Cisco Systems To Lay Off 14,000 Employees

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Lay offs are never good but lay offs of this size are even worse. At this point this is still a rumor but, if true, there is no denying that cutting your workforce by twenty percent is a pretty drastic measure. Thanks to cageymaru for the link.

Cisco Systems is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker's global workforce, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization.
 
Well, for what they charge for maintenance, it is no wonder that people are moving away from them.

And when they took over Linksys, Linksys products became even crappier than they were before.

We want good products at good prices. Somehow companies seem to think that we will buy whatever crap they shove in our faces.
 
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Notices are supposed to go out on thursday/friday after sales m.eetings today
 
I've got a few friends at WebEx. I hope they are going to be ok!
 
Ouch. I know a few folks in sales over at Cisco. I've been getting their LinkedIn profile updates show up on my feed.
 
I have managed to replace all my Cisco equipment with HP for my L3 and DLink for my 2+. They have nicer interfaces, better support staff, and the one time I had to warranty a product it was easy. Not to mention they are about half the price for 99.9% of the performance and up-time.
 
Well then! Think I should skip my CCNA? It was next up!

What does having your CCNA have to do with Cisco laying people off... unless you were going to go higher up the chain and work directly for Cisco as a CCNP or CCIE?
 
What does having your CCNA have to do with Cisco laying people off... unless you were going to go higher up the chain and work directly for Cisco as a CCNP or CCIE?

I believe he meant that the CCNA might not hold any weight or value in the IT field anymore if Cisco is laying off 20% of their workforce (ie. less market share and footprint among businesses meaning less demand for those who hold Cisco certification).

I'm not a Network Engineer, but the customer I'm with now is a Juniper shop and I hear the network guys complain about Juniper stuff crapping out all the time. Apparently they've been working with support on an issue for months and Juniper has no idea how to fix it.

My coworker who used to be a Network Engineer with HP said Cisco stuff is pricier but it runs rock solid and he's never had to RMA anything.
 
I believe he meant that the CCNA might not hold any weight or value in the IT field anymore if Cisco is laying off 20% of their workforce (ie. less market share and footprint among businesses meaning less demand for those who hold Cisco certification).

I'm not a Network Engineer, but the customer I'm with now is a Juniper shop and I hear the network guys complain about Juniper stuff crapping out all the time. Apparently they've been working with support on an issue for months and Juniper has no idea how to fix it.

My coworker who used to be a Network Engineer with HP said Cisco stuff is pricier but it runs rock solid and he's never had to RMA anything.

We used to have HP switches where I work until we needed more ports and went with Cisco switches.

A few months after we bought 4 switches, one of them decides to completely crap out. It was very good that I still had one of the HP switches as a backup and was able to swap everything over to it temporarily while we waited for the replacement Cisco switch to arrive.

The one that went bad basically started flaking out so I rebooted it and it never came back up. Could not even get to it through the console port. It literally completely died and would not even boot up far enough to do anything with it.

The other thing I really, really hate about Cisco is their absolutely horrible documentation. When you go to look up how to do something you haven't done before, a lot of times the documentation is wrong and I have to search and search to find out how to actually make it work. They don't update the documentation properly between iOS releases either. They will drop or rename commands so the ones in the documentation just throw errors when you try to use them.

When it works, it is pretty decent hardware, but when you need to learn how to do something or it has a problem, it is a huge massive pain.

Screw that. If I had my own shop, I would pretty much not even consider Cisco equipment.
 
Well then! Think I should skip my CCNA? It was next up!

Yeah, the technology/IT field isn't exactly the most desirable anymore. I'm 50 and have been in this crap for too long. I wouldn't recommend anything in IT to my worst enemy, well, maybe I would. lol.
 
Wal-Mart is hiring. Maybe those sales people can get jobs peddling iPads.

I think Belkin now owns/makes Linksys consumer gear.
 
Scary trend that keeps happening.

I actually predict a new market opportunity for companies to be formed just to unbreak the stuff that gets busted when entire tech departments get outsourced. India has a reputation as a hub of highly skilled tech workers, but it's complete marketing bullcrap if you actually look at their education standards and the quality rankings of their universities. A Ba over there is only a three year program with one of those being basics like English. The H1B visa program should be restricted to purely government needs such as researchers. Companies have shown over and over they can't use the system honestly.
 
Belkin has owned Linksys for a while now, Cisco sold Linksys off, a year or more back, can't remember the exact date.
 
Evidently Belkin acquired Linksys in March 2013. Was longer ago than I remembered.
 
i've been selling hardware for a long time now and honestly cisco takes a back seat in a lot of smaller organizations or those run by younger new IT guys who like what they hear from the meraki line (unless its enterprise level)

and if you're looking for jobs in IT the space you want to play in now is devops. if you know networking AND some programming you should be able to do very well in the future.
 
5500 layed off, not 14000. This is similar to what they've done in recent years, except last year when they didn't lay off anyone.
 
To think that these people were hiring at all of my school's job fairs for the last 3 years.

Same for Intel. Looking to hire and fire.

Glad i made the right choice.
 
It'll be your loss. Them laying off 14k ppl doesn't mean their physical footprint in the network ecospace will disappear overnight,

Ok, soooo, wtf, what I heard was; Cisco is laying of X (a butt ton) of employees and moving out of the hardware market into software only. Not true?

Meraki? F them. Can't stand this limitation...don't resub after 3 years? Your shit turns off. I've heard good things about the hw/ui, but the price - 700$ AP - and hardware that's all cloud based is not my cup of tea. I don't know how many salesman have offered me a free AP now, maybe 10?

No thanks.
 
And one that will keep happening until the news headline is "Major company fined 125 million for breaking H1B visa rules".

Where they will pay at least double that to keep it out of the presses...Or by hiring more lobbyists on Capital Hill.
 
Yeah, the technology/IT field isn't exactly the most desirable anymore. I'm 50 and have been in this crap for too long. I wouldn't recommend anything in IT to my worst enemy, well, maybe I would. lol.

Sarcasm or? IT in Healthcare at a minimum is one of the more stable professions. And well paid. That and anything that requires skill, erm like pipefitters etc. Ask the next 100 people you meet what DRP means. And not online.
 
I'm surprised no one else has brought this up, but a lot of this is attributed to the NSA fallout.

November 2013: Cisco announced two important things in today’s earnings report: The first is that the company is aggressively moving into the Internet of Things—the effort to connect just about every object on earth to the internet—by rolling out new technologies. The second is that Cisco has seen a huge drop-off in demand for its hardware in emerging markets, which the company blames on fears about the NSA using American hardware to spy on the rest of the world.

Nobody in the international market wants backdoored US technology. They've put their entire country's IT industry in jeopardy and now they're facing the repercussions for their placating to the NSA.
 
Sarcasm or? IT in Healthcare at a minimum is one of the more stable professions. And well paid. That and anything that requires skill, erm like pipefitters etc. Ask the next 100 people you meet what DRP means. And not online.

I've not worked in the healthcare field. I know all about HIPAA, but never heard of DRP. No, I didn't google it, I gave you an honest answer. "Dead Role Players"?

Ok, it's another fancy acronym for Supply chain management. I can't stand all of the acronyms.,
 
I've not worked in the healthcare field. I know all about HIPAA, but never heard of DRP. No, I didn't google it, I gave you an honest answer. "Dead Role Players"?

Ok, it's another fancy acronym for Supply chain management. I can't stand all of the acronyms.,

Disaster Recover Policy. I'm not a huge fan of acronyms either. What field of "IT" are you in?
 
i've been selling hardware for a long time now and honestly cisco takes a back seat in a lot of smaller organizations or those run by younger new IT guys who like what they hear from the meraki line (unless its enterprise level)

Huh? Cisco owns Meraki. As of last year I believe.

Yea, their web stuff for everything is dumb, we've crashed the servers from having too many devices trying to fetch things from them before.
 
Huh? Cisco owns Meraki. As of last year I believe.

Yea, their web stuff for everything is dumb, we've crashed the servers from having too many devices trying to fetch things from them before.

I know they own them. I'm saying a lot of customers who used to purchase "Cisco" branded gear, like an ASA for security, are now going with the Meraki MX firewall line because of ease of use and less complicated licensing schemes. Cisco is still making the money either way but it's funny having these almost redundant product lines. It's sort of like Dell buying EMC. They now have Dell branded storage, Compellent branded storage, and now EMC storage and they are going to have to completely re-brand everything to Dell Storage so it makes sense to their customers because right now it's a ridiculous amount of product overlap.
 
Ah, yea there is a ton of overlap in their products, especially when they purchase companies and continue their product lines.

One of the reasons they do these layoffs is they try to keep a similiar number of workers year to year, so if they do ~10-12 acquisitions a year and take on those employees, they cut employees from elsewhere that are semi redundant now to keep the numbers in check.
 
Here CCNA isn't really worth the paper it's printed on. Hell did it in highschool in early mid 2000s. Everyone has it and it means shit if you rely on it and some other 'see I went uni' piece of paper.
 
Here CCNA isn't really worth the paper it's printed on. Hell did it in highschool in early mid 2000s. Everyone has it and it means shit if you rely on it and some other 'see I went uni' piece of paper.
Well if you let it expire yea :p

It generally is not a good way into a job, because everyone has their R/S version, but it can help you make more money at said job .
 
Its a long downhill road for Cisco. It started like 10 years back if not longer. When Cisco still tried to sell subpair performance for way too much money. Not to mention their support fees.

Any Telco/ISP/backbone supplier worth its money is filled with Huawei, Juniper etc as their core gear.
 
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