American Capitalism 101. Sacrifice future growth for immediate profits.
Me, after firing the Cisco CEO: We just made $53 million in revenue!
This will continue to happen until sociopath executives see consequences.
Or, you know, workplaces organize and form strong labor unions?
my god we have so many layoffs this year.
we have so many layoffs this year.
And the year isn’t even half over yet.
Just wait until the full impact of Trump’s bullshit works its way through the economy.
The carnage will be felt for a decade or more.
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.
dont work hard for companys, better they do more likely you will get laid off with everyone else. Might happen anyway, but if they dont do well they might think they actually need people to do work.
Who are you kidding?
Record profits > “We need to lay off workers to keep these numbers going up.”
Not record profits > “We need to lay off workers to make these numbers go up.”CEO: I need the highest possible performance otherwise the board will fire me.
Board: We need the highest return otherwise we’re not willing to support the CEO.
Fund managers: We need to only invest in the most profitable ventures, otherwise people will move their money out of the fund I’m managing.
Pension companies: We need to only put our money in the most high performing funds.
You: I need the best return on my pension so I can retire as soon as possible.
If you’ve ever moved saved money to an account offering higher interest or performance, you’re part of this. I’m not saying that to blame, but people often don’t connect their own behaviour with the behaviour of the market.
I agree. The stock market was a mistake
Agreed. I participate as a thoughtless investor trying to maximize the growth of my savings but I hate that I have to even bother. Extra work, some guilt or anxiety around whether you made the right choices, and more complicated taxes. I think it’s horseshit that I’m effectively obliged to play in this casino the ruling class set up, just so my money retains its value against inflation.
I’m not against my money being used to grow businesses. But then just let the bank deal with it and pay me a fair interest rate for lending it to businesses. I still haven’t been given a good answer as to why the stock price of a company should have any effect on its day to day operations or revenue generation.
That doesnt even make sense
congratulations on finally getting on the same page as the article and the rest of us
So you think Cisco is shrinking its workforce?
It’s literally in the article and the headline…
Long term they are growing. In a year or two they be at 90k and then 100k in a decade or two. The employee count cant just sit static.
It hurt to read that post. Grammar much ?
deleted by creator
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.
The usual self-cannibalism game.
The stock market is a weird thing - prices seem to be tied to whether a company can make more this quarter than last quarter, and not tethered to whether a company makes a profit. I figure that they made record revenue and now need a strategy to make even more profit next quarter, which they hope to achieve by reducing expenses via layoffs.
I don’t like it, but the economy is more tethered to speculation than reality.
it’s not weird. it’s literally how capitalism works. it feels weird because it actually feels fucking wrong and disgusting but we are propagandized into thinking this is ok.
Nah, not even the basic “its capitalism” excuse works anymore for that idiocracy. Capitalism may force companies to increase earnings, which is already stupid enough in itself, but the timeframe that’s measured in got reduced so much in the last few years that even short term goals are impossible without cutting costs.
Ten years ago monthly earnings were at most an indicator, what mattered most were fiscal years. It slowly evolved to quarterly earnings and now we are at a point were a single “bad” (as in, not as much profit as last month) can plunge your stock prices by 10+%.
Yes capitalism always fucked over the working class, bit it wasn’t made to force big, profitable companies to self destruct for 0.5% higher monthly profits.
i think you neglect to consider capitalism’s growth (as a mechanic) itself. What you describe is exactly how it is working. What I believe is that this is an evolved economic system, designed from the start to “eat its own dogfood” so to speak.
It’s a pyramid scheme. You participate long enough to be able to move your money to a more stable platform and live off the measly interest that provides.
Line go up dog, just give in and roll around in the slop with the rest of us.
One of the biggest (official) recession indicators, is whether or not the public thinks we’re in a recession.
Yes that always irks me. We can have 15 “markers of a recession”, but as long as nobody says it’s name, it can’t be true. The media has the Voldemort approach to economics.
…/shrug
Stock prices are tied to what they did last quarter….
You better thank the Job Creators for the right to work, Serfs! Now go gratefully into the gig economy, singing the praises of Tr*mp.
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.
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
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.
You guys, all those employees contributing to their huge profits were actually a liability and now they’ll be so much more efficient.
/s because people take sarcasm literally
Cisco can take their campus fabrics/DNA and shove it up their arse. They stopped trying a long time ago and IOS is still a pain to use.
We converted our medium-sized network to Ubiquity a couple years ago, everyone who has ever had to touch a config or deal with paying for updates is absolutely giddy.
It’s nowhere near perfect, but lightyears better than dealing with Cisco’s bullshit.
