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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

#41

Post by keiferkif »

BobbyJo wrote: post #21
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would say that a lack of ethics has more financial upside

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

#42

Post by tedivm »

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

You're misreading my statement. My point is that they didn't do interviews. They just gave everyone absolutely crap offers, without actually interviewing or evaluating individuals. Hiring people with 0 interviews just because they worked for the purchased company is exactly what happened, and they did it in such a way that people were grossly under leveled.

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

#43

Post by tedivm »

michaelt wrote: post #38
tedivm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're absolutely right; shame on whoever made the decisions! In this case, it was certainly within their power to make a better choice, and they should have done. However, if you want tech jobs to have a higher and guaranteed severance, national legislation might be more effective. After all, many acquisitions and layoffs are at companies that are in dire financial straits, which limits discretionary spending.

I'm certainly a fan of legislation to require severance. That said I'm also all about shaming bad actors so that other workers are aware of what they can expect when engaging them.

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

#45

Post by solardev »

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…

Isn't this the usual case for an acquisition by a big company? People are just resource units to them, same as any other asset...

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

#46

Post by rapind »

dangus wrote: post #19
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…

Worst case scenario? That seems unlikely. Worst case scenario would be employee stock options and RSU grants remaining or becoming worthless, like in the case of a private company that never gains enough traction to exit or exits at a low valuation. Usually in a public acquisition, shares are purchased at a price premium. E.g., many Twitter employees got to cash out at a stock price well above the value of the compan…

> Every employee should see their role as temporary. This isn’t the lifetime employment pension days anymore. I see many opportunities for employees to walk away as a positive.

Good advice in general, but not a hard rule. There are roles where you need to expend a lot of energy learning proprietary stuff (processes, languages, frameworks, business rules). If you're in one of these roles it can give you a ton of leverage, but tread carefully around egos (you could get fired out of spite if you flex too hard, and maybe that's fine, but generally it's lose / lose).

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

#48

Post by alephnerd »

steveBK123 wrote: post #35
alephnerd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)…

Right I figured Splunks defensive play was to market themselves as infosec which every CTO needs to buy in order to tick a box.

Yep.

It's a 2 birds-1 stone strategy because Splunk can be used by your Platform team as an APM and by your Infosec team as a SIEM. This way you can file 1 PO and use a smaller portion of your budget.

This is was a major reason why Cisco acquired Splunk as their SIEM offering is shit, and there is a massive overlap in customer base.

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

#49

Post by dehrmann »

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?

I don't think it's cut entirely, but when you're looking at your cloud spend, it's got a target painted on it. It doesn't produce revenue on its own, so people will ask a lot of "do we really need X" or "can we lower retention."

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

#50

Post by _ea1k »

cyberlurker wrote: post #27
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.

"Better to fail conventionally than succeed unconventionally" - IMO, this often leads for people making decisions that are defensible by comparison to "industry norms".
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