Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

The February 2025 layoffs will dwarf these. 20,000 to 30,000 cut. Mark my words.

Got it in one!

Wondering your thought about the February 2025 layoffs now? Because … they didn’t happen.

Longtime Cisco veteran here. A true believer.

You have no concept of what is going on so your claim seems plausible.

I have NEVER seen it like this.

Your Zaphod style Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses must have broke.

The February 2025 layoffs will dwarf these. 20,000 to 30,000 cut. Mark my words.

Do you really think the ELT wants the stock to go back to $8 again?

(Splunk will be, in hindsight, the acquisition that ki-led Cisco)

Cisco was failing long before they acquired Splunk.

BOFA

$28 BILLION.

Fools.

Account managers haven’t even received goalsheets and when they do, the numbers will be unattainable.

The whole place is in chaos.

The 6 month goaling + 6 month layoff cadence is a soul crusher.

Cisco is over. $28B disaster Splunked down the drain

Splunk will fail at Cisco.

The ELT is in Bangalore, India finding your replacement

Now that the Fed cut interest rates by .50, recession is incoming.

the fed never cuts rates unless they see major problems. 50 basis points is massive.

history lesson:
inflation soared as a result of shortages in product and labor caused by covid.
inflation (the rate of prices increasing) is dropping. remember kids, it's not that prices are dropping, it's that the rate at which prices are increasing is dropping. important to understand.

The fed has a dual mandate.1. price stability and 2. employment.
the massive rate increase over the past few years (why your money market was paying you 5% interest) was because the Fed had to stop inflation. remember "inflation will be transitory" from 2 years ago. Well, it wasn't.

so the Fed shot the federal funds rate to the sky, fast!

this stopped inflation (with long and variable lags)

but the problem with this approach is that raising the federal funds rate also raises the "cost of money" that is, it makes borrowing costs very high.

and when people and businesses can't borrow, they can't spend. They don't buy cars, houses or Pokemon cards. Businesses that make and sell cars, houses and Pokemon start laying off people.

We live in a debt driven consumer economy. when people can't borrow, they stop buying. When people stop buying, companies cut back which means layoffs.

layed off people don't buy new cars, houses or Pokemon cards.

so now, the Fed is slashing the funds rate. Why?
Financial Media calls it a "soft landing". That is utter nonsense. The Fed never cuts rates unless something is terribly, horribly wrong.

We are heading into the mother of all recessions. buckle up, buttercup, this one will be bad.

My experience was that majority of CISCO's engineering mgr/dir have very low skill to develop new grads into home grown talents.

I've seen Cisco take in kids who only used languages like Java with no "goto" and yet six months in they've created multi-thousand line spaghetti functions in C which take years (and in some cases decades) to fully debug. The real problem is they quickly made "new grads into home grown talents."

Excellent post, OP!

Cisco Just mothballed the mothership. Closing several San Jose offices.

The US Federal Reserve just cut interest rates by .50 (massive)

This is a screaming recession signal.

and Chuckie bought Splunk for $28 Billion right before a major recession. Math major?

holy cow

And what would be your sources to know that Q1 is or was so bad ?

What 🤡 would ask this? You obviously have no idea of the amount of financial and bookings data that is available to people above 🥜 level.

This thread is deeply disturbing for the future of Cisco. I was there for 16 years, took the voluntary ER. I was in UC for many years and saw the demise of Nortel and Avaya. I have to admit many or right saying Cisco is starting to look very similar. Doubling down on bad decisions. Horrific at integrating acquisitions. Flat revenue even after acquiring some very large companies. BU’s fighting each other for revenue recognition. Chick has run Cisco into the ground. They need a new ELT and now!

I was hired as part of AppD. We could have saved you :)

But hey, Chuck only made $32M last year. Poor guy, needs to layoff more to keep his lifestyle funded….

Cisco probably is the only tech company keep a lot of veteran, this is even serious
problem than ELT, honestly, most of cisco veterans cannot find job after Cisco, have to
stay here. If Cisco can't attract young people, it will be totally hopeless whatever ELT doing

Just curious, in your definition - veteran means what? working for CISCO more than 10 years? Age over 40? over 50? or combination. Right now, it is pretty much true worldwide that the attribution rate is very low in our industry. People are not moving a lot. CISCO is also not hiring fresh grads for most of the team. My experience was that majority of CISCO's engineering mgr/dir have very low skill to develop new grads into home grown talents.

OP, if you’ve really been around Cisco for 25 yrs, you know this 1 mo early LR announcement is not the 1st time this has happened. The Aug 2011 WFR was announced in Feb along w/ the 1st voluntary ER saying that depending on the numbers who took the ER, they’d determine the numbers for the WFR. Then in June, they gave the WFR numbers.

There were other reductions that were announced ahead of time. 2021 or 2022.

But I also remember how people said how cruel it was for Chuck to announce the 1st LR under his leadership in 2016 during the earnings call & then notify employees the very next morning. No opportunity to put off summer vacations, or other big purchases.

You'all sound like you are just in for the ride. I honestly hope that everyone who doesn't believe Cisco can achieve its goals end up leaving to go graze on greener fields. Cisco need people who are willing to fight for it. If you think you are too old or too tired, leave!!!!!

Gary tasked to reduce headcount to 40K by end of 2025 and will sell off non-profitable BU’s

That is a nonsense post. I would love to be sold off, though.

Hopping that Gary or whoever is going to turn the ship around by halving the employees number is d-mb.
A leader whose only measure to "stabilize" a company is to fire more people is a leader without vision and experience. If you cut down the numbers in half you will have half the expenses but half the output. For a company of this size that is a dangerous situation because your position on the market depends on volumes.
If you hope to increase your capacity back when the demand is there yu might have wrong expectations, adding man power back does not equate to re -establishing previous production levels in any respect, there is a ramp up time that will cost you more than the savings you achieved when you let people go. What you need to do is to increase the KPIs by making strategic changes.
Based on our own workload I don't think we are oversized (I am in CX)
What is lacking is direction and strategic vision

Merakian? Meraki was a speck before Cisco acquired them. There one of our successful acquisitions. We took it too easy on app d and they skated their way over a few years into irrelevance.

We acquired spelunk because elt committed software revenue to the street and with negative bookings growth on core stuff we needed recurring revenue otherwise the hill they chose to make their legacy on would wash aeay.. because that hill... Which helped our competition... Was subscription revenue. Ignored our customers and gcab on this for years. Customers hate doing subscriptions on routers. So they bought the thing they wanted which wasn't us. So we bought a company that has great products and is actually meant for subscription. Now he can say we are doing x amount of business via subscription. Mission accomplished

"The February 2025 layoffs will dwarf these. 20,000 to 30,000 cut. Mark my words"

No they won't. They should, but won't, and what they do cut in february will again be the lazy "spread the peanut butter around" approach instead of cutting useless, parasitic functions.

Splunk always was really toxic with a lot bureaucracy. I have a few friends who worked there back in 2019-2021 as software engineers and they told me don't move (I had a few offers at that time) here because we are about to leave this place anyways. Cisco and Splunk both companies providing similar experiences for IC and low level employees.

Gary tasked to reduce headcount to 40K by end of 2025 and will sell off non-profitable BU’s

Is Gary that big a dud ? His talks are shallow and it seems he has no idea what he has gotten himself into

For the splunker below me, I am sorry you have to find out this way, but this is Cisco's MO. Aquire and Dissolve!

<3 a Merakian

Im a Splunker. Any positives I saw in joining Cisco were ki-led after the way they handled this last layoff. I worked as little as possible this last month and told my team to do the same.

On the acquisition - Cisco is not acquiring the Splunk of old. Since Gary came along the balance sheet might be better, but he effectively destroyed our culture, compensation, and so many other positives we had in working for Splunk.

Acoount manager as well. Have not received goalsheet but have seen what my number is “likely “ to be and it’s unrealistic. Sales leadership had me stuff my pipe with placeholder upside and commit deals to get as close as possible, which, I will have to move out because 80% will not happen this half. Then next half I will be goaled on some other “historic “ metric and they will add the fluff to the goal. This company is rot.

Sales rep here, can confirm. None of us have received our goal sheets but we all likely have numbers in the tens of millions. This is just for the first 6 months. None of us are even within REMOTE striking distance of that. Not sure where anyone is going to find the motivation to hike directly uphill for the next 4 months to hit pipe dream quotas.

Unless they layoff 20k people in Q1, theres no chance we have a DISMAL earnings call.

But Fran is ‘super excited’ and cares deeply.

Gary’s GSX message wasn’t aggressive at all. It was the normal pap.

"And what would be your sources to know that Q1 is or was so bad ?"

Sales teams have been in limbo from August 1 (Start of Q1) until now. Q1 ends in less than a month and there is still chaos in every org.

CX got decimated (Customer eXperience?).

SE training got axed at the last minute.

4 main Cisco HQ San Jose office buildings just got shutdown.

and look at your bookings. are you blind?

I lived, worked, and ultimately left through the Avaya Su----e through Nortel. This situation at Cisco is starting to oddly feel like the same thing. When we started LRing people in 50-100 people conference calls at Cisco (AppD), it brought back the execution style firings in Conference Rooms .at Avaya/Nortel. We keep shedding Real Estate, no product is capturing the market, the employees are tired - and I agree February will be the bloodbaths of bloodbaths.

A poster states "Source", look at Splunk how they are set up. Cisco is redundant on redundant. Splunk is lean. Mark my words they want to bring Cisco down to 45-50K total employees. The is part of the Reboot Strategy. Vets are going to be cut, too expensive. Inexperience will not be tolerated. Brownnosers will be exposed. The focus on metrics has NEVER BEEN HIGHER. Why? Easy exit for non performers, lack of lawsuits. For those overseas, you WILL NOT be spared - cuts will be large to. Remember we were 90K when Gary started, he will bring us down to 50 even maybe 40.

I was told by a solid source that Chuck reprimanded Gary on how aggressive his message was during GSX and Gary had to "tone" it down. This will be Chuck's last year in control, Gary will be the new leader likely after the February cut downs or least in transition for the role to begin no later than FY26.

We are gonna break some amazing things that make Cisco unique. The market sadly has evolved and doesn't seem to care at all about the Cisco "Magic."

For the last Nostradamus prediction :). I believe the new skinny Cisco will be ultimately acquired by Google or Amazon to augment their AI Play and offer differentiated services.

Reason? Cisco will be much smaller and easier to acquire.

Gary believes through attrition comes success.

And what would be your sources to know that Q1 is or was so bad ?

Cisco probably is the only tech company keep a lot of veteran, this is even serious problem than ELT, honestly, most of cisco veterans cannot find job after Cisco, have to stay here. If Cisco can't attract young people, it will be totally hopeless whatever ELT doing.

(Cisco + Splunk) / (Aquisition) = Nortel Repeat