Look, the announcement about Cisco's challenging outlook was part of their layoff strategy all along. The decision to make bigger, deeper cuts was formulated months ago, but to sell this to the investors without spooking them, they needed to soften them up first. Challenging outlook = green light for purging the ranks. Whether the outlook is challenging or not is immaterial; what they needed was a match to light the fire.
Standby...it's going to get ugly, fast.
But if companies continue to let older employees go because they are "expensive" and replace them with younger, less experienced and therefor less expensive employees, Cisco will no longer lead.
Based on my experience at Cisco, the talented older employees jumped ship a long time ago. Anyone with marketable skills departed many layoffs ago.
Somehow Cisco forgot it is also employees and their families that are invested in the company.
+1
I agree with @1aln that annual LR's is now the new norm. But if companies continue to let older employees go because they are "expensive" and replace them with younger, less experienced and therefor less expensive employees, Cisco will no longer lead.
Morale will tank (like it already has) and employees will no longer go above and beyond to innovate and make the company succeed. It will become a clock-watching do-the-bare-minimum, learn-all-I-can-before-I'm-cut-or-quit transitional staff and nothing will get done in the months following each LR as the people who got stuff done are gone and the few remaining who know how to get stuff done are busy trying to get the new red-badges up-to-speed. And if they're disgruntled, they won't teach them all the stuff they know and precious knowledge will walk out the door over time.
I know for a fact that my team had several back-end jobs/processes that only a couple of people knew about. They're gone now. When the host that runs those jobs gets replaced, if someone doesn't make sure that the cron jobs that ran the processes gets moved to the new host then suddenly all that data collection will stop. Too many times, we've forgotten about them, stuff like cron jobs were not backed up, and we had to re-create them. But now the people who knew what needed to be gone are done. If we had a hard time, I'd hate to think how difficult it will be for someone who has no experience with what the back-end job was even doing or how it did it because "it just worked" and no one thought about it for several years.
I had no incentive to document that stuff, and if I did have it documented, who's to say that the documentation can be found given all the transition from wikicentral to Web-Ex Social to ciscowiki? Hell, half my links were dead/obsolete before I was let go back in Sep and I lost a lot of useful data because the data owner didn't migrate it from one system to the next.
Sorry 1aln the point your post misses is that employees are stakeholders of the company too. after 10 years of leading by focusing on OPEX cuts the company has completely lost that part of leading. Many let go were high performers keeping up,their skills and fully capable of moving to other roles and technology focus areas. Unfortunately Cisco no longer wants to invest in people and leading from the front thru innovation. I am not buying the "It is just business" cr@p after 10 of this. Somehow Cisco forgot it is also employees and their families that are invested in the company.
Unfortunately, many have surely read in the various publications, that the outlook for many big tech companies in 2017 is not good. We can surely expect deeper cuts to Cisco workforce as can other companies.
As for the layoff strategy... I have been with cisco for 20+ years and seen many excellent colleagues get "let go" over the years. My time will also come. Layoffs are now, the new norm, one of the levers of change to influence company results. Layoff blue, hire red, layoff higher paid staff in one part of the world shift same jobs to lower paid staff in other areas of the world, cut bad business bets, invest in better ones... It's ugly, life is not fair... it's just business. Cisco is playing these games of course... I don't blame Chuck, John or anyone for this. It's the economy and the cisco ship having to shift course to a different destination... which will come with many casualties and surely some injustices along the way.
My personal strategy is to re skill towards Areas of future technology demand i.e. cloud, security etc... to make myself more marketable within cisco or outside should the opportunity arise!
My 2 cents / rant....
Listened to and watched lot of sarcasms and jokes from Chuck in the Cisco Beat today.
It was good while it lasted.
There was an interesting post on LinkedIn about companies being upset about there being no employee loyalty, but what do they expect?
I'll have to look for that article. I keep reading about how various political groups want to save Social Security by raising the retirement age. How can they when companies want to keep firing older workers and replace them with younger, cheaper staff? I don't mind working until I'm 70 because I'm a white collar worker. If I was a blue collar worker, that would be a different matter as sitting at a computer is easy no matter your age, but construction or other physically labor intensive jobs get tougher as you get older.
I can see where instead of having an increase in wages as you get older and more experienced it's going to become a bell curve where your prime earning potential is when your in your 30's to early 40's and then it's going to drop back down because all you'll be able to get is a position at Walmart as a greeter once you're 60.
Agree with most of above. Age is a factor as is labor grade 10 and above. I was over age 50 with 20+ years at Cisco and I got whacked in Sept of this year. There was an interesting post on LinkedIn about companies being upset about there being no employee loyalty, but what do they expect?
15% is the number targeting males 35 and up.
I've finally come to the realization that the ELT is clueless. Each earnings call sounds the same as the previous one. Stock in late 2006 was around $27.50/share, today it closed slightly above $30. Nice work John and John, Jr. (Chuck). Good luck on your game-plan to "RL" your way to growth.
10-12% of US workforce in 2017, grade 10amd above biggest impact.
I agree. They're keeping the new layoffs low enough to avoid attention. It helps them keep the margins up while revenue falls.