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?
This news suggests that those apprehensions were not unfounded.
I'm fine interviewing people but interviewing people within the same company where if they don't pass your interview they're going to be laid off? Obviously it's far worse for them but it's a shitty situation all around.
Did the company actually decided to keep/lay the employees individually based on your feedback from the interview? Or were the destiny already decided beforehand and the interviews were just some acting?
A bit of a mix of the two. Essentially you were "soft laid off" if your project ended and your group didn't immediately have another project to put you on so you could apply to work at another group within CSC. If your interviews went well (and they all did interviews differently to the point where some groups did zero interviews and some, likes ours, treated them as a new hire (we were an acquisition so we didn't think they'd have the same quality as us)) then you would stay employed and just work at another group. If the interview(s) didn't go well then you were eventually laid off.
I never went through this process beyond the interview side of things but it was explained to us multiple times. The crazy thing is CSC, at the time, was so large (over 97k employees) that it wouldn't surprise me if each of the larger groups did this even differently. This was just my experience.
To add some context we were part of a larger group at CSC that handles government contracts and you essentially only make money when you fully staff a contract so many folks in the industry referred to them as "butts-in-seats" contracting so it's not entirely surprising.