Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

They want more young activist that they can control.

Meanwhile the ELT are all over the age they are trying to eliminate.

Because Cisco can't demand a price premium due to the commoditization of their products, profits can only increase if costs go down.

Of course, in the mid to long-term, an inexperienced workforce just accelerates the commoditization of Cisco. It's why Chuck finally bought a real software company. Unfortunately, Splunk won't fill in the profit gap created by Cisco's legacy portfolio, but Chuck can at least offer a plausible story to Wall Street as he exits the company.

The crazy thing is the number of senior executives at Cisco that have just been taking big paychecks for years while Cisco's decline has accelerated. The only thing they're good at is telling fairy tales and laying people off. They have accomplished absolutely nothing.

The calm before the storm

Agree with this post, but to get to 75K employee goal, Cisco layoff will be 20,000 within the next 9 months, as must make room for Splunk's 8,000+ employees that will be joining in 2024

Also since 2020 Cisco hired candidates with least qualifications than those hired before Covid, those hired after 2020 actually got higher paid than the ones already inside had better qualifications

example: many hired after 2020 had only CCNP are working on same positions as those hired before 2020 had CCIE

Cisco is going down the sewa-g-e

Layoffs usually comes after furlough

Two Words: Nortel Networks.

The stark reality is if 75% of your engineers are not under the age of 35, you will sink. All the top tech companies know this an adhere to this strategy - period!

Cisco is just another tech dinosaur struggling in a tar pit. Best outcome is a series of spin outs. Worst outcome is managed decline.

1. your math on over 40 isn’t valid. 2) laptop leases are four years now.

Cisco is in commodity business...

Netgear makes commodity products and their operating margin(ttm) is 0.49%. Aside of the SMB white box stuff Cisco lives in a high margin world with an operating margin(ttm) of 30.20% including the SMB white box stuff. One has what they call "high end products" which can't apply both IPv4 and IPv6 ACLs to the same interface and the other makes a high end router forwarding a quarter petabit/sec.

Cisco tried an assortment of commodity goods from buying and later selling Linksys, buying and burying a camera company that made cameras which would fail to recharge 3 minutes in because of overheating, a failed tablet advertised to have the world's best business application "flashlight," and a home telepresence system which required a $60/mo charge on each end to carriers that could provide proper QoS for the service when the world was switching to texting. Cisco can't do commodity.

Last I checked Cisco was in the top 20 technical companies in both revenue and market value worldwide (I checked before the Q1FY2024 announcement) and at that level there just isn't a clear path to doubling either. The fact that the likes of Arista, Fortinet, Juniper and Palo Alto are munching on Cisco's market share rather than taking on whole new markets with the best of FAANG growth tends to support this idea. There is no such thing as infinite growth, Cisco may be close to it's lifelong peak and that may be all it ever could have been given decisions made one, two and three decades ago.

The ELT have lost all sense of what it takes to build quality products and solutions.

Cisco was already ramping up acquisitions before John Chambers became CEO in 1995. $100B of acquisitions later, not even accounting for inflation, you have what Cisco has become.

...culture of excellence in the 90s and early 2000s [increasing stock prices until March of 2000.]

On the software side Cisco has always been extremely poor and the failures in the field from the mid-1990s forward confirm it. A quick run of any of that software through static analysis will also confirm it.

I think I recall something like wanting to get it down to 35...

Back in the early 2000s the goal stated in an all hands meeting by an executive was 25 for the engineering staff. By others we were also offered a chance to move to India on our own nickel for a 75% pay cut. In both cases they couldn't find enough young people in either country who want to deal with what is now 40 years of legacy for a bowl of rice a day (bonus points for anyone who gets the reference without having to search) so they have to take what they can get where they can get it.

Cisco is in commodity business, using bottom ( young graduates ) of pyramid scheme as commodity to making things work at Cisco, and let few of the top making noises about AI ( which is a lie ) to keep Cisco stay alive.

The ELT have lost all sense of what it takes to build quality products and solutions. It takes highly experienced, motivated and rewarded people who are team players who can share in the success of their hard work.. Cisco have lost sight of that fact and want people fresh out of college to do this. Cisco had this culture of excellence in the 90s and early 2000s. Since then it has been strangled with cost cutting and red tape.