Author: David Reyes

Cisco has an almost unyielding quality. The company was founded in 1984 as a result of a married couple’s dissatisfaction with networking and a Stanford computer lab, and it continues to make an impact. The share price was around $117.62 in late May 2026, down 2.3% in a single afternoon after just a few days earlier it had been close to a 52-week high of $120.79. The majority of what you need to know about the current state of investors’ minds can be found in that gap between the record and the retreat. The figures themselves appear impressive. Cisco reported…

Earlier this month, Kyndryl reached for a specific phrase that is used in corporate America whenever bad news is imminent. “Workforce rebalancing.” Like adjusting weights on a scale, it sounds almost delicate. On the ground, thousands of people are going to lose their jobs in offices across India and the UK. On May 5, the company approved the action, allocated about $200 million for severance, and informed investors that by fiscal 2028, the entire process should reduce annual costs by $400 to $500 million. The stock fluctuated, dropping more than 12 percent in early trading following the announcement, and then…

This year, NetApp is experiencing an oddity that is only truly apparent when two documents are placed side by side. One is the company’s earnings deck, which is replete with data, elevated guidance, and assured language regarding the need for AI. The other is more subdued: the messages from engineers who survived ten years of cuts only to be informed, as one put it, less than an hour into a shift, the forum chatter, and the WARN-notice math. At the same time, both are true. That’s what bothers me the most. The San Jose business is performing well by nearly…

It was four in the morning when the email arrived. More than any of the numbers, that particular detail has stayed with me. Before the coffee had even begun to brew, about 8,000 Meta employees in Singapore, Europe, and the US woke up, checked their phones out of habit, and discovered their jobs were gone. The way it is timed—staggered by time zone, sent to personal inboxes instead of work accounts, with a note telling recipients to check their spam folders—is almost clinical. Just picture that. losing your job and being informed that it may have been sent to the…

A layoff’s math is rarely as clear-cut as the headline suggests. Takeda’s announcement last week that it would lay off roughly 4,500 employees in fiscal 2026 carried enough weight to push the industry’s monthly total above anything seen this year. It turns out that May has been the worst month for biopharma layoffs in 2026, and the statistics weren’t even complete when they were released. That has an odd tension to it. From 114 last year to just 52 this year, the number of businesses that are actually firing employees has drastically decreased. fewer businesses. deeper slices. It’s a pattern…

On a Tuesday, just after five o’clock in the afternoon, the press release arrived. Since it was election day, the schools were closed. In Lexington, that timing was not overlooked. The tendency for bad news to arrive when the building is dark and the parking lots are quiet is something that people discuss. That day, Fayette County Public Schools eliminated 120 positions. When the list was released, it read more like a map of everything a contemporary school district secretly depends on than a budget memo. 49 hourly positions. seventy-one salaried. Depending on the release you read, there are anywhere…

In some ways, Wednesdays are the worst days for this kind of thing, and that’s when the email arrived. Not Monday, when at least you anticipated it, nor Friday, when you can vanish into the weekend. About 3,000 employees at Intuit were informed that their last day would be July 31 on a typical midweek morning in Mountain View. In the time it takes to read a memo, 17% of the workforce has left. The CEO of Intuit, Sasan Goodarzi, presented it in the typical manner. simplifying. making the structure simpler. establishing a quicker “builder culture.” That same evening, he…

The week following layoffs, there’s a certain silence in a tech office. People wear their headphones for a bit longer. Slack becomes silent. An engineer with an H-1B visa is working on a computation unrelated to code somewhere in that silence. 60 days. For thousands of Indian professionals working at Meta and Amazon, that is the number that counts now, and the math becomes suddenly personal. In its most recent round of layoffs, Meta eliminated about 8,000 positions as part of a larger reorganization centered on artificial intelligence. Amazon continued to make cuts across all divisions, following a trend that…

The headquarters is located on Santana Row in San Jose, an eight-story structure sandwiched between eateries and retail establishments—the kind of address that indicates a successful business. Additionally, NetApp appears to be doing well on paper. That’s the part that consistently surprises people. For the most recent quarter, the company reported revenue of about $1.71 billion, up about 4% year over year. The management reported record profitability and rapid growth. Then the layoffs resumed during the third week of May. Employees have begun to identify this rhythm aloud. One word that is frequently used on message boards and on Blind…

It is difficult to ignore the timing of the email, which arrived on a Wednesday. Greg Williams had stood under new lights five days prior, on May 15, at the Acrisure Amphitheater’s opening in downtown Grand Rapids, the company’s name glowing over a crowd. By May 20, the same man was informing about 2,250 of his employees that they would be leaving the company by the end of 2027. The space between those two moments—the celebration and the memo—has an almost cinematic quality, and it’s the kind of detail that stays with you longer than the numbers. The layoffs, which…