Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

I wish I didn't just get laid off. :(

The inventor of the modern layoff, Jack Welch at General Electric, also invented the Vitality Curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve) to get rid of the bottom 10% every year.

One of Jack Welch's worshipers was Cisco's previous CEO John Chambers who tried this with the bottom 5%. Cisco did it by group, so if you had two groups of 20 and everyone in the first group was better than everyone in the second group both groups would give up one instead of taking 2 from the weaker group. The alternative at the scale of Cisco with 85,000 employees is letting go of many teams on low end projects and shoving people from higher end teams to jump in and take over the lower end work, and since low end projects can still be big revenue drivers through volume destabilizing them may not be the best business decision. I doubt salaries for a given title at a give site represent the difference in technical wizardry required to keep these products going across these groups even before layoffs are considered. Note that both GE and Cisco have fallen significantly from their peaks.

Even at small companies there are reasons that people just aren't a good fit and they have to be let go, and before Jack Welch it was called being "fired" which had an entirely negative connotation. Now we have "laid off" which is still perceived as negative but there is enough ambiguity that it's less of a stigma that "fired" so layoffs are here to stay regardless of the strength of the economy or company.

Growth has nothing to do with layoffs. MSFT, AWS, Google have been laying off employees. You're living in a fantasy world.

Isn’t Arista mostly Indians too though?

every time there's a layoff, there are many talented employees that being let go by the Indian managers to save their buddies (the bad engineers). So yes Cisco cannot innovate because they keep letting the good people go and the upper management just cannot learn how to fix this corrupted tribal system.

We are different that's why there are different countries, how could you use the data from a third world country where it has no light no water no internet to inflat the data making Cisco as the best place to work?

Best to work surveys are done by workers at Cisco remote offices at third world countries. Many of these Cisco employees at third world countries are also Uber drivers at night

Sad but very true, that is one of the reasons Cisco is not going anywhere, Cisco loves Corporate bootlickers

While I agree with a lot posted here, this one needs to face reality!!!

Correction: Layoffs will continue at Cisco "until there is new leadership in place that values employees and ethics over better earnings and making the ELT rich". Layoffs are part of the Exec culture as we saw earlier this year when we had one of our best quarters ever. The people that are ethical and earn their way up the ladder often get to Sr Mgr or Director, and get cut just because they have a higher salary, or speak up against something. They don't want these people in the ranks of the rich girls and boys club at the top.

You don't "make perpetual growth," you saturate markets and then have to move into new markets which your existing legacy will often make far more difficult. Look at one of many presentations showing the changes in the top companies by market value over time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z93yWXb9Tb0

By 2021 five of the top six players are tech companies and four of those five have customer counts measured in the billions (the first Google result said Amazon only has 310M customers.) Cisco has "partners" because they can't deal with a large number of contact points and generally won't warranty anything not purchased through Cisco or a partner, pushing support for all but the largest customers onto the partners. Cisco is still in the top twenty but the lift into the kind of culture it needs to be in the top ten is not something I'd bet any CEO that Cisco could get to take the job could do.

Since Cisco is built mostly from 30 years of acquisitions and every billion in annual revenue growth is now less than 2% growth, Splunk might get you 6-7% growth the first year (ignoring the cost of buying it and any negative growth in the parent) and while Splunk has shown significant revenue growth, in "rounded to one significant digit because we don't know how either will really perform" numbers that will likely be diluted by something like a factor of 10.