Well if you don’t have to pay people then yah, revenue will go up for now.
Collect your bonus, get your stock, bail and move to the next job. Sell the stock before the damage you caused rears its head.
Finance should be banned
Just ban or heavily tax stocks.
Oh, billionaire just used stocks as collateral for his loan? 30% tax Selling or buying stock? 20% tax
Bring back pensions first then
Pensions? For billionaires?
Fucking suits.
Shit like this is why I had to learn the trades as backup while I was still in the game, in this case training to be a computer technician.
Part of me is glad I’m getting the hell out of this system in the near future. My heart goes out to younger people being royally screwed by it and I don’t see any way out of it within that system.
I’m with you. After this position ends I’m changing careers. Tech has gone to shit lately.
Which system, specifically
This will continue to happen until sociopath executives see consequences.
Or, you know, workplaces organize and form strong labor unions?
dont work hard for companys, better they do more likely you will get laid off with everyone else. Might happen anyway, but if they dont do well they might think they actually need people to do work.
Who are you kidding?
Record profits > “We need to lay off workers to keep these numbers going up.”
Not record profits > “We need to lay off workers to make these numbers go up.”CEO: I need the highest possible performance otherwise the board will fire me.
Board: We need the highest return otherwise we’re not willing to support the CEO.
Fund managers: We need to only invest in the most profitable ventures, otherwise people will move their money out of the fund I’m managing.
Pension companies: We need to only put our money in the most high performing funds.
You: I need the best return on my pension so I can retire as soon as possible.
If you’ve ever moved saved money to an account offering higher interest or performance, you’re part of this. I’m not saying that to blame, but people often don’t connect their own behaviour with the behaviour of the market.
I agree. The stock market was a mistake
Agreed. I participate as a thoughtless investor trying to maximize the growth of my savings but I hate that I have to even bother. Extra work, some guilt or anxiety around whether you made the right choices, and more complicated taxes. I think it’s horseshit that I’m effectively obliged to play in this casino the ruling class set up, just so my money retains its value against inflation.
I’m not against my money being used to grow businesses. But then just let the bank deal with it and pay me a fair interest rate for lending it to businesses. I still haven’t been given a good answer as to why the stock price of a company should have any effect on its day to day operations or revenue generation.
That doesnt even make sense
congratulations on finally getting on the same page as the article and the rest of us
So you think Cisco is shrinking its workforce?
It’s literally in the article and the headline…
Long term they are growing. In a year or two they be at 90k and then 100k in a decade or two. The employee count cant just sit static.
It hurt to read that post. Grammar much ?
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American Capitalism 101. Sacrifice future growth for immediate profits.
What is the logical progression to this kind of a thing. Is there going to be a turning point or is bottom a long long way to go?
I’m just brainstorming here, but do layoffs pave the way for hiring new grads at entry level wages, with more cutting edge knowledge?
Sure, that overlooks the loss of tacit knowledge that keeps the company running. I haven’t actually figured out yet how large companies can keep packaging out their senior employees that glue their disorganized systems together with undocumented knowledge.
That’s an interesting question. Either there isn’t much tacit knowledge in the company that they can’t put in onboarding documentation, or the company is focusing on short term gains at the cost of long term stability
Neither have the large companies. The only difference between you and them is that you have acknowledged this loss of knowledge.
This is just a game to them, they have nothing to lose no matter what happens.
my god we have so many layoffs this year.
we have so many layoffs this year.
And the year isn’t even half over yet.
Just wait until the full impact of Trump’s bullshit works its way through the economy.
The carnage will be felt for a decade or more.
You better thank the Job Creators for the right to work, Serfs! Now go gratefully into the gig economy, singing the praises of Tr*mp.
The usual self-cannibalism game.
You guys, all those employees contributing to their huge profits were actually a liability and now they’ll be so much more efficient.
/s because people take sarcasm literally
Seems fine, employees were well compensated and supported. Its a big company 4000 isnt a huge amount. Interesting to see a bigger pivot to silicon and optics.
How does boot taste?
Leathery? With a hint of shoe wax.
Meta is doing the exact same thing:
Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant will reportedly hand out roughly 8,000 pink slips on Wednesday, May 20, eliminating about 10% of its global workforce. Notably, though, these cuts will arrive on the heels of one of the most lucrative quarters in the company’s history: $56.31 billion in revenue and $26.8 billion in net income for the first three months of 2026…
https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/meta-layoffs-8000-workers-zuckerberg-ai-spending
Slashing 10% of your workforce annually is something Jack Welch thought of when he was CEO of General Electric; essentially it shifts that 10% of staff overhead cost straight to profits per year.
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics. What this effectively does is two fold:
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Anyone who’s focusing on delivering stuff the company needs long term isn’t always or sometimes never will produce nice neat KPIs that can be measured along with the rest of the company. This means these people are under constant pressure and can often get swept up in the firings.
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It makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool. Because everyone is automatically incentivised to deliver KPIs NOT the actual company deliverables that generate the added value and therefore the profit.
This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that’s left of the company’s institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.
If this AI fuelled trend keeps up then companies like Cisco and Meta will eventually implode at some point.
makes KPIs, a measuring tool, the target which as any statistician will tell you that when you make the measurement a target it ceases to be a good measuring tool
This came up recently elsewhere and is known as “Goodhart’s Law”
Yup. Not all value is easily and directly measurable. Trying to overmanage and only value measurable factors is incredibly counterproductive. But hey, that makes the stock price go up. So who cares about anything else.
I remember the grocery store I worked at started posting the rate for each cashier of items scanned per minute logged into a register. They didn’t say anything about it, but I now realize they were probably leading into using that data as justification for something.
My dumbass 16 year old self thought “I’m going to get that number so high it breaks the system.” I would lock my station after the previous customer, and take a little time to face all of the UPC codes and look up produce codes and make a general strategy. Then, I would unlock the register, scan like a madman, then lock it and casually start bagging. The customers would get concerned they needed to hurry up based on my fervor, so I would tell them “Take all the time you need, see that show yesterday?”
Next time they posted the rankings, my number was 20x as high as second place. After a few weeks of getting my number a little higher each time, my boss’ boss came by and told me to knock it off since I was polluting their metrics. Next week no new rankings.
I like to think I inadvertently helped prevent KPI nonsense.
The grocery store I worked for, over 20 years ago, did something similar, with similar results. All it did was incentivize locking and unlocking the register as optimally as possible. They also tracked how often and when in the transaction you scanned the customer’s loyalty card. It was to the point that basically cashiers who wanted to optimize their numbers wouldn’t unlock the register until the customer had their loyalty card in hand.
This is the same grocery store chain that almost failed completely due to a impossible sales requirements in their meat department leading to redating meat and bleaching chicken to increase its shelf life. The company claims they never asked any of their meat departments to do anything like that, they just set impossible standards and held people accountable unless they were able to find a way to cheat.
That’s quite funny, would love to see it in action.
This means after 5 to 10 years of this cycle all that’s left of the company’s institutional knowledge is how to deliver for KPIs and the sycophants who best adapt to this reality. You get a hollowing out of the company.
That happened (and continues to happen) to my former employer.
After years of layoffs and outsourcing, the company doesn’t have anyone on staff anymore who knows how half of the systems work.
Theae days, if something is more than 5 years old, the operations and maintenance staff (entirely outsourced contractors now) have to pray the documentation is correct (or even obtainable) if they have a hope of fixing it if anything breaks.
My experience is nowadays documentation is even going to go away, as the answer to fixing things is more and more going to be “get Claude to fix it”
the answer to fixing things is more and more going to be “get Claude to fix it”
Yeah that will certainly work (eyeroll) to deal with things that were done 10 years ago as a workaround to some other undocumented incompatibility.
I think we are already seeing that with Microsoft. Another 2-3 rounds of AI and they forget how to build windows.
Are you telling me they ever knew how to build Windows?
4x pain + 1 glass
Or, alternatively:
It also fosters a culture of non-cooperation with colleagues (because they are now your competition), where workers and teams try to sabotage each other or at least not help, and throw each other under the bus. So there’s mutual mistrust too. And no one wants to take a risk and innovate, leading to further stagnation.
But that will be a problem for the next guy.
Today’s fires are for next quarter’s employees to fix.
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10% according to internal key performance indicator (KPI) metrics
The thing is, that’s not what layoffs are supposed to be. That’s effectively firing someone for cause. Maybe in America the difference doesn’t matter, but in the civilised world, at least in theory, it does. But in reality they can somehow get away with this and call it “layoffs”.
If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.
If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.
The workload doesn’t decrease, it just gets spread to the remaining workers who are already overloaded because of the previous round of layoffs…
If a company does layoffs, they should not be allowed to hire any staff in the same or similar roles for 12 months.
Either that, or the laid-off workers should get right of first refusal for the positions. (Along with some additional incentive for the company not to game it.)
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10%
But that would be turnover rate, not cuts.
With Meta it very much looks like overhiring. What are those 8000 workers even doing, designing CSS for each individual ad on Facebook?
This blows my mind when I try to think about it. And this is only 10% of a supposed 80,000 globally. Facebook owns a bunch of companies though so I’m assuming they’re being counted too. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, etc
Implementing additional forms of wankery in the “Metaverse”.
God willing
I actually think a few % a year is healthy (1% feels right to me). I work at a company where we never lay anyone off and it’s led to a bunch of deadweight in the company that make work harder for everyone else. You gotta have some mechanism to let low performers go.
10% is way too high though
You gotta have some mechanism to let low performers go.
That’s called “firing for cause.”
Of course, that actually has accountability attached to it. Misusing layoffs for that purpose is an end-run around that accountability, which is why sociopathic corporations prefer it.
“For cause” at my company is gross malfeasance, not merely performing well below expectations. It’s the employer again putting themselves first: problematic employees are “harder” to get rid of than the status quo of letting them stick around indefinitely. Sucks for everyone else who has to work with them. Every company should cull a small number of people every year.
It should be case by case. Simple as that.
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I was about to say, two layoff posts on my feed back to back. Not a good sign.
Nice! Thanks.
Me, after firing the Cisco CEO: We just made $53 million in revenue!
