I keep a spreadsheet, a stupid, ugly spreadsheet, where I've been logging every tech layoff announcement since early 2023, mostly because I got tired of feeling like I was losing track. I added two rows to it this week and both of them made me put my coffee down.
The first was Intel. On August 1st they announced plans to cut more than 15,000 jobs, something like 15% of the workforce, and suspended their dividend starting in Q4. The stock dropped about 26% the next trading day. Twenty-six percent. In one day. People who follow this stuff longer than I have were saying it was Intel's worst single day since 1974, which is a year I wasn't alive for but apparently a useful benchmark for how bad Tuesday was. I've had an Intel chip in every desktop I've ever built except one, and there's something genuinely strange about watching a company that basically was the American semiconductor industry for four decades post a chart that looks like that.
Then on Wednesday, August 14th, Cisco did their thing. Second round of layoffs this year, they'd already cut around 4,000 jobs back in February, and this time it's roughly 5,900 more, about 7% of their global staff. The part that gets me isn't even the number, it's that they announced it on the same earnings call where they beat revenue expectations. Not "we're bleeding cash, brace yourselves." More like "things are fine, actually better than we said, here's another five thousand people out of a job." I don't think that's some scandal, companies restructure around AI and infrastructure spend and whatever else all the time, but the timing always reads a little cold to me. You don't get to have a good quarter and a layoff memo on the same afternoon and act like those aren't connected.
I don't have some grand theory about what this means for the industry, and I'm suspicious of anyone who tells you they do with total confidence right now. What I keep coming back to is more boring than that: this is the second time in six months Cisco has done this, and Intel's cuts alone are bigger than the entire workforce of plenty of cities I could name. Layoffs.fyi has been tracking this stuff all year and last I looked the running total for 2024 was somewhere north of 130,000 tech jobs, and that's before whatever gets announced in September. It stopped feeling like news months ago and started feeling like weather.
A friend of mine, I won't use his name because he'd kill me, works adjacent to one of the teams that got hit at Cisco this week. He wasn't in the cut but he described the day as "everyone just quietly checking Slack status dots to see who went gray." That image has been stuck in my head more than any of the actual numbers. There's a specific kind of dread in watching a coworker's little green dot just never come back on, and I don't think earnings calls capture that particular texture of a Wednesday.
Anyway. I've had this blog running since November 2011, and I went back and checked — I wrote about layoffs at least eleven times before this post, going back to some Yahoo cuts I barely remember the details of now. It's not a new topic here. But something about doing it twice in two weeks, from a chipmaker and a networking company that used to feel like the boring, stable half of tech, is landing differently for me this month than the usual startup-runs-out-of-money story does.
If you're one of the people who got a calendar invite this week with a vague title and a manager who wouldn't quite make eye contact on the video call, I'm sorry, and I hope your severance isn't garbage. If you're not, maybe back up your resume anyway. It's Thursday somewhere.