I was wondering what happened to you! You never come around in a bull market, just disappear. I'm sure you must think Cisco is really overvalued now.
First of all, according to the mercury news SV is down to 1996 employment levels. This is pre-dotcom bubble so you can't blame it on the flaky companies from the bubble. I believe this is accurate. These jobs had to come from somewhere. We have lost 1 in 3 jobs in SV.
Put another way, the county had 864,500 non-farm jobs in July, about the same as it had more than seven years ago in the beginning of 1996.
As far as 10-Q. I have seen the numbers, I looked last Feb. The problem is that unlike the Mercury news numbers, Cisco only lists bona fide employees and not the 1099s- you are missing a huge number of people on both sides of the pond. All the IT people for example from Oracle were 1099, those aren't included.
There isn't any way to get a count of how many employees + 1099s used to work for Cisco locally, vs. how many do now, I know I have tried. The mercury news numbers on matters like this are the most accurate I find. I don't know how they come up with their numbers.
I'm trying to figure out if people here are in denial about this or you are complaining about the options issues. It is just my opinion that overstating options "costs" leads to more offshoring. Because it overcharges what US employees cost on the books. In the early 90s when Siebel paid in options their sense was that options were essentially *free* to the company. Consequently they could startup with low costs, they paid half salaries and in some cases lower. There are other drags against US labor, payroll taxes for example so its not like options "expenses" are the only screw to the US based employee. Still, the preferred method of cost control vs employees for startups in the early 90s when things were quite tight was options. Now it is offshoring, in fact KP is demanding your offshore plans on the business plan. Since the cost in salary to the company is the same or maybe 20% differential US based + options vs. offshore, why offshore? It has to be because they feel they can't afford the options. Based on my own experience I doubt it is state of the art manpower from Satyam.
But as far as the job loss and offshoring, this issue is all over the money shows, there was just another piece on Kudlow and Kramer a few days ago (those 2 guys are DEFINITELY in denial, phew), so are you questioning the job loss, the relevance of it, the mercury news figures or what exactly? Because it really is quite obvious to most working in the industry that we are undergoing a dramatic shift in the labor markets. And half the bldgs at Cisco and Dell are empty. They used to be full. TigerPaw told me yesterday the Dell Metric facility is gone. About a thousand people there once. We're in a recovery and have been for a year. |
