Cisco job cuts widen with round of layoffs

SAN JOSE >> Cisco Systems has disclosed plans to jettison well over 600 jobs in the Bay Area, an ominous signal that the tech sector's brutal season of layoffs in this region has extended into 2023.

The fresh round of Cisco job cuts affects workers in San Jose, Milpitas and San Francisco, official filings with the state Employment Development Department show.

Cisco's plans for the job cuts in the Bay Area were sketched out in new Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notifications that the tech titan provided to the EDD.

An estimated 10 tech or biotech companies have decided to chop at least 200 jobs in the Bay Area in the final quarter of 2022 and during the first half of 2023.

They are:

• Meta Platforms: 2,564 job cuts affecting workers in Menlo Park, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Burlingame and San Francisco;

• Twitter: 1,126 layoffs of employees in San Francisco and San Jose;

• Cepheid, a biotech firm: 1,003 worker terminations in Newark, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara;

• Cisco, a digital communications tech giant: 673 worker layoffs in San Jose, Milpitas and San Francisco;

• Doordash, an online food ordering and food delivery company: 311 jobs in San Francisco;

• Nuro, a robotics and autonomous delivery vehicle company: 269 job cuts in Mountain View;

• Amazon, an e-commerce behemoth: 263 positions lost in Sunnyvale;

• Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle startup: 259 job cuts in Palo Alto;

• Lyft, a ride-hailing giant: 227 jobs eliminated in San Francisco;

• Oracle, a software and cloud services leviathan: 200 terminations in Redwood City and Belmont.

The new Cisco numbers for 673 job cuts include updated figures for Milpitas that the EDD posted Jan. 5 on its public website, as well as the WARN notices.

Here's how the latest Cisco job cuts stack up in the Bay Area:

• San Jose, 170 W. Tasman Drive: 371 jobs lost

• Milpitas, 560 McCarthy Blvd.: 222 layoffs;

• San Francisco, 500 Terry A. Francois Blvd.: 80 positions cut.

“This action is expected to be permanent in nature,” Cisco stated in the WARN notice.

San Jose-based Cisco provided government officials with details of the categories of jobs that are being affected by the layoffs in the three cities.

Cisco's filing showed that the majority of the layoffs that the company is planning affect software engineers, technical engineers, hardware engineers, product managers and supervisors, according to a Bay Area News Group review of the Cisco WARN notices.

However, it appears possible that some of the employees could retain their employment at another position with Cisco, the company told state and local government officials.

“Some of the employees reflected in the job titles and headcounts may not have an employment loss because they subsequently apply for and secure another position within Cisco,” the company stated in the WARN letters related to the layoffs in all three cities.