Being laid off is never easy for anyone, just like the many people let go by Cisco over the past few years. It happens in life, and I think the best thing to do is to move forward and focus on the next chapter. I watched interviews with laid-off IRS employees, and it made me wonder why federal contractors believe they're entitled to a job and should never be fired. Thousands of people laid off by high-tech companies haven't received such coverage. The U.S. government is deeply in debt and grossly inefficient, so why would they expect to be treated any differently than employees in the private sector? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
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So some of the comments are seeming to indicate that you have organizations that are simply not getting the job done, and the posters are glad to see shake-ups and downsizing. I understand this, but I think we've all seen that when layoffs and reorgs happen, the cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top. I've seen so many times over the years where one really capable person is carrying a department. Then when the layoffs come, all the slackers look out for each other, and the one person actually doing the work is the one to go. That's a part of how we've gotten into the situation we are in. Makes it hard to cheer layoffs and ribs that seem haphazardly conducted, knowing that the people getting the short end of the stick just might be the only ones that were keeping the lights on.
I really did not like to tone of the firing (or downsizing or whatever) on government workers...
Tone???? They fired people responsible for maintaining our nuclear stocks only to come back a few days later saying "OOPS, please come back!" then repeated the process with other critical operations. This is some of the most r3tarded management ever.
The "Check In" was a genius software sale to Cisco. Create a tool that is essentially emailing your boss the 5 things you've done in the last week. Then have the tool send that email to your boss once you entered it into the cloud. Most innovative thing since mankind split the atom and went to the moon.
But I haven't lost my empathy for people having the rug pulled out from under them when they are just trying to make a living.
Work with large crowds of people with titles like Principal Software Engineer who can't answer basic questions from the first week of any undergraduate introductory course in a CS program and keep having your project stalled while everyone is reassigned to some other project on fire so a bunch of teams have to spend 100% of their time for years fixing the mistakes made by the first team in only a matter of months. Products ship years late and customers need to spend additional years after FCS testing the highest end platforms and the code still fails almost immediately after fielding. Don't get me started on the static analysis output. Anyone just going through the motions and allowing this to continue is responsible for the result.
I got great reviews and promotions for doing work at least five grade levels below what I should have been doing to justify my pay and it was obvious to me that I wasn't only not growing new skills but the skills I walked in the door with were atrophying so I had to move on. As I've tried to teach people here, find a company that delivers on time and budget release after release after release and learn how to develop effectively. They're rare. Once you've been through that you won't be able to tolerate the failure that is Cisco, but you also have some connections to people who are looking for that same level of competency at new companies and they make for excellent members of one's professional network.
I really did not like to tone of the firing (or downsizing or whatever) on government workers by Musk and co. They made like those people are so lazy and are absolutely waste. A lot of us agreed that US government waste and national debts need to be dealt with but at least have some empathy.
Oh, btw, all government works are not needing to submit weekly status - why not "check-in" like Cisco?
@rb+1jmkensf0, thank you for taking the time to post a thoughtful response and not just snark. It actually gave me some insight, and I appreciate that, sincerely.
@nv+1jmkensf0, I don't know what it was about my post that reminded you of Karl Marx. Please do elaborate.
For the record, I'm a proud American who worked their tail off to get where they are. I have a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, a Master's in Computer Engineering, am a licensed Professional Engineer who has also worked side gigs doing home inspections and structural analysis for homeowners. I ran my own business until the economic downturn in '07 dried up a lot of the opportunities. Currently, I put in 12-15 hr days working for a lot of people that simply don't have the experience or expertise that I do (and frankly, it shows), because despite being at the top of my field and constantly upgrading my skills and getting new certifications and all that...when it comes down to it, I'm at the mercy of HR processes and automated resume-filtration to get another job. The last 15 years, I've changed jobs every 4 years, suffering the poor job market and constantly having to prove myself again, but each time hoping to find someplace that wasn't a sh't show with constant "emergencies" of our own making and drinking the corporate bath water while circling the drain. I still haven't found it. But I haven't lost my empathy for people having the rug pulled out from under them when they are just trying to make a living.
The people on this board seem to have no empathy for anybody else.
I had empathy before reading this board but all the things that make most Cisco employees worse that useless are celebrated here and whatever tolerance I had has been burned away. The whole "I expect to sit in a cubical and get paid to learn nothing, make the same mistakes for 40 years, get raises and promotions while not growing the talent to take on the new responsibilities, and get a free year's salary for early retirement" after more than 40 years of layoffs in industry shows a complete disconnect with reality. If the work is that repetitive it should have been automated.
Find a kid in high school who understood the video with the fat lady singing and the glass breaking and have them explain what that means to an economy moving towards infinite debt when most of the country is too stupid to understand what it means to have $95T of mostly private sector debt. You'll never get most Americans to do the kind of work to pay off hundreds of thousands in debt per man, woman, other and child for literally nothing new in return and the few alternatives are all going to be brutal. Despite all the pretending, the majority chose this, just as too many chose to sit at Cisco and rot as the world moved on.
@nm Is that you Karl Marx?
The people on this board seem to have no empathy for anybody else. That's kind of un-American. Certainly it's not how our grandfathers thought about things, sacrificing by going overseas to fight in wars to make the world better for those that came after them. But let's keep this simple. Government jobs can often not pay nearly as well as private industry. People go into those jobs for OTHER reasons than pay sometimes. If you work 10 years making less than you could have in private sector, because you were promised your student loan debt would be reduced a certain amount, for example, it kinda su-ks having someone change the rules of the game on you after all that time put in. You ask why people are complaining? Mainly it's because you operated on a certain set of rules, and now someone is changing the rules late in the game. That's always going to anger and upset people, in any sector. The people on this board should be capable of understanding that. I have family that worked in the airline industry for 50 years, being told they would get a certain pension. In the end, it was decided, "Nah. We can't afford that." and somehow the corporate bigwigs wriggled their way out of paying. Changing the rules late in the game... To this board, ignore the plight of others at your own risk, because you might be next.
No different than the employees getting on TV during a Gov't budget shutdown whining about it, knowing they're still getting paid once the budget is approved. Paid for sitting at home.
I suggest that in order to improve the efficiency the government should be fired and H1B workers should be hired. Or even better, outsource it to India.
This is usually the American solution for improving efficiency.
To quote Pinhead from He-l raiser: "No tears! It is a waste of good suffering!"
I watched interviews with laid-off IRS employees, and it made me wonder why federal contractors believe they're entitled to a job and should never be fired.
Like most at Cisco you can't read because if you had and went through this board you'd see things like "we should get $1M payout regardless of performance if we're laid off after five years" getting up voted and "keep building your skills and professional network and actively manage your career" getting down voted or people whining they're only starting at $100K out of college when their likely equally useless peers are starting at $300K at a top company so they're not going to put in any effort into their job.
think of the very worst tech debt you have ever witnessed
now imagine that being 10x
I can't tell if you're talking about Cisco or the federal government. The end result after more than 40 years isn't as different as one might like from either side. I fail to see how trying to maintain Cisco's legacy code bases or government code bases in COBOL are much different, and that includes FPGAs with catastrophic bugs found more than two years before FCS at Cisco where management won't approve even the smallest fix as it is considered too risky.
think of the very worst tech debt you have ever witnessed
now imagine that being 10x
it really does seem that most of these orgs haven't even caught up to the 80s let alone 2025, why are we defending them?
everyone is bellyaching about Federal agencies getting layoffs...we aren't even scratching the surface...most of these orgs should simply be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up
Go back to reddit, chief. This isn't on topic.