After Amazon, Cisco reportedly fired as many as 700 employees

In Short

• Cisco fired as many as 700 employees, as per reports.
• The tech company reportedly fired around 5 per cent of its workforce in 2022.
• The layoffs are being done because of the "rebalancing" act.
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By Aaditya Sharma: The last six months of 2022 have been hard for many people because of mass layoffs announced by major tech companies. But, it seems that job cuts will continue for a few more months considering several companies still have plans to fire hundreds of workers. Amazon just recently announced that it is reducing 18,000 headcounts, as part of its layoff plans. It has now come to light that another tech company, Cisco, has laid off around 700 employees.

According to details revealed by SFGATE, layoff has been done in several departments, including software and hardware engineering, programme management, product design, marketing, and more. It is being said that around 371 employees who are based in San Jose, California, have been asked to leave the company.

"At its headquarters, 371 workers were affected, including two Cisco vice presidents," the report said. The cited source also asserted that 222 employees, who are engineers and technical employees, have been fired in the nearby city of Milpitas. In addition to this, some 80 employees have also been asked to leave the company's San Francisco office.

A big step has been taken because of the economic downturn and the company wants to save costs, as per reports. Though, the company hasn’t openly confirmed the reason. The company’s CEO Chuck Robbins hasn’t confirmed details about layoffs, but he did say that Cisco is removing people to “rightsize certain businesses.”

Robbins said he would "be reluctant to go into a lot of detail here until we're able to talk to them. I would say that what we're doing is. You can just assume that we're going to -- we're not actually -- there's nothing that's a lower priority, but we are rightsizing certain businesses.”

There are reports claiming that Cisco fired around 5 per cent of its workforce in 2022, which is more than 4,000 employees. The layoffs are being done because of the "rebalancing" act and to "rightsize certain businesses.” It is currently unknown whether the tech company is providing any severance pay package to impacted employees.

Besides, Amazon had no plans to confirm the layoff of thousands of employees and the company’s CEO Andy Jassy has admitted that the e-commerce giant had to confirm the layoff news because one of his teammates leaked the information publicly.

“We typically wait to communicate about these outcomes until we can speak with the people who are directly impacted. However, because one of our teammates leaked this information externally, we decided it was better to share this news earlier so you can hear the details directly from me. The e-commerce website has confirmed that it will start communicating with impacted employees starting January 18, which is after one week,” he said.