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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

#71

Post by steveBK123 »

jeffbee wrote: post #66
steveBK123 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The savings only really works at scale though right. I've worked in plenty of engineering departments with 200 engineers and essentially 5 operators. You need bare minimum 3 of them for holidays/timezones and key man risk reasons. So you can maybe help a 200 person org save 0.5-1% of their lower paid staff? Is your bill + engineering integration costs going to be less than $200-400k/year?

I've worked in 100-person groups where everyone spent all of their time trying to figure out what the hell the system was doing because it did not have tracing or logging.

microservices I take it ;-) ?

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

#72

Post by dboreham »

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…

Goldilocks percentage.

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

#73

Post by buggy6257 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #61

CFO's will follow suit and Wallstreet will begin to expect tech to make cuts ... It's getting noticed that Twitter/X reduced it's staff by 80%, and also reduced it's cloud spend by 60% ... and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Some might argue that Twitter/X has been able to innovate faster as a result. Now I'm not suggesting that FANG is going to layoff 80% overnight. But I wouldn't be surpris…

I don't think ANY CEO is looking at Musk's handling of Twitter/X and thinking the layoffs had "no material change to their business"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-x-worth-less-221637...

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

#74

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chii wrote: post #68
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins This is wildly oversimplifying. For example, it theoretically rules out principle-agent problems.

While true, you can somewhat assume that the principle could have already incentivized the agent to align by assigning rewards for increasing profits (aka, bonuses, stock grants based on performance targets etc).

> you can somewhat assume that the principle could have already incentivized the agent to align by assigning rewards for increasing profits

No, you can’t. This is the problem of corporate management. Management will tend to act to maximise profit margins or even the stock price is a bad explanatory model.

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

#75

Post by kjs3 »

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…

So the Kenna execs lied to you about the Cisco merger and what it means. OK.

FWIW, I've never be bought by Cisco, but my best friend has been at 3 startups bought by Cisco. He never enjoyed working for Cisco, but always said Cisco was very clear about their process, and it basically worked the same way each time, except when execs at his startup threw monkey wretches into things. YMMV.

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

#76

Post by Arainach »

chii wrote: post #36
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.

> an excuse people who make decisions use to act unethically. at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).

>at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins

Over what time frame?

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

#77

Post by jeffbee »

steveBK123 wrote: post #71
jeffbee wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked in 100-person groups where everyone spent all of their time trying to figure out what the hell the system was doing because it did not have tracing or logging.

microservices I take it ;-) ?

Yes it was one of those extremely bad architectures where every little thing that could have been a library function was an RPC instead and all the services were running in containers with .1 CPU quota and 64MB of memory.

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

#78

Post by nova22033 »

tiffanyh wrote: post #61

CFO's will follow suit and Wallstreet will begin to expect tech to make cuts ... It's getting noticed that Twitter/X reduced it's staff by 80%, and also reduced it's cloud spend by 60% ... and there hasn't been any material change to their business. Some might argue that Twitter/X has been able to innovate faster as a result. Now I'm not suggesting that FANG is going to layoff 80% overnight. But I wouldn't be surpris…

and there hasn't been any material change to their business.

The business is worth less half of what Musk paid for it. And that's his estimate of the value.

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

#79

Post by kjs3 »

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.

You're right, of course, with just a nit of misinformation here that always bugs me: there are still lots of places that have pensions, just not places the HN demographic considers worthy of working at. I have one from my time at IBM, one from my telco days, and my current employer (financial) has a pretty generous one.

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

#80

Post by coredog64 »

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…

> Companies, regardless of what the Supreme Court says, are not people.

What the USSC said was that voluntary associations of people don’t forfeit the rights of the individuals in the association.

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