Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- In the past week, we've had:
* Build for the future (Cloudflare)
* Our path forward (Cisco)
What else did we miss?
- > Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.
Interesting decision considering they aren't at any sort of risk.
by protocolture - Cisco do not have real ai strategy . Routers are routers. Even their ai factory is yet another box just with label nvidia on it . No major investment needed.
All that observability tooling around is only benefiting ai wave . They can vibe re-write everything .
by maxdo - > We have important, impactful, and consequential work ahead
writing so bad claude could do better
- "I could not be prouder of the growth you delivered"
Note the "you delivered"...
---
A few lines later
"With this, we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs"
Rough, bit on the nose no?
by HDBaseT - > Today we announced our Q3 FY26 earnings with record revenue of $15.8 billion, up 12 percent year over year, and double-digit top and bottom-line growth. The ELT and I could not be prouder of the growth you have all delivered for Cisco.
Great! A successful company, right? Ah, but then:
> we are making changes today that will result in the reduction of our overall workforce in Q4 by fewer than 4,000 jobs, representing less than 5 percent of our total employee base.
I wouldn't have put those two together so close, nor in the same announcement.
- My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view:
Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.
Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.
GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:
- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI
- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering
- They made sure to include a special section for investors
Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.
Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.
But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.
by passive - I briefly worked for Cisco after an acquisition, and it was a great time: I would get my sprint’s worth of work done in two days, ask if I could do anything else and be told no, and then spend the rest of the two weeks doing whatever I wanted, which at the time was learning Rust.
All that is to say, I would not be remotely surprised if Cisco has more employees than they strictly need. But, this email from the CEO is comically out of touch. “We’re doing great, better than we’ve ever done, so we’re going to fire thousands of you” is a chef’s kiss encapsulation of American corporate culture.
by mplanchard