I am not an employee, but a customer of Juniper. In the last year the quality of Juniper's products have gone down the tube, both hardware and software. And the people at Juniper almost seem to not care about this. Why is this? Why has Juniper gone from a rising star to an expensive paperweight?
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As Cisco transitions to the cloud, they will need engineers with different skill sets, which is why it is necessary to get rid of existing engineers who do not have the right skills. Folks might argue that existing engineers could be trained instead of getting laid off. Not easy. If you have rested on your laurels for many years, your brain cells start to die and learning new things becomes harder. This is the problem with lots of engineers in both Cisco as well as Juniper.
Due to the above reason, Cisco will continue to lay off in the foreseeable future. It will also continue to hire people at the same time. Whether it succeeds or not is yet to be seen. They have an advantage of billions of dollars in the bank. New tax laws w.r.t repatriation is another positive. This helps them buy other innovative companies. Juniper does not have this luxury. Juniper cannot buy companies as Cisco does, nor does it have the capacity to hire top talent to transition successfully to the cloud.
Juniper's fate is sealed, it will slowly move towards obsolescence. Cisco, under Chuck, is executing well, I think and will emerge successfully. They will continue to layoff older expensive employees in this process, this is unfortunately necessary.
Csco price shot up b/c they retransitioned to the Cloud but there is stall which is why the stock hasn't taken that next step. Reinventing is hard and takes time. The story isn't over with how much Csco can evolve (or not).
As for Jnpr, their story hasn't been told yet. The next two years will say alot.
Uh look at Cisco share price over the last 5 years then look at Juniper’s. Then come back to me and tell me which is the better managed company. By far. It’s not even close.
Please dont hold up csco as a better co than juniper. You wont find their name in the warn act pdfs lately but layoffs are constant in trickles with periodic clumps. Even for a impending big round in november they have found some way to skate under the radar
Other than enterprise routing all other csco routing is down in dumps and both morale and quality is pretty low
Older expensive employees are being replaced - there has been multiple purges since 2012
I don't think it's fair to call it expensive paperweight. Heck, you can say that about Microsoft software as well then, etc.
As the company transforms itself to the cloud (like Cisco), there will be growing pains (i.e. attrition, layoffs, etc). Cisco had HUGE public layoffs trying to reinvent itself. Juniper, on the other hand, does it in stealth mode almost every other month (devastating morale with worry) trying to stay off the radar so it won't affect the stock as much.
I can tell you that this so-called reinvention will be hard given the leadership. Too many incompetent/toxic "buddy/buddy yes-men" with little ability to lead or innovate. Maybe the new CTO will change this as he's a baller, but he's in charge of a motley crew of Bad News Bears where he'll need Negan's baseball bat to motivate them in the right direction. It may be too late. We'll see. He obviously doesn't think so or else he wouldn't have left mighty Google if this ship was already halfways in the water.
For the sake of the people, I truly hope it works out for J. But they really need to address the TOXIC apples in the company. They ruin everything for everybody on every level.
One reason that comes to my mind is the extremely strong job market which is preventing good engineers from considering a company like Juniper for employment. Good engineers leave for better opportunities and they are getting replaced with lower quality engineers. This reduces the overall quality of the engineering team leading the lower quality products.
Another reason is the work culture which does not reward engineers who get things done. There is little difference in compensation for good performers vs mediocre performers. This causes engineers to lose motivation which leads to slacking culture.
Periodic layoffs cause loss to morale. Lots of good ICs have been laid off, however, I do not see the same for incompetent managers.
Juniper is no longer a rising star, it is a dying company.