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Cisco Slashes 4,000 Jobs
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Cisco's CEO John Chambers dealt employees a blow Wednesday, saying the networking giant would cut 4,000 workers from the payroll. Not quite a death blow, but this 5 percent cut could leave some employees gasping. Chambers took the knife to Cisco last year, cutting 2 percent of its workforce."
FTFA:
For Cisco, the cuts are not a result of the company bleeding tons of red ink. In fact, when it unveiled its fourth quarter results Wednesday, Chambers noted the company posted a record quarter for revenues and its bottom line was profitable.
A history lesson from an old fogey. There was a time, believe it or not, when profitable companies would generally not layoff people because the company was, uh, profitable. If a company did layoff people the stock market usually took it as an indication that something was wrong (which it generally was). No, I swear this is true.
I also know that there are ways of twisting arms to change such behavior, but that only meant something back when the government gave a damn about employment. It typically went something like this. Gosh Cisco, we buy a lot of equipment from you, but there have been some questions lately. Frankly we may need to take another look at the competition. BTW, sorry about your layoffs. No, no, no relation between these two things. BTW, did you know your competition was hiring?
Furthermore, if Cisco does need more people in the future, they'll be the first to scream "shortage, we need 10x more H-1B's!". There was a time when profitable, or even temporarily mildly unprofitable companies, wouldn't layoff people because they'd need their expertise in the future. How silly management was back then, and how wonderful our brave new world is.
I think you nailed it right here. I worked for Cisco for a couple years when they started doing layoffs, and it was more a way for them to get rid of bottom performers than anything else. Well, by and large. They did also ax whole projects, but that was a bit more rare. It's hard to get fired from Cisco, so they use the layoffs to get rid of some cruft.
Also, the layoff package they give you isn't bad at all. They provide job placement services, as well as paying you for quite some time.
Then you've not noticed or paid attention to their behavior.
The NSA encourages backdoors, and unencrypted communications, that make their and other intelligence service's jobs easier directly at the expense of US confidentiality. Take a good look at the history of the "Clipper Chip" and its "Skipjack" technology. As soon as means were discovered to use it with keys that were *not* held in law enforcement hands, it was pulled from the market. Not because this created a security risk, but because it meant the NSA could no longer effortlessly obtain keys to monitor traffic. The prevalence of unannounced backdoors, and irreparable back doors, in large amounts of Cisco equipment has been repeatedly demonstrated.
The fact that Cisco configuration tools and the AnyConnect VPN clients were written by drunken, outsourced monkeys who were downsized from the "Hamlet" writing project also has its effects. What other VPN client, in the world, is not even capable of saving more than the last VPN configuration you happened to use, saving your passwords, or saving an unsigned SSL key from a corporate site that you yourself selected and have hand verified so that the client will *stop throwing random popups* about it?
Uh, John Chambers has been with Cisco since 1991 when he left IBM and has been the CEO of cisco for almost two decades.....Just sayin.