Cisco workforce reductions
blogs.cisco.com
blogs.cisco.com
All that is to say, I would not be remotely surprised if Cisco has more employees than they strictly need. But, this email from the CEO is comically out of touch. “We’re doing great, better than we’ve ever done, so we’re going to fire thousands of you” is a chef’s kiss encapsulation of American corporate culture.
Maybe with normal people but that's not the target audience. The investors are the target and it's exactly what they want to hear.
“it was a great time” = “I worked two days a week”
Any job that pays a full week and only requires two days of work is a “great time”
tells you literally nothing about the actual job.
In which case, I'd say they struck a helluva bargain at salary negotiation. Kudos.
It's not like they didn't ask for more work to do.
The actual job was working on a python server for the acquired company, and it’s not like there wasn’t more work to do, but we were not allowed to go outside the bounds of the work that had been allocated for a sprint, which was always conservative in order to allow for more accurate overall plans. It’s certain that it was different in other departments or areas or acquired companies, but that at least was my experience.
Crazy right?
There are no high integrity companies so it’s just a rat king
I think that in most places the business is going bad in fact, but if you were to believe their words it will show a very despicable spirit of the current decade where the goal is to enjoy maximum profit without any care at all to do any good.
Before a boss might enjoy to have a sound business to be able to preserve the work/income of his employees.
Now they would not care to fuck employees first but also customers after if that provide with a second yacht for holidays.
Just see Elon Musk as the godfather of this discipline...
Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.
Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.
GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:
- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI
- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering
- They made sure to include a special section for investors
Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.
Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
I don't think they offer anything unique. Forgejo[1] offers a similar platform.
But that's not all that relevant to the opportunity in front of them.
The opportunity, generally, exists because of their place in an industry that most folk believe will be very different a decade from now.
That belief is going to lead a lot of CTOs to try new things. When a company tries something new, it almost always picks a new vendor to work with, rather than adding complexity or risk to an existing vendor engagement.
Yes, there are other alternatives, but they are less well known, require self hosting, and/or are secondary products of companies with very broad focus.
Atlassian might be another, given how much of the rest of the software development cycle they have their hooks in, but many tech leaders have unresolved JIRA trauma. :)
1. FAANG does something that's relevant to their company.
2. Everyone thinks that this is an universally good move because they're FAANG.
3. Market rewards copying FAANG regardless whether that strategy also applies to your company.
Simple as that.
It's nothing personal, it's just how the US works. If this were to happen in Europe, your company would burn to the ground. The amount of compensation you'd have to do would eat your gains from the layoffs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-offi...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employee...
SK Hynix is making an absurd amount of money from the RAM shortage, and the employees are not unreasonably demanding their cut from it.
A dividend or basic income or something funded by a tax on this stuff is not at all unreasonable.
The technology is cool but it’s basically mass piracy.
GitLab has just as many outages, just nobody notices/cares so much
GitHub does provide self-hosting via GitHub Emterprise Server.
I'm not so sure, and I'm looking at the friggin' thing: https://enterprise.github.com/trial
For the small, small price of your business email address, it's yours.
I think it goes a little deeper than that. In ways that seem to echo in your description of GitHub vs GitLab too.
Big Tech doesn't seem to attempt to generate value. The most positive attribute you can ascribe to a silicon valley startup is "disruptive" which in effect means eating somebody elses lunch. I think this is pretty natural for an industry that has pretty much achieved perfect penetration, but we're still dimensioning the industry for massive growth.
In that framework, silicon valley startups have to identify some sort of frontier they can expand into, and with pretty much all productive enterprise already interfaced with technology. They have to expand into simply replacing labor.
It is in their class interest to try and beat workers that have gotten too uppity down and AI is a tool they see fit for purpose.
Also if compensation has come down over the last couple of years sometimes you have to do this instead of lowering salary because for whatever reason our industry doesn't ever lower salary.
I do personally believe it would be wonderful if companies invested more in helping people retool and move to new parts of the stack and where compensation becomes non-competitive it should be okay to at least give an employee an option of a lower salary to stay.
Great! A successful company, right? Ah, but then:
> we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than 5 percent of our total employee base.
I wouldn't have put those two together so close, nor in the same announcement.
I agree, we've built an extremely inhumane economy in the US. And it feels like it's gotten worse since I entered the workforce in 1999. But calling out CEOs isn't going to change it - the only thing that will help is the force of law - higher taxes on executives and profits and stronger worker protections might make a dent.
As for the CEO the only moral response is to quit and force someone else to write this statement.
I've had to lay off a few people over the years. It's by far the worst part of my job. I loose sleep for weeks, can't eat, etc whenever it happens. If I was a normal part of my job, I'd have to quit because it's unhealthy.
These reason this statement and many like it are so heinous is because they do not even pretend to say they had no other choice in order for the company to survive.
The CEOs are the ones who are preventing those policies from being put in place.
And people who don't have jobs are a drain on society, unlike trucks. So we're left hoping those people find jobs quickly. And the impact on those individuals isn't great - they either lose or have to pay massively more OOP for health coverage, the stress has physical impacts, etc.
When sales were bad we didn't have budget cuts. Now that we have stable profit margins, we are cutting costs.
Note the "you delivered"...
---
A few lines later
"With this, we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs"
Rough, bit on the nose no?
These statements are so weird to be joined together. In other words, he was able to just say: "I am proud to announce that we are going to reduce the overall workforce.."
writing so bad claude could do better
All that observability tooling around is only benefiting ai wave . They can vibe re-write everything .
But I agree though, this is an artificial stock pump because of the rush for picks and shovels.
I guess when they said "insert token" they meant "insert quarter" and by "insert quarter" they meant "insert your entire fiscal quarter".
Interesting decision considering they aren't at any sort of risk.
* Build for the future (Cloudflare)
* Our path forward (Cisco)
What else did we miss?
* More Human
as they've slowly laid off people due to the AML fines they've been dealing with in the U.S. and replacing folks with either AI, more Indian/Canadian/Ireland talent.
If you view it as a signing bonus it makes perfect sense. They want to get you in the door but also don't want you to take advantage of them by quitting immediately. In that case you wouldn't be entitled to it if you left voluntarily or were fired for cause but being laid off is entirely their choice.
Now to be clear, stock options are completely different, and in the vast majority of cases, I'd value those at zero or near-zero.
If you recognize something as wrong in principle when taken to the extreme shouldn't you also regard milder instances to be wrong as well? "Well sure, if you steal $1M that's obviously immoral but that guy only stole $100."
Of course in this case I recognize that there's quite a bit of uncertainty over how exactly the intent and representation of RSUs ought to be interpreted. I had always seen them as akin to a signing bonus but it's clear now that many people don't share that perspective.
This is bizarre. When you agree to take a $100k base salary, you don't get all $100k on the first day; your salary is split into pay periods, and if you leave earlier (voluntary or not) then you don't get the rest of the year's salary by default (severance aside).
I'll agree with you that RSUs for public companies should not have cliffs. But the idea that you agree to a large amount of compensation up-front (so that re-negotiation is infrequent) which is then paid out in portions on a regular basis is very standard, for both cash and equity.
And yes, obviously a contract can be declared void, but have consumer protection agencies started going after companies for not vesting immediately after a layoff? If not, then I don’t see how that’s relevant.
25% unemployment doesn't seem like something to brag about.
Also, 75% placement seems wildly successful. Why isn’t Cisco also a head hunting firm?!
I wonder if someone in the C-suite simply decided that they had some rough percentage of underperformers on the payroll, but they can’t publicly call them performance based terminations without triggering a risk of lawsuits.
I believe it's because they truly didn't think that way.
(Edit - I wouldn’t have minded either line, at first glance on mobile, curious if it’s an “all bad” situation for you)
What a sick, deeply disconnected opener. Essentially a big FU to their employees. All these AI-first geniuses will eventually bring about is people intentionally slowing down their "productivity" while maxxing the shit out of the company token budget.
> We have important, impactful, and consequential work ahead. Your focus, resilience, and leadership are vital to our growth and relevance in FY27 and beyond.
The message here is - generate more with less, so we can layoff even more of you. At some point even the dumbest, most loyal corporate shills will start to get it.
I have actually started doing this. At first I was just slowing down productivity, but then I realized that if everyone is going to breathe down my neck about token use, I can just use a shitload and not utilize the output for anything. I consider this game theory optimal and possibly most ethical.
For example they tend to be more stable during crisis, because workers tend to vote for lowering salaries/benefits temporarily rather than doing layoffs. So they retain talent better. But they also tend to have difficulty to grow quickly, for obvious reasons.
Besides full on coops, there are also plenty of examples that are hybrids (partially worker owned).
> they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
You're possibly of assuming that a company needs to have an adversarial relationship to their workers in order to be competitive. I don't think that's generally true. This approach has advantages in specific situations, but disadvantages in others.
That’s exactly why you don’t need worker owned companies
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
While there are some pretty easy examples here, the easiest one is probably health care: The country that pays the most - by far - for 'average-ish' health care is the one where the system is privatized.
This works because the actual service is not monopolised by the state but rather a large pool of providers.
This doesn't apply to other services.
And public schools. And public communication infra. The list just goes on and on. It's not 'just healthcare' and the amount of data on this is so staggering that to suggest that the private sector running things somehow results in an efficiency gain of some kind is borderline brainwashed rhetoric from Fox News more than it is any kind of defensible position.
Do you have any numbers to support this? Governments spending stupidly higher than private sector for this, I know this as a matter of fact.
Same for the other claims about "public schools. And public communication infra." Per unit of service provided, governments spend upwards of 2 to 5x in major western countries.
Except last month I met someone who worked there and got TUPE (involuntary contractual transfer of employment) to Wipro (Indian outsourcerer) a few years ago.
So even though this corporation is owned by the employees, and is one of the best examples of this in the UK, it seems you also need some kind of management structure that is also immune to the usual senior leadership trolls to avoid it turning out to be shitty.
I am Swedish, in Sweden, and we are a market economy combined with unions. Companies can do layoffs but for a 3month agreement, they have to notify basically, WARN.
For context, I was most recently employed at a public tech company as a staff engineer. I was there for five years, got paid very well, and then was part of broad layoffs last year. I got a generous severance, and moved onto the next thing. I don't have any bitterness about it; I was selling my time and expertise to the company, and they no longer felt it was worth buying. I wouldn't have felt bad about leaving the job, so why should they feel bad about ending the employment?
Don't get me wrong, I know how stressful layoffs are. But all kinds of things in life are stressful (like a breakup, for example), but that doesn't imply you've been morally harmed in some way. You aren't entitled to keep your job for life!
Help me understand.
To try to steelman it best I can, maybe it's the feeling that a successful company should (ethically) pass on the success to the workers in some way. Like, my labor resulted in record revenue, but instead of a raise I'm getting fired. Feels bad.
Also if workers reacted game theoretically correctly to this situation, they would work just enough to not get fired for cause, since working hard is not rewarded. This is overall bad because if everyone starts doing the bare minimum it's not a pleasant place to work. So it's basically the company forcing the workplace into becoming worse, and actually harming themselves in the long run if everyone reacted that way, so the company is being shortsighted. So then the workers are mad because the company isn't even laying them off for "rational" reasons.
Once you accept that employment is just a roulette wheel that you spin quarterly, it becomes less frustrating, but also becomes more soul sucking.
I will say that I don't think game theory would dictate that you do as little as you can to not get fired, for at least a few different reasons.
First of all, that's pretty difficult to do, since you don't know in advance exactly what the dividing line is between who gets fired or laid off, and who doesn't.
Second, my experience has been that people who do take that approach are statistically more likely to get laid off, when compared to people who really push hard at work, trying to win. And even if the latter group does get laid off, they're much more competitive in the job market if they have a solid body of work and a network of former colleagues who view them favorably.
And third, having gone through a phase like that when I was getting divorced, it just feels shitty. I'd much rather pull my weight, regardless of whether my job continues in the future.
I do think that game theory would certainly imply that you should not have any loyalty towards your employer, and be willing to jump ship whenever it makes sense for you. But that has always been the case, at least in my lifetime.
Interesting use of fewer.
Another round of layoffs at CrowdStrike would fit the pattern nicely.
A workplace that values job security is such a motivating factor for employees that I don't think is recognized enough. At a company that conducts layoffs, it feels like you're just waiting for the next one.
Virtue signalling about "treating employees well" is shortermist and doesn't consider the higher order effects.
Right now everything seems so inflated. I don't believe this economy represents any of the underlying assets correctly anymore. I really think we are on the verge of one of the biggest bubbles in history.
Time will tell.
Don't do the mistake of shorting Weimar Stock markets.
If so many companies out there are doing layoffs, ignoring whether they are right/wrong or the motives being real or investor signaling, who's gonna benefit from it?
I would tend to think that talent being freed would imply that newcomers have a wider pool to find great contributors, but is it really happening?
Also, H1B are issued and requested by the company. Blame the system, not the immigrants .
I was laid off last year by one of the big tech companies, and they called me again for a rehire but I just dont trust them anymore even if they pay more. The layoff completely disrupted my life and I developed health issues because of the stress. Not worth the mental hassle.
I have seen a few workplaces which are more deliberate in their hiring and are not on 24x7x365 hire and fire mode unlike many of the big names. I would rather work in such a place rather than have 10 varieties of coffee and condiments in the pantry.
Frankly i'm pissed off.
Sorry for the people who pinned their hopes on cisco and were laid off yesterday. It's not easy.
As someone that has worked for them a decade ago, some of their division are >90% Indian. Those are all good engineers and not dunking on them at all but it should be unacceptable to bring over competing workers on a visa while also laying off so many people.
https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-h1b-visa-applicat...
It makes no sense to lay off H1Bs only to immediately re-hire them afterwards.
How many non-h1bs did they hire in that fiscal year? How many h1bs did they lay off?
> It makes no sense to lay off H1Bs only to immediately re-hire them afterwards.
"It doesn't make sense to lay off programmers only to immediately rehire them afterwards", yet that has been happening for the past 4 years in every company.
It does if you stop seeing them as labels like 'H1Bs' or 'Programmers' and start seeing them as human beings with particular skills and strengths and weaknesses or members of particular teams (who get grown or cut at the very high-level whims of directors or VPs, without any regard for who is on them.)
Laying someone, or a team off happens for any one of a million reasons, most of which have fuck all to do with their immigration status.
You're mixing a combination of prejudice with a poor understanding of how businesses actually operate. When some corporate shithead chooses which team to cut in half, they aren't looking at the immigration status ratio in them. And for these mass layoffs, the team's direct and next level managers have next to zero say in them.
An L5 SWE performing at S gets paid about the same, and receives the exact same benefits, regardless of their status.
Actually, scratch that, the H1B is often awarded an extra benefit - sponsorship and legal fees for converting to a green card.
the entire floor were Indian other than our org, and over time our org was filled out with incoming transfers and new hires.
i'll never forget some irony in that one of the engineering leaders brought us together for a mini townhall once and praised our "diversity" but by then the percentage of people in the room were basically the same as you described, including said leader. even our twice a week catered lunches were almost always indian.
just an interesting experience being part of cisco for a couple of years.
Jokes aside, if in 15 years you have worked with only few good Indian engineers, you probably have not yet worked at places with high talent density. I could understand if you had said you have (a) worked with many low quality engineers from India, or (b) worked with far more low quality engineers from India than high quality ones. But if, in absolute numbers, you haven't come across many good engineers from India, I can only infer than you probably haven't worked with very good engineers across the board.
Wow this escalated quickly. What OP is saying is not anecdotal but true to every major US tech company. You can cope all you want, won't make a difference
If you get a job at a good company on your own merit, you immediately start getting calls to "refer" your college friends, family, people from your region/state.
Refer here means refer it to HR and make some "setting" that you are guranteed to be hired based on your "reference". Naturally reference would mean that considering you are an employee you would know about open positions and may refer the position to your friend, who would later on get the job on his own merit considering that he is skilled for the position along with required experience.
But the case for Indian employees is that a reference entails to scam the company itself, by letting a less skilled person into the company by making a "setting" with HR etc, who may themselves be from the same region/state.
And if you try to be morally upright person to deny such a scammy "reference", you would then get to listen verbal abuses from your friends and even from your own family members. To deny such a reference leads to straight up "banishment".
Tip:- Among 100 Indians if you see, only 1 or 2 are actually good at their job (or by morality).
It's a brilliant slogan, not just because virtue signalling, but because it spawns cross cultural factions, all selfishly united to defend it. At no further brainwashing cost to you.
You dare to attack it? You are out. Pack your stuff, and your shame.
Consolation? It would at least provide opportunities to those who always suffered injustice. Yet many who claim their right to a seat don't bother with competence.
It works, because the goal isn't more talents, we never lacked them: it's to pressure the overall labor cost.
The scheme's motive is the overall effect. Lower wages. It doesn't care about white hetero, or black trans who happen to participate in paralympics.
By the way, I was wondering if learning Hindi would be the winning strategy here. Be the only white guy speaking Hindi, instant hire.
As for learning Hindi, it may help. But don't make the mistake of confusing cultural diversity with competence uniqueness. One expands the number or silos in the labor pool. The other justifies better pay.
Of course those difference aren't meant to object the dominant force. They are meant to counter act each others.
I see more push for integration than assimilation in the workplace.
Outsourcers don’t just compete on price, they compete on hours worked, and support given.
You do it in outsourcing contracts to a degree, just go further - holidays available, work hours, firing procedures, support and health services.
I do know that FDA inspectors travel to factories around the world to ensure they are compliant.
You’d remove the incentive to undercharge based on sweat shop practices, and then it’s only a cost of living arbitrage.
At that point you could set up in a lower CoL region in America over outsourcing.
I’m probably missing some incentives but I think this would work, and it’s an easy political sell.
Cross border inspectors is mostly PR theater. Even if it was feasible, local verticals spill into others, so it would always be lower costs in less developed/regulated nations.
Factory Safety standards I would make an argument for, you should see some of the things I see in developed nations.
> Please please America spend serious efforts developing your labour standards to a humane level instead of exporting them.
This is possibly the critical weakness in the idea. Maybe EU labour standards?
Firstly, This is how things are being done now - post colonialism. America has many laws and drives to avoid labour from sweatshops. This was a whole thing, it may not have been the most effective, but it was a political force that drove change.
Foxconn factories having workers commit suicide and place safety nets around buildings was a huge issue for Apple, and it resulted in changes to working conditions.
And as I mentioned before, the FDA inspects factories around the world to ensure that something sold within America that has the FDA approved label actually meets standards.
The idea is feasible I just don’t know how effective it will be. Political will can be found in America, and this affects only foreign outsourcing while supporting American workers. You don’t need political will in other nations.
On top of that, it moves competition away from a race to the bottom, which reinforces worker rights. If worker rights in India and America are at parity, then the attractiveness to move to America changes as well. America will remain attractive because of standard of living.
It’s an issue for outsourcing, and firms that buy outsourced services, but not that much of an issue.
One issue is that worker rights in America are kind of a low bar.
Yes you do if you want to change their labour laws.
You aren't changing the labour laws in their nations.
If firms want to trade with American firms, then they have to have certain work norms that they abide by in their contracts/.
America (or any country) can set whatever rules that it likes on firms that exist within its boundaries.
Those rules currently cover things like not taking bribes, not using sweatshop labour, not enabling terror groups - all which America is well within it's rights to set.
Those firms float contracts goes out, and international firms that can satisfy those rules, take them up.
If they don't want to, or cannot fulfill those contracts, they don't win the contract.
(Of course, it would be a problem if you think H1Bs are for hiring people who cannot be found domestically, but it does not seem like many people think that these days.)
Any policies to help the people are labeled as "socialist" nowadays
H-1Bs also lose jobs in these layoffs, so there is an implicit reduction.
Those extra hours? Only if the team really needs them.
Naturally this tends to be something only seniors see, thus ageism.
? I started a new job a year ago. Overtime pay in contract. I gladly work and report overtime as I get paid way more :) BUT there has to be a real reason, such as deadline, alarm/alert and such.
You people are just lost. But I am in Sweden with a union job hehehe
As a tip for others as well, even without an union it helps to be aware of the country labour laws even if superficially.
Personally the salary isn't worth it.
Who the hell needs gratitude if you can't earn an income.. seeing all of these layoffs I cant help but think something along the lines of .. Those of use who greatest asset is our labor need to recognize the great risk it is at of going to 0 value in the near future, and renegotiate everything to get as much value out of that asset before it does. Like enough to retire on. And as with established theories of intelectual property rights protect creators moral rights to the profits of their work, there needs to be mandated moral rights that stop peoples labor being used as training data for AI without the consent, and without a path or compensation for the loss of income that will cause them.. Otherwise this is just one big transfer of power from most people, to people with capital, who can then wield that power in more capricious and selfish ways.
With the benefit of hindsight we know that marxism didnt help, but I can see why the siren song was so attractive back then. Time to reread Eric Hobsbawm.
But that won't please The Market.
Companies can still do layoffs, but that’s how you manage the consequences at a societal level.
I know the unionization part is contested these days in Europe, too - but it is still much stronger than in the US.
The people who just gave you a 20% increase in profits in a year need to go?
What is your option? Companies keep people forever? In what economy does this work?
Please ask the Poles, Baltics and Eastern EU, when did their living standards increase? Was it joining EU or communist Soviet?
in a market economy you layoff people when functions, business, products or roles actually become redundant (or fire for cause / underperformance) rather than waiting potentially months till the end of the financial year to do it in a mass firing.
when you need new headcount, inventory or inputs to your supply chain you don't wait 7 months selling no products to see how full year revenue looks before you decide
if you are managing a team and have poor performers or functions that are no longer necessary, you should bring them up to scratch or manage them out immediately, not wait 11 months till the next eoy layoff round. these stupid layoff rounds promote dysfunctional organisations with bloat and keeping around dead weight or overhiring to sacrifice people at the altar of the consultant / mba / earnings juicing layoff rounds.
A synonymous but more gentle term to layoff.
layoffs are for at risk companies undergoing restructuring not semi-annual financial engineering of your earnings release
I’m not a big collective action proponent historically but in the face of this bs, it might be time.
You believe more in the individual relationship each worker has with their employer to negotiate times like these? With what power? The employees did excellently so they are being let go. The individual worker has no leverage for anything.
Do you employ construction workers for lifetime after they have built your house?
I suspect you'll say the company owes them nothing in the US, which is true, but companies aren't/weren't always this stingy (or lying about financial strength), and you could have just said so without this strained analogy.
People earn money on capital. Software developers work on code within a company. The company makes tonne of money. Then lays off the very people who wrote the code. Why shouldn't the code writers get royalties for as long as their code is in use. Consider construction workers. They build our houses. Why shouldn't we pay also royalties to them for continuing to live in that house. What if the code changes, should the royalty still be paid? Why is capital treated differently than actual production artifacts prepared by people? The company should share its surplus with its previous employees and the house owners should pay their surplas to construction workers too. What if my house is engulfed in a fire caused by shortcircuit due to faulty work by electrician?
Ask LLM to connect this distinct ideas and it will help you understand how difficult problem it is to assign monetary value to our contributions.
Imagine the construction company said "record profits this year, thanks for building great houses, you're fired." The message wouldn't go over well. They are being outrageously cutthroat or hiding bad news.
This is not an AI job elimination story. I think the next recession will trigger that. The AI hype train ironically needs engineers of all stripes to run.
I think you could be. Just saying.
I cringe at this attempt to soften the numbers by saying "fewer than" and "less than" here. Conversely, and ironically, it also puts inflated numbers in your head.
"How many people will be axed at Cisco?"
"3,998 ... but at least it's fewer than 4,000!"
Contrast with the benefits of the path set onward. Small steps for humans, but a leap forward for humanity!
This is Cisco. They do layoffs every quarter and have been doing so since the early 2000s.
This is outrageous. Where are the armed men who come in to take the protestors away? Where are they? This kind of behavior is never tolerated in Baraqua. You shout like that they put you in jail. Right away. No trial, no nothing. Journalists, we have a special jail for journalists. You are stealing: right to jail. You are playing music too loud: right to jail, right away. Driving too fast: jail. Slow: jail. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you right to jail. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, jail. You overcook chicken, also jail. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, jail, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of jail.Watch the video above to get the reference :)
https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2026/m05/ci...