// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Highest Point in the Netherlands
It’s a year since Cisco made me redundant, after 25 years.
I’m not going to make the case against them here. I did write that one, at some length, with sources, and it turns out that having written it was the point. This is the other half. What it actually did to me, and what I did about it, which at one stage involved mushrooms in the Netherlands.
One moment you are inside the company, the next you are not.
It’s an extremely well optimized process and you almost have to admire the craft. Script, timing, outplacement firm. Harm priced and settled. The thing I actually lost was never on that ledger.
The process felt too standardized to be accidental. Every piece of that call functions to contain what happens to the person on the other end.
The layoffs there arrive like the flu. Most years, sometimes twice, occasionally a year off. Some are announced. Others just happen, and you find out because somebody isn’t in the meeting any more, and then isn’t in the next one either.
You can’t set your calendar by it, and that is the part that does the work. A date would let you brace. An irregular season means you never quite stop listening for it. Every reorg rumour, every meeting that appears without an agenda. Twenty-five years of that, and I still picked up the phone like it might be about a meeting.
I remember hanging up and sitting there. Laptop still open. Calendar still full of things that were no longer my problem.
I didn’t tell my wife for several days. Too ashamed.
The company as a balance sheet I can almost shrug at. HR I still hate. Not abstractly. The function, the script, the practice it takes to fit twenty-five years into a checklist. None of that is improvised. I get angry about it, and then I get angry that I still get angry. I’m aware how that sounds. It also just hurt.