Comment by redwood

I look at it a bit differently. I bet Cisco's overall employment will only rise over time maybe even this year but certainly in the years to come. But the point is they do need to rebalance the kind of focus area they have. In other words someone who's great at one part of the technology stack might not be who they need for a different part and the priorities change over time. The reality is Cisco does a huge amount of large acquisitions and this brings more and more people with specialized talent all the time and you can't just do that forever without removing focus elsewhere.

Also if compensation has come down over the last couple of years sometimes you have to do this instead of lowering salary because for whatever reason our industry doesn't ever lower salary.

I do personally believe it would be wonderful if companies invested more in helping people retool and move to new parts of the stack and where compensation becomes non-competitive it should be okay to at least give an employee an option of a lower salary to stay.