Cisco layoffs

For many, Cisco sucks. Almost all contractors/temps/vendors have gone. They're also semi-officially laying off circa 2000. What's not reported is that there's planned 'passive attrition' with middle management aggressively making life very unpleasant to sections of their teams in an effort to reduce headcount.

Morale is plummeting, but this and the hidden layoffs, go under the radar.

Acquisitions make some redundant...

Cisco has been on a buying spree. So with the new employees, come redundancies.

Besides if Cisco did lay off 10% of their workforce, they could then buy what's left of Sun.... ;-)

No doubt here

I work at Cisco in, err, somewhere. They've definitely been cutting off people in my business section - I'm on an extended 6 month notice, and 90% of the test staff were made redundant as work was moved to cheaper outsourcers in India/China etc.

They've also been removing a lot of the peripheral benefits - no more stock options as standard (worthless as they are right now), no mid-year bonuses (which means they can keep people on long 'risk of redundancy' without a bonus, without needing to give notice for a few months - I know of one 4+ month gap between being put 'at risk' and given formal notice, which included the usual mid-year bonus time), no more free fruit/cans or cappuchino machines, prices rises at all the canteens and no more pot plants(!).

The company is either using this as an excuse to cut as many benefits as possible, or is genuinely in a headless chicken state of panic. i'm not sure which is worse.

Cisco has already laid of a lot of contractors

I had an Internal Channel Account Manager who was covering Eire, and he was a contractor and went now we are left with 2 people who wear slip on shoes as laces would be too complicated for them.

On the whole 70% of the contract marketing teams across Europe where told a week before christmas that they was no longer needed fab christmas present