Cisco's Second Layoff of 2024 Affects Thousands of Employees (techcrunch.com) 23
U.S. tech giant Cisco has let go of thousands of employees following its second layoff of 2024. From a report: The technology and networking company announced in August that it would reduce its headcount by 7%, or around 5,600 employees, following an earlier layoff in February, in which the company let go of about 4,000 employees. As TechCrunch previously reported, Cisco employees said that the company refused to say who was affected by the layoffs until September 16. Cisco did not give a reason for the month-long delay in notifying affected staff. One employee told TechCrunch at the time that Cisco's workplace had become the "most toxic environment" they had worked in. TechCrunch has learned that the layoffs also affect Talos Security, the company's threat intelligence and security research unit.
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PinkslipGTP (tp = toilet paper)
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I've been on hiring committees. Merit only gets your foot in the door. People like to hire social clones of themselves. If there is a certificate or degree requirement, I agree that part should be based on merit, but the "soft skills" side of measuring is very fuzzy and subject to bias.
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As to your "victims" comment, it seems all I hear about is how white men are
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As to your "victims" comment, it seems all I hear about is how white men are now victims. So why should I hire them?
Well, if you don’t wish to hire them, then perhaps you can keep finding value in the new-and-improved DEI alternative? After all, hiring based on purely race or gender works out so well, right? I mean look at Kamala Harris. Went from worst rated VP to Our Savior practically overnight! SO much value.
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> hiring based on purely race or gender works out so well, right?
Purely? Nobody I know is doing that. Fox News (allegedly) found a few and you think that's accurate statistical sampling because you flunked statistics.
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> hiring based on purely race or gender works out so well, right?
Purely? Nobody I know is doing that. Fox News (allegedly) found a few and you think that's accurate statistical sampling because you flunked statistics.
So, if Kamala Harris wasn’t a DEI hire, then she actually earned those accolades as the worst rated VP ever? You can decide which to choose to justify that abysmal performance. She has literally made the world question why the US even has a VP. Then we were forcefully reminded when Dumb was swapped with Dumber for this election.
Got her ass handed to her by Tulsi Gabbard and dropped out of the last election by 2019. She was never actually elected by The People. She was picked. And we all know why
And a few executives (Score:3)
Refused to say because they did not know (Score:5, Interesting)
Cisco employees said that the company refused to say who was affected by the layoffs until September 16
I have been in middle management at a number of corporate environments. I can tell you with rare exceptions (those being really old school orgs where a manager's 'power' is a directly reflection the headcount below them, mostly manufacturing and finance shops) nobody in middle management likes to have a bunch of dead wood on their teams. It makes their groups P&L / allocation or whatever metric the upper management team favors.
If are on a team with a lot of dead wood the actual explainations are likely:
1) Your manager has not effective way to measure performance
2) Your manager is friends with the guy/gal and or has some 'arrangement' with them
3) Your manager is in title only and does not really have any authority over HR decisions even if it is made to look like they do (surprisingly common), and the next levels of management are to far removed to know who really does what (see (1)).
What usually happens is upper management decides on some target. They look at all the numbers and conclude that payroll reduction is the only possible way to meet the target objectives. They may well be correct on this point. They don't actually know what parts of the business can and cannot meet their profitability goals. All they can do at this point is tell the next layer of management down you need to reduce payroll by so much in dollars.
That next level then has to translate that into numbers of people at the various rings of pay scale. The next part of it is does their division have more than one product/activity and do they have authority to exercise discretion as to if they want to continue those products/activities. If they do they might decide to pull more dollars out of the activity they like less, otherwise they don't and they can't be seen by upper management to be favoring or disfavoring anything because they may have their own opinions as to the value of these things, finally some level of management usually one more run down has to start attaching that to specific names, and that might be pulling them out of hat or it might be they have some measured and reasoned metrics behind the choices.
Long story shorty short when Cisco says they are getting rid of ~5000 people they don't know who those people are and it probably takes a month or more to figure that out. I don't think real dysfunction of the corporation can be over stated, its just that like democracy its a terrible system just better then other known options.
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I agree with what you're saying, but their logic is back to front when this happens.
Not knowing the people to reduce, only to meet numbers makes it look like the company is struggling. If the positions were known already, and were done when the time arises naturally makes sense.
Sacking 5000 to make numbers makes it look like the company is asset stripping. I wouldn't invest in a company that has no product to innovate (or seems like that).
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That's too much defeatist rhetoric. Are we relying too heavily on debt financing? Yes. Are we bankrupt? Only if we choose to be.
The US population could collectively pay off its debt if it produced more goods and services (this is the only way to pay off national debt). The question then becomes - why is the collective population not doing this?
What is it about US culture and/or regulation that has made people unwilling (or unable) to produce more? Are people just consuming more while producing less?
The w
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The playing field isn't level. To do what you say (Increase production) we need to start cheating like other countries, like China, do.. If we ditched those pesky environmental regulations we could be the number 1 oil producer in the world. If we ditched a lot of corporate HR rules we could suck even more life out of employees. We're used to being very coddled in the US. Don't expect any miracles. Nobody wants to take a step down in their comfort level.
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Um, the US is the number one oil producer in the world, so that's a non-sequeter.
While it's definitely true that if you have a low-cost global supplier it makes it difficult to meet the prices, you don't have to cheat to produce more; you just have to produce more of the correct things.
I mean as a dumb (as in not well-thought-out) example, why don't we simply take all these supposed displaced manufacturing workers and have them build houses? Why not have some of them produce lumber or other raw materials?
T
Survivor here (Score:3, Informative)
The layoffs in February were brutal for my team (an acquired startup), Monday's were even more so.
I'm old enough to have been through this many times. I have yet to be laid off in my career (IC dev here), but as always it falls on those remaining to pick up the slack.
I guess the lesson here is to not work on a product which "only" makes $10mn / year in profits, but for the one which makes $1bn / year. Otherwise you're going to have a bad time.
One employee said (Score:3)
"One employee told TechCrunch at the time that Cisco's workplace had become the "most toxic environment" they had worked in."
There's 100,000 employees at Cisco, and a single one told you it was toxic? Thanks for that amazing reporting, dude, I'm sure the single fired person wasn't biased or anything.
Cisco is a big ass company with lots of acquisitions and lots of departments. It's highly likely that a _single_ team can be toxic, but they're so isolated from the rest of the company it's nearly impossible for that culture to spread. The corporate culture itself is actually fairly businesslike; of all the large companies I've worked for, Cisco actually seemed to have their shit together, corporately speaking. All the random teams were a disorganized mess, but that's what happens when you acquire a lot of random shit and then try to smoosh them all into existing products.
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This phrase:
Cisco actually seemed to have their shit together, corporately speaking.
seems at odds with this sentence:
All the random teams were a disorganized mess, but that's what happens when you acquire a lot of random shit and then try to smoosh them all into existing products.
I presume the first phrase is talking about Cisco. If so, then bodging together disparate random products and expecting pink unicorns is probably not going to happen.
And they all had to leave (Score:1)
via the back door.
Ditto Dell (Score:2)
I hear from friends that Dell laid off a bunch of people this month. That's on top of a layoff in February.
Anyone know of a good site collecting scuttlebutt about layoffs? Dates, numbers, locations?