Cisco To Slash Up To 6,000 Jobs -- 8% of Its Workforce -- In "Reorganization" 207
alphadogg (971356) writes Cisco Systems will cut as many as 6,000 jobs over the next 12 months, saying it needs to shift resources to growing businesses such as cloud, software and security. The move will be a reorganization rather than a net reduction, the company said. It needs to cut jobs because the product categories where it sees the strongest growth, such as security, require special skills, so it needs to make room for workers in those areas, it said. 'If we don't have the courage to change, if we don't lead the change, we will be left behind,' Chairman and CEO John Chambers said on a conference call.
While Buying Back $1.5 Billion In Stock (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
Re:A complaint (Score:4, Informative)
The move is shortsighted because it costs money to hire someone and the new person must then learn the culture, infrastructure, and the business.
No they'll just hire some idiot Indian slave labor and offshore them. Cisco's been at this for over 10 years.
Re:A complaint (Score:5, Informative)
ob disc: I work at cisco.
cisco has extremes in terms of talent. some really bad idiots work here (and many products show ugly warts and horrible design, including poor docs) and yet there are some really amazingly smart people here, too.
hiring has clearly been 'hire the cheapest foreign workers we can find'. you can walk the hallways and not hear any english (I'm talking about san jose buildings, here). for an 'american' company, its shameful. clearly, they don't hire the best and brightest, overall; they follow the silly valley standard of cheap h1b's for the most part.
tech support (internal) is the worst I've ever seen. wait times on phones for int support is 15 minutes, min; and you get someone who has such a thick accent, you can't understand them. they can't do much, they waste a lot of time asking dumb questions and it takes forever to get anything done.
cisco should strip more than 10% of its workforce, but I know the reality: they'll strip the higher waged folks and keep the crappy folks around since its cheaper for them and that's mostly what matters, these days.
cisco is also planning on ripping out all the cubicles and going 'open office'. chambers is convinced its 'better' (its not, but its cheaper and they refuse to admit what the real motivation is). everyone I talked to is in fear of this open-office conversion and many will work from home to avoid the noise and distraction, or they'll just give up and quit, which I also heard is part of the unspoken plan.
I recently saw this kind of thing in the router production source code (paraphrased, just to show the concept):
function_a() ...)
{
FILE f=open(...);
read(f,
do_stuff();
return;
}
not kidding. opened a file inside a routine, did some i/o and then returned. doh! no need to close the file handle? really?? must be a java guy who didn't know how C really works. and yet, this was in production code and no one seemed to have done a code review or even a smoke test! unbelievable!!
like I said, we have really smart people here and some really lame idiots that, somehow, got hired here and are farking up the production code, designs and even the docs. we are just too large and have hired cut-rate 'programmers'. unfortunately, those are the ones that will likely stay and the higher cost, more experienced folks will be told go leave.
Re:While Buying Back $1.5 Billion In Stock (Score:2, Informative)
"broadening the tax base" is code for tax those poor people more.
Re:While Buying Back $1.5 Billion In Stock (Score:4, Informative)
Cisco isn't perfect, but I wouldn't be surprised to see their stock remain strong. IPv6 rollouts, security issues, and future IPv6 items [1] will ensure that existing customers will be buying new equipment.
Cisco also benefits from the fact that fiber channel is getting tossed for FCoE. With FCoE or iSCSI, it just takes one fabric to handle both storage and networking, while FC requires a separate switching network to handle zoning and I/O. With 40gigE around the corner, fiber channel is going to be left in the dust until faster HBAs come in 2016.
Would I consider Cisco stock a "buy"? I'm not going to give investment advice, but I wouldn't consider their stock tanking anytime soon. They are the biggest player in a core industry that isn't going away anytime soon.
[1]: IPv6, while getting deployed, still has yet to go through the real-world torture testing the IPv4 stack went through back in the late 1990s with land, teardrop, ping of death, smurf, and other packet based attacks which would drop machines.