M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.
I work for a very large corp. As part of a round of layoffs earlier this year, they cut an entire foreign office, to the man. The decision was made from very high up: VPs were informed after it occurred. For some departments, the losses were small. For others, they were crippling: It was a very important group, doing things nobody else did, and which we couldn't cut.
The end result? The VP realized that the cuts had been extremely unwise, and now almost everyone that worked on that group has US visas, and is working from a new office in the US, with American salaries instead of their far, far lower ones. Not a costs savings, not an improvement in capability... just more expensive, and with projects that got delayed for months, as everyone was out for about 6 months.
For US layoffs, the decisions were not made quite that high, but still high enough that people in the know of salaries and performance were extremely confused about who got cut. Some great, cheap people were cut. Some expensive people that are poor performers by any standard remained. But nobody that managed ICs was involved with the decision making.
A large organization either makes very slow decisions, or acts basically blind. Sometimes they really fail, and do both!
The message was that they were in control. That they could cut off their nose to prove a point. This layoff event will be their downfall.
No one is looking at individual people or teams.
You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jellyfish; the more you feed them, the larger they grow, the bigger impact they have on their environment. No real thoughts, just an urge to consume and expand.
FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.
In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.
Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.
The only way to achieve a change in behavior in corporations is to change the regulatory framework in which they operate.
In the narrow context of the OP, this doesn't even need to be very heavy handed (unlike say environmental devastation, which is a much bigger challenge). One option would be to pass legislation that makes it harder for megacorps like Cisco to eat smaller companies. Another would be to make layoffs relatively more expensive (require better severance, etc) or to limit them during the M&A phase that Splunk is currently in.
However, if you want tech jobs to have a higher and guaranteed severance, national legislation might be more effective.
After all, many acquisitions and layoffs are at companies that are in dire financial straits, which limits discretionary spending.
There is no reason to over complicate things and require businesses to directly pay, figure out how much cash to always have to be able to pay, hire auditors to make sure they have enough cash, then take them to court when they don’t have enough cash to pay, yadda yadda.
Business sells product or service. Employee sells labor to business. Government takes care of the safety nets.
at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).
This is wildly oversimplifying. For example, it theoretically rules out principle-agent problems.
No, you can’t. This is the problem of corporate management. Management will tend to act to maximise profit margins or even the stock price is a bad explanatory model.
Over what time frame?
What the USSC said was that voluntary associations of people don’t forfeit the rights of the individuals in the association.
I’m considering whether I should ask for my options to immediately vest in the event of a buy out or liquidity event. It’s not that much money or options that the overall company will care. Should I ask for 1 year, or all 4 years, I’m uncertain if it could poison the well. Is this even something they would do?
Its not unusual for the force cuts to be done via interviews at the new company
Presumably if you trust the organisation enough to pay for the whole thing, you would have a measure of trust in their ability to hire?
Acquirers of growing businesses generally want that growth to continue and can "optimize" by hiring less.