the Cius where the competent can know with 100% certainty that the application will work before they start. Senior management at all companies have to make wild-a55 guesses and if Cisco's competitors were much better at this they wouldn't still be collectively dwarfed by Cisco.

If you ever worked in an environment that demands fixed price and fixed time you learn how to figure out what you're going to do and how you're going to do it and you have to be confident the problem is doable within the time and money available or you pass. Cisco's engineering staff has no experience with any of this and I can point to technical decisions at relatively low levels that have cost the company tens of millions each and delayed critical projects by years each.

"Oh, management let them be fools!" Yes, management who were those very fools only a few years before when they were bad minions.

"Oh, just hire better people!" Like the best of the best want to maintain 40 year old COBOL in a more than 50 year old language.

On the cloud, there was a big move to white box compute and networking to reduce costs, things Cisco doesn't know how to do. What critical piece would Cisco have brought to the table to starve off competitors when cloud took off? Read only SNMP for management? Boxes which could never be rebooted because a single reboot breaks five nines over the course of an entire year? The need to roll a truck when software on a single component in a box fails?

The other also-ran legacy players who made a serious effort are bit players with 5% of the cloud market combined and they had compute and data experience Cisco did not. Cisco never had the technology nor the culture to take on this market and given the players that won Cisco had no way to acquire their way into this market. It's far more complex than asserting "they should have just made the right decision."

poster has a point about IPv6, anytime I hear a company asking to move to it, I think they have a bunch of id--ts who doesnt understand how routing works, cause unless you are a SP, why in the F do you need that level of complexity since most companies now use SDWAN which uses its own address space. But hey ill sell you new equipment for IPv6 that you dont need if you want to waste your money.

@2rea+1lebGjjp Typical ELT nonsense. There are no "minions only" projects. Those projects don't get any budget.

The cloud debacle at Cisco was a CxO decision. Hence, the management should pay for the consequences. Every business decision that fails or succeeds is a management decision - minions are not allowed to make them. So, if those fail and the company has to pay the price, then it's only justified that the management pay for the consequences with their hefty bonuses and RSUs before the minions. You can churn rubbish as much as you want with gibberish nonsense, but that won't give you credibility. Ridiculous decision making at leadership level has brought Cisco to a point where they have to serially keep firing people even though their quarterly results are blow-outs. It's the CxO that should have sleepless nights thinking about their job security, not the minions and engineers.

I'm always entertained by someone that blames the "minions" for the business failures of incompetent leadership.

What's your role on the ELT?

None. I declined offers to manage at Cisco. Most of Cisco's software staff aren't even as competent as maintainers of ancient COBOL. No matter how good the ELT and the lower levels of management are these are not the minions that are going to solve the next great challenge in a timely manner. Likewise, good minions will never achieve with this ELT and lower levels of management which is why good people who know better leave before they rot, and most of what's left have no reference to know how bad they've become.

If Cisco's ELT was uniquely incompetent Juniper, Arista and a bunch of other competitors wouldn't be collectively dwarfed by Cisco. IPv6 is a dumpster fire nearly three decades out so it will be a while before something completely displaces IPv4 and Cisco will milk profit from that legacy market better than anyone else for a long time to come, just like HP, IBM and Oracle do in other markets. There is no such thing as infinite growth, which means successful management is also about managing almost inevitable declines.

This is those only company I’ve ever work at where there are directors with less than 5 reports. The directors do nothing except push meetings where they do not contribute any real value. None were impacted by recent layoffs. They need to be the ones held accountable and think of how much more money the company would save getting rid of these bottom feeders.

@2rea+1lebGjjp

I'm always entertained by someone that blames the "minions" for the business failures of incompetent leadership.

What's your role on the ELT?

These guys do not add anything to the revenue generation process.

They define the revenue generating process. Look at some of the minions-only projects out there like btrfs where after an eternity basic functions like RAID5 don’t work reliably. Most “engineers” only like blinky lights and left to their own they’d only dabble in what they consider “cool” and never actually make anything work. Google pushed off the near zero P/E of making Android phones to others and made their fortunes on the massive amount of data they collect at everyone else’s expense. That wasn’t a minion level decision.

People complain about Cisco failing to rule the cloud. Amazon and Google had extensive systems level experience with worldwide data center buildout and scalable software for their core applications and Microsoft owned some of the most valuable software properties on which most business runs. Cisco had people who couldn’t correctly fix bugs on what was to the cloud “white boxes.”

Whatever the “next big thing” is it’s going to involve software and Cisco’s minions who haven’t mastered structured programming from the 1960s aren’t going to lead you there. Churn everyone at every level all you want. Four decades of legacy means you’ll never attract top development talent because maintenance is career su----e and no ELT is likely to find a way around that.

In Silicon Valley, as in Washington DC, the serfs are not allowed to have opinions and are just expected to take their punishment as a sign of their unending fealty to the self-appointed elite.

Don't you know how wonderful they are?