Cisco Reportedly Lays Off over 4k | Hacker News Reader

Cisco Reportedly Lays Off over 4k

forbes.com

119 pointsjrwan41 comments

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Phraseology:

Roku: “Current economic conditions”

Cisco: "rebalance across the board"

Amazon: "unusual and uncertain macroeconomic environment”

Disney: “a targeted hiring freeze”

Meta: “macroeconomic downturn”

Salesforce: "performance issues”

Stripe: “stubborn inflation, energy shocks, higher interest rates, reduced investment budgets and sparser startup funding,”

Opendoor: "the most challenging real estate market in 40 years”

>Opendoor: "the most challenging real estate market in 40 years”

Didn't the subprime mortgage crisis happen in 2007? The current situation is worse than that???

For the greater world I'd say definitely.

>For the greater world I'd say definitely.

Could you elaborate? I honestly don't understand...

The effects of subprime crisis was not limited to the US. And instead of people not being able to afford homes, there were lots of people worldwide who lost their homes after they lost their jobs and their properly values collapsed.

https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/investment-analysis/The-...

Opendoor is US only (as far as I know) so the layoff justification just seems silly.

I think it's possible market velocity is lower now (house prices still somehow insanely-high while mortgage rates are also much higher than they've been for many years) and expected to remain so longer, than in 2008, which might mean it is worse for Open Door, if not overall.

Also forget about a multi year slump of the early 1990s

For them it is, I think they're one of those companies that buys property from you without listings, etc. then you can move and they clean it up and list it. My guess is the property is on their books and prices have been fluctuating a lot so they could be upside-down on a bunch of inventory with less home buyers because the interest rates rose.

For a home owner selling and a realtor, the realtor likely has to compete to earn business but they are a third party to the transaction.

About 5 years post dotcom bubble.

I think it's worse considering the inflation in food and gasoline. A 6 pack of beer at the grocery store is $10 now. 1 L of carrot juice is $6. It's unsustainable especially considering how wages barely moved for anyone. I don't see how people are getting by.

Easy. Stop drinking so much beer and prepare your own food for starters.

FTX: "drug laced penthouse orgy ponzi scheme blowup"

Cool observation. Fascinating to see how corporate speak spreads and builds off each other. These are like memes in their technical definition - "behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation"

Once a company or two uses these phrases it become politically acceptable to repeat them because they have now been "vetted". Contrarian or outsider views are not well received most of the time despite all of us wanting to believe we're different/unique/contrarian.

Humans are such an interesting species.

Absolutely none of that is new, its all recycled from 2008, 2001 and prior cycles with minor tweaks for current conditions.

Twitter: "" gestures vaguely at Elon.

> "Frankly, the economic picture ahead is dire"

> "An increasingly competitive world"

I prefer this over everyone using the same excuse and or reason (contrast with Twitter talking points from pundits who use the same phraseology to push for or against something).

Upstart: "the challenging economy"

Seagate technologies: "global economic uncertainties"

Philips: "worsening macroeconomic environment"

Microsoft: "valuate our business priorities on a regular basis and make structural adjustments accordingly"

Intel: "sudden and rapid" economic decline

Twilio: workforce grew “too fast” and “without enough focus”

I love how vague they all are. They might as well have said "We have a bad feeling about the world" or "We consulted an ouija board" as justifications. Do they really think a normal person reads these and accepts the reasoning?

SAP (2019): "fitness program"

It's hard to understand if this is actually related to layoffs based on larger market forces, or just a once a year house cleaning.

I've worked at places that laid people off once a year. It's a common way to give managers a way to get rid of under performing employees without the hassle of going through a PIP. The manager gets rid of a bad fit, the employee gets some severance, so both sides get something.

But since this is happening at the same time as other companies doing layoffs it can seem like it's all occuring for the same reasons.

I mean it doesn't matter in the sense if those laid off can't find a job easily. The numbers are starting to build up.

You are correct that if you are unemployed and looking for a job it doesn't matter. All you see is increasing competition in the job seeker market and that sucks.

But it does matter for people who are employed and looking for jobs. If you are unhappy and/or underpaid at your current job, layoffs all caused by larger market forces might be interpreted as a hint that you should think about staying at a "safe" job unless you really hate it. However, if some significant portion of the the layoffs is due to recent over-hiring and that has now swung the other way into layoffs, changing jobs might be less risky.

> If you are unhappy and/or underpaid at your current job, layoffs all caused by larger market forces might be interpreted as a hint that you should think about staying at a "safe" job unless you really hate it.

That's an excellent point. I'm itching to leave my company at the moment, but I've avoided looking elsewhere because it's relatively "safe" (for now), so you're spot on. This also appears to be the case with literally everyone I've spoken to about the topic in my social circle. That being said, all those people have reported recent layoffs at their companies; across many different sectors and income brackets. My sister works in healthcare and said the hospital just sent out letters notifying everyone of upcoming layoffs.

I stayed at a company I hated for too long because it was safe - I was literally the only person who could fix the legacy system that was responsible for half of the company.

After I left, I realised how much of a negative effect the company was having on me. I had coworkers point it out and say they were sad about it but I never realised it myself until after I left and realised the difference just in my dreams nevermind all the other stuff.

The thing with people getting laid off is I think many of them are in the position where the only place they would fit in is a mega tech corp. And since all the mega tech corps are doing layoffs, it really doesn't seem like it's going to be that easy for them to find a job.

For example, if you've been working on a database system for 8 years, there aren't that many companies that need to develop their own internal database system so the matches are slimmer. Or if you've been doing SRE on 1k k8s clusters, there aren't that many companies that are doing k8s at that scale and working at lower scales is completely different.

Another thing with going from a mega corp to a startup/smaller business is the expected performance. Mega corps are slower with low acceptance of errors while smaller businesses are faster with a higher acceptance of errors.

This doesn't even factor in that it also seems like smaller companies are also doing downsizing at the moment. I'm seeing smaller companies add in policies which are clearly designed to make people want to quit to companies getting rid of all of their remote devs because they're the easiest to fire. The job market doesn't look good right now.

Yes... with qualifications.

I saw the dot com crash up close (wasn't laid off, but I saw the people who were recently laid off in the local pub with a pager that wasn't buzzing next to a pint glass... or the guy with a masters working the late shift at Blockbuster). When the housing crash came with its recession and layoffs, I was part of that.

If I had done a "I want to keep living in SF and maintain my big tech standard of living in an expensive city" it would have been difficult since there were thousands of other people who had that same idea.

Instead I moved to the midwest and got a job working in the tech department of a retail company. I did not have too much difficulty finding that job.

I've since switched to public sector and that job was not hard to get either (and for those who have applied, we've hired every competent dev who has shown up in the stacks of resumes - as this is public sector, not many apply).

There are a lot of jobs out there. Pull up https://careers.walmart.com and go to 'technology' and follow it from there. Hundreds of open positions.

If one moves away from expecting that the median job is the big tech job in SF or one that they can get remote... there are a lot of jobs out there.

However, from many that I've see on tech career sites, the mere thinking of getting a job at Wallmart is beneath them. That SRE with 1k k8s clusters? https://careers.mcdonalds.com/global-corporate/jobs/40600010... or https://careers-chickfila.icims.com/jobs/12125/lead-site-rel...

It's the upheaval and the lack of security. Not everyone can get a job instantly, especially if they're older or fresh out of college.

Another reason to favor worker-owned co-ops rather than publicly-traded companies.

I feel it's more market psychology in many cases - having to demonstrate to the analysts that you're being fiscally prudent (hence the commonly resultant stock price increase) rather than any particular internal need. It's a shame that perfectly decent people are being let go so that some Wall Street Chad can make a check mark.

I worked at Cisco for about 3 months as a contractor before not getting renewed a month ago. Most hilariously inept infrastrecture code base I have had the displeasure of working with so far, and this team was supposed to be the one paving the way forward for finally bringing them from on-prem to the cloud. Literally could only understand my manager about half the time as he had a thick accent and spoke quickly (did not have this problem with any other team members despite them having the same type of accent), and my laptop broke halfway through and it took them a week to send someone out to fix it. Making about $50k per year more full time in a new gig and get to work with an infra code base that I actually enjoy. AMAA.

The only shocking things about this layoff at Cisco, which happen about once a year, is that it didn't happen during their normal time in the summer and that the numbers are so modest.

Ikr? They’ve been laying off thousands from botched acquisitions and what not for as long as I can remember

A pundit pointed out that in several cases, the tech firms laying off have returned to their employee size of 1 year ago and that there are still many jobs available in the industry. Have you seen articles on how long people are taking to find their next job and if they are better off?

This is something I'm interested in as well. It feels like last year, I saw every tech company fighting tooth and nail to scrape up every last engineer. We even had trouble making modest pickups at my own megacorp because candidates were getting multiple offers during our accelerated interview process.

This seems weird though because I have no doubt that every financial analyst at each of these companies saw the incoming downturn a mile away. If it was just a few of the companies making recent questionable decisions (Twitter, meta) it would make more sense to me, but the list of companies laying people off keeps growing.

https://archive.ph/Wt7Rp

Cisco has been known to have constant annual layoffs

Been there done that. Part of a cisco layoff due to department moving ... 15 years ago I think. Caused me to sell my shares, which turned out to be an excellent decision.

I believe it was 2001 or 2 post dotcom, Intel fired a fraction of the company by algorithm. A lead architect of a critical project was fired. Oops.

All of these companies seem to rely on pandemic lockdown - demand for remote job influx. As pandemic is over, surge of the demand evaporated and now they need to downsize again.

What's ironic I remember articles actually predicting that at the end of the pandemic people will not go back to offices and would rather quit than work inside the office again.

But here we are, companies firing en masse

I’m one of those that would rather quit than work in an office. Remote life is too hard to give up now. Im healthier physically and mentally, have more time to spend with friends and family, why would I give that up?

Cisco recruiter hit me up on LI today!

Cisco it's graveyard for almost anyone's career.

Interesting how stripe lists "sparser startup funding".

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