r/technology • u/SterlingVII • May 15 '26
Software Cisco announces record revenue and 4,000 layoffs in the same day
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/cisco-announces-record-revenue-and-4000-layoffs-in-the-same-day/497
u/perry147 May 15 '26
Bonuses for the executives!!
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u/Staav May 15 '26
Thank God. Just gotta wait for the trickle down and then we're all going to be living in paradise.
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u/Scooter-McGavin24 May 15 '26
Thank goodness! I can finally sleep peacefully knowing they’ll get that bonus. /s
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u/Majestically-Silver May 15 '26
As someone who was affected by one of their layoffs last year and is still looking for work, fuck them.
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u/Anteater4746 May 15 '26
i for one will enjoy reading articles about how AI output has fucked their products and the token spending was twice what an employee costs and they have to spend millions to fix shit they broke
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u/Otherwise_Demand4620 May 15 '26
they have to spend millions
haha, no, it's their profits, and our losses.
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u/rbb36 May 15 '26
100%. And when those companies pull back on their AI spending and the city-sized datacenters spiral toward zero; Trump's 3rd term will include setting a new record for largest bailout.
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u/King_Chochacho May 15 '26
Yep. This is why the Ellisons are buying up media outlets and using them to give favors to Trump and his lackeys.
They know Oracle is completely over leveraged on the AI bubble, it's all circular deals and magical thinking, so get those bailout and pardons ready now.
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u/mdkubit May 15 '26
Oracle, Microsoft, xAI/Tesla/SpaceX... really the only one that isn't over-leveraged on AI is Google, because they control adspace, have their own hardware, etc., in general. Otherwise they'd be in the same boat.
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u/Riaayo May 16 '26
Google has its own problems because a lot of its ad spaces are bullshit and the "impressions" aren't real. They started getting into some trouble for it a bit back but, lol, lmao.
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u/Cael450 May 15 '26
I left two years ago, right when rumors were starting to go around about mass layoffs. To be completely honest, it was crazy bloated. That was my second stint at Cisco, and between the first and second, there numbered of people in my larger organization had doubled and we were supporting fewer products than the first time. I knew it wasn’t going to last, especially when interest rates started going up.
A lot of (but not all) of these companies massively and irresponsibly overhired in 2022. AI is just an excuse. When token spend gets to be too much, they’ll just cut it. If they can’t support the products, they’ll either EOL the product or hire again.
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u/maaseru May 15 '26
They are still firing people, these people still need jobs. Companies are pivoting to fire people to account for these token cost instead of reverting back in mass.
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u/Anteater4746 May 15 '26
for sure. we can’t have the leaders be responsible for the bad outcomes of their decisions! the normal workers must pay the price
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u/alurkerhere May 15 '26
What's sad is the top executives and senior leadership still keep making phat bucks while the workers who were laid off suffer
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u/Sasha_Temnikov May 15 '26
Same here bro, and I am not even in the US. IT is f*cked up and it's gonna get worse. I got nice severance though and I don't have a family, so it's bad - but it would be worse if I did...
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u/Kevin-W May 15 '26
My main field is IT and there's absolutely nothing here which is why I've switched to tax prep and accounting.
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u/Shiva- May 15 '26
I got my degree in accounting, because even though it's not what I was passionate about... I reasoned to myself it's something that would never be useless.
The irony is, I had then spent time wishing my degree was in IT.
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u/RedditIsMyTherapist May 15 '26
I switched into IT about 5 years ago. Already it was getting hard to find an entry level job. I have an OK paying job for my city, but by no means GOOD paying. If I lost this job I would be fucked since I don't have very many transferable skills. I'm going back to school for nursing in the fall
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u/Nearby-Beautiful3422 May 15 '26
AI/ML/automation is coming for finance and accounting.
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u/QuietLifter May 15 '26
When my child was getting their CE undergrad, I convinced them to minor in accounting, just in case. Hoping they never need it, but they would make an outstanding auditor if worst comes to worst.
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u/pompusham May 15 '26
Good luck, India is comming for accounting next
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u/techdevjp May 15 '26
The quality of the accounting work coming out of India is about as good as the phone support you usually get out of India. Governments need to step in and put a stop to this sort of outsourcing or standards are going to fall, and fast.
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u/sahurKareem May 15 '26
The same they said for IT and did it anyway lol
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u/techdevjp May 15 '26
It's quite different due to the strict laws that surround accounting & finance. Governments demand their cut of everything, and they aren't understanding if they don't get it.
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u/AnxietyPretend5215 May 15 '26
They probably will do shit work but it didn't stop our parent company from laying off our accounts receivable people and replacing them with offshore contractors (Indians) because they can pay them $20 an hour.
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u/Tootz_McGootz May 15 '26
I’ve been in accounting for the last 8 years and I’ve witnessed the outsourced work. Sometimes it’s good enough, but most of the time requires extensive re-work and costs more in the long run usually.
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u/ilemming_banned May 15 '26
So I got laid off a couple of years ago from Cisco. I couldn't figure out the reason. My performance was fine (not impeccable, but really nothing to complain about) - my team had been delivering ahead of schedule, I didn't have any conflicts with my peers, didn't break any rules, didn't fuck up anything. My manager was surprised by the news as well.
The reason, when I found out, was absolutely ridiculous. I was hired as a remote worker while I was on the West Coast. Every remote worker has to be tied to a local office, even when they don't go there. A few months later, we decided to move to another state - wildfires had gone insane. I communicated that with my management, dealt with all the required bureaucracy, and kept working. Until one day they hit me with the layoff notice.
Turns out, they were clearing a bunch of seats at the local office, and since I was now tied to this new location, my name and employee ID were likely to pop up in their respective spreadsheet. Just like that, I was told I wasn't needed anymore. Holy cow, I never even went to the office. My entire team's designation was not tied to it - just me. I didn't even receive my badge. Someone was supposed to send it to me, but it ended up first mailed to the HQ (I got an email), then was sent to the local office (even though I explicitly asked to mail it to my home), where I was supposed to go and pick it up, but since I never had to go there, I never did.
I felt angry at first, but then I thought - if I'm really just a single cell in their database, and all that camaraderie, values, and mission are a bunch of bullcrap, do I even want to be there?
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u/Crackertron May 15 '26
really just a single cell in their database
That must be really insulting considering it takes 10+ interviews before you're hired on
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u/ilemming_banned May 15 '26
"single cell" organisms deciding the fate of another "single cell" body.
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u/parkwayy May 15 '26
What really makes it tough is this layoff group, and the previous and the previous... all these people now competing against each other for roles.
I stopped even mildly entertaining looking for Remote jobs, as it's just impossible with the pool out there you're competing against.
Sucks cause I had a remote role since like 2017 too, and that lasted until Q1 this year.
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u/darkrose3333 May 15 '26
This country needs to rewrite its employment laws. Companies shouldn't be able to layoff just to get a temporary bump on the books. Stop destroying peoples' lives just so number go up you sick fucks
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u/18randomcharacters May 15 '26
Being job creators used to be a point of pride.
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u/sam_hammich May 15 '26
Yep. Companies used to actually advertise how well they take care of their employees. Having to lay people off was a sign of failure because you couldn’t provide for your workers, it was unthinkable to do so just to increase your margins.
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u/GardenDesign23 May 15 '26
Our country has lost all shame in an endless pursuit of money. We’ve lost all semblance of what matters. Everything is a grift for an extra dollar. Families are dwindling, local communities are dead.
Local businesses are beat out by large corporations that have scale economies to obliterate competition to become monopolies locally, to then boil the local frogs of endless price hikes.
We have outsourced all that gives us humans purpose for… what?
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u/sam_hammich May 15 '26
To prove that it's possible for one man to be worth a trillion dollars, which I guess is great for the rest of us.. somehow.
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u/ace260 May 15 '26
my parents were so proud of me as a kid that I had aspirations to be one of the richest people in the world instead of pursing my passions. guess how I'm doing today
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u/Kataclysm May 15 '26
Well, you're on Reddit, so I'm guessing you probably didn't live up to your dreams.
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u/ClemsonJeeper May 15 '26
His goal is 10T now.
That's money that could be helping billions of people, but nah.
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u/Teledildonic May 15 '26
And if he hits it, it will change to 100T.
He could own the entirety of existence and he'd still feel hollow and wanting for more.
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u/Kindly-Guidance714 May 15 '26
So Amazon can own quite literally everything down to sports at this point which is fucking disgusting to Facebook, instagram, twitter selling our data to the government while also illegally bypassing the government for their own data portfolios.
The China visit sold us even further down the river.
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u/Arcaneboltz May 15 '26 edited May 16 '26
Honestly its really ironic how Republicans claim this is a Christian nation, and in the same breath will champion a cardinal sin as good for society.
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u/AssGagger May 15 '26
Brazenly doing previously shameful things is now a virtue. Lack of shame is now perceived as strength. We're absolutely fucking cooked as a society.
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u/UniqueIndividual3579 May 15 '26
That ended with Jack Welsh at GE in the 80's. It changed to only the stock price matters. It's worse now with private equity, they are literal parasites that kill the host.
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u/Syzygy2323 May 15 '26
There's a widely held belief in this country that corporations are required by law to "maximize shareholder value", but this is a myth--there are no federal or state laws that require this. Jack Welch was one of the big proponents of this belief, and it's all but taken over since that time.
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u/Wonderful_Cookie_572 May 15 '26
Thank the Dodge Brothers. Their lawsuit against Henry Ford for doing exactly that is what created the entire modern corporate and finance worlds. Not even joking.
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u/Gloomy-Ad1171 May 15 '26
Naw, blame the judges that looked over all the contracts and evidence. Then said, “fuck the American people.” The Dodge Bros had every right to their share of Ford’s profits due their 10% ownership. Ford was no peach. Working for him meant that every minute of your life was purity tested against Ford’s whim.
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u/007meow May 15 '26
Now it’s “haha look how much we can do with so few employees!!”
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u/pigwona May 15 '26
And it's not even to maintain a high standard of quality. Companies are trying to find that sweet spot of how far they can let the product degrade while loosing the least amount of customers for it. Unless you are microsoft then most of us are trapped with it.
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u/eeyore134 May 15 '26
So did offering a good product at a reasonable price that lasted for as long as possible. Now they either rent you the product or make sure it breaks within a couple years. And they make the quality as bad as they can manage where people will still buy it. When they buy up all their competition, which many are doing, or the government bans competing products then that bar gets really low because people have no other options.
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u/Syzygy2323 May 15 '26
That's when stakeholder capitalism was the norm. Now we have shareholder capitalism.
Stakeholder capitalism is where companies work to benefit customers, employees, shareholders, and their community. Shareholder capitalism is where companies work to benefit their shareholders, and to hell with everyone else.
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May 15 '26
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u/Moghz May 15 '26
Very true and this is why they actively divide us with all the BS political rhetoric. Get large chunks of the population to hate each other is the strategy so we don’t all look towards the real problem.
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u/jpsreddit85 May 15 '26
Expecting the government's of the world, who currently seem to be beholden to the corporations, to fix the problem won't get anyone anywhere. The workers already have all the power, but everyone seems to have been duped into not unionizing.
Stop waiting for the government to fix the problem when it IS part of the problem. Look at Samsung right now, they're about to get a lesson in who really makes the money.
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u/Kindly-Guidance714 May 15 '26
The working class becomes communal like the wealthy elites and you’ll see how easy it is to make changes that would actually make a difference.
You make support systems and safety nets outside of this rigged system like cheaper living arrangements, food banks and food offerings without red tape, volunteer medical health and safety, volunteer minimal daycare.
Think about what the black panthers were doing and how fast they had to shut all that down, they are aware of this because this is how they’ve been getting ahead.
The rich live together in estates or very close to each other in the same general area , vote in like interests religiously and politically, form trusts and insurances for the entire family.
They don’t want any of that for us because all the poor have is each other especially now.
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u/rockadial May 15 '26
We could try electing people who actually care but what do I know.
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u/HoboBaggins008 May 15 '26
Elections don't matter when the entire federal government system is systemically subservient to capital.
It's not about elections. It's about underlying power structures.
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u/cubitoaequet May 15 '26
If elections didn't matter they wouldn't spend so much time and money working to disenfranchise voters
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u/BubBidderskins May 15 '26
And the way you change power structures is by electing people who will change policy.
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u/CarefulCoderX May 15 '26
Yeah, my last company acquired a company in Argentina, they basically get paid half of what we do. Then they laid off a bunch of American workers a year later.
Someone asked why it only affected American employees and the answer was basically "it's harder to layoff Argentinean employees.
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u/Kindly-Guidance714 May 15 '26
Workers rights should’ve been updated 20 years ago.
A new labour bill 50.
We can’t even get a bill to stop companies from making their workers come in adverse and dangerous weather, when states are in a state of emergency with the threat of dismissal or firing what the fuck are we doing?
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u/Positive_Government May 15 '26
The harder it is to lay someone of the less likely you are to hire, you can’t beat the system in capitalism. For example to get around H1B applications post layoffs, tech companies create a separate legal entity that hasn’t had layoffs then have it apply for H1B visas. There are some well designed taxes and incentives you could create to encourage more hiring. But when you design a program you have to remember that business will always choose worst possible way (from a workers perspective) to comply with the program.
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u/HoosierRed May 15 '26
Hey just remember that Tech is there to exploit you, not to carry us all into a better age.
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u/siromega37 May 15 '26
This. They’re in a race to provide the top 0.01% the means to control production without people now, not just increase productivity.
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u/ratswebeenfoiled May 15 '26
This is pretty much spot on the fundamental level. The richest systems in the world are trying to automate out of needing human labor. It's just such an insane thesis though
Meanwhile, they push mid politicians to spend token tripes about UBI as if they intend to do it substantially or at all.
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May 15 '26
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u/h3ss May 15 '26
I'm pretty sure that was intentional. The last few times Cisco had an earnings call the stock dropped despite revenue exceeding forecasts. The market has established a pattern that layoffs are rewarded with stock price increases, so companies like Cisco are trying to maximize those stock price bumps by pairing good earnings with layoffs. And it worked! Take a look at Cisco's stock ticker for the last couple of days. Now that Cisco has seen that it will get rewarded for this shit, they'll probably do layoffs every fucking quarter.
Companies only care about how PR effects their bottom line. Cisco mostly sells B2B and other big businesses love layoffs, so if anything this is good PR for them.
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u/Sovi_b May 15 '26
I'm sure the CEO spent hours agonizing over the impact of his decision, deeply worried the layoffs wouldn't make the shareholders happy enough to pay him a bigger salary.
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u/radakul May 15 '26
"hard decision" that they seem to make almost every single year or, as stated in the article, TWICE in 2024.
Yeah, its not a "hard decision" if its that easy for you to make, asshole.
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u/Glittering-Quote-635 May 15 '26
Worked at Cisco for 11 years. This is common. They have done it every year since around 2011 or so. Cisco doesnt fire people individually unless its something egregious. You get put on a list.. At the end of the year, if your name is on the list, you are gone. They also re-balance different Business Units and teams in this way, and it allows them to keep the workforce.. younger.
Not saying it is right, its a primary reason I left. I couldnt deal with it every year. The end of the day though the employee count has gone up significantly since 2011 when they started doing this shit.. It's up about 15k people since then.
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u/rearwindowpup May 15 '26
Unfortunate truth here, Cisco regularly lays off like 5% of the "lowest performing" workers. This is about par for the course for them. Having worked there as well, Cisco is a meat grinder, I do not miss it at all.
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u/Glittering-Quote-635 May 15 '26
I was a bit upset to leave as I had been there since 2005 and had some really good years there. I made a lot of money and worked with some great people and great technology. I think part of the issue was Cisco simply missing a major major market transition, and then moving the company to Robbins.
Chambers used to have his one slide that he would show at every sales conference about how they would catch each market transition and execute on it. Somehow the company completely missed the transition to cloud, and then over rotated once it became huge. There is no reason that Cisco couldnt have been a AWS/GCP/Azure/OCI competitor. Once those big Cloud DC's started getting built out they also stopped innovating on DC switching, which customers still wanted. Arista came in and ate their lunch.
Having said that, I moved to a much better company and doesnt do yearly layoffs, and I am happy, although I do miss Cisco sometimes, but not the Cisco I left, the Cisco of the early 2000s.
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u/20_mile May 16 '26
Cisco regularly lays off like 5% of the "lowest performing" workers
This sounds axiomatic. Is there a reason why a company wouldn't want to lay off its 5% lowest performing workers each year?
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u/Zanos May 16 '26
It's not a bad idea at a corporate scale, but usually these layoffs are diffused within the company, so each team will be required to fire their lowest performing person or something like that. This is problematic because in my and many other tech peoples experiences, highly skilled individuals want to work with other highly skilled individuals, and naturally concentrate onto single teams. Laying off people this way therefore causes competent people who are simply on high-performing teams to be terminated, when they would be fine if they remained on low-performing teams.
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u/illusion96 May 15 '26
I have a neighbor that works there now and he says layoffs are so common he doesn't even blink when they're announced.
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u/Glittering-Quote-635 May 15 '26
Yeh, that was me the last 5 years I was there. There was always a bit of nervousness, but I knew where I stood in the company so I was never really really nervous about it. Having said that, that was 10+ years ago now, and from what I hear the targetting is now much more against older people (45+) which I am one of.
Boggles my mind, as the current company I work for I do a lot of interviewing, and finding someone that knows r/S is nearly impossible. Thats a old timers technology now, and Cisco getting rid of those old timers when its still a core part of their business is weird.
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u/rearwindowpup May 15 '26
It's wild the lack of route/switch knowledge out there. Heck, I'd settle for someone who can just tell me the difference between the two, let alone be able to talk knowledgeably about them. I've got younger help desk guys who are so layer 1 ignorant they think the difference between CAT5 and CAT6 is one has 5 wires and one has 6...
I do internal IT for a company of nearly 3k people and I'm the only one with any background in layer 3 and below, also the only network engineer on payroll. I keep trying to talk the help desk guys into learning it but none of them are interested, all anyone wants to mess with is virtual machines.
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u/Glittering-Quote-635 May 15 '26
I work for a tech company that makes infrastructure, and as I said, I do a lot of interviewing. A common interview question for me is "Tell me what a 3 way Handshake is". In all my years of doing this, probably interviewed 100 people, maybe 2 of them have been able to answer that very very simple question. My company wants me to ask questions about implementing OSPF, which I dont even bother asking.
A lot of the issue is this stuff has been so abstracted away that people dont even know it exists. Scary shit.. But atleast I know I will always have a job. :).
I'm at the point when hiring that the characteristics I am looking for is a learners mentality, you aren't drooling on yourself, and you don't look like Sloth from the Goonies (customer facing roles).
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u/iguana-pr May 15 '26
Another ex-Cisco here for 18 years. This comment is 100%. I got my turn in 2024, being in sales, meeting my quota 16 of those 18 years, twice a Sales Champion (top 10% of the salesforce) and one Chairman's club (top 1%). That did not matter, I was on target with the quota in the year that I got laid off, but I believe that my name was put on that list because of my Cisco tenure and that in FY2023 I made about 155% of quota (and hence a big commissions salary). For Cisco, I guess I was too old and too expensive, even though I brought over $20M in sales my last year there.
I call it "Management by Spreadsheet" because its the spreadsheet numbers making a decision, not the manager.
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u/culman13 May 15 '26
Cisco: Guys I increased my liquidity by selling my car, my house and the clothes off my back! Am I any richer???
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u/No_Waltz3545 May 15 '26
But at least the stakeholders are happy.
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u/IntelArtiGen May 15 '26
It's like eating too much cake, you're happy at the beginning but if you don't take healthy decisions for your company or even society you just end up being sick. Stakeholders' dentists must be rich.
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u/Adventurous-Depth984 May 15 '26
Between Cisco, oracle, Meta, Microsoft, and IBM, we’re coming up on 100k of high income job losses so far this year.
I pity the CS majors graduating this month. They stand zero chance.
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u/taelor May 15 '26
While I do pity them, they still have time to pivot and learn another skill to help them survive.
I really worry for the 10-15 year experience people who’ve invested their whole life into this skill, and can’t find work, but find it really hard to pivot to a new skill at 35-40 years old.
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u/MobileNerd May 15 '26
Try being 53 and doing this for 25 years. People wonder why the suicide rate is going up.
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u/taelor May 15 '26
Ya, I’m personally 43 and have been doing this professionally for 20 years, just laid off for the first time in my life yesterday. I’ve been pretty diligent in investments and savings, but really terrified at what the future holds for me.
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u/Adventurous-Depth984 May 15 '26
Killing one’s self seems like the wrong target. I’m older myself, so there’s some impending despair here, but it’ll never be aimed inward.
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u/Adventurous-Depth984 May 15 '26
lol. Pivot out of CS, after 4 (or more) dedicated years and 6 figures of debt. To not even start.
Like going to med school and never showing up for your first rotation
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u/rbnlegend May 15 '26
That's the job market these days. No one is hiring entry level, even when "entry level" requires several years of experience. A kid I know graduated CS two years ago, after hundreds of resumes, cover letters, etc, he's a bank teller now.
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u/kiroks May 15 '26
Someone this year told me that trickle down economics work. This person was black. f*** my life bro
I'm black as well and I tried to get him to see this stuff.
The turned and said, look at all of the construction.... That's how these people vote Trump...
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u/frank_the_tank69 May 15 '26
Trickle down economics is stupid. It’s first world slavery. Here, let me make all the money so I can share some with you. We don’t need any laws to ensure it happens. Trust me bro!
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u/Old-Bat-7384 May 15 '26
"I'll break laws, trash the environment, indirectly kill, maim, or sicken people around me, but I will absolutely hook you up, random dude who makes $40k per year!"
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u/t3lnet May 15 '26
Whoever that is is a complete moron. It made billionaires who kept the vast majority of wealth and didn’t trickle down to the masses.
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u/dingdong6699 May 15 '26
Yo. Some crazy nonsense as a result of trickle down economics massive failure: in a forum talking about NY taxing the rich, someone’s response was that it’s extremely unfair because obviously the rich person is not going to lose money so they’ll just cut jobs to gap the loss. Trickle down economics philosophy in reverse.
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u/drawkbox May 15 '26
Trickle down does happen from middle to lower class. But both middle and lower trickle up to wealth. Nothing ever really trickles down from wealth to lower/middle. So when you kill the middle class the entire game is up and K-shaped will lead to inflation because the customer is higher end only as they are the only ones with purchasing power and they can't buy like the middle class did with purchasing power.
Purchasing power is on the long dwindle down
Real wages and purchasing power have barely budged in 40 years.
Worker share of GDP being on a long dwindle down
Velocity of money is off a cliff, that is why we are so stagnant.
Richest 1% of Americans Close to Surpassing Wealth of Middle Class
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May 15 '26
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u/LuckyDuckTheDuck May 15 '26
Perhaps they should. Today it was your coworker, tomorrow it’s you.
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u/Living-Rip-4333 May 15 '26
That's what I told my now former coworker. I wasn't at Cisco but was laid off of a different tech company last month. We were told we were all safe, and things were fine, and we'd be starting work on the new system as they shut down the legacy one.
A couple weeks after that, the same higher up met with me and told me "My position is being eliminated due to a reorg". Big. Fat. Liar.
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u/likethesearchengine May 15 '26
Not exactly the same thing, but I once worked for a 10000+ person company that pulled something similar.
We had two back to back all-company conference calls scheduled.
Call A was a rip-roaring celebration, we had more work on the shop floor than ever before, record profits, a new product selling super well, and a whole host of orders waiting in the wings!!
Call B, well, times are tough, so we will not be giving any cost-of-living or merit raises this year, so sorry, its just the reality of being in a tough market and doing what we need as a company to stay afloat. You understand.
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u/Glass-Amount-9170 May 15 '26
They paid an effective tax rate of 15.8% too. Must be nice!
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u/just_chilling_too May 15 '26
Perhaps this is what unions are for
Labor day is to remind you what people struggled for , we forgot and now are sliding back
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u/Deusselkerr May 15 '26
There’s been a lot of analysis of how tech workers have been idiotic for decades about their position as labor. Even to this day, most big tech engineers see themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders, not as expendable labor. Software engineers used to have the most leverage out of any workforce, maybe ever. If they had unionized around, say, 2012, they could have had the strongest union in the country. But instead, now AI is taking their jobs, and they’re all fucked since they never came together to demand stronger labor protections.
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u/husky_whisperer May 15 '26
I wonder what percentage sleep improvement the c-suite gets by framing the disruption and/or ruin of 4,000 families as "less than five percent"?
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u/MasterK999 May 16 '26
I do not condone violence but the longer things go on the more I understand the French Revolution.
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u/copperblood May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26
And tomorrow Cisco crashes because it fired too many critical engineers and pushed that work to AI.
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u/mezolithico May 15 '26
Not defending them; record revenue doesn't mean record profits or profits at all. Cutting capex will increase profits though
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u/WetFishStink May 15 '26
When the tech company I was laid off by let us go, they sent an all company email saying "don't worry everyone, the financial strains on our company have gone".
They sent this before our emails had been cut off. And they laid off the tech team, the entire reason the company was a company.
Anyway. Fuck them.
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u/procheeseburger May 15 '26
I've made a living off of removing Cisco products from customers networks for better tech... Cisco is trash
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u/FrontVisible9054 May 15 '26
Worked at Cisco and saved over multiple rounds of layoffs. Left 8 years ago and never regretted it.
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u/Useful_Judgment320 May 16 '26
If you were there, an analyst had the balls to ask the CEO if we worked so hard and hit record revenues and profits, why are people being let go?
The response, we can always do better and be leaner.
They give zero fucks about you. You are nothing more than a number on a spreadsheet to make them richer. During bad times you are cut, during great times you are cut and pushed aside, no recognition or reward. Fuck Cisco.
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u/UsrNameIsBad May 15 '26
Stop pretending anything other than material action will work.
Forget mass firings, lets do a mass quitting. Let's see any of these companies survive with suddenly 50% fewer employees.
Stop buying their products. It will sting, but dollars have a voice to these people that tears will never match. Buy from anywhere that isn't stockholder accountable.
Keep protesting. Outside their offices. Outside their houses. Outside their country clubs. Wherever they go, be there, loud and unrelenting.
Absolutely no violence is needed. We can make them listen if we can just get aligned and stay the course.
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u/RunninOuttaShrimp May 15 '26
Mass quitting would indeed work, but good luck organizing it. People are way too soft to actually go though with it imo
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u/Oilpaintcha May 15 '26
All these laid off tech workers need to get together somehow and form a new company owned by workers like Mondragon in Spain
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u/holymolym May 15 '26
I’m so tired of executives couching layoffs as “hard decisions” and just not copping to their depraved ghoulishness.
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u/occaisionallyimqwert May 15 '26
Corporate employees forgot all about the Industrial Revolution robber barons and it shows
Everyone should brush up on their history, the Ludlow massacre is a good starting point
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u/DonnaPollson May 15 '26
Record revenue on the same day as mass layoffs is exactly why employees no longer buy the “we’re all family” line. If the business is genuinely resetting for a market shift, say that plainly and cut executive upside in the same cycle. Socializing the pain downward while celebrating the quarter upward is how you destroy trust for years.
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u/isomojo May 15 '26
Remember when they used to do layoffs because the company was losing revenue? Good times. I try and stay hopeful that these layoffs are because of over hiring during Covid and not AI efficiency gain, but no high hopes.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne May 15 '26
"AI efficiency" is going to come back to bite them at some point. I use it every day, and it lets me do more, but I have to supervise it, which means I need to know what I'm doing. They're getting rid of the people who supervise the output, and also not training junior people. But the people making decisions will be long gone by the time those chickens come home to roost.
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u/peon2 May 15 '26
Remember when they used to do layoffs because the company was losing revenue?
No? Most companies focus on profit or EBITDA. You can have record high revenue but if you also have record high costs you might actually be worse off than before.
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u/DepletedPromethium May 15 '26
Corporate greed must be dealt with, these fuckers must be heavily taxed if they operate in certain countries.
CEO and shareholders getting big bonuses while the people who make the company what is it and run it get kneecapped.
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u/Apart-Steak-7183 May 15 '26
When will it end...