This time is different. Cisco has forever damaged their credibility in the eyes of current and future employees with their LR cadence. I have spoken to individual contributors, first line managers, senior managers, business development, partner account managers, developers and directors.
A job is a contract between an employee and the corporation. The employee is a private citizen, the corporation is simply a business entity whose primary motivation is shareholder profits. This is not a bad thing, it's capitalism. Cisco is not your friend, your family, your nanny, your tribe or your mom. Cisco is a declining corporation that has been steered in recent years to primarily financially benefit the Executive Leadership Team (ELT) and shareholders. LRs are simple financial engineering that artificially inflates the price per share of CSCO stock. ELT can then sell shares at these lofty values. The current Cisco ELT most closely resemble private equity in the sense that they have drained capital from Cisco at the expense of partners, customers and employees.
Prior to this era, Cisco was a good place to work.
The contract between an employee and the corporation is an exchange of value.
Cisco provides sompensation in the form of Pay & Benefits.
(Benefits in the form of time off, medical insurance, dental insurance, retirement benefits (401k matching) and others). The employee provides time and work as well as intellectual capital contributions in the form of innovations, patents, etc, although this is fairly limited. What is not discussed enough in this contract is Certainty.
That is, a sense of certainty that the employee will be employed in the future, as long as they do the job in the manner prescribed by management.
The last few LRs removed this from the contract.
Cisco employees, in exchange for their labor, get Pay, Benefits and now:
- Layoff fears every 6 months.
Anxiety, worry and fear that they will not have a job in half a year that persists, year in and year out.
- Unlimited PTO
which is in many ways a scam tied to #1. PTO no longer accrues which is effectively a pay cut. Worse than that, however, is that the constant fear of the next LR will make taking ANY time off to be a considerable risk for employees. This will adversely affect health, families, stress levels on a personal level. On a professional level, Unlimited PTO has proven to negatively affect team dynamics, management relationships and overall job satisfaction
Two of the biggest benefits that working for Cisco used to provide (Job security and benefits) are now almost entirely gone. What is left is chaos, fear and uncertainty.
What about Cisco Partners? well, Splunk likes to sell direct so you're sc--wed too.