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Comment by davidcollantes | Hacker News Reader

> Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.

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.

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The same thing is happening at my company. We get meetings saying how the market and sales predictions are going well, we're doing so good... yet, budget within organizations inside the company keeps shrinking and we are having massive layoffs year after year.

When sales were bad we didn't have budget cuts. Now that we have stable profit margins, we are cutting costs.

Why not? All that matters is the investors, and both of those are positives to that group. Sure, it's not particularly humane, and I'm sure those that were fired are angry, but this is the norm in American business and has been for many years.

Why should we be ok with this? Just because something is the norm doesn’t mean it should be nor does it mean it’s moral.

Does making separate statements suddenly make it moral or humane? How long between the statements should the CEO wait?

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.

Sure but you know what doesn’t help, defending CEOs. Calling out CEOs expands the number of people who realize this is immoral and who find statements like this repulsive. The more people that find this announcement repulsive the more likely we’ll get actual political change.

As for the CEO the only moral response is to quit and force someone else to write this statement.

I'm convinced most/all C-suite (at least at big enough companies) are sociopaths. It's the only explanation I have for how they do the things they do and sleep at night.

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.

Myself as well it’s absolutely brutal. Sometimes it is the case that people must be let go for a company to continue existing. In those situations it’s awful but even someone as hostile to layoffs as I am understands that sometimes there is no other choice. Normal people can preside over those in a well meaning way.

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.

> 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.

The CEOs are the ones who are preventing those policies from being put in place.

Because it's just as beneficial to society to say "we're doing the same work with fewer workers" as "we're doing the same work with fewer trucks" or "we're doing the same work with fewer barrels of oil".

But it would be ever better to say "We're doing more work, and therefore making even more money, with the same people/trucks."

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.

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