M&A can be done without being ethically and morally bankrupt. It's totally possible. Cisco just doesn't think that's a priority.

I work for a very large corp. As part of a round of layoffs earlier this year, they cut an entire foreign office, to the man. The decision was made from very high up: VPs were informed after it occurred. For some departments, the losses were small. For others, they were crippling: It was a very important group, doing things nobody else did, and which we couldn't cut.

The end result? The VP realized that the cuts had been extremely unwise, and now almost everyone that worked on that group has US visas, and is working from a new office in the US, with American salaries instead of their far, far lower ones. Not a costs savings, not an improvement in capability... just more expensive, and with projects that got delayed for months, as everyone was out for about 6 months.

For US layoffs, the decisions were not made quite that high, but still high enough that people in the know of salaries and performance were extremely confused about who got cut. Some great, cheap people were cut. Some expensive people that are poor performers by any standard remained. But nobody that managed ICs was involved with the decision making.

A large organization either makes very slow decisions, or acts basically blind. Sometimes they really fail, and do both!

No one is looking at individual people or teams.

The message was that they were in control. That they could cut off their nose to prove a point. This layoff event will be their downfall.

Its not unusual for the force cuts to be done via interviews at the new company

Presumably if you trust the organisation enough to pay for the whole thing, you would have a measure of trust in their ability to hire?

You can have people running the company change what the company does to be more ethical or moral, but it's like training an elephant to do tricks: an unnatural edge case. Their natural incentives are more like swarms of locusts or jellyfish; the more you feed them, the larger they grow, the bigger impact they have on their environment. No real thoughts, just an urge to consume and expand.

at every level, the incentive is to maximize the profit margins. If acting ethically doesn't increase the profits, then any personal sacrifice on the part of the decision maker to act ethically is only going to get punished (may be not immediately, but certainly some time in the future).

This is wildly oversimplifying. For example, it theoretically rules out principle-agent problems.

No, you can’t. This is the problem of corporate management. Management will tend to act to maximise profit margins or even the stock price is a bad explanatory model.

Over what time frame?

However, if you want tech jobs to have a higher and guaranteed severance, national legislation might be more effective.

After all, many acquisitions and layoffs are at companies that are in dire financial straits, which limits discretionary spending.

There is no reason to over complicate things and require businesses to directly pay, figure out how much cash to always have to be able to pay, hire auditors to make sure they have enough cash, then take them to court when they don’t have enough cash to pay, yadda yadda.

Business sells product or service. Employee sells labor to business. Government takes care of the safety nets.

FWIW, I didn't read parent post as making an excuse, just describing the reality.

In the corporate world, approximately nobody is rewarded for acting ethically, and as such it's a reasonable assumption that corporations will always trend towards unethical behavior (read: any behavior that pushes costs onto some other entity, while bringing profits to the company), because that can be a competitive advantage.

Acknowledging this is a first step in fixing the problem. We need to incentivize companies to do do the "right thing" - where the "right thing" is something other than simply maximizing profits - because we can't rely on "good people making moral choices" when they are incentivized not to do so.

The only way to achieve a change in behavior in corporations is to change the regulatory framework in which they operate.

In the narrow context of the OP, this doesn't even need to be very heavy handed (unlike say environmental devastation, which is a much bigger challenge). One option would be to pass legislation that makes it harder for megacorps like Cisco to eat smaller companies. Another would be to make layoffs relatively more expensive (require better severance, etc) or to limit them during the M&A phase that Splunk is currently in.

What the USSC said was that voluntary associations of people don’t forfeit the rights of the individuals in the association.

I’m considering whether I should ask for my options to immediately vest in the event of a buy out or liquidity event. It’s not that much money or options that the overall company will care. Should I ask for 1 year, or all 4 years, I’m uncertain if it could poison the well. Is this even something they would do?

Acquirers of growing businesses generally want that growth to continue and can "optimize" by hiring less.

The real lesson to learn here is twofold:

- People recruiting / hiring are incentivized to say whatever is needed to close the deal. With the exception of a bold faced lie (I don't think this was that).

- People at the company being acquired are more often than not going to lose most of their power. Including the C-suite. No one is safe and as an employee/victim you won't know the actual arrangements of the deal until the dust settles.

- People forget and circumstances change. Signed documents don't.

Sorry to hear that happened, that sucks.

My equity got paid out quickly, I have since gotten raises and bonuses, and the only shittiness has been all the mega-corp nonsense (omg the trainings) and worse health insurance.

Cisco is not a nightmare acquirer, that would be Amazon. If AMZN had acquired us I'd have left immediately.

Worst case scenario would be employee stock options and RSU grants remaining or becoming worthless, like in the case of a private company that never gains enough traction to exit or exits at a low valuation.

Usually in a public acquisition, shares are purchased at a price premium.

E.g., many Twitter employees got to cash out at a stock price well above the value of the company.

Every employee should see their role as temporary. This isn’t the lifetime employment pension days anymore. I see many opportunities for employees to walk away as a positive.

Good advice in general, but not a hard rule. There are roles where you need to expend a lot of energy learning proprietary stuff (processes, languages, frameworks, business rules). If you're in one of these roles it can give you a ton of leverage, but tread carefully around egos (you could get fired out of spite if you flex too hard, and maybe that's fine, but generally it's lose / lose).

You're right, of course, with just a nit of misinformation here that always bugs me: there are still lots of places that have pensions, just not places the HN demographic considers worthy of working at. I have one from my time at IBM, one from my telco days, and my current employer (financial) has a pretty generous one.

I've also had a company get acquired by private equity. I got nothing for my shares and they shut the team (and the product) down within two years.

FWIW, I've never be bought by Cisco, but my best friend has been at 3 startups bought by Cisco. He never enjoyed working for Cisco, but always said Cisco was very clear about their process, and it basically worked the same way each time, except when execs at his startup threw monkey wretches into things. YMMV.

Regardless, a dream offer landed before my shares vested, so I made the hard choice to leave empty handed. There did appear to be a lot of turnover before and after the acquisition. Though during M&A that's to be expected IME, so experiences may vary.

The two weeks of severance was actually pretty generous too for your time invested.