Cisco today eliminated roughly 700 positions as part of a minor restructuring that it announced back in February. That’s on top of the 760 employees the networking company shed in the first three months of the year due to “employee attrition and a hiring pause.” Cisco claims it has no plans to make major layoffs going forward, something CEO John Chambers defined as 10 percent of the company’s workforce. One Cisco staffer told us:
They’re doing these small cuts so people don’t notice. It makes it look better if they say they’re ‘restructuring’ and ‘reallocating’. From the inside, I wouldn’t call it transparent or restructuring.
We hear today’s cuts were fairly spread out inside the company and that laid-off employees will stay on at Cisco for another two months to finish up projects and then get four months of severance.
Many contractors were also let go this week that don’t appear on the general layoff list.
Yep, Cisco is in a little financial trouble, it appears…they’re just piece-mealing the cuts so it doesn’t look so bad.
@Gadget
Not sure they are in financial trouble. Cisco has $28 Billion in the bank.
Still, I’d rather make money than lose money.
1300 went today worldwide; 700 of them in san jose. That makes 2000 worldwide since February, plus contractors.
Typical lame corporate games. The bit about layed off people staying for 2 more months doesn’t say much about the competency of Cisco’s management.
“Layed off folks will stay on for 2 more months in order to sabotage ongoing work for their soon to be ex-employer and get paid to look for their next job…”
Hmm Maybe people are starting to realise you can get products that have the same performance or more with half the cost.
You didn’t hear it from me, but inside, Cisco aims for a more feature-rich product. This has actually hurt sales, so they ship the same hardware with a limited version of IOS. Apparently some customers realize they really do want high-end features, but I have a feeling that a lot are happy with twice the throughput and half the features.
This was another brutal layoff at Cisco that has only created more animosity towards management and the offshoring philosophy. The horrible part of the layoff was that it was hovering over employees for weeks,with unscrupulous managers telling staffers and leaking info for a couple of months. Management was also able to “position” many over 45 year old employees so that they got the boot. The company is targeting all the older employees and if they don’t leave through attrition, then they are put on fake performance plans or told that their job is going away due to changes in structure,when in fact, they bring in younger ones or push the job to India. The entire thing is cruel and really sickening. This company was really a great place to work 10 years ago, but now it has become a very sorry and shameful place run by losers in upper management who have run other companies into the ground, and a born again John Chambers who now believes in canning anybody over 50 as soon as possible to make room for the ignorant and inexperienced . Someone should go after this company for the entire program of firing aging employees. Somebody must do it. It is just terrible to see this and to let this company do this. It’s wrong.