Cisco announces record revenue and 4,000 layoffs in the same day
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I wonder if Cisco is expecting some strong headwinds when the Hyperscaler bubble bursts.
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Which areas does this help them to move towards? I would struggle to tell you what Cisco is leading in right now. That seems like a problem.
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This reads like "we're using the savings from firing people to increase surveillance of those we didn't fire."
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Well, they've been using their WebEx and IP telephony systems to steal IP from clients, and have been sued over it more than a few times.
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Silicon, optics, security, and AI, you say? All I can think of is this episode from NewsRadio.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIqIzPGv2Sw
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I bucket Cisco in the same category as VMware, in that they seem to have decided to focus on milking the living fuck out of a handful of extremely large customers who are incapable of migrating, and see no need staff for sales, customer service, or possibly even product development. Make hay this quarter and who gives a shit about next quarter.
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Well, to be fair, that's been the corporate world's trajectory since 1980. We're looking at end-stage capitalism where revenue growth is the be-all and end-all goal. That's not a focus on actual EARNINGS, which is what drives profits. As long as their stock value increases, sales can drop like the Chicxulub Meteor on the economy and they have zero fucks to give about it.
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It helps them to move towards juicing stock prices and thus executive compensation. Any side effects are unfortunate and unforeseeable.
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Cisco has been garbage for years.
Maybe in the 80's or something they were ok but not for decades.
Seems to be one of those names that still hangs around in the shadows of IT where greybeards remember Cisco and IBM and the like fondly.
Maybe in the 80's or something they were ok but not for decades.
Seems to be one of those names that still hangs around in the shadows of IT where greybeards remember Cisco and IBM and the like fondly.
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"Thank you for making me rich. Bye now. And stuff about future endeavors..."
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What to say except that this disgusting and disgustingly normal.
There were layoffs apparently right before I got this job and literally from day one it's been deeply hollow to hear about what an "exciting time it is to be at $(company)" - except for the folks looking to sell their houses and move in with parents, or alternating which bills get paid to stretch an imaginary runway as far possible.
Best of luck to those laid off. It's really, really rough out there.
There were layoffs apparently right before I got this job and literally from day one it's been deeply hollow to hear about what an "exciting time it is to be at $(company)" - except for the folks looking to sell their houses and move in with parents, or alternating which bills get paid to stretch an imaginary runway as far possible.
Best of luck to those laid off. It's really, really rough out there.
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Thank you for helping us generate this amazing revenue stream... now we don't need you anymore - good bye!
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"Thanks for making us boatloads of money... now it's time for you to fuck off."
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If you have the wrong resources in the wrong places then you restructure. Train them and place them where you need them to be.
Oh. You meant that you didn't have AI resources but those pesky humans. Yeah. We are a needy bunch. But still need less water and electricity to keep us functioning.
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Yeah. They are in a really weird spot. Boom now for sure. Probably better to build up a safety fund for later.
n.b. I'm not even trying to comment on the ethics of layoffs. Everyone else will cover all that just fine.
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Indeed, I don't see what type(s) of role it is that they are shedding and it will be interesting to see if they kept that nebulous on purpose.
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ubercurmudgeon
Ars Praefectus
On a Thursday? I thought that studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do this at the end of the week. But cruelty is the point, as in "Look at us, we're firing people on the same day we're announcing record revenue. Aren't we the alpha dogs of the alumni of our MBA class."
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Seems like they could take all these great people, give them access to lots of AI, and get even better results.
Gee, I wonder why that's not happening?
Gee, I wonder why that's not happening?
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Cisco hasn't "led" much of anything in over a quarter of a century, possibly closer to 30 years. I was a programmer there (rare direct hire) from the late 90s through the early aughts. At the time, pretty much any "new" or "leading" product that came out from Cisco came from acquisitions. As the company exploded from the mid-90s until the initial 2001 dot com bubble burst, Cisco struggled with scaling its internal systems and internal software development got caught up in bureaucratic hell. From the BFR hardware to the failed IOS-TNG and early internal attempts at 3rd gen cell data protocol stacks and move away from its own monolithic single threaded single processor operating system all got bogged down in feature bloat and legacy concerns. Cisco was always trailing Juniper and other smaller, more focused companies. Cisco's "lead" came from being "first" and then being the "biggest". It had production and support capabilities that nobody else could match. When everything melted down, Cisco's staff from tech support, customer support, and hardware and software engineering could get stuff going again like nobody else. But Cisco has long been reactive to technology. Since the turn of the millenium, Cisco has purchased its way to continued relevance more than developed it from scratch in-house.
The layoffs make sense internally in that it's easier for a company like Cisco to go buy a small company with new technology and hire new engineers and support to develop it than it is to retrain older employees in the new technology.
The brutal calculus our capitalistic system. I've got a handful of long since expired patents from my days at Cisco, but I saw that first hand. I was hired into a development role, then our only real competitor in my product space surrendered, leaving Cisco with 99% market share - and no further need to innovate in the space as the customers were now a captive audience. Half my team were part of the dot-com layoffs, the rest of us went to a "sustaining role" (aka bug fixing our protocol on new hardware) and some effort was made to throw us some work in new technology, but basically we were glorified bug fixers for code initially written by other teams. In the long run most of those efforts ended up in the trash heap as Cisco basically would kneecap internal efforts by finding some small company that had a head start and just buy it.
I haven't written software for a living for over a decade.
And don't misread me. I don't defend the layoffs. They're terrible and wasteful. It's a management and direction problem. The business/economy incentives that lead to layoffs and hiring new people instead of reassignment and retraining existing employees are a major societal issue.
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scortiusthecharioteer
Ars Centurion
I am positive at this instant there are still large accounting firms who are still scrambling to replace as400.
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$4.2 billion of net income (profit) in this quarter alone. You can bet darned little of that will go to those losing their jobs, "pro-rated bonuses" or no.
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They'd get more bang for the buck by firing the top dozen executives. Plus probably see a lot of innovation from those left.
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We have a customer in healthcare and they still run AS400 for some service or another...
Yeah..
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IBM i is actually a pretty well-liked operating system among its userbase; I've not seen any "scrambling" to migrate off of it, and it's periodically getting some new users.
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A friend of mine recently departed Cisco when they realized their area had more VPs than engineering leaders.
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Of course not. If it was folks might wonder if the C-suite bonuses should be cut as well, but since revenue is high (due 100% to enlightened, bold leadership and not the work of the thousands now jobless) we can make sure those are paid in full.
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Layoffs that happen in profitable years should result in a tax burden multiplied by 2
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“could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco, now fuck off!"
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We really need legislation to do two things: announcement of strong profit should also be a declaration of bonuses to the entire company. Not to shareholders, but to stakeholders. Shareholders make their money in stock value and loan interest, they don't need to be rewarded with dividends before the ones who made the damn money in the first place get paid for their work. The other thing we need to do is a law that obliterates extra compensation packages for C-suite and board members if more than 5% of a company is let go for a period of 3-5 years. If you need to cut staffing to help the company survive, fine, but execs need to put their own necks on the line when they do so.
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Firing 4000 because AI just to overwork who stays and re-hire a bunch after AI screw ups get too big to manage.
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So, you caused me to (morbidly) wonder.... If we could quantify AI "work" in a unit which we could compare 1:1 with the "work" from a human, and we could then accurately compare the energy and resources it takes to support a human and the energy and resources it takes to maintain the AI that does that work, would it actually be cheaper in terms of total energy and resource usage to keep a human around or not???
There has been all kinds of noise about declining birth rates, but maybe that is actually better for these tech oligarchs in the long run because it means there's less pesky, needy, unproductive humans around to use up the resources they need for their data centers....
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