From the perspective of an ex-cisco employee, two main reasons: 1) Because it never ends at cutting overhead. In fact it would be quite accurate to say it neve

From the perspective of an ex-cisco employee, two main reasons: 1) Because it never ends at cutting overhead. In fact it would be quite accurate to say it never ends. I still have contacts with cisco employees and the fear of mass-layoffs has gotten worse every year, I am told since 2001 (I wasn't yet an employee in 2001). When the "overhead" in my office was visibly cut, I thought like you did, it was a mistake. Firstly, I should have immediately found another job. Granted it took another year and a half, but I could have done far better, even with just a bit of preparing. I thought I'd work forever at cisco. In retrospect that was a very, very bad assumption to make. Secondly, I should have taken my employment contract to a lawyer. Because they fucked me on severance, stock options, and a few other things. You see, paying employees, especially during mass-layoffs, definitely is something they maximally cut (even to the point of probably being illegal). 2) Because top level managers keep making things worse. At cisco, the specific thing that made me really angry was that we could no longer book our own flights. We had to use the company travel agency. Then you find out what really happened: senior management was told they could no longer expense first-class flights for their entire family. So what did they do ? They went to a particular airline, and negotiated a deal : free first class flights for them (meaning at sub-business prices), if everyone at cisco would fly economy and business only with that airline. Mind you, this was the one that made me blow up, it was far from the only thing.