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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

#101

Post by nerpderp82 »

throw3823423 wrote: post #29
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.

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…

The pain is real. Those layoffs forever changed the company. It killed the culture, ultimately the controlling stock holders were the decision makers. It is their company and they had a message to send.

The message was that they were in control. That they could cut off their nose to prove a point. This layoff event will be their downfall.

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

#102

Post by lotsofpulp »

tedivm wrote: post #43
michaelt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no reason to involve businesses in the equation. If your goal is to ensure people have cash in the event they are terminated from their job, then have the government give them cash in the event they are terminated from their job.

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

#103

Post by steveBK123 »

jeffbee wrote: post #77
steveBK123 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone needs to explain to me the purpose of containerizing architecture down to such small subcomponents that they could have run on my Windows 98 machine 25 years ago.

At some point you're wasting a lot of time/bandwidth on RPC, and/or memory on all the data copies across process boundaries. So its bigger and slower, harder to orchestrate, harder to monitor, and.. I'm sure there's some positives somewhere.

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

#104

Post by BobbyJo »

keiferkif wrote: post #41
BobbyJo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on the circumstances. If you are trying to make a valuable product, good ethics will probably serve you better than bad ones in a majority of cases. If you aren't concerned with generating real value and are fine with running your company and reputation into the ground, then sure.

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

#105

Post by rubymancer »

bbayles wrote: post #33
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…

For a contrary perspective, this wasn't my experience with being acquired by Cisco. I had my issues with the process, but I felt well-treated throughout and was never lied to.

Agreed. I was also part of the Kenna acquisition after being there for 2 years and am still there.

My equity got paid out quickly, I have since gotten raises and bonuses, and the only shittiness has been all the mega-corp nonsense (omg the trainings) and worse health insurance.

Cisco is not a nightmare acquirer, that would be Amazon. If AMZN had acquired us I'd have left immediately.

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

#106

Post by JeremyNT »

tedivm wrote: post #24
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…

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.

> 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.

FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.

In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.

Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.

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

#107

Post by jeffbee »

steveBK123 wrote: post #103
jeffbee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Someone needs to explain to me the purpose of containerizing architecture down to such small subcomponents that they could have run on my Windows 98 machine 25 years ago. At some point you're wasting a lot of time/bandwidth on RPC, and/or memory on all the data copies across process boundaries. So its bigger and slower, harder to orchestrate, harder to monitor, and.. I'm sure there's some positives somewhere.

I don't get it either, and the people who designed and built that system were idiots, so I didn't get a good impression of such fine-grained services. I am comfortable with services that are much larger, such as "store this document" or "classify an email as spam or not".

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

#108

Post by foobiekr »

sireat wrote: post #96
foobiekr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flip basically shows up at the same time the iPhone got video. They were dead already and only Cisco didn’t realize it.

Oh Flip was dead in the long run no question about it. It was not only iPhone but Android phones that finally got good enough video quality. It is just that Cisco cut their losses extremely early. There were still 2-5 years left where Flip could have been profitable.

Without insider information, which I don't have, who knows.

But I will say this:

1. cisco is not a consumer company. they tried with linksys, bailed. tried with scientific atlanta, bailed. no surprise that they bailed on PD.

2. having seen a lot of ASIC acquisitions in my lifetime, which is basically what Pure Digital was - apple knockoff packaging and branding plus an encoder - in my experience tons of startup teams get their first ASIC done, but then totally flub their second (and some of this is the layoff dynamics of how ASIC startups operate on the HW side - unless you immediately start the next chip before finding fit, you have dead weight that you cut). Also, once you show how it's done and have fit, the professionals show up, like Qualcomm, which makes that even harder.

It wouldn't surprise at all if (2) was the culprit.

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

#109

Post by Apocryphon »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #93
lucidguppy wrote: post #83

M&A is noncompetitive and should either be prohibited or heavily taxed. Create a subsidiary? Fine... Buy up all the tadpoles so you don't have to deal with frogs? Noncompetitive...

I don't totally disagree but the consequence would be 80% of VC investment vanishing overnight and a whole class of founders just not bothering. The chance of a successful IPO is faaaaar less than "bigcorp wants you to go away, so here's some $$"

Where would the VCs put their money instead? NFTs?

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

#110

Post by fred_is_fred »

technick wrote: post #97

It would be cool if there were laws or something requiring the acquiring company to keep all employees on the payroll at their pay rate when the acquisition occurred, for a minimum of a 18-24 months. Sadly the majority of our politicians are glorified fluffers for big corporations, so nothing like this would ever happen.

With that plan you may as well just make M&A illegal. The net result would be 0 mergers other than giant companies acquiring small startups with minimal payroll.
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