Oh my god you are probably right, at least according to their jobs website [0]. There are plenty of jobs posted, I looked at a few job categories and there are pages over pages of openings in their database. Not 14,000 though, it seems like maybe 3,000 at most. Still a lot for a company with such a headline.

[0] https://jobs.cisco.com/

Some companies tend to post jobs they don't have, to be able to show that they are productive and investing in resources. The reality is they just want to show competition/shareholders that they are hiring a lot of people and investing in new markets. Most of those jobs will be re-posted again and again as they are never filled. Some other nasty companies put jobs online as a trap to interview competition exec/directors and know more about their strategy, then they never hire them. Welcome to the world of greed.

I concur. I have seen at places where I work that even with complete hiring freeze there are open positions posted on job portal. And as you said at higher level it must be to glean information.

An acquittance who worked at Cisco mentioned a month back or so that it was in trouble. In fact, the person mentioned switching over to another company for the same reason.

This news suggests that those apprehensions were not unfounded.

This seems to be Cisco's standard operating procedure. They do big layoffs from the product groups that are underperforming. But all those affected can apply to jobs in other groups that are making money still. It seems to be Cisco's way to de-staff a product area quickly and let the employees figure out what to do.

Honestly when I worked at CSC it was the same way. The amount of people we'd have in our group that we'd have to interview from other parts of CSC in order for them to stay employed was staggering. Even worse was many of them were developers for over 20 years and couldn't program much of anything =/

What languages did they work in?

The vast majority were Java developers. I always felt bad about it as I never passed a single one of them during my time working there and interviewing them. They were in such a shitty position but at the same time I only ever had one of them actually able to talk through how to code something (and even that person said they only "know how to do a for loop in theory" which I don't understand but I digress).

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.

I am curious. If I may ask.

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?

> 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.

I am really confused - how can you be a Java developer and never use a "for" loop or know how to write one????

Not really sure I can give you an acceptable answer here (I know I felt the same). Essentially we were told "interview X, he or she is a CSC employee working with Y title in Z group". I suspect many of them have become non-developing architects or technical managers or something. Some of my colleagues had a tiny bit better luck but for the most part the developers we interviewed didn't really know much about programming.

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.

Wow, that sounds terrible...

That's the way all big companies operate. There simply isn't any better way.

Article says they're moving from hardware to software. Perhaps the hires have different skills to the layoffs?