It sounds like the VP gave some pretty blunt advice regarding career progression for first-level managers. If the manager doesn't transition to an IC, they might be at risk of getting a pink slip
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While the leaders talk and talk about quality, anyone look the chat? RL said the quiet thing loud. No one touches tech debt.
@bd / Mick,
hahaha - sure, if a FLM spends more than 5 minutes a week on those activities, sure, let 'em go. No leader I know spends that much time on what you listed.
If there was a mass elimination of Mgrs, I can't wait for the subsequent posts on here:
"My Mgr was LR'd, and now I can't get any time with Leadership"
"My IPF su-ks after my mgr was LR'd"
"I'm even more overworked now that my mgr was LR'd"
"My Director knows nothing about my role and doesn't understand what I do"
"All these Directors are useless; they don't help at all. They should be LR'd to flatten the org"
And who would you clowns scapegoat for your misery afterwards?
Cisco does collab?
@Mick Swagger I’m a FLM and your comment resonates: QEP, team space rofl!!! This is what comes down from Directors. I feel like we do more than that of course 😉. But point well taken
3 hours of productivity sounds about right in my experience. It’s wild how much time is wasted on teams doing multiple layers of simple status updates, demos, and sync-ups with slightly different groups of people. Leadership on my team only seems capable of absorbing information in actual meetings, so there is always chunks of time throughout the day.
white collar office workers only do 2 hours and 53 minutes of actual work per day.
https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-average-worker-is-productive-for-this-many-hours.html
Re: Amazon's latest 30,000 person layoff
- nearly 80% of the affected roles were held by managers both junior and senior.
- the majority of the initial 14,000 layoffs targeted mainly managerial positions.
- 90% of the initial 7,500 laid-off employees were managers at L5 to L7 levels.
I left that BS company behind. The toxic, brown nosing, sycophantic, grandstanding, BS culture was making me unwell. Feel much better now that I am away from it.
thoughts on overlay roles as they flatten the org? Also, timing of when they start? November, February, a year from now?
AI isn't taking managers jobs, Individual Contributors using AI are taking managers jobs.
The bloated mass of humanity occupying Cisco's gooey center (i.e. the management layer) is wholly unnecessary.
Teamspace?
expense approvals?
"did you complete your quarterly training?"
(which is just a 30 minute un-skippable video of some middle manager bloke spouting off corporate gibberish)
middle management is f-cked
Also note that many parts of Cisco are already relatively flat. Lots of major functions have only 6-8 layers from IC to CEO, vs other companies who reduced from double-digit layers. If Cisco is flattening orgs with more than 8 layers, I'm all for it.
umm, first line managers aren't 'the middle'. the extra 'middle' is Directors with 0-2 reports.
getting rid of FLMs is what you do after you've gutted all the other seemingly extra roles like program managers. It's a sign of desperation, not savvy leadership.
I heard they are getting rid of engineers and certified technicians so that PMs can leverage the circle-back synergy throughout the organization. The essential jobs of the world run on powerpoint presentations.
Shrink the middle layers - ELT is listening
Needs to happen across the board.