Cisco Announces Mass Layoffs Just After Soaring Revenue Report (sfgate.com) 34
Cisco, the San Jose-based technology giant, has announced another round of layoffs affecting Bay Area workers, marking a familiar pattern of reporting skyrocketing revenue followed by drastic job cuts. From a report: According to Aug. 13 WARN filings with California's Employment Development Department, the company will eliminate 221 positions across its Milpitas and San Francisco offices.
WARN documents are generally required by the state in the event of mass layoffs. Employees were notified of the layoffs on Aug. 14 and their terminations will be effective Oct. 13. The most cuts, affecting 157 jobs, largely in software engineering roles, were at Cisco's Milpitas office at 560 McCarthy Blvd.
Cisco's San Francisco office at 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd. will cut 64 positions, according to the filing. The filings came the same day Cisco released its fourth-quarter earnings, which reported $14.7 billion in revenue, an 8% increase from the same quarter last year. Revenue for the 2025 fiscal year was $56.7 billion, up 5% from the previous year.
WARN documents are generally required by the state in the event of mass layoffs. Employees were notified of the layoffs on Aug. 14 and their terminations will be effective Oct. 13. The most cuts, affecting 157 jobs, largely in software engineering roles, were at Cisco's Milpitas office at 560 McCarthy Blvd.
Cisco's San Francisco office at 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd. will cut 64 positions, according to the filing. The filings came the same day Cisco released its fourth-quarter earnings, which reported $14.7 billion in revenue, an 8% increase from the same quarter last year. Revenue for the 2025 fiscal year was $56.7 billion, up 5% from the previous year.
Acquistions (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't need too many employees to badly integrate acquisitions together. Just buy another Splunk or Isovalent and squeeze their clients with expanding into your suite.
And for the long term enterprise network equipment customers, they are too locked in. So strategy looks just like Oracle/Broadcom playbook, got the virtual monopoly on the big enterprise market. So squeeze them for more because who are they going to switch to and find plug & play engineers or big enterprise features they need. So screw paying for R/D, don't need to innovate and can run lean and work existing employees harder. Exploit them not being able to leave in a poor job market.
Re:Acquistions (Score:5, Interesting)
screw paying for R/D
R&D became extremely expensive since Trump 1's elimination of same-year tax exemption for R&D expenses went into effect.
He had timed it, and the mass layoffs it'd cause, for the next president after him, assuming he'd be reelected. His sucessor, likely a democrat, would have taken the blunt, with the GOP then pointing at the horrible state of employment under that future president as during in the then distant 2026 mid-terms.
Things didn't go as planned though. Trump lost the reelection, Biden was elected, and Trump himself became the target of his original time bomb. So at least in this case the thing backfired Dick Dastardly-style.
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EDIT: president as during in the then -> president during the then
If I were a shareholder... (Score:2)
I would be asking if it's wise to be getting rid of your most valuable assets.
Re: (Score:2)
People that actually make products we could sell tomorrow? Why would we keep those? Profits are great now!
I guess in 10 years, Cisco will mostly be dead. Another one for the trash-heap of tech history. To be fair, not much of value will be lost.
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Yea sure, it's a less than 1% layoff so threatening. Sounds likes you have no idea what the company is or does.
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Programmers are hardly Cisco's most valuable assets.
It's a hardware engineering company with an overwhelming emphasis on Network Eng's (TAC).
The majority of the firmware development is done in Australia not California even TAC is in Texas and India not California.
Any programmer in California will not be a design hardware role it's all MBA's.
The sky is falling (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The sky is falling (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Not yet. Maybe next year.
Some pretty basic business logistics are missing (Score:5, Insightful)
While I get the whole Snidely Whiplash image being projected here, a few things need to be said:
- Revenue isn't profit
- High profit doesn't mean you still need every job position that you currently have
- There's no sense in paying for something that you don't need
This isn't the fifth element where Zorg is just picking arbitrary numbers of people to fire.
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Profits are looking sky high https://investor.cisco.com/new... [cisco.com]
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...Which doesn't really mean anything...
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Profits are down while revenue is up. The fact that the number is positive alone means nothing. The trend shows a massive increase in waste and internal costs.
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You say it isn't Zorg but that's exactly the sort of behavior that the movie was mocking.
A bet (Score:2)
Want to bet, that these layoffs won't affect the decision making chain involved with the hard coded root password [schneier.com] in Cisco's professional networking products?
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In these layoffs, the keep the idiots and fire the people that pointed out the stupid decisions, because they are "troublemakers". "Shoot-the-messenger" type of "management".
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If Cisco is anything like the company I work for, we actually like those because they've saved us from many potentially costly mistakes. We never penalize anybody for finding issues related to safety, even if they cause them. The only thing we penalize is repeating the same mistake multiple times, or blatant policy violations.
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Cisco, with its really bad security track record, is probably nothing like the sane style of doing things you just described.
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Why would they? Revenues show that customers don't give a shit.
"I got mine" (Score:2)
"Screw the rest of you peons."
The World Is Finite (Score:2)
Unlimited growth isn't possible so one way of showing quarterly profits is to cut damn dirty labor.
Correlation =/= Causation (Score:2)
Cisco Announces Mass Layoffs Just After Soaring Revenue Report
The thing is, those layoffs were planned for a while to reduce cost and increase profit. It's hard to tell if the layoffs are simply vampiric bizness shenanigans to reduce cost by any means and make the numbers look better for the next quarter, or if the layoffs are indeed strategic and necessary.
There's a good chance that layoffs were going to happen no matter what, but the number of people getting the axe was going to be inversely proportional to the revenue or profit.
It does suck to get canned (been
Why do people have jobs in the first place? (Score:2)
I heard an economist pose this question once. Why do companies have employees at all? Why not use contractors? Then you could hire just as much labor as you need, when you need it, then not pay for labor when you didn't need it.
His reason was the costs involved with finding contractors then negotiating agreements with them. I think there are other reasons, but for sure that's part of it.
But I think technology is pushing us into an intermediate position between the semi-permanent, often lifelong employme
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Now there's a lot of holes in this rosy (for management) scenario. Automated application screening is dog shit, for example. But you can do it, and you will find people; probably not the *best* people, but then you'll never know, in fact *nobody* will ever know. People will never get to know their jobs well, but again you won't ever know what you're missing. Most of all you will never have anything resembling loyalty from the people you hire; young people these days look at every job as transient. But you can't *measure* loyalty and in most cases, job competence with any precision. But you can track costs down to the penny.
Yes, the Quantitative or McNamara fallacy. If you can't measure it then it's not important ... until it bites you hard and you wonder what happened.
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Another reason to have employees (and for larger companies, having a few more employees than you need right now today before noon) is to be able to quickly scale up for an unexpected order, and to have people around who actually know how YOUR systems work. If you have a contractor that switches between jobs every week then he'll be spending that week just figuring out which systems you use for customer management, ordering, etc.
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Another facet of your final statement: You also can't measure Firm Specific Knowledge. Especially given how companies drink their own branding kool-aid and refuse to call things universal names (looking at you MicroStrategy, "attribute" is a very doctrinal term for databases, not some random term you put in your BI User Guide), companies often forget to measure the productive effect of understanding the cultural idiosyncrasies of their own company. I think the real big block to eternal contractors everywher
Don't ever be engaged in your job (Score:2)
This is the reason why I keep telling people not to be engaged in your job.
Your job is just a means to get a stable income, and there always other jobs out there for you. Do what you need to do and get out of your workplace. Get engaged in your hobbies, in your loved ones, in your games, or in whatever you choose except your job.
Save up enough money to last you through 6-12 months of zero income. Be prepared. Then your world will not come crashing down when some nameless VP decides to get himself a bigg
Executive share options (Score:2)
It's a Boeing play. Get the money now and leave a ruin after you're gone. Don't short them right now because the value extraction is full speed ahead, but they will be gone in a few years.
TFS is stupid (Score:3)
Revenue = sales, not profit. Revenue is up, profit is down, EBS is down, EBITADS is down. That precisely shows a company is overspending compared to previous years on some internal costs and having drastically reduced margins. It stands to reason they'd start with staff cuts.
If I were an investor I would absolutely expect them to tighten their belt, it looks like they are getting fat an inefficient.
Executives need their bonuses (Score:2)