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Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

reuters.com

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Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#261

Post by brianwawok »

adventured wrote: post #216
meira wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 boundari…

Indeed.

I think the % of Americans doing the off-shore thing is very very low.

Now from a raw $$$ standpoint, perhaps it is a problem. Is 10% of wealth hidden offshore by the .1% of abusers? Or is it only 5% I doubt anyone knows for sure. I suspect it is less than the "legally" held offshore money using the double irish and other such accounting tricks.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#262

Post by mmagin »

michaelvoz wrote: post #46

I live down the street from Cisco HQ. I share an apartment building with many of their engineers. Perhaps it is anecdotal, and my evidence comes purely from speaking with them (I have never seen their work), but they come across as absolutely terrible as software engineers. They seem like the kind of company destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant. They have no care for the product, good pr…

Look at it this way: why would a lot of the best engineers want to work at Cisco? Maybe when they were the company they were 20 years ago, but today?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#265

Post by user5994461 »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #233
72deluxe wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What languages did they work in?

The vast majority were Java developers. I always felt bad about it as I never passed a single one of them during my time working there and interviewing them. They were in such a shitty position but at the same time I only ever had one of them actually able to talk through how to code something (and even that person said they only "know how to do a for loop in theory" which I don't understand but I digress). I'm fine…

I am curious. If I may ask.

Did the company actually decided to keep/lay the employees individually based on your feedback from the interview? Or were the destiny already decided beforehand and the interviews were just some acting?

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#266

Post by user5994461 »

Meanwhile in "HN: Who is Hiring (August 2016)"[1]

> Cisco Meraki | San Francisco & London | Full-Time ONSITE

> ...

I have the feeling that company is sending mixed signals.

Well, on the bright side that can explain why they don't reply =)

---

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12222620

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#269

Post by m52go »

scotch_drinker wrote: post #256
m52go wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand this isn't a good situation for the community, but what about the other side? That $980m isn't just disappearing into thin air. CSCO will use it to refocus their efforts into more valuable services, which by itself will entail some level of hiring & investment, and if successful, they'll hire & invest more. If you think this is an optimistic perspective, consider the alternative...CSCO continues employin…

Will they? Or will they use to just do more buybacks? I'm not sure I trust any company to refocus after layoffs when they practically just announced a huge temporary gift to shareholders. http://www.recode.net/2016/2/10/11587764/cisco-soars-on-15-b...

Good point. But even buybacks are taking that cash somewhere...it's the market's way of reallocating capital to a place it can be more productive.

It's hard to picture, since that cash is going from one entity (CSCO) to a lot of different entities (the market), but obviously CSCO thinks the market can make better use of that capital than it can.

The only thing that could be worse than what they're doing, in my view, is if they fired all these people and sat on their cash, AAPL-style.

Re: Cisco to lay off about 14,000 employees

#270

Post by jedberg »

ryandrake wrote: post #34
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #27

It's scary seeing all of these lay-offs happening. I'd hate to be looking for a software engineering job right now.

If you listen to tech CEOs, there's this huge "shortage of software engineers". Surely any former Cisco employee with software experience will be snapped up within days by all these tech companies desperately searching for tech talent.... Any day now....

There is a shortage of good software engineers. There are many people currently employed who call themselves software engineers but I'm not sure what they're actually doing. I saw this a lot when I was doing hiring -- people who can't even write simple loops or know what 12 mod 5 is.
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