Cisco to layoff 6,500 employees
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
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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?
It is excessive and it isn't typically done at Cisco. I'll speak to the engineering organization since that's what I know (reminder: Cisco is not organized by product at the top level, they are organized by function: engineer, sales, etc). A typical senior manager will have approximately 30 people under them: 3-4 managers with 7-10 employees each. A Directory rolls up 3-4 managers, a Senior Director 3-4 Directors, and a VP 5-10 Directors and Sr. Directors. A VP would typically have several hundred employees under them.
Cisco is actually quite regimented about how it does this. Part of the yearly evaluation is (or was, when I was there ~ 3 years ago, not sure if it is still done this way) essentially "does this personal manage enough people to warrant their title". They will make exceptions and won't punish you explicitly if you don't, but it will be harder to compete for bonus and promotion dollars. They typically like for you to be managing beyond your level in terms of people before being promoted.
Internally, Cisco has serious Apple envy. They desperately wanted to be seen as a cutting edge consumer company, to the point of hiring some well known former Apple UX designers. They entered markets where they had no business being (Flip) and starved their core business units (can you believe the guys who build the work group Catalyst switches could almost NEVER hire anyone because of budget) to pay for it.
I can't really comment on their enterprise products, but I have heard rumblings that their partner programs have been getting worse and worse, leading VARs and re-sellers to seek better margins from HP and the like.
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.
Since this recruiting is primarily for new customers, I would guess that Juniper is doing quite well competing against Cisco.
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.
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.
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.
Anecdote: I know quite a few engineers who were laid off as part of a product reorganization (read: engineering for this product moved to India). At a minimum everyone received 6 months. On the high end, if you were asked to stay and help in the transition, you received 6-9 months plus 1.5x salary during the transition, which lasted approximately 4-6 months if I recall.