Cisco Exec: Turnover In Engineering No Problem 148
alphadogg (971356) writes The engineering reorganization currently underway at network giant Cisco Systems is intended to streamline product development and delivery to customers. That it is prompting some high profile departures is an expected byproduct of any realignment of this size, which affects 25,000 employees, says Cisco Executive Vice President Pankaj Patel, who is conducting the transformation. "People leave for personal business reasons," Patel said in an interview with Network World this week. "Similar transformations" among Cisco peers and customers "see personnel change of 30% to 50%."
we need the freshest talent! (Score:5, Insightful)
No old people, they have too much experience! We need to do things fast and poorly! So we can sell total crap to complete idiots!
Re:we need the freshest talent! (Score:5, Funny)
We don't need a better America if we can just improve America's approval rating. Fire the engineers and hire more marketing.
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Cisco doesn't need to streamline product development, they need to streamline product lines.
They also need to stop hiring Indian engineers...not that they're all stupid, but many of them have some really bad cultural traits when it comes to product design, support and business.
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They also need to stop hiring Indian engineers...not that they're all stupid, but many of them have some really bad cultural traits when it comes to product design, support and business.
Well, with a Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer named Pankaj Patel, a Senior Vice President and General Manager named Ravikrishna Cherukuri, and a Senior Vice President and General Manager named Ravi Chandrasekaran, I don't think they will stop hiring them.
I wish I knew the nationalities of the people that are leaving, and the nationalities of the new hires. I wonder if Americans are being replaced with non-Americans. I'm not saying that's happening - just wondering.
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You should have no trouble getting a job that requires 5 years of Swift experience or 25 years of Java experience then.
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Well, I was one of the (older) American engineers let go in this most recent layoff (of more to come, I am afraid). The development group I was a part of had multiple layoffs (older white engineers) and the future product we were developing has been transferred to India for further development. I don't think this will be the last time this is done ...
Cisco is transforming it's development organizations from a product centric BU approach, with combined marketing/software/hardware development, to a more centr
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As opposed to selling volumes of old crap that still doesn't do basic features becuase you need to speak *every single version * of IOS fluently to figure out what the old configurations were.
Been there done that. And have you noticed that, at its core, Cisco ASA's are actually a rebuilt CentOS? I took apart the installation tool a few years ago because it demanded a single disk image of over 200 GB, when a little rewrite allowed the OS to be one quite small disk image and the scattered, voluminous log loca
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can tell you from a company that continually recycles their talent that after a while, watching the talent go out the door and having new blood learn how to fix old problems all over again gets really old. A company that treats their engineers like second hand citizens is a company that I won't invest in. They won't have a future.
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, it's not the deadwood that leaves.
Re: Engineers have no future. (Score:2, Funny)
"... deadwood that leaves ..."
Aha! I see what you did there.
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Quote from a tv show?
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Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly I see my share of managers who do get the idea that people can be swapped in and out at no cost. Needless to say their teams are not the high performers.
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Exactly so. And there's also this to consider:
Historically, there were two major changes in how people worked, in order to greatly increase productivity. The first was the transition from everybody-must-be-a-generalist (e.g. any subsistence culture) to specialization and trade in goods and services made or performed by experts. The second was industrialization. In the industrial society, most people are not experts at anything, but their work consists of doing one very small task repetitively.
In the tec
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But you also need experts in defining what routines need to be coded and how they are supposed to interact to achieve big picture goals, and you need creative people to define what big picture goals should be and decide which are most worth pursuing. Those people are hard to develop and hard to replace.
They get even harder to develop and replace when no one wants to invest in the development of such people. They generally don't just pop in fresh from a 4 year program.
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They get even harder to develop and replace when no one wants to invest in the development of such people.
When I worked at Cisco for nine months on contract, my boss explained to me that he couldn't train me since I'll get certified, leave Cisco and make more money elsewhere. Never mind that a lack of training caused many employees to train themselves, get certified and leave Cisco to make money elsewhere anyway.
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's that tipping point when the work gets harder, the code is even more rotted, the "process" is even more constricting, because they know something is wrong but they need to "measure" everything to figure out why. That's when people are running, not walking out the door.
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." - Red Adair
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And given in the field of "Hell Fighter" he basically INVENTED large chunks of the tools and protocols he knoweth of what he speaks.
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:4)
Saturday afternoon mini-matinee [utexas.edu]
Re:Engineers have no future. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure how many employees Cisco has left (didn't RTFA), but a quick glance at Wikipedia indicates that they still probably have more than 50K employees. Of course not all of them are engineers, but I have worked in organizations of that size before. If my experience is common (and I believe it is), they have already gone well pas the point you indicate. Even if they only have 5,000 engineers, it is practically impossible to hire anywhere near that many good people. You are stuffed to the rafters with dead wood. Not only that, but quite a lot of that dead wood will have made it up to management level -- the engineering and political skill sets are orthogonal, and people who are good at politics get promoted.
This means that the management probably has absolutely no idea how to separate the good engineers from the bad. In other words, just by growing the company to the size that they have, they are in a position where they can't evaluate talent. A 30-50% turnover rate is another way of saying 2-3 year attrition rate. I agree with the manager. This is common in large companies. Because they are unable to distinguish good from bad, they simply cycle through the available talent in a random fashion. They have chosen to go with quantity over quality and his statement makes absolute sense.
I don't think it is possible to do (for a variety of political reasons), but lets pretend that a company of 5000 engineers could cut back to their top 10% of talant. You'd end up with a solid core of 500 good engineers. Then, let's pretend that you knew how to do whatever it took to keep that talent for 10 year. Would the company be better off? I'm not so sure. I work in a former start up that is trying to scale itself up now. Since I'm fairly senior (possibly indicating I'm better at politics than engineering??? ;-) ) I'm exposed to more of the business end of the company. The CEO is demanding that we double our development group. He knows that this will throw the group into chaos, but he also sees a way to grow the revenue of the company by an order of magnitude if we can do some very specific work. Crucially, it doesn't really matter how badly we do it. It just needs to mostly work.
Which is better? Grow your revenue by an order of magnitude today and destroy your development team, or carefully grow your development team and trust that opportunities will show up when the team is able to handle them? It's a very difficult call. Personally, I can't fault companies who expand quickly (like Cisco did) and who take the opportunities that were presented. That's what the business guys are paid to do.
Luckily, the company I work for is wholly owned by the CEO and he has decided (for now anyway) to adopt a more sustainable growth for the company. Again, I am very lucky that our CEO views our team as being the engine of the company and values long term viability. He doesn't have investors trying to take their money out and has the ability to make the choice that leads to a very good place for me to work. Not every company has that luxury.
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a 30-50 percent turnover rate is not sign a of a healthy company, normally companies that are doing that, had a massive downsizing and got rid of the wrong people. You don't lose half your companies employees if things are going well. I expect that hiring is way up at their Indian and Chinese design centers considering who they have in charge of their Engineering team.
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Even if they only have 5,000 engineers, it is practically impossible to hire anywhere near that many good people.
1: Cisco didn't hire all the people who work for them. They made acquisitions.
2: How many good engineers do you think there are in the world, and how many of them do you believe is it feasible for Cisco to have hired? Because I'm suspecting a massive dose of arrogance on your part, here.
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Which is better? Grow your revenue by an order of magnitude today and destroy your development team, or carefully grow your development team and trust that opportunities will show up when the team is able to handle them? It's a very difficult call. Personally, I can't fault companies who expand quickly (like Cisco did) and who take the opportunities that were presented. That's what the business guys are paid to do.
Hey, it worked out great for NORTEL.
(or at least for the stockholders who managed to sell out before they went bankrupt)
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I'll fill you in on some details. Since I worked (past tense) at Cisco, before they cut me, they had cut about 30% of the people I knew working for them. I was cut about two years ago. Since then, they've cut another 30% or more.
People aren't leaving Cisco for personal reasons. They are leaving because Cisco is offering them packages to leave, and if you don't take the package, you get to leave without it.
Considering that this "Cisco" manager seems oblivious to that basic fact, I doubt that anything el
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(Hey, someone has to put a MS spin on every story - now can I get a prize?)
Netcraft confims, you win a Beowulf cluster of internets.
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He's pretty much required to downplay it, otherwise they would have to honestly state in their 10-K that turnover would affect future profits.
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Agreed. A manager who says that turnover is not a problem is a manager that has no inkling of what engineers do, what exactly their company produces, or how badly they are in trouble when knowledge and experience walk out the door. Either that, or they're lying to your face.
There's that tipping point when the work gets harder, the code is even more rotted, the "process" is even more constricting, because they know something is wrong but they need to "measure" everything to figure out why. That's when people are running, not walking out the door.
Oh god, the "metrics" thing. They did that at my last job, to the point it got ridiculous because you spent more time trying to update the 10 different 'tracking systems' than you did doing actual work. It even got to the point where to take a vacation day you had to update the group sharepoint calendar, plus two other systems, plus send email on it to 3 different people (any one of which could reject the request for whatever reason). It got to the point where I was *glad* when they laid me off because t
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Just today, I sat in on a lecture that basically said, engineers can expect about 2 years of work and then be put on the chopping block.
Did the lecturer say anything about jobs that require 5 years experience in order to be hired?
All the good talent leaves. (Score:1)
Anyone who can get another job elsewhere leaves. Anyone who is really good gets head hunted or starts their own business. What are you left with?
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Anyone who can get another job elsewhere leaves. Anyone who is really good gets head hunted or starts their own business. What are you left with?
You?
Might as well be a startup (Score:2)
You guys (Score:5, Interesting)
I may just be interpretting this discussion different than everyone else here, but assuming every developer is happy with company, and company decides to implement a new development philosophy or production model (for strategic / financial / etc..) reasons, wouldn't it be sensible and actually expected that a non-trivial number of developers won't be happy with said changes?
For example, If my company went from Dev and IT groups to merging them into devops, some people are going to be rocking the idea, and a shit ton may be unhappy about the change and decide to move on. DevOps isn't any more or any less better for an employee, but it means a different set of tasks for that developer to live in. Maybe this change will significantly improve workplace productivity and the change isn't only merited, but essential for the company's survival. Same with, say dropping support for Windows/Linux/Mac/etcc OS's and just supporting a smaller set of OS's. Some would say there are valid reasons to adopt the standard (less IT burdens), and others who use said dropped OS's will be more willing to leave.
To assume that the company simply doesn't care about its developers walking out is a little bit of an overstatement. Many won't like a change (regardless of what it is), and if you're going to leave, you might as well leave when you perceive a negative change in your job.
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DevOps isn't any more or any less better for an employee, but it means a different set of tasks for that developer to live in.
Well, here's a statement that's even more better, a different set of tasks will be better or worse (or more better, or less better) for a given employee.
Personal and business reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal and business reasons are actually opposite. These people are being fired.
The essence of enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.
It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.
What this means is that all and any employees must (and this is essential) be plug-replaceable as a matter of policy. Those that aren't should either be unique individuals like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the actual owners of the company, or leaving.
That is one of the drivers (not the only one of course) behind the desire for standardisation of work procedures and documentation of ideas and knowledge.
The result of careful execution of such policy is a situation in which personnel really is replaceable. Even when it concerns 10%-30% of the employees. Which is what we are now seeing illustrated at Cisco.
So there's no need to be surprised. And no need to be disgruntled. It's simply the consequence of a certain feature of our society we collectively decided we want and actively maintain. And it has truly served us well for the past century and a half and its end-result is the envy of our neigbours.
Unfortunately the current economic tide makes the downsides (for such they are) of this state of affairs more visible: i.e. employees are just another commodity and any successful enterprise will treat them as such. . As a result, employees can get a rough deal (if they get any deal at all, i.e. if they are employed). Let's be clear about this: I don't know how to make those downsides go away without wrecking the competitiveness of enterprises. But I suspect it will involve a realignment in the balance of power between labour and capital.
One way of achieving this is through the use of force. Also known as "legislation". Fortunately we have a mechanism in place for effecting change. It's called Politics. But what actual policy should be enacted through Politics? If knew (and could prove it) I'd tell you, but I don't.
One of the problems is the constraints imposed on all of us through competition. I.e. if the policy we adopt is too disadvantagous for enterprises, they will simply take their capital, set up shop elsewhere, and drive the disadvantaged enterprises off the market.
So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.
Re:The essence of enterprise (Score:4, Interesting)
...the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component...
Mr. Patel was misquoted in the header, FTA he did not explicitly say "Turnover in Engineering No Problem", but let's assume he did say so in so many words. He is about 33% correct, all engineers are replaceable, and that is the main reason good engineers always document their work. But the question that is often ignored by business school 101-types is how much money and time does it take to replace a competent engineer? Can your enterprise afford the Project disruption and late time-to-market? Will your development still be relevant by the time it finally launches?
You argue that "capital" and "labor" are essentially equal to the identity of an enterprise. In a lot of enterprises that may be true, where either the labor is totally unskilled (light-bulb turners) and requires no training, or the labor is "certified and trained" and perform a set of narrowly-defined tasks, e.g. truck drivers, shipping, railroad engineers, airline pilots, etc. In product development, this ideal model breaks down. Engineering has no standardised training, and every situation or development situation is a unique learning experience, both for the enterprise and for the labor. That's why we have "project management" and development in the first place. History is full of examples of enterprises that made the mistake of treating their engineers as fungible, interchangeable assets. Products started coming out "a day late and a dollar short". Eventually they reorganised, split, made a splash with some big announcements and then disappeared.
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I really didn't: when I said "bundle" I left the relative proportions unspecified. But I agree with you in that the relative importance of people's identity varies sharply with the scarcity of people's skills and that depends on the setting.
We agree that in a environment where people do routine work, so many people share the required skill that identity of who provides this skill no longer matters. And that's wh
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We agree that in a environment where people do routine work, so many people share the required skill that identity of who provides this skill no longer matters. And that's where vast majority of the working population is employed.
You seem to completely ignore the value of institutional knowledge.
Maybe in your world, everything is documented, but everywhere else, knowledge of certain critical business processes is only retained in the memory of a few employees.
Slashdot even had a nice conversation about it a few years ago
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/12/04/1742211/institutional-memory-and-reverse-smuggling [slashdot.org]
Re:The essence of enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems grossly oversimplified. Like most things with humans, it isn't a dichotomy of 'exceptional' and 'ordinary'. Every worker usually has some amount of 'exceptional', and some amount that aligns with what you need them to do, and that amount might be more or less than others performing the same role. And engineering (which is encapsulated by the 'techie' group of Slashdot readers), a field where insight, clarity, work ethic, intelligence, and lateral thinking are major factors of job performance, that 'individual skills' factor matters at least as much as it does with scientists and inventors. Your posts indicate that you might fall into the category of people, as pointed out elsewhere, who don't actually understand what engineers do and instead confuse them with technicians.
Overall an excellent post-- too bad you posted anon so fewer will see it (I don't have mod points).
To expand on the quoted section-- good management of technical people is finding the areas where people are exceptional and putting them into positions where you can best use those skills, and avoiding forcing them into areas where they aren't particularly special or interested interested in becoming so (which will make them unexceptional).
I should also point out that there's a very fuzzy line between "engineer", "scientist", and "inventor" (which you sort of imply, but I'll come out and say it). A very substantial part of many science fields is engineering to make the observation that you're trying to make. And anybody can "invent" something that they need, but it usually takes a bunch of engineering to implement it, much of which gets done by the inventor. Even on a small scale, a significant fraction of engineers have to "invent" things on a small scale on a regular basis.
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In my experience, depending on the position, it takes 2 to 6 months to replace a competent engineer. (Incompetents can be replaced in a week.)
Considering that the AVERAGE engineer's value to the organization necessarily exceeds the cost of employing him, which is something like 150% of salary, that means each engineer you lose (that you didn't intend to lay off), costs 3 to 9 months of an average engineer's salary AT MINIMUM. I'd estimate that the average engineer is worth 3 times his total compensation,
Re:The essence of enterprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The insane idea that humanity exist to service corporations is, well, insane. Our society exists to service and support us, it has been corrupted by psychopaths to allow them to exploit us to service and support themselves only. The idea that competition is the ideal management solution is a direct measure of that insanity, real fairies at the bottom of the garden stuff. Competition as the solution means failure as a solution. That's was competition versus cooperation is about, competition is about using failure as a normal everyday occurrence and cooperation is about avoiding failure.
Examples of competition in business. Health insurance where people who paid premiums and when they need them the company fails after feeding huge amount of cash in management pockets now have no coverage. In schools it means failed schools put their students through a year of education for nothing, which now has to be repeated. Hospitals where patients suffer and die until they are shut down. Prison where recidivism is a desirable corporate objective, have to keep those prisoners coming back, until the governments that fund them finally shut them down as failures.
Competition is not a sound management principle, it is a psychopathic management principle because it is driven by failure. Even winning companies can still be bought out and mismanaged directly into failure, in fact it is historically inevitable.
Re:The essence of enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
Competition is not a sound management principle, it is a psychopathic management principle because it is driven by failure
Competition from competare, which I am probably misspelling, everyone running together to go faster. Competition is a sound management principle, but only if the penalties for failure do not include incarceration and death. And the risk of that goes way up if you fail in the corporate reality and become homeless. Then you get stigmatized, and society can do anything it likes to you. Ironically, only Utah seems to be figuring out a compassionate solution.
Competition helps us achieve more and helps us decide on the best solutions. But when you combine it with an artificial scarcity society (which is rapidly leading us down the path to a real one) then it becomes fear-driven, rather than the desire to excel, and fear makes us make poor and short-sighted decisions.
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Again you adhere to the fantasy that competition only has winners, the PR=B$ marketing delusion, competition inherently means there must be losers, lots and lots of losers, in fact far more losers than winners and losers as the majority represent a system of continual failure, failure as the majority element of a psychopathic society based upon competition rather than cooperation. So pushing the bullshit of competition with only winners and you never have losers ie repeated failure, just like the standard
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competition inherently means there must be losers, lots and lots of losers
Competition rewards hard work and innovation. The "losers" learn from the "winners" and everyone ends up better off. In your idealized model of "cooperation" there is no way to know what works best and what is worst: you have nothing to compare against and no motivation to become better.
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... there is no way to know what works best and what is worst: you have nothing to compare against and no motivation to become better.
You haven't heard of metrics other than dollars?
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Competition rewards hard work and innovation. The "losers" learn from the "winners" and everyone ends up better off. In your idealized model of "cooperation" there is no way to know what works best and what is worst: you have nothing to compare against and no motivation to become better.
It also rewards lying, cheating, and fraud, which have all increased in science as the competitive pressure (for positions and funding) to publish large volumes of high-impact research in short times has increased.
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You are just repeating the same stupidity over and over again, as if that idiot right ideology actually means something. Competition just creates failure in the majority, the winners keep their secrets but it does not matter, inevitably as history has proven they 'ALL' in turn fail, so instead of cooperation you have repeated endless failure.
OHH AHH 'idealised' cooperation, how moronic can you be, without 'idealised' cooperation we would be naked animals screaming in the darkness, which is exactly what y
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Evolution is driven by competition. Evolution works in making life take advantage of every possible bit of resource in the world. Sadly, evolution also forces the losers to die out.
Cooperation is like the activity of an individual body. Cells cooperate with one another, because they all are on board with the program, they understand their place in it, and have an interest in making things work for everyone. It is easy to see that competition within a body is a body dying of cancer.
Is society a body, or is
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You do understand the difference between the evolution of a social species versus a species that survives alone. As a social species we evolve 'togethor' and go extinct 'togethor', it is psychopathic to 'write' down that we in any way do it alone. Psychopaths and narcissists only see themselves, it is the nature of their genetic defect, it is normal to see and fully appreciate we do it all together, just as I write and others read.
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Again you adhere to the fantasy that competition only has winners
Nonsense. I adhere to the fantasy that we could be convinced (as a society, species, etc.) to lower the penalty for failure by changing the rules of the game. The truth is that there will always be failure. It's part of attempting to succeed. Some fail, some succeed, some fail and then succeed, some succeed due to learning from the failure of others. That's going to happen. How we handle these situations is up to us.
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Competition in the workplace disincentivizes teamwork. Watch any one of those competive "reality" shows some time where all the prize money goes to one winner and see what competition does to people's behavior. They cooperate only insofar as it helps them toward winning and then turn on each other at the first opportunity. They'll work together to eliminate a person they think might beat them in the competition.
You do not want that behavior in the workplace. You want cooperation toward team objectives,
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Or it can be employed within a business between teams but only if there is no possibility of their influencing the other team's success, because you should want both teams to succeed.
What I want in this hypothetical scenario is to have the best possible product, and if there are two competing means of achieving the goal I might well choose to explore both of them. And the two ideas are competing, so no matter how much pretty language you dress the idea up in, the two teams will be competing. The important thing is to not see a lack of selection as failure, but as an exploration of an idea which didn't pan out but about which you now have more information. Either you'll have an idea of a
Re:The essence of enterprise (Score:4, Insightful)
The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.
Well, let's look at how important the identity of the capital component can be: it can make or break a company. Depending on the identity of known major investors, you can attract or repel other major investors. So clearly you have agreed that the identity behind the labor component is critically important.
It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.
No. The only reason that is the case is because of mindless chasing of the bottom line. In the real world, we know that while individuals can be replaced, no individual is a perfect replacement for another. Even identical twins have their own unique proclivities, and the rest of us are less identical than they except by astounding happenstance which you statistically cannot depend upon.
The truth is that companies change (and sometimes fail) based on loss of specific talent. You don't tend to see the results instananeously because the failures are gradual and accumulative. Eventually they become too great, and they topple the organization. When you lose specific talent, you lose knowledge you didn't even know you were depending on in most cases, and you lose business-enabling shortcuts in the organizational structure which can take in some cases years to build.
So it's up for debate really, and this isn't a new debate. It's a debate about a basic balance in our society that needs to be realigned from time to time.
Well, no. Everyone knows that shitting on employees and causing them to leave (or just firing them when they are necessary) produces inferior results. The actual problem is the chasing of short-term profit. A CEO can do something that they know will harm the company in the long term in order to produce a bump in profits in the short term, and moreover, their interchangeability means that they can do that and get away with it, come out looking like a winner to investors, and then move on and do it to another company. And this in turn is related to the modern idea that a corporation must serve the shareholders' every whim, but this is nonsense. The corporation must serve its charter, and shareholders who don't approve of that charter should invest elsewhere.
Of course, one way to stop this would be to institute better laws for protection of employees of absorbed corporations. That would make other corps less likely to cannibalize them, since their value in an acquisition falls sharply if you can't simply sack all the employees you don't like in short order.
A better way to stabilize society might be a COLA/MGI, which would eliminate people's need to go to work for corporations which should be allowed to fail anyway, either because they don't treat workers well or frankly for any other reason. Most corporations shouldn't exist, but in our modern make-work system we must preserve them so as to preserve jobs so as to preserve economic prosperity. Meanwhile, many are stacking up numbers in bank accounts which will remain untapped until their death. You can't take it with you, but you can deprive someone who needs it right now.
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Sounds like a good way to ensure mediocrity and low skill levels in your workforce. Successful companies value employees and try to keep them happy and developing, to get the best from them.
Car analogy: You can get a cheap, generic, replaceable Ford or you can get a high performance model that needs a little more maintenance and care. The Ford isn't going to win any races, but you can drive it into the ground and then dispose of it for an identical replacement any time you like.
HR idealism vs. the real world (Score:2)
Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs.
That's a horrible oversimplification, but let's take it as read for the purposes of this discussion.
It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.
What this means is that all and any employees must (and this is essential) be plug-replaceable as a matter of policy.
Unfortunately, if you adopt that policy, you have immediately and severely restricted your ability both to hire and retain the most effective staff and to build the most productive teams.
It is obvious that HR would love for employees to be plug-replaceable in such a way, and it is obvious why. However, the reality is that in a creative industry, and particularly in one related to technology, no two employees
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> Let me try to bring some perspective into the discussion. Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.
I'm afraid, sir or madam, that your very opening statements show exactly why engineers will disagree with the enti
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Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component. It is for this reason that any contemporary HR policy is aimed at (and this is important) divorcing the work from specific individuals.
Lest anyone misunderstand, We might as well try to crap gold bricks.
The problem is that the pluggable employee simply doesn't exist. And it never will for almost any position on the planet above the completely menial.
Where I worked, we had three employees with the exact same job description as my own, and they all had the appropriate education.
But through the situation, I had lots of other education due to a longer career. an ability to think fast on my feet, and willingness to do whatever it took to
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I don't know how to make those downsides go away without wrecking the competitiveness of enterprises. But I suspect it will involve a realignment in the balance of power between labour and capital.
One way of achieving this is through the use of force. Also known as "legislation". Fortunately we have a mechanism in place for effecting change. It's called Politics. But what actual policy should be enacted through Politics? If knew (and could prove it) I'd tell you, but I don't.
Good thing our political system doesn't also have a large power imbalance favoring capital!
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What this means is that all and any employees must (and this is essential) be plug-replaceable as a matter of policy.
Those that aren't should either be unique individuals like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, the actual owners of the company, or leaving.
Exactly, how else are you supposed to abuse people and crush debate if those people are actually needed and not easy to replace? Engineers are not plug replaceable, never will be and never really have been. Neither are good IT folks. And to suggest someone who's studied their craft their whole life should be "plug replaceable" while some exec whose daddy got him the gig due to family money shouldn't is laughable.
We are no easier to replace than a good exec. We have had to study just as long for our skil
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Whatsapp hired 14 engineers to make the company worth $19B. They were not 14 completely replaceable, run of the mill engineers, they were each unique and probably irreplaceable. The quality of those employees at that concentration, the fact they could be a small agile group, that was the reason they created so much value. If you want to create small predictable progress and run an enterprise with steady churn of cash, you might go the Cisco way, but you will never produce anything great or even just above a
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Lest somebody misunderstand, the very essence of an enterprise (any enterprise) is that it is a bundle of labour and capital whose essential structure and identity is independent of and more persistent than the labour it employs. The identity behind its labour component is no more important than the identity of its capital component.
Sigh. This is obviously false. The essence of any enterprise is the information that it encodes, its "DNA". The capital is like the energy that runs the organism. The labor is analogous to the cells, taking the information, and encoding it into products that are exchanged with the environment, and which allow the enterprise to function.
However, in high tech, the information is somewhat more difficult to encode than in, say, civil engineering, where everything they do is easily codified, and there is a long
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new employees, even with years and years of experience, will typically earn less than employees in the same job but with that many years of experience at that same employer
As a contractor, I found that to be the opposite. I ran into an old coworker while interviewing for a job during the summer. We compared notes. He still has the same job at the same company and making the same amount of money that I did from nine years ago. Since tech companies have an annoying habit of letting me got every so often, I held multiple contract jobs and made 80% more money than he did.
If you stay at the same company for a long period of time, you're accepting less than 5% raises every year. I
It's interesting what Cisco is becoming. (Score:5, Informative)
It's interesting what Cisco is becoming.
A decade, even half a decade, ago, Cisco was greatly admired for their ability to acquire without attrition. When a company acquired another company, you usually saw 10-12% attrition in the first 6 months, after the pay-for-stay for key personnel expired, and another 8-10% at the end of 12 months. That meant that between 18% and 22% of what you just bought had walked out your door in your first year.
Cisco's numbers were 2% and 5% for 6 and 12 months, respectively. Cisco knew how to do an "acquihire", and keep the talent that it bought the company for, and in acquisitions which weren't simply talent plays, it knew how to do that too.
It seems that this expertise has been lost along the way, or that in one of these annual "transformations", something broke. Either way, with the way they are acting like IBM Global Services these days, or perhaps the post acquisition EDA or post-divestiture Agilent, they are unlikely to be able to repeat their past successes in acquisition, since the trust has been lost.
Which is really a shame, since they were the envy of the entire tech industry for their capability in this regard, not just Silicon Valley. We used to have meetings at IBM about how we could possibly do what they did, with the numbers they got, and thus avoid killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Similar meeting took place at Apple, particularly prior to the acquisition of P.A. Semi (and much of the team deserted Apple for places like Google anyway, after the lockout handcuffs were removed so that the people who were there prior to the acquisition could cash out and skedaddle.
It's interesting what they are becoming, because it's not the old Cisco; it most resembles, if I had to pick a company and an era, the post Carly Fiorina H.P.; here's hoping it doesn't turn out the same for them, and that they can correct their course before the rudder falls off entirely.
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It's not as if Cisco's acquisitions have always been completely independent, though -- look at their connections to Insieme Networks for example -- so I'm not sure you're really comparing apples to apples with those figures.
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What a sad story. My friends at cisco talk about having to do more with less. People get layed off, but the work they did still needs to get done. So, more hours, more frantic checkins, less QA. In short, a dreadful mess. My last year there, I was required to be on call (unpaid) during a mandatory company wide 'furlough' over the Christmas holiday. They used to give us a paid week of holiday over Christmas/Newyears. At the end, I was, in effect, forced to give them a paid holiday instead.
I'm also glad I got
Cisco is completely dysfunctional (Score:3, Interesting)
My company is "partnered" with Cisco to develop networking equipment for smart infrastructure. Working with them is impossible, and they are completely dysfunctional as an organization. The result is that their product is total shit and doesn't work, and their attitude is that it's our job to make our product work with it, despite the fact that their stuff does not comply with published networking standards.
They've been riding on their brand's coat tails for far too long... Hopefully a Ubiquiti or someone like them will step up and fill the hole that Cisco is digging itself into.
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My company is "partnered" with Cisco to develop networking equipment for smart infrastructure. Working with them is impossible, and they are completely dysfunctional as an organization. The result is that their product is total shit and doesn't work, and their attitude is that it's our job to make our product work with it, despite the fact that their stuff does not comply with published networking standards.
They've been riding on their brand's coat tails for far too long... Hopefully a Ubiquiti or someone like them will step up and fill the hole that Cisco is digging itself into.
I hate this. Cisco used to be the innovators in the networking space. Now, they are stuck in the mud. Like IBM in the 90s.
My company (Score:1)
I started my company about 20 years ago on a simple principle. Only hire people that are worth keeping, and keep them.
I have never had anyone resign, and I have never laid anyone off - in 20 years.
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Goodness, are you hiring? I'm doing a lot of partnership consulting with environments that have good people that have been trying to fix things for years. We respect them profoundly for their input and do our best to make sure they get full credit. But there is sometimes political infighting to get the work done and they wind up as sacrificial lambs. I'd love to send some your way: I wish _I_ could hire them, but my team is pretty well staffed and we often have non-poaching agreements.
Cisco is just like the rest of them (Score:3, Interesting)
They announced several thousand job cuts at the same time that every job board today lists hundreds and hundreds of 'openings' but when you apply for them you get a response that the job doesn't exist. And tomorrow is the same thing, and so on. Cisco is a half-tarded company like all the rest that doesn't know from one minute to the next what it's doing and none of the stove pipe orgs know what the other stove pipes are up to. Long story short they're going to appease institutional investors by massively cutting the US workforce and moving it to Asia. Quality will suffer and no one will care. Any day now Cisco will turn into IBM which is little more than an investment fund that buys and sells other companies.
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>but when you apply for them you get a response that the job doesn't exist
Oh, dear. This is a quite old trick. It's even more fascinating when they say "we already have candidates", but when your colleague with a different age, gender, or citizenship applies with similar credentials at the same time their application is accepted for review. The classic example of this is tuning HR requirements to only hire H1B candidates, as shown at:
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There's also the practice of "resume collecting". HR knows they don't need any new bodies, but to justify THEIR jobs, they spend part of their time in the make-work process of keeping a pool of raw talent available. It's even worse for recruiting firms, who collect them so that they can brag to potential customers of how many workers they have access to.
And of course if there's a real job being offered, either by a company or another recruiting firm, many of the other recruiting firms will basically cl
Folks this is what happens with bad leadership (Score:5, Interesting)
Cisco was an innovative company that created huge market value. Now they're becoming "lean, agile" company with no real vision or future. They want to be "market focused" yet they're supposed to push the market to their view of technology and to create markets. When you lead from behind you certainly take on less risk but you sure don't create the profit margins and patent portfolio investors look for. Sell your shares now.
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They were suffering from price competition, and then Snowden exposed the NSA bugging their hardware. Now they are floundering.
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They've been floundering for years. They've gone through reorg after reorg. Their margins were eroded by other companies who came up with more competitive products. Their certifications are practically useless in all but the most die-hard Cisco shop and those are starting to go away as well.
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Snowden had nothing to do with it. You could Cisco was circling the toilet bowl years ago when their idea of innovation was to buy other companies and attempt to pound whatever they bought into whatever they had.
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> They were suffering from price competition
Not just price competition: they were also suffering profoundly from fraudulent Cisco hardware.
http://www.crn.com/news/networ... [crn.com]
Not only does it cost Cisco profits to lose the legitimate sale, but it costs them profoundly in customer support for the purchasers of fraudulent Cisco hardware. And Cisco support is a very large business cost to Cisco.
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all datacomm companies are in bed with the spooks. cisco is just like all the others, not special in that regard.
I joined cisco in the early days, back in the early 90's. I was there a short time, then left, and recently came back; so I see the new cisco and do remember the old 3 building cisco. they are not even close to the same company anymore.
I enjoy being there but its more about my group than the company. company wise, I see a lot of bad designs and bad decisions and a lot of young kids who have n
Cisco just "Jumped the shark" (Score:1)
Wow. Totally reminiscent of Digital in the late 1990s (and I did work for both Digital and Cisco).
The important thing is not to innovate, but to focus on V.next switches.
Cisco NEVER had any serious focus/commitment on security (I know - i worked for Okena, which was bought by Cisco, and then slowly killed over a couple of years). The corporate focus @ Cisco boils down to: If it isnt a bigger/faster router, it isn't interesting/relevant.
Wall St. already knows that Cisco is stagnant; this confession by Cisc
Chambers needs to go. (Score:1)
I've been working with Cisco gear since 1992 or so, and I've seen a continuous drive to crap. Once rock solid products are now feature- and bug- bloated, impregnable silos exist between the product lines, support simply sucks on both an account team and TAC level... and every time Chambers puts forth a quarterly report he doesn't seem to have anything good to say. (Mind you, I appreciate honesty, but sometimes as CEO you have to sell the company a little).
Perhaps if they spent a little more time preventi
Waste (Score:2)
Streamline product realignment? (Score:1)
In other words mass firings, the savings on the wages bill showing up in next years accounts as increased revenue. Followed by the company imploding in the following year. By which time the CEVPaCDO will have took his bonus and moved on elsewhere.
So Cisco is pursuing the vaporware market? (Score:2)
Instead of a handful of product managers, engineers and marketers working directly with those SVPs on a customer hardware/software solution, engineers are now split off into separate business units, making product development coordination more cumbersome and perhaps elongating development cycles.
from articles like NetworkWorld's Cisco reorgs trimming SVP ranks [networkworld.com].
Separating engineering from marketing's' "Yes, we can - and by tomorrow night, too!" is far and away the best primer for a vaporware pump.
But hey...corporate longevity is as nothing compared to the need to provide current senior executives and large shareholders with maximum returns; somebody else can part out the wreckage.