Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

We've become a company of managers who want to make more money for ourselves.

Before 2000 it was people producing bugs for stock options and walking away with tens of millions leaving behind more work fixing their mess than they were paid in salary to create it. Once the value of the options went away title became the key to big money and we started getting herds of managers with only a few reports each and even directors with no reports, along with TLs and PEs who can't perform at any level. How is it that so many of you think that politics and layoffs are just occurring for the first time and only at Cisco?

@8rgl - Sad and depressing but true on many levels. The company is rotten in the middle.

Cisco managers only care about becoming directors so they can get that fat 35% bonus on top of their $200k salary. At this point it's all about continuing to surround yourself with yes men and women who they themselves want to become directors. We're a company that nolonger cares about building a great company with solid products to delight our customers. We've become a company of managers who want to make more money for ourselves. If we have to stomp on others, backstab our peers to get ahead, so be it. Just got to make it to July to ensure my fat bonus. Then use lots of buzzwords with your VP to ensure you make it to the next year, no need to be accountable for failed projects because you know more buzzwords than your VP.

God I love this place. Don't be jealous because I'm better than you at it.

Managers with no leadership skills promoted and then put on Micky Mouse condensed Harvard or Stamford leadership courses so are therefore qualified. It annoys me as I studied at two of the top business schools in the world doing my BA, MS and then an MBA off my own back. I then have to listen to these halfwitts who know little about modern business practices, map out the future for Cisco. There are a lot of very fortunate people at Cisco who were in the right place at the right time and offer little in terms of what the business requires.

Cisco's problem is not from engineers, but from managers. They only manage up!

Cisco has been promoting storytellers to management. How many Managers, Directors, and VPs merely tell grandiose stories without generating any business value? Data-driven employees that attempt to measure business value are sidelined and managed out. Reminds me of the Madoff scandal.

Engineers are the same every where ... management is who really let everyone down. Cisco started promoting people into management who had no leadership skills back in 2007-8 in a big way. They are really paying for it these past years

Cisco is like smelly old lady and old man with bad breath that tell you same stories over again all the time. We pretend to be like hip New Company to attract cheap grade 8 (or less) kids from college but all I see are people that could not get job at other fashionable company so they come hear and add to bloat and are lazy. My engineering Manager, director, and vp only care about trying to keep revenue from dying product going so they can keep fat salary and rsu...kind of like pigs in trough. They know next gen product and sw will not backfill current revenue so they don't care about new ideas or methods from engineers. Therefore they buy start up so they don't have to make hard decision. Our team don't listen to sales unless they want to buy a meal. They are too clueless to know what needs to be done.

OP is clearly some idiot from sales who thinks he know how engineering should operate. In fact is that not the true issue with Cisco? A bunch half brained sales people climbing the ladder and driving engineering in to the ground?

@3kih - you are absolutely correct, the gloss of working for "Cisco" has dramatically faded and is no longer a big player. Having to take a Cisco internship now is seen as a failure. It means you couldn't get into Google or Facebook or Microsoft or pretty much anywhere else.

Cisco has become a management driven company where managers are driven to become directors and directors are driven to become VPs. Empire builders and directors with < 10 total reports are everywhere. The ELT is being fleeced by middle management because they don't know any better and the engineers are leaving in droves. There was a time when working at Cisco meant something, not any more. Might as well tell people you work for the City of San Jose. Atleast there's something noble about public service.

In the early '90s Cisco was an engineering-driven company. If you could do the work you were golden. You could have shouting matches with your manager or your VP about technical issues, and everyone understood that it was more than OK.

The software quality was poor back then as well. The screaming child thing persisted for more than two decades which has seriously degraded both the engineering and the working conditions and is just another failing of bad leadership. It is not OK.

In the last several years the culture changed completely, and the focus shifted to s---ing up and staying off the bad list. Nobody wanted to take a risk because you'd get killed if it failed, and perhaps even if it failed.

The culture shift to brown nosing occurred in the outlying sites during the 2001 layoffs when the hiring and new building construction stopped. Repeat after all my management from 2001 forward: "perception is reality, and even if you do a better job than anyone else in the company could have with a bad hand if it's not perfect you'll still get fired so try to grab simple problems."

@M3Cz9JO :

Putting aside the terrible English ("it's engineers"? Really? "process these traits"? Likewise), it doesn't sound as if you have any idea what engineering is like at Cisco, or what it used to be.

In the early '90s Cisco was an engineering-driven company. If you could do the work you were golden. You could have shouting matches with your manager or your VP about technical issues, and everyone understood that it was more than OK.

In the last several years the culture changed completely, and the focus shifted to s---ing up and staying off the bad list. Nobody wanted to take a risk because you'd get killed if it failed, and perhaps even if it failed.

Your arrogance is silly and speaks poorly of you. I met some of the brightest people in my life during my time at Cisco, but they're all long gone. None of them likes what Cisco's become.

s/your/you're/

I've thought more about this and would like to offer just one example of what might have been wrong, or is wrong, which has nothing whatsoever to do with engineers.

I once participated in a VP/GM staff meeting in which the VP stated flatly (and I quote): "It doesn't matter what business case exists - I mean, a $500M return for a $1M investment - I cannot increase headcount by even one head. Not one."

Now, if you (still) think Cisco's seeming inability to develop system projects internally has anything to do with engineers, your just plain wrong, though I would certainly claim that some teams, and some development locations, simply weren't good at defining and developing quality products to market on time.

AWS breaks the internet today. Quick, call a millennial. They'll save us!

I agree that this has nothing to do with age. Cisco culture and staffing strategy breed complacency which is why I didn't stay.

The main reason are the H1Bs are slave labor and don't innovate.

I work in a team with many engineers in their 40's. I'm a millennial. Some are good at what they do and some are ok, but what is consistent is they don't go beyond their remit and they bi7ch and moan all the time. I personally think most of them have been at the company too long and they should look to go elsewhere if it's so bad. I've noticed on this board that most the posters are from the engineering community, which says it all really.

There are many responses to this, but I'll summarize by saying this is one of most clueless posts about what might be wrong with Cisco that I've ever read.

What you're forgetting is that the 40-50yr old execs realize that it's cooler to hire some kid out of college or pay for a barrista in the lobby than it is to continue to pay for a g12/13/14 engineer. Millennials are cool, an engineer with a spouse and two kids and a mortgage is not. Ever notice how facilities get worse (you'd think they'd redo the restrooms when they remodel an entire building) but the ELT still get's their $1000 luncheons in building 10. Btw, their catered meals are not the same crap that you and I get when we have a training session. There's a completely separate menu for them.

1aql, you nailed it. true #gold

your fancy iphone: designed by people in their 40s

your fancy Tesla: designed by people in their 50s

your fancy Intel CPUs that power your computers: designed by people in their 40s

your fancy C++/python languages: designed by people in their mid 30s

your over priced cup of latte from Petes: designed by people in their 40s

your Lithium Ion batteries that power all your hipster toys: designed by people in their late 50s

your hipster Fender Jaguar offset guitar: designed by someone in their 50s

your fancy iphone: designed by people in their 40s

your fancy Tesla: designed by people in their 50s

your fancy Intel CPUs that power your computers: designed by people in their 40s

your fancy C++/python languages: designed by people in their mid 30s

your over priced cup of latte from Petes:designed by people in their 40s

your Lithium Ion batteries that power all your hipster toys: designed by people in their late 50s

your hipster Fender Jaguar offset guitar: designed by someone in their 50s

40+ yo employees have been there, done that. now they just laugh at the 20 something millennials that think they are creative and innovative when in reality they are just being used as cheap labor to implement and do the mundane tasks that some 40+ yo conceived.

When you're 40! Ha! Modular Programming and Structured Programming techniques are well over 50 years old and yet few software engineers at Cisco have these skills. Functional Programming from the 1950s, Object Oriented Programming from the 1960s, and Generic Programming from the 1970s are all on the far side of 40 years old and yet few Cisco software engineers at any age can tell you anything about them despite theoretically having passed college courses covering these topics. This is how you end up with data structures and functions which are over 10,000 lines long and a resulting development budget that is mostly spent on bug "fixing."

Add to this managers teaching courses on how to add and then remove two printf calls a week for an award winning 4 bugs per week and it isn't long before no one is capable of writing even a small amount of new working code. Hearing a manager start to cry in a conference call because the thousands of lines of code you wrote took five days so his dashboard light is no longer green is a truly disturbing experience in so many ways - especially when junior didn't compile the two printf adds and broke the build with those two checkins that week because dashboards don't track build breakage.

At the end of the day many startups grow not on the risk of development teams but of venture capitalists. Cisco has the money but won't spend it internally because they knowingly and intentionally grew teams which are fundamentally incapable of doing new development. That's why they only allow engineers to "innovate" for 24 hours a year on their own time and chastise you if you show up with working code you wrote on your own time to solve a real problem which wasn't already assigned to you as a bug.

"computers let alone the internet didn't exist when he was born"......are you serious?!? Even the internet had it's underpinnings in the defense ARPA network, and computers have been around since the 1950s (even earlier, depending how you want to define it). And I'll just say it: coding is coding. Sure there are some new algorithms out there, but a good coder is always a good coder, no matter the age. Same goes for a general engineer....it's a mindset.

Out of interest, what's the average age of the engineering team behind Meraki? I bet it's a lot younger then Cisco's and probably the reason they are coming out with great stuff that's generating growth for the company.

The comment about FB made me laugh..... yes it was invented by a 23 year old.

Let's face it, if you haven't done anything amazing as an engineer by the time you're 25 you'll become a "corporate engineer". Then you have a life span of 15 years before you become expensive baggage. It is rare that someone beyond that point still has the ability to do something big, as your knowledge is old and you're probably just in it now for a pay check.

Cisco needs to bring in a 30 something superstar to run engineering and shake things up a bit!

You might take a remedial English class while you're there. You apparently missed the lesson on contractions.

@M3Cz9JO :

You sound like a clueless, new-grad VSAM : all hepped-up on the blue Kool-Aid and still wet behind the ears !!

Go back home to Mom and Dad's basement.

Really, how old are you? 15? Engineers obey hierarchy, if anyone to blame in a company it is the top management, and the leadership, they are directly responsible as decision makers, not the army of engineers, engineers just do what they've been ask to! Cisco is not a start-up where smart engineers have a word to say, Cisco is just a giant with strict hierarchy and a lot, a lot of POLITICS! But obviously you are too "young" (sarcasm) to acknowledge that...I'm a young person too but not "young" in your way, fortunately! ;-))))

40 is the new 20

... you're ability to process these traits are extremely limited. (SIC)

It's not "... you are ability...", but "...your ability..."

Yet another fail.

"when your 40" (sic)

....

When you're under forty and can't manage contractions properly, but whine about how older folk can't code... your argument fails on its face.

... down to it is engineers ... ?

What does that mean, genius OP?

To the fresher OP, did you think of this all by yourself after coming back from the games room?

Here at Cisco the leaders take credit for the work of their employees. Most Sr. Mgrs and Directors are better at "managing up" than managing their own employees.

Management is only foccussed on their growth. I am not sure why many people on this blog blame engineers . I am sure if given the right opportunity engineers any age can do the magic. Management is only worried about their growth and dosent care about what the engineer expects to make things works. Politics , politics and politics is all Cisco now! Many of the so called aged employees are sure working outside Cisco and getting their work done for sure .

As one of my colleagues told the story. He was sitting at an airport lounge and doing some Facebook and email stuff whilst awaiting a flight. A young person watching nearby made a comment expressing surprise that an older person (he was 55 or so) would be so adept at using all this technology. His response was simple: "who do you think built it?"

The internet was born in the 70s. Leaders are supposed to lead and get out of the way of their talents' work. A leader should be wise and bring leadership to their team. Sorry, but a milennial is not leadership material. Your comment is insulting.

Couldn't agree more. The engineers have let the company down massively. I always found it strange that for so many years our head of engineering was so old, computers let alone the internet didn't exist when he was born, yet he's meant to lead innovation.