Cisco layoffs add to hard feelings from employees, forum comments show

Thousands of workers were laid off by Cisco early this month, prompting frustrated staffers to take to online forums.

“This is the worst layoff handling [in history] by Cisco leaders,” one user posted to Blind, a popular site for anonymous commentary on internal company issues, primarily in the tech industry.

This most recent round of cuts comes just over three months after the company’s Cisco Live! event in Las Vegas where Cisco detailed its plans to invest in AI and celebrated its recent purchase of the data processing company Splunk. One Blind user reported observing the layoffs disproportionately impacted the company’s AppDynamics full-stack observability and application performance monitoring system.

Cisco reportedly cut 5,600 positions across a number of sectors of the company. According to commenters at Blind and similar site The Layoff, the layoffs appeared to be driven by cost cutting—not the talent of those who lost their jobs.

“It didn’t matter that their value for the company far exceeded the actual compensation they were receiving,” a The Layoff user wrote. “Cheap labor is the only thing corporations care about.”

The reaction mirrored anger from Cisco employees after a previous round of cuts came in summer 2023, as IT Brew reported. “Working at Cisco is like gambling at a casino,” someone commented at the time, noting that it was hard to predict whose job was safe or not.

For some forum users, the latest round of layoffs indicates a deeper problem at the company. In August, a Cisco employee told TechCrunch that the company had “become the most toxic environment I’ve ever worked in, and the mood, as evidenced by comments on internal platforms, is as dark as I’ve ever seen it.” That sentiment was echoed in a September 19 comment at The Layoff: “Cisco is not a healthy place. The aggressive layoff culture breeds toxicity that brings out the worst in people.”