Tough times
The beginning of the tech bubble burst?
Cisco is a hardware company. Software companies throughout the US are having difficulty finding enough qualified individuals to fill job vacancies.
Ditto for almost all companies with job vacancies related to tech skills.
Think the omnipresent TV ad for GE.
We’re in an up cycle in the business cycle, but I wouldn’t call it a bubble. At least not like the dot.com bubble we had in the late 90s.
This is more about Cisco than the tech market.
When I talk with my friends in the tech world one thing becomes clear: software has overtaken hardware in a big way. One friend, a BSEE who works at a huge communication company and did large fiber-optic pipe work in the past, said that he mostly works on “software-defined networks” now. Basically, the CPU hardware has become fast enough to handle complex networking on-the-fly, something you needed dedicated hardware for in the past. That certainly isn’t helping Cisco! Anyway, I still don’t know what the “Cloud” is exactly … but I have used the VM part to my advantage in business already. The ability to fire up VMs online for testing server scenarios is really nice (though I still use a regular dedicated box for my rinky-dink one-man company). I think the real advantage of the cloud comes in when you exploit its “elastic” features to scale on-the-fly.
If I were a student in CS or similar field right now I’d exploit the potential to “rent” a supercomputer in the Cloud for heavy online numerical computations and the incredible computational horsepower of the GPU in every users’ computer for client-side work. The opportunities are ridiculous. I’m an old f*rt and spent most of my career worried about saving bits and bytes and CPU cycles … none of that matters in the GPU world. The computational horsepower even in a lowly Intel Integrated GPU on a laptop is astonishing.
Announced layoffs are 5,500.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/174128/20160817/cisco-to-let-go-of-5-500-workers-amid-cost-cutting-shift-of-focus-to-software.htm
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cisco-announces-plans-to-cut-5-500-workers-1471465487
“Up to 14,000” was a rumor before the actual announcement.
http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300081750/sources-massive-layoffs-coming-at-cisco.htm
The layoffs are inconsequential. What isn’t being reported is that Cisco is hiring software engineers, etc. Men graduating with a CS degree will have multiple job offers. Women will have multiple offers times ten. There’s a significant difference between today’s rapid growth in software technology, biotechnology, cloud computing, disruptive companies, etc. and the dot-com bubble.
My DD is a raising senior in CE/CS and is finding the job market to be great. At the company where she interned she had 7 interviews last week and already a job offer from a dept. that she did not interview with but just worked casually with this summer.
Thanks for your input (all of you.) Always nice to get insiders’ views. @droppedit, sad to say I only understood a few words in your post, but I believe you anyway 
Cisco is getting a lot of the layoffs done quickly today. I always feel bad for those people. The economy is not very good for finding a new job right now.
Whats goes up nearly always comes back down. What are all those $110K to start petro engineers doing now? Trees never grow to the sky.
I am sure the CS staff will land on their feet. It will be tougher for the EEs.
Huh? Depends on the market. For example, Silicon Valley is booming. Unemployment rate <4%. Of course, hardware engineers may not be a attractive as SW engineers…
What it reflects is that network hardware is a mature market, there is competition there that has driven down prices, and there is only so much networking hardware people will need. Cisco is concentrating a lot more on areas like network security, and things like cloud computing are changing the nature of networking and computer technology. I don’t think EE’s will have trouble getting new jobs after leaving cisco, there is still a lot of hardware engineering out there in all kinds of fields, if not in network technology, I suspect they will be able to find jobs. I don’t think this reflects the overall economy as much as it reflects the changing nature of the tech world.