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Cisco Systems Will Lay Off 14,000 Employees

posted by CoolHand on Wednesday August 17 2016, @04:08PM   
from the caring-for-the-workers dept.

"exec" writes:

Cisco Systems, the largest networking equipment company in the world, will lay off 14,000 of its over 73,000 employees, according to a new report by CRN. The company is expected to announce the news in the coming weeks and has reportedly already starting offering many employees early retirement packages.

http://gizmo.do/oPt0LQG

-- submitted from IRC

Other Links:
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Original Submission

• Re:acquisitions (Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday August 17 2016, @09:48PM

  by turgid (4318) on Wednesday August 17 2016, @09:48PM (#389315) Journal

  I think that you get some kind of tax discount if you lay off workers, so keeping some back to lay off next period is a smart move, financially. The analysts love it (so the share price goes up) because they love to see the cost base being cut to produce the same or increasing revenue. How the business actually works and what the people are for is completely irrelevant it seems.

  I've worked for three large-ish American companies now. The first one over-expanded during the dotcom bubble and went into a terminal decline and was bough out by a large and nasty database company, During the decline, it kept acquiring smaller but successful companies, but let them wither on the vine and took the tax break at the end of the year when they laid off 5 to 10% of staff. Meanwhile, they arrogantly ignored what was happening with FOSS until it was too late.

  Another one used lay-offs to similar effect, despite breaking even or making a reasonable profit and holding staff pay constant for several years,.Then it decided it valued Engineers and STEM so much that it sent 15% of us to an Indian outsourcing company.

  The third one had the growth through acquisition strategy, which was basically buying a customer base, product range and "intellectual property" then firing the staff, doing a "write down" on old inventory and transferring operations to existing over-loaded and under-resourced sites, meanwhile firing or waiting for people to get exhausted and leave and not hiring to replace them. Then transferring to another site... It did wonders for the share price.

  The system is broken.

  --
  I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].

  Parent

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