
Cisco to layoff 6,500 employees - thematt
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/18/technology/cisco_layoffs/?cnn=yes
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patio11
_Of the 6,500 employees being cut, Cisco expects 15% to come from the vice
president level and above._

...

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rednaught
Out of a current staff of 73,400. Even wildly assuming that is half of their
VP+, I've seen a lot worse ratios.

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yannickmahe
Quick math:

This means that about 975 VP or higher are being laid off. Assuming that you
are right about it being half their VP+, it means that one person in 37 is
(before layoffs) VP at Cisco.

I haven't work in such large firms, but it seems excessive to call VP someone
who is in charge of 30 people, no?

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roel_v
Doesn't Goldman Sachs have Vice Presidents who have no people reporting to
them? Back in the Golden Days I used to read about programmers, who actually
programmed all day, who were Vice Presidents. Of course they made several 100k
but still, they weren't in charge of anyone. (All of this IIRC)

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lrm242
A VP at a financial services firm is not a VP at Cisco or really any "non
financial services firm". Firms like Goldman hand out Assistant VP and VP to,
essentially, 3-5 year tenured employees. Directory and Managing Director are
where the rubber really meets the road in these organizations.

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rednaught
No longer is it verboten to mention Juniper and HP in the same breath as Cisco
when talking about quality networking equipment. Hopefully, Cisco can get back
on track and refocus on it's core networking products.

Interesting that they are letting go 6500. "6500" is their workhorse
networking device but has been in market for about a decade now and needs a
serious overhaul to be competitive again compared to Juniper's MX and the
Brocade XMR devices.

~~~
tom_b
I have a neighbor who manages Juniper support engineers. These engineers are
typically working onsite at Juniper customers. He has been almost constantly
recruiting new support engineers (who seem to either have CCIE certs or a
similar experience level) for probably 18 months.

Since this recruiting is primarily for new customers, I would guess that
Juniper is doing quite well competing against Cisco.

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Silhouette
I bought a bunch of Cisco "Small Office" series equipment recently. Some of
the items, particularly the NAS (NSS 300 series), have been very
disappointing.

More disappointing, though, is that there seems to be no simple way to get
meaningful support or contribute feedback afterwards. Half the canonical links
on their web site don't even work. They seem to have a whole bunch of forums
scattered around the site, but it looks like you can only participate after
jumping through all kinds of hoops that we just don't have time for.

You can't even download documentation on how essential features work. Obvious
example: If we're using encryption on our NAS, how does the key system work
and do we need to keep a back-up copy of anything like that in case one of the
disks in the RAID array fails? More subtle example: If there is this great
integration with Mozy to deal with off-site back-ups automatically, why can't
I even find out the prices and do basic due diligence about data security
before I sign up for the service, and why did the Mozy call centre staff
apparently not even know about the deal and the Mozy sales e-mail address not
even reply to a basic enquiry? Is there even anyone at Cisco we can talk to
about this?

Given that the only other reason to buy the Cisco version of the NAS rather
than the original model from QNAP seems to be the Cisco 5-year "support", and
the QNAP has had all sorts of enhancements and new functionality rolled out in
the intervening period while Cisco have done squat, it's all one-way traffic
in our office, and it's away from Cisco.

So I'm not surprised they're tightening up. If their other groups are
performing as poorly as their Small Business people, I imagine they're
suffering a rapid exodus of customers to organisations that understand the
meaning of the term "customer service" and realise that professionals working
with their kit have a job to do and don't like to waste time.

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roel_v
But aren't those all derivations of the Linksys products? I mean I loved
Linksys for home use, but they're hardly in the same class as the 'original'
Cisco products and quality (or at least as it was 10 years ago, I don't know
how they compare nowadays).

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Silhouette
No, I don't think so. The Linksys ones are a clear level down, now badged as
"Linksys by Cisco" or something similar. The "Small Business" ranges aren't
the kind of equipment home users would normally need, but should be plenty for
a small office. I'd point you to a link on the Cisco site so you could see the
sort of devices for yourself, but as I mentioned, they seem to keep moving
them around. :-(

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pan69
What happened on that one day where the graph drops so suddenly?

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paganel
This, apparently: <http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/09/technology/cisco/index.htm>
. I couldn't find any article from later that day, when the drop happened, but
it seems that in spite of "beaten expectations" the investors weren't that
happy with the 18% drop in profits.

Also, "temporary" URLs are so not cool. I had first tried to link to a Reuters
article which I had found via Google Finance and it just wasn't there anymore.
at least not where GFinance said it was supposed to be. And we're talking
about a web resource published online only ~6 months ago, not about some 1998
article documenting the ongoing dot-com bubble.

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georgieporgie
6,500 employees ... 15% to come from the vice president level and above ... up
to $1.3 billion in severance expenses ...

Wow. If I'm not mistaken, that's $195 million split up among an unknown number
of VPs (let's say, what, 50 of them?), leaving around $171k per remaining
employee.

Either those are very, _very_ nice severance packages, or there is some
tremendous overhead that I don't understand.

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zxwind
I think 15% means the number of employees to lay off, not the ratio of
severance expense.

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georgieporgie
You're right. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway, it still sounds like Cisco
has ridiculously good severance packages!

