At least they're giving you a nice six months severance package and time to try to transfer to another group. A lot of companies would just either escort you out of the building on the day of the notification or 1-2 months severance at the most. Cisco is actually very generous this time around.
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You do realize that Cisco still stack ranks you, but behind closed doors. I'd love to go back to the days of performance reviews.....at least then you had an idea of areas you needed to improve upon. And if you were in the bottom 5%, you got put on a performance improvement plan to get yourself back in gear. At least that had some humanity in it. Ranking behind closed doors does not.
In my 15 yrs experience at Cisco, if you ended up on a PIP, you days were numbered and you were gone. Everyone I know who had a PIP started interviewing and either quit Cisco to take a new job they'd found, or they decided to wait out the PIP and get a severance package. There was no "get yourself back in gear."
Even back then, it was mostly relationships and not performance, so it was personal. I was part of a team who had a manager w/ a great team and he rotated the the bottom 5% ranking around every year to keep/protect his team from attrition. Then a new manager came in, and he started using the PIP as a we-pon to replace the old team w/ a new team that sucked up to him. He had a 70% attrition rate w/in 2 yrs where as the previous manager had not had anyone leave the team in 5 yrs.
Forgive me if I don't think favorably of the bottom 5% cull. But at least you had some advance notice before you were gone.
I'm betting we sat in the same waiting room for interviews. I'm glad to hear you recovered.
I had to leave the state for a contract job leaving my family behind for what we thought would be until the school year ended. That role didn't turn out very well, so I moved to another contract role that did work out nicely and the family followed that summer.
There were 10s of thousands of people laid off in the same geographic job markets, with similar job skills, and no jobs to go to.
That was exactly the issue. Things were still mostly on dial-up at that time and cable modems were not yet available in many markets. You didn't have remote access to work, so if 5000 people were applying for the same 2-300 jobs, the odds were that you were going to have to move to get a job.
No matter how you spin it, layoffs are horrible and wreck lives....PERIOD. Sure, some people get jobs right away, but many do not......and it's not always due to their work ethic. It could be the type of job they have is not in high demand, etc. It happens all the time.
To the poster that mentioned the early 2000s TX telecom corridor/internet implosion layoffs.....I was there too (worked for a startup company that went bust, like most did), and was also the only paycheck in the family. That was by far the worst job market in the last 40 years.....hands down. There were 10s of thousands of people laid off in the same geographic job markets, with similar job skills, and no jobs to go to. I would go to interviews and see my friends and coworkers there....all vying for the same job. Even though I was damn good at my job, I was unemployed for 5 months, with ZERO severance. I had friends that were unemployed way longer. When I finally did get a job, it was with a 40% paycut....but at least I could pay my mortgage and keep food on the table. It took me a few years to claw my salary back up to it's proper level.
And to the poster that said "Do you want Cisco to go back to the days of performance reviews and ranked stacking and the annual culling of the bottom 5%?" Huh? You do realize that Cisco still stack ranks you, but behind closed doors. I'd love to go back to the days of performance reviews.....at least then you had an idea of areas you needed to improve upon. And if you were in the bottom 5%, you got put on a performance improvement plan to get yourself back in gear. At least that had some humanity in it. Ranking behind closed doors does not.
@OP 00100
I am not sure why OP put up this loaded of. Of course, people will complain about the LR, they have all the right to do that because overwhelming majority of them have nothing to do with over-hiring, bad acquisitions, wrong business decision, in-flighting, empire building, favoritism/harbor the a** kissers, on and on.
I'm not the OP, but I've been affected by multiple LR's. I'll take this Cisco LR over any of the others.
It's way better than what this company did to me. They let a few people, 5 or 6 maybe, go in July or August. Then they let me and 8 other people go the Monday following Thanksgiving. This company matched 401(k) contributions at the end of the year, so you had to be employed on Dec 31st to get your match. My employment ended at the end of the 2 weeks severance plus the additional 2 weeks if I waived by rights, so it was Dec 29th. I thought that was pretty cold and heartless by the company, so I shouldn't have been surprised when they let 49 people go on July 6th (just over 180 days after the previous reductions) so they could avoid giving notice and paying for job location assistance when companies layoff more than 50 people.
I was also part of the 2016 Cisco LR, CR's first announced LR as CEO, when he announced it during the year-end earnings call. My manager sent out a team-wide email an hour before the earning call suggesting that everyone watch it. Then he immediately left for the day. As soon as the earnings call ended, he sent me and another co-worker individual 1:1 invites for first thing the next morning. That LR was badly managed because it was the first one Cisco had done in a while. We were told there would be HR people in various buildings in some specified small conference room where we could ask questions, etc., but you went there and they were not in that room. The lobby ambassadors had no idea what room they were in. You had to roam the hallways to find them.
When the jobs market is slow, getting cut in Aug/Sep with 5 mo severance sucks because it runs out in Dec/Jan and companies are typically not hiring in Nov and Dec or even early Jan. The job market usually picks back up in late Jan, and into Feb. At least for these people, they're able to prepare now, but get their severance in Feb/Mar when companies are starting their annual hiring based on their new year's budgets. I've heard this LR comes with 6 months severance, so if that's not including the time between notification and termination, that's Aug/Sep before the severance money runs out. I'd have ki---d to have income from Dec - Sept while I looked for my next job instead of a paltry 4 or 5 weeks.
I may not like the ELT, or their lies, and I didn't like the "we're-doing-layoffs-bang-you're-gone" notifications they used to do, but I'd take this advanced warning style or the bang-you're-gone style with generous packages any day compared to companies that give no notice and barely a few weeks of severance.
I was the sole bread winner in TX living and working in the telecommunications heart in the early 2000's when all the "bells" were doing LRs, so when that non-Cisco company let me go, it was tough. It took me until May to land a new job and was the longest I'd ever been unemployed. So yeah, I know what it's like. There's a lot worse companies out there than Cisco.
He-l, you could have been working for Twitter and get let go after the initial & voluntary rounds Twitter had. That was a mismanaged sh-t show.
Don't be so melodramatic. Is the ELT lying to us. Yes. So many other companies do the same. Doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make Cisco unique either.
If workers are hard workers, then they have a strong work ethic and people who know them know that. Finding jobs since the early 2000's have become almost as much about who you know as what you know. Companies, recruiters, and hiring managers check people out on the Internet to see who knows them and asks if they should be considered for a role. Generally, the hard workers rarely have a hard time finding a job and end up pocketing that generous severance package as a bonus. Their lives are hardly ruined.
Do you want Cisco to go back to the days of performance reviews and ranked stacking and the annual culling of the bottom 5%? That's what used to pi-s me off. They'd let 5% go every year, but it was never called an LR or made the news and you were perceived as being a poor performer and it could be lies made up by a manager who just wanted to replace you with a "yes" man and replace their current team they inherited when they took over that team with all new people they like. I like the non-personal lies of the current ELT than the lies directed at me personally by sh---y managers.
But I certainly agree that the leadership, vision & politics have ruined Cisco.
I will agree with the OP that Cisco is, and has historically been, very generous with their severance packages and many companies just let you go with 2 -4 weeks of severance and may add an extra week of severance per year of service.
The question we should be asking, is why Cisco is so generous w/ their package compared to other companies? It's certainly not out of love or concern for its employees.
My guess is that it's to encourage people to just take the package and not sue.
Rebalancing is one thing but they need to identify the true hard workers and retain them and oust the loafers. I know some SR Directors that recently promoted their gd 11 buddies to gd 12 people managers and these people couldn’t lead themselves out of a paper bag. I see no effort to drain the swamp of the good old boys in SCO. Thank god a certain VP resigned- she was worthless.
@OP Could have been "worse", not "worst". Get your English in order if you want to continue working for Cisco.
you can sit here and cry and moan but it doesn't change a damn thing. They don't care. If you're truely a hard worker, you can find jobs anywhere. If you're just cruising for easy paychecks which is the best thing about Cisco then this is a wake up call for you.
It genuinely baffles me that people are complaining about getting laid off. When I received my separation package a few years ago it was the biggest financial windfall of my life. Short of hitting a jackpot on a slot machine or winning the lottery I'll never get lucky like that again.
I found another job immediately so I was able to pocket everything, even the money that was earmarked for health insurance. This was during the height of covid and on top of that I'm a fairly incompetent employee. Now I'm at another job where I can snooze all day with the added benefit of not being exposed to an awful, toxic workplace like Cisco.
Newsflash: if you're at Cisco for the easy paycheck (the only reason to be at Cisco) there are thousands of droning, pointless jobs where you can coast. Dime a dozen here in the valley.
Wake up, Mr. Clueless. It's about the lies of the rebalancing versus opex cut. It's about cutting the hard workers and ruins lives because of their mistakes. Bottom line is lack of leadership, vision & politics that damage this once great company.
Many generations before rebalancing it was limited restructuring and before that it was layoffs and before that over 40 years ago it was firing. Pre-401K firing shortly before retirement was a great way to reduce the pension payout when you had to reach 65 at a company to get a full pension. Yes, as shareholders we call ourselves job creators so you’ll vote to transfer all the wealth you create to us via the private sector and no, we don’t care about your jobs. When your significant other says they love you and you’re the best they’re playing you too.
On “ruins lives” of “hard workers” I know plenty of ancient decrepit people who actually are good at what they do and they always get new jobs quickly. Working hard at doing the wrong thing is nothing like working smart and continuing to develop skills.
On “their mistakes” and a “lack of leadership” there is plenty of that all the way up and down the reporting trees. When the union at GM said it was unreasonable for the person running the glue g-n around the windshield opening to let anyone know it was out of glue so cars rolled off the assembly line with the windshields unattached that was a failure of the rank and file. Most software engineers at Cisco are just as willing to check in broken code even when the manager isn’t demanding it. “Yes the box hung so bad we needed a truck roll but it’s not worth filing even a Sev6 bug to track.” Great.
Look up Cisco’s origin story on how the hardware and software were “acquired” from Stanford. So much for a “once great company.” It was originally great at acquiring and severely overcharging so it could rain stock options on its still mostly incompetent employees who thought themselves G-ds. Most of them weren’t and most of you aren’t.
In your own words, “Wake up, Mr. Clueless.”
#OP “ Cisco is actually very generous this time around” sounded like Fran?
You forgot to add congratulations on 25 years anniversary to Chuck on ‘thelayoff’ board.
If you are so bothered by thelayoff board, why are you here?
The chat option in the Check-in is more fitting for your promotion.
@OP if you don’t wanna hear people complaining about layoffs then stop visiting layoff forum boards.
#OP I'm assuming you are internal to Cisco and not affected by the LR?? Have you ever been affected by an LR?? or one this badly managed based on lies and BS this close to Christmas as the sole breadwinner while sitting through endless crapppy all hands where ELT and SLT parade around their plans for the holidays and say how proud they are and blah blah blah?
Either way #OP - crawl back under your rock and #ELT how about you start delivering on the much talked about transparency and just be fk1ng honest for once rather than waiting for the EPS to peak so you can dump your shares and strike rich off of the backs of all these good people you are culling. you lot in your ivory towers make me sick
Sure, just pretend that everything is just fine now. It all was inevitable.
All our people's lives are now going to be disrupted; because a well managed, well devised, comprehensive strategic corporate business plan portfolio was unobtainable.
Or maybe it might have something to do with a somehow still empowered, inept, executive team; not capable of much more than golf and pretending to be social cause crusaders.
Happy 25th Cisco Anniversary Mr. Robbins.
Other companies don’t discriminate, lie and make false accusations and put proverbial g-ns to your head. Cisco then class such action as normal and professional. Cisco’s HR team is morally bankrupt and the worst of it is they claim to be so ethical. When you provide the evidence of Cisco HR officers and execs lying through a legal process and submit an ethics complaint against HR they ignore it. Fortunately there are legal processes and the message to Cisco HR is you are being watched closely. If Cisco HR read this you know the country involved you know the evidence against you you know who has that evidence.
Few companies require the commitment and time. This is not a one way street.
@OP, Wake up, Mr. Clueless. It's about the lies of the rebalancing versus opex cut. It's about cutting the hard workers and ruins lives because of their mistakes. Bottom line is lack of leadership, vision & politics that damage this once great company.
Couldn't have been worse than your grammar.