My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view:
Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.
Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.
GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:
- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI
- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering
- They made sure to include a special section for investors
Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.
Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
I agree with you. Putting myself in the shoes of a tech CEO, I see other companies laying off and saying that their AI strategy made them so productive that they don't need 20% of their employees anymore, I see investors flocking to that company, I look at my company and feel investor FOMO, I layoff as well.
It's nothing personal, it's just how the US works. If this were to happen in Europe, your company would burn to the ground. The amount of compensation you'd have to do would eat your gains from the layoffs.
It absolutely does and a very good effort of compatibility with GitHub actions. It’s not perfect but migrating is far less of a pain than I experienced moving to others
Wish I could find the article from some years ago, but it made the comparison that just because the US Navy has aircraft carriers doesn't mean they are well suited for every country's navy
> But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
I think it goes a little deeper than that. In ways that seem to echo in your description of GitHub vs GitLab too.
Big Tech doesn't seem to attempt to generate value. The most positive attribute you can ascribe to a silicon valley startup is "disruptive" which in effect means eating somebody elses lunch. I think this is pretty natural for an industry that has pretty much achieved perfect penetration, but we're still dimensioning the industry for massive growth.
In that framework, silicon valley startups have to identify some sort of frontier they can expand into, and with pretty much all productive enterprise already interfaced with technology. They have to expand into simply replacing labor.
Maybe this is the reason why I will never be a C-suite person. But if my product/service workforce became 20% more productive I would direct my sales department that we have more capacity to overtake our competitors and/or deliver more from the backlog of requests from existing customers which we can invoice for. And at the end of the year celebrate a double-digit growth.
The "evidence" that you think about is probably that dopamine hit you felt when the shit-generator spat out a complete half-finished react app. But that's not evidence of increased productivity, unless we now measure productivity by the size of the codebase bloat.
I think you make a point that is worthy of discussion, but the first sentence is unnecessarily hostile. The comment you responded to already made a caveat that they might be too cynical.
Does that productivity increase translate into monetary gains for the company that are greater than the token+compute+other new inteoduced expenses? For smaller companies I can believe it, but massive orgs like Cisco I’m really not so sure. You can be extremely productive and not actually contribute to the company cash flow
Can you link to any actual evidence about this 10-20% productivity increase? And I don't mean anecdata like "I'm totally like 8200% more productive!1" that the AI bros love to spew.
From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.
> Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.
Great! A successful company, right? Ah, but then:
> we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than 5 percent of our total employee base.
I wouldn't have put those two together so close, nor in the same announcement.
Why not? All that matters is the investors, and both of those are positives to that group. Sure, it's not particularly humane, and I'm sure those that were fired are angry, but this is the norm in American business and has been for many years.
A bit off-topic, but I'm curious: why do so many people seem to be outraged when companies do layoffs? I genuinely don't understand. It's like there's this unspoken agreement that once you get hired, you're entitled to that job for life. Of course, you are free to leave whenever you want, nothing wrong with that, but many seem to see it as immoral or unethical for the company to decide they don't need you anymore, and let you go. Why? What exactly is a company's moral obligation when it comes to who they employ and for how long?
For context, I was most recently employed at a public tech company as a staff engineer. I was there for five years, got paid very well, and then was part of broad layoffs last year. I got a generous severance, and moved onto the next thing. I don't have any bitterness about it; I was selling my time and expertise to the company, and they no longer felt it was worth buying. I wouldn't have felt bad about leaving the job, so why should they feel bad about ending the employment?
Don't get me wrong, I know how stressful layoffs are. But all kinds of things in life are stressful (like a breakup, for example), but that doesn't imply you've been morally harmed in some way. You aren't entitled to keep your job for life!
I briefly worked for Cisco after an acquisition, and it was a great time: I would get my sprint’s worth of work done in two days, ask if I could do anything else and be told no, and then spend the rest of the two weeks doing whatever I wanted, which at the time was learning Rust.
All that is to say, I would not be remotely surprised if Cisco has more employees than they strictly need. But, this email from the CEO is comically out of touch. “We’re doing great, better than we’ve ever done, so we’re going to fire thousands of you” is a chef’s kiss encapsulation of American corporate culture.
> Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.
What a sick, deeply disconnected opener. Essentially a big FU to their employees. All these AI-first geniuses will eventually bring about is people intentionally slowing down their "productivity" while maxxing the shit out of the company token budget.
> We have important, impactful, and consequential work ahead. Your focus, resilience, and leadership are vital to our growth and relevance in FY27 and beyond.
The message here is - generate more with less, so we can layoff even more of you. At some point even the dumbest, most loyal corporate shills will start to get it.
My company just did something like this. We completed a big redesign and the CEO sent an email saying how proud he was of our work. Layoffs started the next week.
By this point I believe people like these should be excluded from all social contracts and reminded at every step that what they did is not ok. Maybe finally a positive use for facial recognition technology?
These statements are so weird to be joined together. In other words, he was able to just say: "I am proud to announce that we are going to reduce the overall workforce.."
> Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.
Interesting decision considering they aren't at any sort of risk.
Cisco do not have real ai strategy . Routers are routers. Even their ai factory is yet another box just with label nvidia on it . No major investment needed.
All that observability tooling around is only benefiting ai wave . They can vibe re-write everything .
At this point Cisco is a conglomerate that does everything and nothing. They own so many different verticals that even people working there don't really know what cisco fully does anymore.
But I agree though, this is an artificial stock pump because of the rush for picks and shovels.
> We will provide support in finding new opportunities, whether internal or external, through Cisco’s placement services – a program that has seen 75 percent of participants discover their next role.
25% unemployment doesn't seem like something to brag about.
How many layoffs does a company have to do before realizing it’s in their best interest to start asking other companies to take the employees they don’t want to employ anymore?
Also, 75% placement seems wildly successful. Why isn’t Cisco also a head hunting firm?!
On and off for the past year or so, the commercials from TD Bank have been
* More Human
as they've slowly laid off people due to the AML fines they've been dealing with in the U.S. and replacing folks with either AI, more Indian/Canadian/Ireland talent.
"Executive Leadership Team" is such an interesting phrase. Never in several years inside Apple spanning Steve Jobs and Tim Cook heard any such condescending nonsense.
I believe it's because they truly didn't think that way.
Tim Cook has referred to the “E-Team” in many earnings calls. I am guessing that consists of the SVPs who are above the horizontal line on https://www.apple.com/leadership/
that horizontal line is hillarious. I can imagine the discussions with the designers "just put the fucking line there, I dont care how it looks, its important to separate the two sets of people"
I personally dont mind it, but apple is famous for ruthlesly removing decorative design and trying to make everything a slab of color, and this thin line goes so much against this
Cisco's fiscal year closes at the end of July, which makes this time of year the season for reorgs, LRs (as they're colloquially known) and the usual maneuvering that leads up to establishing budgets, sales quotas and the like. It sucks that this kind of thing has become so normalized now.
The casualness of mentioning record revenues in the same PR statement as laying off 4,000 people is fucked up on a new level. It used to be you were supposed to at least pretend you were forced into a layoff. But now it's like "Hey guys! It's time for our regularly scheduled layoff to juice profits! I got an extra $5M bonus for this!"
What’s really weird to me is they clearly wanted to convey to the Street that these layoffs were _not_ motivated by any of their financial results with the phrasing “fewer than 4,000”. But they conspicuously didn’t provide any other reason. No divisions closing down, no realignment of capital.
I wonder if someone in the C-suite simply decided that they had some rough percentage of underperformers on the payroll, but they can’t publicly call them performance based terminations without triggering a risk of lawsuits.
I do wonder if we're going to start seeing people intentionally writing poorly so it's clear their memo is not just "Claude, please write an email saying that..."
Maybe they will start writing better, so it stops reading like corporate nonsense all the time. Because I'd argue most corporate PR statements and such as not written well, they are just written grammatically correct.
I don't think so. I think that ChatGPT will just become the standard communication interface between humans. Sending someone a manually typed email in 2030 will be like sending a handwritten letter in 2026.
If 51% of the employees would benefit from firing the other 49%, you'd be as good as gone anyway. Not saying it would be worse, but the same incentives are at play.
No, because the average employee has both a lot more in common with their peers and because the gains are lower for people whose stock shares are orders of magnitude lower. Joe from accounting isn’t laying off a department so he can sell shares worth the price of a Corolla before taxes.
For the last 15 years I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about my idea for a John Lewis (British retail chain) model IT consultancy- employee owned, everyone is motivated, high quality, etc.
Except last month I met someone who worked there and got TUPE (involuntary contractual transfer of employment) to Wipro (Indian outsourcerer) a few years ago.
So even though this corporation is owned by the employees, and is one of the best examples of this in the UK, it seems you also need some kind of management structure that is also immune to the usual senior leadership trolls to avoid it turning out to be shitty.
Yeah - the answer is that the cost to deliver a service from my local government is a lot cheaper than it is when it's coming from the private sector.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
No, this never works... The socialism glaze on HN amazes me...
I am Swedish, in Sweden, and we are a market economy combined with unions. Companies can do layoffs but for a 3month agreement, they have to notify basically, WARN.
these corporations would never work because they would optimise for the wrong thing - they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
These corporations exist and do work. Worker owned companies have their own challenges and their own advantages.
For example they tend to be more stable during crisis, because workers tend to vote for lowering salaries/benefits temporarily rather than doing layoffs. So they retain talent better. But they also tend to have difficulty to grow quickly, for obvious reasons.
Besides full on coops, there are also plenty of examples that are hybrids (partially worker owned).
> they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
You're possibly of assuming that a company needs to have an adversarial relationship to their workers in order to be competitive. I don't think that's generally true. This approach has advantages in specific situations, but disadvantages in others.
The other thing is that the laid off employees will lose all their unvested RSUs. These shares were granted as compensation for past performance but they can now be conveniently clawed back by the company just because they decide to lay you off. Stock can be a large part of someone's compensation in a tech company. Companies shouldn't be allowed to benefit this way if they decide to lay off employees.
How is that legal? I thought the entire point of delayed vesting was to disincentivize jumping ship. If they're the ones throwing you overboard clawing back RSUs seems like a roundabout form of wage theft.
I always viewed them as future comp that was locked at a certain rate (in terms of number of shares per quarter). I got four years of unvested stock on day 1 when I joined a tech company, why on earth would I think I'm entitled to all that if I leave before it's vested?
A workplace that values job security is such a motivating factor for employees that I don't think is recognized enough. At a company that conducts layoffs, it feels like you're just waiting for the next one.
To profit you also need to get out at the right time.
Right now everything seems so inflated. I don't believe this economy represents any of the underlying assets correctly anymore. I really think we are on the verge of one of the biggest bubbles in history.
There are more important things than making money. I assume that the parent poster was glad to not buy into a company that doesn't treat their employees well.
Why would an individual buy stocks other than to make money? Certainly not for charity. And if it's just virtue signalling, there are far cheaper ways to feel morally superior.
The companies in the stock market are not primarilay a jobs program. It is not the primary role for companies to pay their workers. Such a system would never work and would collapse.
Virtue signalling about "treating employees well" is shortermist and doesn't consider the higher order effects.
They buy a lot of companies then restructure them and that causes these layoffs. I think it’s just normal way of doing business for them. And the stock is up 20% after hours =)
Who really cares about the lives of lim n —> 4k wagies? There is an opportunity to maximise shareowner returns here - failing to seize it would be little more than economic treason, a dereliction of our duty to be good capitalists. If those people wanted job stability, they should have worked harder to become indispensable to their employer. Frankly, they should have known better than to stake their livelihoods on unstable, declining industries like employment. Now, The Market Has Spoken, and only those let go are to blame for what it said - no one else.
As someone that has worked for them a decade ago, some of their division are >90% Indian. Those are all good engineers and not dunking on them at all but it should be unacceptable to bring over competing workers on a visa while also laying off so many people.
we were acquired and part of our org moved into cisco HQ.
the entire floor were Indian other than our org, and over time our org was filled out with incoming transfers and new hires.
i'll never forget some irony in that one of the engineering leaders brought us together for a mini townhall once and praised our "diversity" but by then the percentage of people in the room were basically the same as you described, including said leader. even our twice a week catered lunches were almost always indian.
just an interesting experience being part of cisco for a couple of years.
Shocking. I had an interview for an Australian job with JP Morgan recently and even the interviewers were based in India. Super rude, could barely understand him due the strong accent, he couldn’t ask a single intelligent question and it was kinda clear that the org basically just hires other Indians. They always end up talking a lot while doing almost nothing and only hiring their friends and family while Chinese engineers just get stuff done. I’m sure there are exceptions but in my 15 years in tech I can count with two hands how many good Indian engineers I worked with.
The reason is basically that you are "required" to hire other "Indians".
If you get a job at a good company on your own merit, you immediately start getting calls to "refer" your college friends, family, people from your region/state.
Refer here means refer it to HR and make some "setting" that you are guranteed to be hired based on your "reference".
Naturally reference would mean that considering you are an employee you would know about open positions and may refer the position to your friend, who would later on get the job on his own merit considering that he is skilled for the position along with required experience.
But the case for Indian employees is that a reference entails to scam the company itself, by letting a less skilled person into the company by making a "setting" with HR etc, who may themselves be from the same region/state.
And if you try to be morally upright person to deny such a scammy "reference", you would then get to listen verbal abuses from your friends and even from your own family members. To deny such a reference leads to straight up "banishment".
Tip:- Among 100 Indians if you see, only 1 or 2 are actually good at their job (or by morality).
Or maybe you just aren't that good of an engineer (or whatever profession you are into) and find the easiest group to blame on your failures. I found that people who often are quick to judge and group of people in one bucket based on their color/ethnicity/gender/... are often not that bright people and like to focus on directing it on others. Somewhat like MAGA.
Wow this escalated quickly. What OP is saying is not anecdotal but true to every major US tech company. You can cope all you want, won't make a difference
Well, can you refute any of the points in the thread?
Indians hire only Indians.
We cannot understand them due to the accent.
Having worked with many of them, I am not impressed either. So maybe... you are not good either :)
Concrete examples, master student in networking could not ssh into a Cisco router, as in, did not know what ssh was (thread related)
On various company teams meetings internationally they are just warm chairs doing "project lead" until the USA & EU people join and actually start working on the problem.
They just say yes to everything, despite not understanding, then doing 0 work.
H1B should be limited. (and/or what it is called in EU)
I'm sure you do. But your real life experience is not everyone else's real life experience, so there's no really need to make blanket statements about people.
Oh wow, you went from one place to some totally different place at the drop of a hat. Where did me "coming" to Western Europe come into the discussion about racial stereotyping about Indians? I'm not in Western Europe, and I don't plan to live there, not sure how you got that impression.
I think there's no reasoning with someone who only wants to deal in absolutes. Have a good day.
Jokes aside, if in 15 years you have worked with only few good Indian engineers, you probably have not yet worked at places with high talent density. I could understand if you had said you have (a) worked with many low quality engineers from India, or (b) worked with far more low quality engineers from India than high quality ones. But if, in absolute numbers, you haven't come across many good engineers from India, I can only infer than you probably haven't worked with very good engineers across the board.
Diversity is the term to disguise cheaper labor. Call it women, ethnic minorities, trans, neuro divergent, on wheelchair, or those having criminal records.
It's a brilliant slogan, not just because virtue signalling, but because it spawns cross cultural factions, all selfishly united to defend it. At no further brainwashing cost to you.
You dare to attack it? You are out. Pack your stuff, and your shame.
Consolation? It would at least provide opportunities to those who always suffered injustice. Yet many who claim their right to a seat don't bother with competence.
It works, because the goal isn't more talents, we never lacked them: it's to pressure the overall labor cost.
One faction, whether we adhere to its other political views or not, hating DEI doesn't disprove the mechanism. The other factions still defend it selfishly. That's exactly why it holds.
Please don't export US labour and safety standards. The amount of paid time off is hard to argue is not unethical, the conflation of vacation time and sick time clearly is unethical, the amount of parental leave (especially maternity) is a crime against humanity. The firing procedures are also something you'd expect to read about in a history book besides a picture of a child visibly yearning for the coal mines, contracts with a mutual resignation period giving both parties adequate time to transition is a bare minimum. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Please please America spend serious efforts developing your labour standards to a humane level instead of exporting them.
Abolishing restricted borders, collectively would push the logic to its final destination. Such sweat shops exist because humans are confined.
Cross border inspectors is mostly PR theater. Even if it was feasible, local verticals spill into others, so it would always be lower costs in less developed/regulated nations.
That's essentially colonialism. You can't go into other countries and change their labour laws, it's a violation of their sovereignty. Obviously there's a huge problem with uneven development across the world that makes outsourcing possible and difficult for workers in the developed world, but I'm not sure such a solution would be politically feasible.
Eh? That’s such a stretched definition of colonialism that it ceases to have meaning.
Firstly, This is how things are being done now - post colonialism. America has many laws and drives to avoid labour from sweatshops. This was a whole thing, it may not have been the most effective, but it was a political force that drove change.
Foxconn factories having workers commit suicide and place safety nets around buildings was a huge issue for Apple, and it resulted in changes to working conditions.
And as I mentioned before, the FDA inspects factories around the world to ensure that something sold within America that has the FDA approved label actually meets standards.
The idea is feasible I just don’t know how effective it will be. Political will can be found in America, and this affects only foreign outsourcing while supporting American workers. You don’t need political will in other nations.
On top of that, it moves competition away from a race to the bottom, which reinforces worker rights. If worker rights in India and America are at parity, then the attractiveness to move to America changes as well. America will remain attractive because of standard of living.
It’s an issue for outsourcing, and firms that buy outsourced services, but not that much of an issue.
One issue is that worker rights in America are kind of a low bar.
Don't be embarrassed. Most don't see it, because the moral framing blocks economic analysis.
As for learning Hindi, it may help. But don't make the mistake of confusing cultural diversity with competence uniqueness. One expands the number or silos in the labor pool. The other justifies better pay.
My thinking was, the goal of "diversity" is to have people reject their cultural backgrounds and form a shapeless blob that absorbs commands more easily and resists less. Basically "divide and conquer" applied to workplace.
lol that depends. If they are mostly from South India, learning Hindi might not move the needle as much. Might want to pick up some Kannada, Telugu and/or Tamil. Would be pretty cool for trying, and it’ll probably make your outlook favorable
In the bay area, I've met relatively few NRIs who don't know Hindi well, even if it's not their first language. Most of them that I've met are not even Kannadiga, Mallu, Telugu, or especially not Tamil. Sample size of at least several dozen.
Studying Hindi has felt very rewarding to me, and it impresses people disproportionately to my actual skill, but I don't feel it has affected my ability to communicate with coworkers whatsoever.
No. Very large numbers of Indians, particularly ones in the US do not even really speak Hindi or use it much. It is more common for them to speak their local languages and good luck learning all of those. Also, the culture is such that I think they would just have a good laugh as they click delete on your resume or whatever.
The way you can phrase it: you may jsut get people that are happy to do a good job for the pay they get. In many areas your typical white/cis/hetero/neurotypical male is not present, because you cannot get the maximum reward for their well-trained ego. I think diversity/pay is pretty munch confounded for plausible reasons.
That's saying the white/cis/hetero male is absent because ego demands more reward. Exactly. Diversity fills that gap at lower cost. That's my point, or a counter?
The scheme's motive is the overall effect. Lower wages. It doesn't care about white hetero, or black trans who happen to participate in paralympics.
I was a contractor at Cisco as the only non-indian in my group. But, I think the entire floor (100+ people) was Indian except for me. I'd always heard of "toxic work environments" but was pretty dismissive, until working at Cisco. I never knew people could bring high school bullying, manipulation into a supposed professional workplace.
When tech companies lay off large amounts of workers like this, they often immediately replace them with H1Bs. These layoffs are almost always cost-cutting measures, not caused by lack of work - the work is still there and still has to be done, they just don't want to pay expensive white people to do it.
If a company is set on hiring foreign workers who will work for less than Americans and we don't let them bring them over here, won't they just offshore instead? I don't ask this to be contrarian but more to wonder how to combat it.
By penalizing offshoring. I don't say this as a particularly nationalistic person either. All companies in all countries should be heavily incentivized to hire local labor and sell to the local market. Globalization is extremely beneficial of course but the various side effects need to be managed.
An offshored worker is already much cheaper than an H1B worker, I would expect any easy substitutions along those lines to already be performed. Probably some effect on the margins, but I would doubt it outweighs the primary effect.
(Of course, it would be a problem if you think H1Bs are for hiring people who cannot be found domestically, but it does not seem like many people think that these days.)
As I understand it, the fee doesn't apply in many situations and is fairly easy to work around. Apparently it was neutered immediately after being announced.
This. Once Indians get in, they hire other Indians only. It is a disgrace. They are here in Sweden too studying for masters, terrible. They should be barred from EU honestly... sadly we just did a trade agreement...
one would think that those jobs identified as superfluous or dispensable are in administration more than in engineering. The lay-off procedure itself looks very bureaucratic and makes HR, lawyers, and managers indispensable. Cunning plan.
If so many companies out there are doing layoffs, ignoring whether they are right/wrong or the motives being real or investor signaling, who's gonna benefit from it?
I would tend to think that talent being freed would imply that newcomers have a wider pool to find great contributors, but is it really happening?
It's important to keep in mind Cisco made a billion AI and cybersec acquisitions in the past few years and they've downsized to 2022 levels.
This is not an AI job elimination story. I think the next recession will trigger that. The AI hype train ironically needs engineers of all stripes to run.
Here we have a PR statement of a company announcing at the same time record revenues AND cutting 4000 jobs and the longest thread is complaining about Indian workers instead of bitching about the dystopian reality we live in where Cisco's behavior is accepted and acceptable.
Also, H1B are issued and requested by the company. Blame the system, not the immigrants .
>Those extra hours? Only if the team really needs them.
? I started a new job a year ago. Overtime pay in contract. I gladly work and report overtime as I get paid way more :) BUT there has to be a real reason, such as deadline, alarm/alert and such.
You people are just lost. But I am in Sweden with a union job hehehe
Same here, some of your southern neighbours also have unions on IT, as a union in general covers specific industries, regardless of what job each person does in the building.
As a tip for others as well, even without an union it helps to be aware of the country labour laws even if superficially.
Do this comparison both ways and factor in what you pay in addition for American high-stress/low-quality healthcare, college, retirement, etc. If you’re on the higher-end of the SV tech salaries, you’ll probably still come out ahead but for everyone else even Denmark tends to be cheaper.
>To those leaving Cisco, thank you for your contribution, your dedication, and the mark you have made on this company. We are deeply grateful and are committed to handling this transition with the care, clarity, and respect that defines our culture.
Who the hell needs gratitude if you can't earn an income..
seeing all of these layoffs I cant help but think something along the lines of .. Those of use who greatest asset is our labor need to recognize the great risk it is at of going to 0 value in the near future, and renegotiate everything to get as much value out of that asset before it does. Like enough to retire on. And as with established theories of intelectual property rights protect creators moral rights to the profits of their work, there needs to be mandated moral rights that stop peoples labor being used as training data for AI without the consent, and without a path or compensation for the loss of income that will cause them.. Otherwise this is just one big transfer of power from most people, to people with capital, who can then wield that power in more capricious and selfish ways.
Here you get laid off you need a notice 3 month in advance. America is just a hellscape but no need to be so drastic... companies still need to lay people off...
layoffs at earnings results time never ever need to happen.
in a market economy you layoff people when functions, business, products or roles actually become redundant (or fire for cause / underperformance) rather than waiting potentially months till the end of the financial year to do it in a mass firing.
when you need new headcount, inventory or inputs to your supply chain you don't wait 7 months selling no products to see how full year revenue looks before you decide
if you are managing a team and have poor performers or functions that are no longer necessary, you should bring them up to scratch or manage them out immediately, not wait 11 months till the next eoy layoff round. these stupid layoff rounds promote dysfunctional organisations with bloat and keeping around dead weight or overhiring to sacrifice people at the altar of the consultant / mba / earnings juicing layoff rounds.
lately I've been stuck by the similarities between the conversations workers are having now (we are toiling to increase someone else's capital, and need to reverse the imbalance of power) and the conversations people had in the 1920s and 30s.
With the benefit of hindsight we know that marxism didnt help, but I can see why the siren song was so attractive back then. Time to reread Eric Hobsbawm.
Look at social democratic European states for inspiration. High unionization (supported by the state), unemployment benefits, cheap or free higher education.
Companies can still do layoffs, but that’s how you manage the consequences at a societal level.
I know the unionization part is contested these days in Europe, too - but it is still much stronger than in the US.
And to think, if they could just take less, and be satisfied being billionaires, not tens of billionaires, this could all be avoided... people don't ask for much. Give them a little, you'll be fine.
Chuck Robbins is not a billionaire. Yes, he's still extremely wealthy, but I really feel it's important to understand that that labor-capital relations are not primarily defined by people being greedy and wanting Bad Wealth when they could be satisfied with Good Wealth.
its sickening that these companies making 10s of Billions in profit annually at 60% gross margins are going to throw their employees that got them there under the bus.
layoffs are for at risk companies undergoing restructuring not semi-annual financial engineering of your earnings release
I’m not a big collective action proponent historically but in the face of this bs, it might be time.
Among other differences, a house construction contract is understood to be limited in time.
Imagine the construction company said "record profits this year, thanks for building great houses, you're fired." The message wouldn't go over well. They are being outrageously cutthroat or hiding bad news.
Ive seen this exact analogy on HN quite a few times now, and its a bit odd (read: nonsensical). You dont tend to employ construction workers directly to build your house. You contract a housing company, who contracts construction companies (or has inhouse workers), who do keep their employees employed.
The individual is his own construction company in this scenario. Just like the construction company has to advertise itself to keep getting contracts, here the individual has to do the same with employers. The analogy is not superficial.
You believe more in the individual relationship each worker has with their employer to negotiate times like these? With what power? The employees did excellently so they are being let go. The individual worker has no leverage for anything.
Whenever a company does layoffs willy nilly frequently I stop trusting them with my career.
The AI excuses are lazy.
I was laid off last year by one of the big tech companies, and they called me again for a rehire but I just dont trust them anymore even if they pay more. The layoff completely disrupted my life and I developed health issues because of the stress. Not worth the mental hassle.
I have seen a few workplaces which are more deliberate in their hiring and are not on 24x7x365 hire and fire mode unlike many of the big names.
I would rather work in such a place rather than have 10 varieties of coffee and condiments in the pantry.
Frankly i'm pissed off.
Sorry for the people who pinned their hopes on cisco and were laid off yesterday. It's not easy.
"...fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than 5 percent of our total employee base."
I cringe at this attempt to soften the numbers by saying "fewer than" and "less than" here. Conversely, and ironically, it also puts inflated numbers in your head.
This kind of behavior is never tolerated in the market. Your revenue is flat; they lay you off. Right away. No trial, no nothing. Your revenue is down, right to layoffs, right away. Revenue grows but less than guidance? Layoffs. Record revenue exceeding guidance? Believe it or not, layoffs.
This is outrageous. Where are the armed men who come in to take the protestors away? Where are they? This kind of behavior is never tolerated in Baraqua. You shout like that they put you in jail. Right away. No trial, no nothing. Journalists, we have a special jail for journalists. You are stealing: right to jail. You are playing music too loud: right to jail, right away. Driving too fast: jail. Slow: jail. You are charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses: you right to jail. You undercook fish? Believe it or not, jail. You overcook chicken, also jail. Undercook, overcook. You make an appointment with the dentist and you don't show up, believe it or not, jail, right away. We have the best patients in the world because of jail.
Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.
Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.
GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:
- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI
- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering
- They made sure to include a special section for investors
Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.
Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
It's nothing personal, it's just how the US works. If this were to happen in Europe, your company would burn to the ground. The amount of compensation you'd have to do would eat your gains from the layoffs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/south-korean-offi...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/sk-hynix-employee...
SK Hynix is making an absurd amount of money from the RAM shortage, and the employees are not unreasonably demanding their cut from it.
A dividend or basic income or something funded by a tax on this stuff is not at all unreasonable.
The technology is cool but it’s basically mass piracy.
GitLab has just as many outages, just nobody notices/cares so much
GitHub does provide self-hosting via GitHub Emterprise Server.
I'm not so sure, and I'm looking at the friggin' thing: https://enterprise.github.com/trial
For the small, small price of your business email address, it's yours.
I don't think they offer anything unique. Forgejo[1] offers a similar platform.
[1] https://forgejo.org/
It is in their class interest to try and beat workers that have gotten too uppity down and AI is a tool they see fit for purpose.
1. FAANG does something that's relevant to their company.
2. Everyone thinks that this is an universally good move because they're FAANG.
3. Market rewards copying FAANG regardless whether that strategy also applies to your company.
Simple as that.
Wish I could find the article from some years ago, but it made the comparison that just because the US Navy has aircraft carriers doesn't mean they are well suited for every country's navy
I think it goes a little deeper than that. In ways that seem to echo in your description of GitHub vs GitLab too.
Big Tech doesn't seem to attempt to generate value. The most positive attribute you can ascribe to a silicon valley startup is "disruptive" which in effect means eating somebody elses lunch. I think this is pretty natural for an industry that has pretty much achieved perfect penetration, but we're still dimensioning the industry for massive growth.
In that framework, silicon valley startups have to identify some sort of frontier they can expand into, and with pretty much all productive enterprise already interfaced with technology. They have to expand into simply replacing labor.
No, actually all evidence points exactly to a ~20% slowdown> https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
The "evidence" that you think about is probably that dopamine hit you felt when the shit-generator spat out a complete half-finished react app. But that's not evidence of increased productivity, unless we now measure productivity by the size of the codebase bloat.
I have seen data going both ways.
From what I'm seeing at the Co I work for with ~1300 devs, productivity is more or less the same as it has always been. Projects aren't being done noticeably faster, there's no less bugs than before (if anything things are more unstable), the backlog remains endless. And we do all the crap that the AI hype tells us to do, we've got harnesses, complex agentic setups etc.
Great! A successful company, right? Ah, but then:
> we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than 5 percent of our total employee base.
I wouldn't have put those two together so close, nor in the same announcement.
For context, I was most recently employed at a public tech company as a staff engineer. I was there for five years, got paid very well, and then was part of broad layoffs last year. I got a generous severance, and moved onto the next thing. I don't have any bitterness about it; I was selling my time and expertise to the company, and they no longer felt it was worth buying. I wouldn't have felt bad about leaving the job, so why should they feel bad about ending the employment?
Don't get me wrong, I know how stressful layoffs are. But all kinds of things in life are stressful (like a breakup, for example), but that doesn't imply you've been morally harmed in some way. You aren't entitled to keep your job for life!
Help me understand.
All that is to say, I would not be remotely surprised if Cisco has more employees than they strictly need. But, this email from the CEO is comically out of touch. “We’re doing great, better than we’ve ever done, so we’re going to fire thousands of you” is a chef’s kiss encapsulation of American corporate culture.
Maybe with normal people but that's not the target audience. The investors are the target and it's exactly what they want to hear.
What a sick, deeply disconnected opener. Essentially a big FU to their employees. All these AI-first geniuses will eventually bring about is people intentionally slowing down their "productivity" while maxxing the shit out of the company token budget.
> We have important, impactful, and consequential work ahead. Your focus, resilience, and leadership are vital to our growth and relevance in FY27 and beyond.
The message here is - generate more with less, so we can layoff even more of you. At some point even the dumbest, most loyal corporate shills will start to get it.
Note the "you delivered"...
---
A few lines later
"With this, we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs"
Rough, bit on the nose no?
These statements are so weird to be joined together. In other words, he was able to just say: "I am proud to announce that we are going to reduce the overall workforce.."
Interesting decision considering they aren't at any sort of risk.
All that observability tooling around is only benefiting ai wave . They can vibe re-write everything .
But I agree though, this is an artificial stock pump because of the rush for picks and shovels.
I guess when they said "insert token" they meant "insert quarter" and by "insert quarter" they meant "insert your entire fiscal quarter".
25% unemployment doesn't seem like something to brag about.
Also, 75% placement seems wildly successful. Why isn’t Cisco also a head hunting firm?!
* Build for the future (Cloudflare)
* Our path forward (Cisco)
What else did we miss?
* More Human
as they've slowly laid off people due to the AML fines they've been dealing with in the U.S. and replacing folks with either AI, more Indian/Canadian/Ireland talent.
I believe it's because they truly didn't think that way.
(Edit - I wouldn’t have minded either line, at first glance on mobile, curious if it’s an “all bad” situation for you)
I wonder if someone in the C-suite simply decided that they had some rough percentage of underperformers on the payroll, but they can’t publicly call them performance based terminations without triggering a risk of lawsuits.
writing so bad claude could do better
A synonymous but more gentle term to layoff.
Except last month I met someone who worked there and got TUPE (involuntary contractual transfer of employment) to Wipro (Indian outsourcerer) a few years ago.
So even though this corporation is owned by the employees, and is one of the best examples of this in the UK, it seems you also need some kind of management structure that is also immune to the usual senior leadership trolls to avoid it turning out to be shitty.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
I am Swedish, in Sweden, and we are a market economy combined with unions. Companies can do layoffs but for a 3month agreement, they have to notify basically, WARN.
For example they tend to be more stable during crisis, because workers tend to vote for lowering salaries/benefits temporarily rather than doing layoffs. So they retain talent better. But they also tend to have difficulty to grow quickly, for obvious reasons.
Besides full on coops, there are also plenty of examples that are hybrids (partially worker owned).
> they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
You're possibly of assuming that a company needs to have an adversarial relationship to their workers in order to be competitive. I don't think that's generally true. This approach has advantages in specific situations, but disadvantages in others.
That’s exactly why you don’t need worker owned companies
Interesting use of fewer.
A workplace that values job security is such a motivating factor for employees that I don't think is recognized enough. At a company that conducts layoffs, it feels like you're just waiting for the next one.
Right now everything seems so inflated. I don't believe this economy represents any of the underlying assets correctly anymore. I really think we are on the verge of one of the biggest bubbles in history.
Time will tell.
Don't do the mistake of shorting Weimar Stock markets.
Virtue signalling about "treating employees well" is shortermist and doesn't consider the higher order effects.
As someone that has worked for them a decade ago, some of their division are >90% Indian. Those are all good engineers and not dunking on them at all but it should be unacceptable to bring over competing workers on a visa while also laying off so many people.
the entire floor were Indian other than our org, and over time our org was filled out with incoming transfers and new hires.
i'll never forget some irony in that one of the engineering leaders brought us together for a mini townhall once and praised our "diversity" but by then the percentage of people in the room were basically the same as you described, including said leader. even our twice a week catered lunches were almost always indian.
just an interesting experience being part of cisco for a couple of years.
If you get a job at a good company on your own merit, you immediately start getting calls to "refer" your college friends, family, people from your region/state.
Refer here means refer it to HR and make some "setting" that you are guranteed to be hired based on your "reference". Naturally reference would mean that considering you are an employee you would know about open positions and may refer the position to your friend, who would later on get the job on his own merit considering that he is skilled for the position along with required experience.
But the case for Indian employees is that a reference entails to scam the company itself, by letting a less skilled person into the company by making a "setting" with HR etc, who may themselves be from the same region/state.
And if you try to be morally upright person to deny such a scammy "reference", you would then get to listen verbal abuses from your friends and even from your own family members. To deny such a reference leads to straight up "banishment".
Tip:- Among 100 Indians if you see, only 1 or 2 are actually good at their job (or by morality).
Wow this escalated quickly. What OP is saying is not anecdotal but true to every major US tech company. You can cope all you want, won't make a difference
Indians hire only Indians.
We cannot understand them due to the accent.
Having worked with many of them, I am not impressed either. So maybe... you are not good either :)
Concrete examples, master student in networking could not ssh into a Cisco router, as in, did not know what ssh was (thread related)
On various company teams meetings internationally they are just warm chairs doing "project lead" until the USA & EU people join and actually start working on the problem.
They just say yes to everything, despite not understanding, then doing 0 work.
H1B should be limited. (and/or what it is called in EU)
t. 15 years experience
I've worked for Indian managers several times and they all hired non-Indian people.
Wrong?
Ok good, don't come here then.
I think there's no reasoning with someone who only wants to deal in absolutes. Have a good day.
Jokes aside, if in 15 years you have worked with only few good Indian engineers, you probably have not yet worked at places with high talent density. I could understand if you had said you have (a) worked with many low quality engineers from India, or (b) worked with far more low quality engineers from India than high quality ones. But if, in absolute numbers, you haven't come across many good engineers from India, I can only infer than you probably haven't worked with very good engineers across the board.
It's a brilliant slogan, not just because virtue signalling, but because it spawns cross cultural factions, all selfishly united to defend it. At no further brainwashing cost to you.
You dare to attack it? You are out. Pack your stuff, and your shame.
Consolation? It would at least provide opportunities to those who always suffered injustice. Yet many who claim their right to a seat don't bother with competence.
It works, because the goal isn't more talents, we never lacked them: it's to pressure the overall labor cost.
Outsourcers don’t just compete on price, they compete on hours worked, and support given.
You do it in outsourcing contracts to a degree, just go further - holidays available, work hours, firing procedures, support and health services.
I do know that FDA inspectors travel to factories around the world to ensure they are compliant.
You’d remove the incentive to undercharge based on sweat shop practices, and then it’s only a cost of living arbitrage.
At that point you could set up in a lower CoL region in America over outsourcing.
I’m probably missing some incentives but I think this would work, and it’s an easy political sell.
Factory Safety standards I would make an argument for, you should see some of the things I see in developed nations.
> Please please America spend serious efforts developing your labour standards to a humane level instead of exporting them.
This is possibly the critical weakness in the idea. Maybe EU labour standards?
Cross border inspectors is mostly PR theater. Even if it was feasible, local verticals spill into others, so it would always be lower costs in less developed/regulated nations.
Firstly, This is how things are being done now - post colonialism. America has many laws and drives to avoid labour from sweatshops. This was a whole thing, it may not have been the most effective, but it was a political force that drove change.
Foxconn factories having workers commit suicide and place safety nets around buildings was a huge issue for Apple, and it resulted in changes to working conditions.
And as I mentioned before, the FDA inspects factories around the world to ensure that something sold within America that has the FDA approved label actually meets standards.
The idea is feasible I just don’t know how effective it will be. Political will can be found in America, and this affects only foreign outsourcing while supporting American workers. You don’t need political will in other nations.
On top of that, it moves competition away from a race to the bottom, which reinforces worker rights. If worker rights in India and America are at parity, then the attractiveness to move to America changes as well. America will remain attractive because of standard of living.
It’s an issue for outsourcing, and firms that buy outsourced services, but not that much of an issue.
One issue is that worker rights in America are kind of a low bar.
Yes you do if you want to change their labour laws.
You aren't changing the labour laws in their nations.
If firms want to trade with American firms, then they have to have certain work norms that they abide by in their contracts/.
By the way, I was wondering if learning Hindi would be the winning strategy here. Be the only white guy speaking Hindi, instant hire.
As for learning Hindi, it may help. But don't make the mistake of confusing cultural diversity with competence uniqueness. One expands the number or silos in the labor pool. The other justifies better pay.
Of course those difference aren't meant to object the dominant force. They are meant to counter act each others.
I see more push for integration than assimilation in the workplace.
The scheme's motive is the overall effect. Lower wages. It doesn't care about white hetero, or black trans who happen to participate in paralympics.
https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-h1b-visa-applicat...
It makes no sense to lay off H1Bs only to immediately re-hire them afterwards.
(Of course, it would be a problem if you think H1Bs are for hiring people who cannot be found domestically, but it does not seem like many people think that these days.)
H-1Bs also lose jobs in these layoffs, so there is an implicit reduction.
Any policies to help the people are labeled as "socialist" nowadays
If so many companies out there are doing layoffs, ignoring whether they are right/wrong or the motives being real or investor signaling, who's gonna benefit from it?
I would tend to think that talent being freed would imply that newcomers have a wider pool to find great contributors, but is it really happening?
Another round of layoffs at CrowdStrike would fit the pattern nicely.
This is not an AI job elimination story. I think the next recession will trigger that. The AI hype train ironically needs engineers of all stripes to run.
Also, H1B are issued and requested by the company. Blame the system, not the immigrants .
Those extra hours? Only if the team really needs them.
Naturally this tends to be something only seniors see, thus ageism.
? I started a new job a year ago. Overtime pay in contract. I gladly work and report overtime as I get paid way more :) BUT there has to be a real reason, such as deadline, alarm/alert and such.
You people are just lost. But I am in Sweden with a union job hehehe
As a tip for others as well, even without an union it helps to be aware of the country labour laws even if superficially.
Personally the salary isn't worth it.
Who the hell needs gratitude if you can't earn an income.. seeing all of these layoffs I cant help but think something along the lines of .. Those of use who greatest asset is our labor need to recognize the great risk it is at of going to 0 value in the near future, and renegotiate everything to get as much value out of that asset before it does. Like enough to retire on. And as with established theories of intelectual property rights protect creators moral rights to the profits of their work, there needs to be mandated moral rights that stop peoples labor being used as training data for AI without the consent, and without a path or compensation for the loss of income that will cause them.. Otherwise this is just one big transfer of power from most people, to people with capital, who can then wield that power in more capricious and selfish ways.
The people who just gave you a 20% increase in profits in a year need to go?
What is your option? Companies keep people forever? In what economy does this work?
Please ask the Poles, Baltics and Eastern EU, when did their living standards increase? Was it joining EU or communist Soviet?
in a market economy you layoff people when functions, business, products or roles actually become redundant (or fire for cause / underperformance) rather than waiting potentially months till the end of the financial year to do it in a mass firing.
when you need new headcount, inventory or inputs to your supply chain you don't wait 7 months selling no products to see how full year revenue looks before you decide
if you are managing a team and have poor performers or functions that are no longer necessary, you should bring them up to scratch or manage them out immediately, not wait 11 months till the next eoy layoff round. these stupid layoff rounds promote dysfunctional organisations with bloat and keeping around dead weight or overhiring to sacrifice people at the altar of the consultant / mba / earnings juicing layoff rounds.
With the benefit of hindsight we know that marxism didnt help, but I can see why the siren song was so attractive back then. Time to reread Eric Hobsbawm.
Companies can still do layoffs, but that’s how you manage the consequences at a societal level.
I know the unionization part is contested these days in Europe, too - but it is still much stronger than in the US.
But that won't please The Market.
I think you could be. Just saying.
layoffs are for at risk companies undergoing restructuring not semi-annual financial engineering of your earnings release
I’m not a big collective action proponent historically but in the face of this bs, it might be time.
Do you employ construction workers for lifetime after they have built your house?
Imagine the construction company said "record profits this year, thanks for building great houses, you're fired." The message wouldn't go over well. They are being outrageously cutthroat or hiding bad news.
You believe more in the individual relationship each worker has with their employer to negotiate times like these? With what power? The employees did excellently so they are being let go. The individual worker has no leverage for anything.
I was laid off last year by one of the big tech companies, and they called me again for a rehire but I just dont trust them anymore even if they pay more. The layoff completely disrupted my life and I developed health issues because of the stress. Not worth the mental hassle.
I have seen a few workplaces which are more deliberate in their hiring and are not on 24x7x365 hire and fire mode unlike many of the big names. I would rather work in such a place rather than have 10 varieties of coffee and condiments in the pantry.
Frankly i'm pissed off.
Sorry for the people who pinned their hopes on cisco and were laid off yesterday. It's not easy.
I cringe at this attempt to soften the numbers by saying "fewer than" and "less than" here. Conversely, and ironically, it also puts inflated numbers in your head.
"How many people will be axed at Cisco?"
"3,998 ... but at least it's fewer than 4,000!"
Contrast with the benefits of the path set onward. Small steps for humans, but a leap forward for humanity!
Watch the video above to get the reference :)
This is Cisco. They do layoffs every quarter and have been doing so since the early 2000s.
https://newsroom.cisco.com/c/r/newsroom/en/us/a/y2026/m05/ci...