I used to work for Cisco but I can't say what it's like internally. Not because of an NDA but because I literally have no idea. I worked for a much smaller competitor of theirs that they acquired, obviously just to remove a competitor from the marketplace. We were all allowed to work remotely but given nothing at all to do for six months and then everybody (except the executives, of course) was laid off.

[–] wheezy@lemmy.ml 3 points 3 days ago

Literally just had the same thing happen to me. This time at Microsoft. Worked for a small startup. It got bought out in 2023 after investments in actual hardware that wasn't named Nvidia died.

Layoffs on most of our engineers. Somehow I survived and basically did no work for 2 years. Was finally laid off.

I hated it. But I basically stole a salary from Microsoft for two years. Fuck these big tech companies.