
Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees - petethomas
http://reuters.com/article/businessNews/idUSKCN10S05D
======
drawkbox
Let's just say the average salary is 70k which is very conservative. That is
14k * 70k annually lost from the local community, a grand total of 980M or
let's just say 1 billion annually.

Looking for another job when there are massive cuts like this also degrades
the salary they accept on their next job because of the competition.

I wish companies, if possible, throttled layoffs a bit more instead of large
chunks like this, but that is unlikely as the board/CEOs are looking for a
stock uptick when they do and don't want to drag it out to affect the market
value (translation: their own pay / stock value/price).

We rarely look at the amount of money lost in communities when things like
this happen but it would be nice if reporters put out the lost community
dollars/salaries along with the layoff number. The Great Wage Stagnation
continues in our consumer driven economy.

~~~
shangaslammi
It's kind of strange that massive layoffs like these result in a stock uptick.
At least for me it's a sign that the company is probably unhealthy and that
its value is going to go down in the future.

~~~
Altay-
It mostly just confirms my belief that fully half of all white-collar workers
in the developed world are adding zero value. They hustle for their first few
years, then coast as old products sell themselves to old customers they
already established relationships with in their younger years...

I can't fault them for not giving their all every day... I know for a fact I
would instantly put in the minimal amount of work required after achieving
tenure / seniority / whatever at a large organization.

~~~
jomamaxx
"It mostly just confirms my belief that fully half of all white-collar workers
in the developed world are adding zero value. They hustle for their first few
years, then coast as old products sell themselves to old customers they
already established relationships with in their younger years..."

This is not necessarily true.

It's more like - as you add people to the pile, you get diminishing marginal
returns on value-added for each person yo add.

Trust me - older products that are hardened, and sold through established
channels - those are where the juicy profits come from! Nobody wants to mess
with that!

------
femto
> ...as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric
> organization.

With all these companies exiting the hardware space, who is going to be doing
the hardware?

Will hardware remain a niche department within these software based companies?
Are off-the-shelf systems-on-a-chip now powerful enough that there is now no
need for hardware, beyond a generic universal SoC based device? Is it going to
be an unserviced niche for new players to move into?

To use the specific example of Cisco: what hardware are Cisco planning to have
their software running on in (for example) 5 years time?

~~~
mdani
The software will run on inexpensive dumb hardware from whitelabel
manufacturers such as Quanta computers. The secret sauce in hardware that gave
Cisco big margins is increasingly replaced by software that is good enough
(e.g. You can use SDN controller and a cheap switch hardware to replace very
expensive Cisco stuff). The trend in Enterprises and telcos is to use cloud
(AWS, GCE, Azure,...) and open source (aka Facebook Open Compute) so the
hardware spending has slowed down. (in tier 1 carrier I deal with, all new
deployments must be on Openstack that uses whitelabel hardware purchased in
bulk). EMC, Oracle, Cisco, HP are facing the impacts of such decisions.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
> all new deployments must be on Openstack

you have my sympathies

~~~
the_duke
What's so bad about OpenStack?

~~~
karma_vaccum123
The Vision: a community-managed set of integrated tools that let you create a
featureful cloud on hardware you control.

The Reality: a bunch of python scripts everyone forks.. committee
politics...frustration

OpenStack is a great example of going "community" before the problem is well
understood or there is a solution people trust.

It's basically a tire fire at this point and most of the community
participants are market losers.

~~~
Rapzid
Substitute Python for bash and I get the same sense from Kubernetes.. I'm not
sure it's fair to say "before the problem is well understood... But maybe.
Whatever Google had going on internally Kubernetes is very much figuring it
out along the way at almost every level. If you are wanting to use on AWS then
you have kops, kube-up, hyperkube, protokube; a dizzying, un-approachable and
interconnected ecosystem of launch scripts/programs. Very strange interop
decisions with AWS, but hard to fault because it's darn near one person trying
to manage all AWS integrations.

~~~
bogomipz
"Substitute Python for bash and I get the same sense from Kubernetes"

Huh? Kubernetes is written in Golang.

------
michaelvoz
I live down the street from Cisco HQ. I share an apartment building with many
of their engineers. Perhaps it is anecdotal, and my evidence comes purely from
speaking with them (I have never seen their work), but they come across as
absolutely terrible as software engineers. They seem like the kind of company
destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant. They have
no care for the product, good programming, or their company. Their main goal
is to just have a job and fly under the radar.

~~~
lil1729
I have looked at Android code. It is awful. Now, I don't form opinions about
Google engineers based just on that code.

I meant to say, generalizations don't always work well. They may have bad
engineers. But they have great engineers too. Kent Dybvig and his team who
wrote Chez Scheme works for Cisco. There are many others. Jonathan Rosenberg
who wrote many Internet RFCs on fundamental protocols that run the Internet
voice/video works for Cisco.

Let's not generalize. It hurts people!

~~~
_pmf_
> I have looked at Android code.

You just have to look at the API. From little details (wifiInfo.getSSID()
returning either the quoted SSID, an unquoted string of hex characters the
SSID consists of, the special string "<unknown ssid>" or "0x") to the overall
architecture (needlessly convoluted lifecycle, 2D rendering architecture from
2000s, the whole intra-app Intent bullshit that causes people to find
alternative ways of communicating between Activities within the same app ...)

~~~
72deluxe
Out of interest, what's wrong with Intents??

As alternatives, do people just end up dumping to an sqlite database and
polling it in each Activity? Haha that'd be madness

~~~
Fargren
For inter-app communication Intents are a pretty reasonable solution to a
complex problem. But inside an app, I would just love to have constructor
parameters for my activities. I make do with Intents, but I don't have type
safety, I have to deal with partially constucted objects until I've read my
Intent Parameters and any time I have to pass something that's not in the
default types that a bundle can contain I have to build a Parcelable wrapper
for it, or find some other convoluted solution. Overall I just feel like I'm
working at the wrong level of abstraction.

------
rosstex
Sweet jesus that's a lot of people! I'm having trouble wrapping my head around
that many people being fired.

~~~
mrweasel
I'm surprised that they have 14,000 working at Cisco. I know it's a big
company, but still.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Total workforce is around ~73000.

------
ashwinaj
I don't think any past or present employees are surprised by this. Cisco has
always been a volatile place to work (at least since the dot com bubble) where
these layoff rumors start every 4-6 months; and more often than not they do
occur.

This kind of uncertainty is unsettling to any employee (good and bad
performers). It's prudent for existing employees to look for employment
elsewhere since this uncertainty has been going on for over a decade now. If
that means gaining additional skills, networking (no pun intended) etc. so be
it.

------
pnw_hazor
Wonder what this shift to SDN will mean for F5? It seems like you still need
fast edge devices to get to the SDN of the cloud.

~~~
unethical_ban
Downvoted and can't undo on mobile.

I will say that I wish F5 were less of a substitute for reliable applications
where I work. If we had gold, horizontally scalable apps we wouldn't need to
Bork with routing so much.

------
chucky_z
Interesting. I live in the south bay right next to the Cisco campus, and the
amount of new employees they are hiring is staggering. I wonder how many of
the 14,000 are being rehired as a contractor or something?

~~~
Noseshine
Oh my god you are probably right, at least according to their jobs website
[0]. There are plenty of jobs posted, I looked at a few job categories and
there are pages over pages of openings in their database. Not 14,000 though,
it seems like maybe 3,000 at most. Still _a lot_ for a company with such a
headline.

[0] [https://jobs.cisco.com/](https://jobs.cisco.com/)

~~~
SinomaSo
Some companies tend to post jobs they don't have, to be able to show that they
are productive and investing in resources. The reality is they just want to
show competition/shareholders that they are hiring a lot of people and
investing in new markets. Most of those jobs will be re-posted again and again
as they are never filled. Some other nasty companies put jobs online as a trap
to interview competition exec/directors and know more about their strategy,
then they never hire them. Welcome to the world of greed.

~~~
geodel
I concur. I have seen at places where I work that even with complete hiring
freeze there are open positions posted on job portal. And as you said at
higher level it must be to glean information.

------
ag_47
According to the CRN article [1], "The networking leader has a history of
announcing layoffs at the end of its fiscal year each summer."

Yes this is a huge number, but seems like usual practice for Cisco.

[1] [http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300081750/sources-
massive...](http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300081750/sources-massive-
layoffs-coming-at-cisco.htm)

------
aestetix
Will be interested to see if this is followed by Cisco applying for 14,000 H1B
visas.

~~~
kbart
Cisco has offices all over the world, I doubt hey are particularly interested
in H1B visas.

~~~
zhte415
I understood the largest H1B users were companies such as Infosys, TCS and
Wipro, companies whose core business developed as offshore/outsourcing
locations.

------
vkat
I work here and this is a surprise to me, company seems to be doing well there
has been considerable hiring in my organization in the past few months so I am
not sure why 20% of the employees are being laid off.

~~~
bpodgursky
It's often easier to fire under performing employees en masse for legal
reasons. Fire one and they can claim discrimination etc. Be part of a layoff
and there's not much argument.

If it's just 20℅ it could just be cleaning out the ranks while continuing
hiring.

------
dreaminvm
The reported number from Cisco is 5500 (7%) per
[http://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-announces-plans-to-
cut-5-5...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-announces-plans-to-
cut-5-500-workers-1471465487).

The 7% number is more of a norm for Cisco at the end of each fiscal year. I
wonder why the big gap between the Reuters source and Cisco's own reports.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Reuters (and everyone else) aped it from CRN.

------
philip1209
I'm curious about which business units this affects most. I expect it to
affect hardware development as the company increases its focus on security.

~~~
arbuge
Why would hardware development not be important to security?

~~~
philip1209
Long story short: I think that, in the next year, we will see a marked shift
toward subscription pricing. Amazon pushing subscriptions. Dollar shave club
for X. Same for Cisco - getting recurring revenue through security/SDN/SaaS
subscriptions rather than one-time hardware sales seems to be a safer long-
term bet.

~~~
fensterblick
It's already happening. Several examples come to mind, but for now I'll use
one that is relevant to Cisco: Palo Alto Networks offers several subscription
based services for its security/networking hardware.

~~~
unethical_ban
IPS and URL filtering have always been a subscription model though.

------
kirankn
Cisco is a very hierarchical company. Every time there is a shake up, most
people affected are not generally bad performers but those who fall under
spineless Directors/VPs. Also, Cisco generally starts hiring right away.. So,
in effect nothing changes drastically. You still have long hierarchies and the
drab environment. The same set of names at the top level get reassigned or
regrouped and nothing major changes. I feel that it's a company going down,
though it will be a very slow process (perhaps a decade more) before it
becomes insignificant in the tech field. (mainly because of the money they
have in the banks/overseas). It's very difficult to expect the company to
transform itself unless it lets other people grow and not feed suck-ups.

------
lowmagnet
I interviewed with them a half-year year ago and I didn't get the position
because of a "hiring freeze" in the department.

This is the third major "dodge" of my career and I feel somewhat lucky to miss
out on opportunities before they cause potential harm.

------
sengork
If anything this shift to software based networking is a reflection the
Intel's CPUs have reached the 'fast enough' mark.

Here are some of the relevant articles for those who may not be in the
datacentre loop:

NFV
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_function_virtualizatio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_function_virtualization)

SDN [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-
defined_networking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_networking)

Regardless there is still place for time-critical network segments where
you'll find the likes of QNX.

~~~
fastball
Yup. For most use cases, SDN is now good enough that you don't need
premium/bespoke hardware solutions, commodity hardware works just as well.

And for the segment of the market where SDN isn't yet good enough (HFT, for
instance), there are a lot of players in the field.

See this article that was on HN recently about one of Cisco's competitors,
that seems to be making more performant switches than Cisco.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602135/high-frequency-
tra...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602135/high-frequency-trading-is-
nearing-the-ultimate-speed-limit/)

------
Hydraulix989
It's scary seeing all of these lay-offs happening. I'd hate to be looking for
a software engineering job right now.

~~~
ryandrake
If you listen to tech CEOs, there's this huge "shortage of software
engineers". Surely any former Cisco employee with software experience will be
snapped up within days by all these tech companies desperately searching for
tech talent.... Any day now....

~~~
jdale27
_If you listen to tech CEOs, there 's this huge "shortage of software
engineers"._

There is no shortage of software engineers. What there is, in the eyes of
those CEOs, is a shortage of H1-B visas -- i.e., cheap labor from abroad with
low mobility. Of course, the alternative is to invest in training citizens and
permanent residents, who will then go and get higher-paying jobs elsewhere. So
the myth of the software engineer shortage lives on...

~~~
conqrr
Low mobility? Immigrants on H1-B can change employers.

~~~
dmix
I can assure you most H1-B employees would be scared to mess with a good
thing. Unless they are well experienced with H1-B or their job offer is
quality w/ promises of an immigration lawyer taking care of it.

~~~
Hydraulix989
Yes, several of my friends are "stuck" working for big companies that people
on HN wouldn't want to work for until they get their green cards.

------
alex-
Looks like the number is 5500 - 7%
[http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/08/17/cisco-report-
lay...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/08/17/cisco-report-
layoff-14000-employees/)

------
williamscales
I think hardware will take a hit for sure. Cisco will consolidate development
around software defined networking hardware and then charge a yearly
subscription fee to use its network OS.

------
user5994461
Meanwhile in "HN: Who is Hiring (August 2016)"[1]

> Cisco Meraki | San Francisco & London | Full-Time ONSITE

> ...

I have the feeling that company is sending mixed signals.

Well, on the bright side that can explain why they don't reply =)

\---

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222620)

------
rosege
This link seems relevant [https://klmlinks.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/fucked-by-
the-clou...](https://klmlinks.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/fucked-by-the-cloud/)

------
sp527
Reading some of these comments has reminded me just how much I no longer have
to really think about in full-stack engineering, because it's been so
successfully abstracted away. It's like reading an abridged version of the
history of technology growth.

------
codeisawesome
This is Cisco admitting defeat to commodity manufacturers. I wonder if there
is a massive skilled worker crunch on the other side of the world from which
the commodity manufacturers operate (despite the huge population).

~~~
bogomipz
Is it? Because I guarantee if you go look at the Akamis, and Level 3's, really
any large scale CDN or Telecom network you will find that is majority Cisco
and Juniper. Aside from a handful or very large companies like FB and Google
that have the expertise to build their own, you won't find a lot of commodity
hardware running the datacenter.

------
bogomipz
The actual number being reported now is 5500, significantly less that 14K.

------
didip
I kept hearing that code quality at Cisco is poor, so perhaps this is an
opportunity to clean house and pivot?

Not all layoffs are bad, and the good engineers most likely jumped ship
already.

------
anders098
The root cause is: this is capitalism. "Capitalist production, therefore,
develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a
social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and
the labourer.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)"

------
coroutines
I was just yesterday called to schedule an interview... >.>

~~~
0xmohit
Ah, hiring before the formal firing. Efficient.

------
squozzer
Huh. My CareerBuilder feed has a lot of Cisco reqs today.

------
MichaelMoser123
don't they typically do these thing before the end of a quarter? Now is the
beginning of a quarter - so why should they do the layoffs now ?

------
Kinnard
I thought they were ramping up for IoT.

------
tmaly
software is eating the world in one regard.

but industries like Cisco and Intel are very cyclical.

------
known
"China is now low-cost, high-quality" \--Jack Ma

------
reactima
Cisco is losing the ground to Huawei, ZTE

------
carsongross
Winter is coming.

~~~
starving_coder
And its going to get lot worse without company subsidized health insurance.

~~~
karma_vaccum123
In fairness, Cisco has offered excellent severance in the past...but then
again, they've never done layoffs on this scale

~~~
signa11
> they've never done layoffs on this scale

in 2k1, if memory serves right, they laid off approx. 10k folks. i would
guess, in percentage terms (given at least 10% less employees), it might be
similar though...

------
beedogs
Anything to keep the all-important stock price up. Capitalism is wonderful,
isn't it?

~~~
blahi
Yeah, let's keep 14,000 people who we don't need because communism turned out
great.

------
yeukhon
70,000 employees is way too big. Not know much about how Cisco runs its
business, half of it must be sales, business and enterprise solution
consultants.

~~~
manarth
According to this 2009 document[1], they're 30% engineering, 27% sales, 43%
business support functions.

[1]
[http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac227/csr2009/pdfs/CS...](http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac227/csr2009/pdfs/CSR_09_Employees_Demographics.pdf)

