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?
401Ks have replaced pensions for most Americans.
No idea what that is. Sounds like it belongs with WH40K
So they used to have pensions for most private workers, then they went to 401Ks which are self managed market based retirement funds.
- The company has a management agreement with a brokerage (i.e. Fidelity) to manage the accounts and they pick which funds you can invest in.
- You allocate how much you contribute, up to the IRS max.
- Many companies give matching funds which means you get a 100% return on that amount right out of the gate.
- In good years you can do very well, far beyond what pensions would’ve given.
- The money is pre tax so you lower your income for tax purposes during your peak earning years.
- You can still save and invest anyway you want in addition to this (i.e. IRA). You can still collect social security.
Downside…
- You are limited in investments
- You are not guaranteed returns since you are at the mercy of the bond and equities (stock) market. You can lose money in bad years.
- You must pay income tax on it when you start taking distributions from it in retirement. The minimum mandatory distribution amount could push you into a higher tax bracket.
The big push away from pensions to 401Ks and IRAs means the market has become the main retirement savings for most Americans. Wall St and financial institutions love them because it pumped trillions of $ into the market and profits in fees into the financial firms. Companies no longer had to manage pensions and guarantee returns. Most gov jobs still have pensions.
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.
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?
This is just a game to them, they have nothing to lose no matter what happens.
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.
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
A wooden baseball bat starts at like $75 for quality wood and never runs out of ammo, in case you’re worried that there are more rich sociopaths than there are bullets in your backpack.
Traditionaly these situations require the use of tar and feathers.
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.
Do you honestly care about the month to month hirings and firings of Cisco? These companies are giants and restructure regularly. If Cisco comp their workers properly which they did then IDGAF.
If you can’t see how layoffs are used to suppress worker rights and keep pay as low as possible then I’m sorry but you are a total fool.
This is economics mixed with some rage bait. None of this is a workers rights issue. This is just standard business in America they enjoy the benefits and consequences that come along. These are very highly mobile workers who were well paid and well compensated. These workers got better exit packages than every country with “strong workers rights”. There is absolutely zero reason to pretend to care about this. Should cisco should just constantly expand its workforce infinitely, should they have published a detailed reason for letting every person go.
You’d expect this to be like oh 4000 people were laid off because cisco predicts a downturn in the economy but they’re just restructuring and no longer require those people. They will hire more back for the new path.
You sure do love deep throating that boot, huh? Are you a small business?
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”
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.
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.
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.)
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…
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
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.
The justification they give for the figure is that it’s the lowest performing 10%
But that would be turnover rate, not cuts.
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 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!
Despicable
I know someone who worked a weekend event to show case a product and they did extremely well going nearly 15k in sales. They made $50 for the few hours it took to generate that. The amount of effort to prepare for this, drive there, waste weekend hours working is not worth $50. Especially with how much gas is. I don’t understand why people don’t just say no.
$50 sounds like a ridiculous commission under any circumstances. There are more numbers that we need before we can really judge the situation though. It’s not like $50 went to your friend and $14,950 went to their boss’s pocket. Surely there’s a cost to manufacture whatever it is being sold. Still, there’s no way that 0.3% is a reasonable sales commission.
They don’t get paid commission. Since people continue to work for companies like this and are OK being paid so little, nothing will change.
who works a sales position without commision?
Yeah, I was gonna say, that sounds more being paid an hourly rate (at sub-livable wage, BTW) and $0 commission.
I worked in customer support/sales for the largest ISP in my country. We were always understaffed because it was a shit job, so the turnover was high. We were forced to sign overtime, weekends and holidays included. I’ll never forget this middle management asshole who enthusiastically attempted to convince me it’s totally worth it. He does it, too, and he’s always happy to see higher paycheck. At the end of the month that overtime amounted to ~€15-20 for me. Yeah, fun times. I was thrilled to kiss that job and its abusive management goodbye.
American Capitalism 101. Sacrifice future growth for immediate profits.
Can’t be expecting the peasants to share in the success of their hard work! Better to fire them and rehire them for cheaper when they are desperate.
It’s an interesting case for leftists because there is no means of production to be seized. Nothing needed to create websites or apps is hard to get or proprietary. If anything, the means of production is capital itself, because only by paying people can you direct a lot of them to spend time on any particular thing. I wonder if communism has already addressed this case somewhere. I’m hardly educated on the topic.
Operating Facebook is rent-seeking, in a way. Any company could make another Facebook, but without people on it, there’s no point going on it.
In some countries, this is illegal.
What countries? This is capitalism baby, only way to stop it is to have a union strong enough to fuck Up that record profit if the CEO even jokes a out layoffs.
Japan. Layoffs are extremely difficult to pull off there. You have to show poor performance by the individual involved, and the standards for that are very rigorous. The government knows that unemployed people immediately become their problem, so they just demand that if a corporation wants to employ someone, they have to be willing to enter into that in an open ended arrangement. So unions aren’t the only way.
I’m curious how it’s considered a “layoff” if it’s based on performance rather than the job itself being eliminated.
It’s not.
What I meant was you can dismiss people for poor performance, but that’s the only valid reason. You cannot lay people off in Japan in the sense of “we cut the budget and decided we don’t want to employ you anymore.”
However, that said… if you want to lay someone off, you can jump through a million hoops. I have seen people relegated to ridiculously inappropriate roles to convince them to leave. You can also mess with non-salary compensation if you want. And you can offer generous severance. And maybe you can convince people to let you “lay them off.”
America’s trick for this is to let the unemployed become their own problem! 👏
Wrong. The unemployed are just temporarily displaced slaves waiting to become homeless so they can be put in prison for poorcrime.
Exactly
This is capitalism baby
Other countries handle capitalism different.
Most of their profits are paid out to shareholders, like last year, and the year before that. Nobody should expect anything better from any capitalist corporation.
