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Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

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Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#21

Post by BobbyJo »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #13
tedivm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Malwarebytes (I left in 2014) I helped with two acquisitions. In both cases we took care of all of the people in the new company and rolled them into Malwarebytes. M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.

Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people; they don't have ethics and morals. All that matters is the balance sheet, the stock price, and the executive bonus. You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jel…

Ethics an morals have financial upside, for people and groups of people (companies). For instance, do to their past behavior, and its publicity, Cisco is likely to lose many more competent employees during an acquisition than had they behaved otherwise.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#22

Post by werrett »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #16

It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same pl…

“I’ll be there in 7 minutes” is my standard answer when I know it’s going to be more than 5, probably less than 10.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#23

Post by alephnerd »

steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

> what do people think of the "observability" space from here?

Splunk and other observability companies (Datadog has been hiring like crazy on the security side) have been pivoting into becoming a SIEM 2.0 for a couple years now.

Infra budgets now include Security spend, so an entire generation of Infra companies in segments such as Observability/Application Management (Datadog), Data Platform (Databricks, Snowflake), API Management (Imperva, Wallarm, Postman), and DevTooling (Hashicorp) have begun pivoting into the Security segment.

The same thing happened with networking in the 2010s.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#24

Post by tedivm »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #13
tedivm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Malwarebytes (I left in 2014) I helped with two acquisitions. In both cases we took care of all of the people in the new company and rolled them into Malwarebytes. M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.

Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people; they don't have ethics and morals. All that matters is the balance sheet, the stock price, and the executive bonus. You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jel…

That's an amazing cop out. Companies are run by people, people make the decisions, and ethics/morality can have an impact on the bottom line. Using "it's a company, ethics aren't real" is just an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#25

Post by argiopetech »

leetrout wrote: post #8
tedivm wrote: post #6

Cisco buying your company should be considered a worst case scenario for most employees. The important thing to remember is not to trust a word they say. I was at Kenna Security when Cisco bought them (I was only there for a month too, so Kenna hired me knowing the purchase was going to happen). They lied through their teeth about the process. They promised every resume would be reviewed for leveling, but then gave o…

> The VP of Eng at Kenna promised me that to my face The real lesson to learn here is twofold: - People recruiting / hiring are incentivized to say whatever is needed to close the deal. With the exception of a bold faced lie (I don't think this was that). - People at the company being acquired are more often than not going to lose most of their power. Including the C-suite. No one is safe and as an employee/victim yo…

Three fold:

- People forget and circumstances change. Signed documents don't.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#26

Post by jeffbee »

steveBK123 wrote: post #2

Typical post deal RIF, but bigger question - what do people think of the "observability" space from here? My sneaking suspicion is that outside vertical integrations like this.. they are going to see some revenue issues in this downturn. Outside of huge FAANG infra, paid observability seems like a "nice to have" rather than a "must have".. the type of thing you cut before you cut engineering staff, and extend your ru…

I work at an observability service and have a personal stake in the outcome so you can disregard my opinion I guess. But it seems to me that observability is there to enable you to get along with fewer people. The more stats and logs and profiles you have the fewer human operators you need.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#27

Post by cyberlurker »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #16

It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same pl…

Talk to enough MBAs and you realize most of them are following the same playbook. They all say and do the same things and no one cares as long as things aren’t disastrous. But it is the safer option and probably results in less innovation.

So the 7% cuts will continue until someone boldly breaks the mold and standardizes 8% and brands it “the rule of 8s” and preaches it at overpriced executive retreats.

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#28

Post by konradb »

shmatt wrote: post #20
tedivm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was at Malwarebytes (I left in 2014) I helped with two acquisitions. In both cases we took care of all of the people in the new company and rolled them into Malwarebytes. M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.

Not challenging peoples capabilities doesn't scale well. Did you ever hire someone with 0 interviews, just because they work for another good company? Then why do that after M&A? Its not unusual for the force cuts to be done via interviews at the new company

> Then why do that after M&A?

Presumably if you trust the organisation enough to pay for the whole thing, you would have a measure of trust in their ability to hire?

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#29

Post by throw3823423 »

tedivm wrote: post #12
greggsy wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a Cisco thing - it’s M&A in general. The sellers need to maintain the appearance of growth before the sale, and the buyers want to rationalise costs. Once they have the IP, or have successfully eliminated the competition through acquisition, those in the old company are really just numbers in an hr system.

When I was at Malwarebytes (I left in 2014) I helped with two acquisitions. In both cases we took care of all of the people in the new company and rolled them into Malwarebytes. M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.

It often has to do with the size of the company: the larger you are, the weaker your decisionmaking.

I work for a very large corp. As part of a round of layoffs earlier this year, they cut an entire foreign office, to the man. The decision was made from very high up: VPs were informed after it occurred. For some departments, the losses were small. For others, they were crippling: It was a very important group, doing things nobody else did, and which we couldn't cut.

The end result? The VP realized that the cuts had been extremely unwise, and now almost everyone that worked on that group has US visas, and is working from a new office in the US, with American salaries instead of their far, far lower ones. Not a costs savings, not an improvement in capability... just more expensive, and with projects that got delayed for months, as everyone was out for about 6 months.

For US layoffs, the decisions were not made quite that high, but still high enough that people in the know of salaries and performance were extremely confused about who got cut. Some great, cheap people were cut. Some expensive people that are poor performers by any standard remained. But nobody that managed ICs was involved with the decision making.

A large organization either makes very slow decisions, or acts basically blind. Sometimes they really fail, and do both!

Re: Splunk to cut workforce by 7% after cisco deal

#30

Post by dangus »

rufus_foreman wrote: post #16

It's always 7%. "T-Mobile is laying off 7% of staff" "Robinhood Lays Off About 7% of Its Full-Time Employees" "Sonos lays off 7%" "Vox Media to lay off 7% of workforce" "Payments firm PayPal to lay off 7% of its workforce" "Roomba maker iRobot to lay off about 7% of its workforce" "GitLab to reduce workforce by 7%" "Informatica to lay off 7% of its workforce" It seems like these CEOs are just copying from the same pl…

My guess is that it’s a safe number where you can lay off at that level and guarantee minimal disruptions in operations.

7% equates to laying off one person per group of 14 people. It would be hard to argue that most companies couldn’t get by with 13 people doing the work of 14.

I think you would feel the loss of one person on a team of 10 a lot more.

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