Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

The shift in the business was not a complete surprise to Cisco. As long as 8 years ago, they saw the shift coming and a small team was convened to work on it. We knew that the shift would require different skills (for example, selling solutions instead of selling boxes, stronger software skills, etc.) as well as changing business policies and processes (accounting, finance, etc.). But when they tried to take it the next level, many of the existing VPs, were threatened by it as it would upend their empires, fought it and tried to shut down the initiatives through stalling, interfering, and ignoring the recommendations.

Instead of taking steps to retrain and build new skillsets in its workforce, these VPs stalled, blocked and played political football to retain their power and positions. Three years ago, reality hit and the market shifted in a big way as predicted. By then, it was just a big scramble.

True but who cares. When Cisco collapses, the director will be VP somewhere else. Ravi Chandra will become the CEO of Juniper, and Johnny and Chuck will be retired already.

Intel is imploding. Qualcomm on knees. IBM has quarterly massive cuts. VMWare cut in half. Oracle ditching all HW. SAP/Oracle losing customers. Broadcom sliding sales (permanent), Microsoft struggles but still milks the Office, that's about to end. Do you want me to continue?

No amount of layoffs will cure the sickness that Cisco has. The layoffs are just an open season for managers to thin the ranks so they can then refill them with "their people".

Cisco is a racial cesspool.

Cisco is literally a prison, just filled with tech people instead of felons. Morale s---s, in order to survive you have to stick with "your race". There is a constant power struggle that leaves innocent victims in it's wake. The best you can hope for is to just blend in, lay low and try and mix into the general population. If you speak out, "snitches get stitches", or in Cisco case, you just get LR'd / Re-Org'd / Fired / RiF'd, un-happy ending'd

I used to love to tell people I worked at Cisco, now.. with it's current industry rep and general poor reputation, I'm happier when it never comes up.

Troll

Chuck Fiorina

Look at what the real cloud guys are doing todag. Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc... networking gear isn't even part of their business yet they 1upd Cisco by making internet scale architectures because they had to. And this to them was like an internal mini project...#WeAreCisco

Nobody cares.

at nearly every level cronyism predominates in selection for management roles and whoever gets in makes sure only his or her cronies get to rule at the next lower level. non B-kissers are kept around to work if they keep quiet (someone needs to do the real work), or managed out if they start speaking out too much.

Cisco destruct because of bad code load and bad coding for to make router leak packets to India.

some practices sure need overhaul if csco is to survive as a viable concern even for 10 yrs.

• in dev teams only G11 TLs should be eligible to be considered for manager roles after 360' voting from the team and not just because he is favoured by the director or other track2 common grounds like some school/college/linguistic/country/sports history.

• wet behind the years non-technical people managers are the bane of developers existence

• get rid of such deadwood managers enmasse - the schemers, connivers, the shadow players, the street level enforcers who have no standing technically and just function as proxy messaging agents for bigger players in the pond ...

• nothing hits morale like bad managers going after unrealistic things based on his shallow assessment and beating engineers for it.

over 15 years i have seen a lot of very inappropriate very underserving people rise to 1st and 2nd level managers and do a lot of damage, operating well beyond their competency level. in some cases they have even made it to dir or above. if things need to be tightened , this sure is one low hanging fruit area to me.

Nortel, Sun, Compaq etc. ... Cisco - so who is the up and coming company we should be looking to?

Nortel, Sun, Compaq etc. every beginning has it's end.