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Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

reuters.com

211–220 of 294 posts

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#211
The root cause is: this is capitalism. "Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.

Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 15 (1867)"

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#212

Let's just say the average salary is 70k which is very conservative. That is 14k * 70k annually lost from the local community, a grand total of 980M or let's just say 1 billion annually. Looking for another job when there are massive cuts like this also degrades the salary they accept on their next job because of the competition. I wish companies, if possible, throttled layoffs a bit more instead of large chunks like…

I've been through throttled layoffs in the past. They're much much worse. 1) You're always looking over your shoulder, and can't think about long term projects or work. 2) The first people out (frequently the weakest performers) are able to find jobs the easiest, but by the time the better employees are also let go, the market demand has been filled. 3) It encourages and environment of non-cooperation. Employees coop…

I agree, its like being stuck in purgatory. Although, I disagree somewhat with your last statement -- in my experience, all throttled layoffs have been a result of acquisition synergies. The current one around me is by a market leader with a great past and excellent vision of the future.

From my experience there's an easy way out of this: take control of your own career. Ask yourself: are these the conditions I want to work in? whats best for me; family; situation? Are there opportunities here while everyone else is looking over their shoulder?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#213
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you amputate a limb, you want to do it as quickly as possible. When you throw the bathwater out, make sure you aren't loosing valuable resources. the best case scenario is to be really smart and constantly drain the bathwater such that the baby doesn't even notice the level dropping. Keeping the baby focused on the new shiny thing helps.

You mean stack ranking? LOL that doesn't work out how you want it to either...

No I don't mean that at all.

I work at a place where we surgically remove deadwood, keep valuable people & tech. Those who have value feel valued.

As an aside I was with 3Com when they tried to go toe to toe with Cisco. 3Com did very much the same thing.. one major event was even called 'Catapult', senior management's intent was to launch the company forward, workers looked on with incredulity as over half the workforce lost their job in one day. 3Com never recovered.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through throttled layoffs in the past. They're much much worse. 1) You're always looking over your shoulder, and can't think about long term projects or work. 2) The first people out (frequently the weakest performers) are able to find jobs the easiest, but by the time the better employees are also let go, the market demand has been filled. 3) It encourages and environment of non-cooperation. Employees coop…

I agree, its like being stuck in purgatory. Although, I disagree somewhat with your last statement -- in my experience, all throttled layoffs have been a result of acquisition synergies. The current one around me is by a market leader with a great past and excellent vision of the future. From my experience there's an easy way out of this: take control of your own career. Ask yourself: are these the conditions I want…

But when layoffs are as big as 14k, rarely are employees evaluated for individual value...it's usually entire business units or office locations that are closed. Throttled or not, the people exiting Cisco have likely already been picked...not much they can do about it in the meantime.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you amputate a limb, you want to do it as quickly as possible. When you throw the bathwater out, make sure you aren't loosing valuable resources. the best case scenario is to be really smart and constantly drain the bathwater such that the baby doesn't even notice the level dropping. Keeping the baby focused on the new shiny thing helps.

Bathwater doesn't have morale. I worked at a semiconductor company while in school and for a bit after graduating. It's a volatile industry and layoffs are frequent. Every time anything happened, people were just concerned about layoffs. On every project, people's concern was usually protecting themselves so they wouldn't get laid off. None of them were really happy in their jobs, but they all had golden handcuffs (I…

There's two ways you can throttle. As you describe, and being smarter about it.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#216
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I own stock in most large companies through index funds. I want to someday retire and the government won't/ can't provide for me to life up to my standards. No offshore tax haven here.

Unfortunately, your case is not the majority. I believe free market would work if it was the case, but it is an utopia, like communism.

His case is in fact the majority, the radical majority. You couldn't be more wrong about how US investors store their wealth, it's almost entirely located within the United States, which is proven by estimates on domestic held wealth by the major banks, the Fed, and the Treasury. If you have something to dispute them with, let's hear it.

Americans almost never use off-shore tax havens, because the IRS has no boundaries on chasing them down. US income is taxed globally, and the IRS will destroy you if you attempt to hide it from them and they find out, which they almost always do (they have direct or indirect access to nearly all global banking, financial transactions, stock transactions, bond purchases; they can also directly or indirectly get access to nearly all banks accounts in first world nations through treaties). There are very few countries where you can even attempt to hide your money from the IRS now, and most of those you'd be a fool to park money in.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#217
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting fired and getting laid off are very different things!

Am I missing something? They are the exact same thing. The company decides to terminate your employment contract, as opposed to you making the decision.

Good companies also typically offer some documentation that the termination was not performance-based.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#218
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting fired and getting laid off are very different things!

Am I missing something? They are the exact same thing. The company decides to terminate your employment contract, as opposed to you making the decision.

Fired means that they don't want you doing your job. Laid off means that they don't want anyone doing your job.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Vision: a community-managed set of integrated tools that let you create a featureful cloud on hardware you control. The Reality: a bunch of python scripts everyone forks.. committee politics...frustration OpenStack is a great example of going "community" before the problem is well understood or there is a solution people trust. It's basically a tire fire at this point and most of the community participants are ma…

What alternatives are there?

AWS, Azure or GCE....or if you insist on your own hw, just what spit and bailing wire you minimally require... at least you will own and understand it.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#220
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have looked at Android code. You just have to look at the API. From little details (wifiInfo.getSSID() returning either the quoted SSID, an unquoted string of hex characters the SSID consists of, the special string " " or "0x") to the overall architecture (needlessly convoluted lifecycle, 2D rendering architecture from 2000s, the whole intra-app Intent bullshit that causes people to find alternative ways of commu…

Out of interest, what's wrong with Intents?? As alternatives, do people just end up dumping to an sqlite database and polling it in each Activity? Haha that'd be madness

Event bus mostly
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