Cisco likes to claim it is transitioning from a HW to a SW company - but I've seen software centric teams devistated by "limited" restructuring more than once.
Look, it is time to be honest - Cisco is never going to be the innovative company it once was. It might have created much of the backbone of the Internet age, but has absoliutely no idea what to do now.. If you really look for a pattern, you will see that most of the layoffs are just trying to cover costly mistakes that management has made.
Around 2011 there was a push to compete with AWS / Azure and start developing SaaS/IaaS solutions - but instead a handful of directors squashed that with facination with scaled-scrum that neither scaled nor even met the basic team-led development model of scrum.
Our cloud was beyond a joke when compared with AWS (seriuosly, was anyone besides Cisco teams using it?), and just take a look at Teams/Spark to see how good money can be flushed down a toilet. (Seriously, what the the total cost of that project now -- counting calling it has to be getting close to a quarter of a billion, give or take 100 million - on headcount alone!)
Next take a look at management - except for RT nearly everyone from senior manager to VP is STILL there. Most even have been promoted!
Do yourself a favor - ask those that left Cisco what they think of it after being away a year or two. Most will say they stagnated and that the pay wasn't worth the lost opportunities.
Sad to say this is all very true. Originally posted by @WmdvidC-1cic