Cisco posted record quarterly revenue this afternoon and announced 4,000 layoffs in the same release. GM cut 600 IT workers on Monday and called it a “skills swap.” The vocabulary moved faster than the people.
Sources: Cisco and Fox Business on Cisco; TechCrunch on GM; BLS Employment Situation, May 8 release; BLS CPI, May 12 release.
Two BLS releases reframed the month. April nonfarm payrolls came in at 115,000 on May 8, with the unemployment rate unchanged at 4.3 percent. The same report revised February down again, from -133,000 to -156,000. Combined Feb-March revisions are now 16,000 worse than first reported. Information employment fell another 13,000. Federal employment kept declining. The job growth was concentrated in health care (+37K), retail trade (+22K), and warehousing. [source]
Four days later, April CPI printed at 3.8 percent year over year. That is the highest annual reading since May 2023. Core inflation sits at 2.8 percent. Gasoline is up 28.4 percent over the year. Real average hourly earnings fell 0.5 percent for the month and 0.3 percent year over year. The last time inflation wiped out the wage gain was three years ago. [source]
Initial jobless claims rose to 211,000 for the week ending May 9, up 12,000 from the prior week. Continuing claims rose to 1.78 million. None of these numbers individually looks alarming. Stacked, they describe a labor market where the headline jobs are added in lower-wage sectors while higher-paid roles are being unbundled and repriced. The headline is the average. The average is hiding a redistribution. [source]
Cisco confirmed today it will cut fewer than 4,000 jobs, under 5 percent of headcount, the same release that reported Q3 revenue of $15.8 billion. Revenue grew 12 percent year over year. Pre-tax restructuring charges will reach $1 billion, with $450 million booked next quarter. The memo cited a pivot toward AI, cybersecurity, and high-speed networking equipment. A networking company is restructuring around the thing it sells. Most affected employees begin getting notifications starting today. [source]
On Monday, May 11, GM cut roughly 600 salaried IT workers, more than 10 percent of the department. The company called it an “AI skills swap.” The four capabilities GM is now hiring for: AI-native development, data engineering, cloud engineering, and agent and prompt design. The company is still hiring inside the same department. Just not the same people. [source]
The list keeps growing. Meta moves on 8,000 cuts May 20. Oracle is now north of 10,000 with internal projections of 30,000 by year-end. Cloudflare cut 1,100. PayPal cut 4,760 in what it called a $1.5 billion AI overhaul. Fidelity cut 800. April tech layoffs alone hit 45,000, up 38 percent from March. Every announcement is the same announcement written by different communications teams. The common word is “skills.” The common subject is experience. Meanwhile, the fractional executive market topped $5.7 billion and is growing at 14 percent annually. Seventy-three percent of the people doing that work have fifteen-plus years of operating experience. [source]
“Skills swap” is the phrase to watch this week. It is a Tuesday-morning HR-deck phrase, polished enough to fit in a 10-K disclosure and vague enough never to be falsified. The 54-year-old senior engineer who built three generations of GM’s internal systems does not have a skills gap. She has a portfolio. Calling it a gap turns two decades of knowledge into a deficiency, which is convenient if the decision has already been made.
Nobody on the receiving end is buying it. The people who built the IT stack at GM are the same people the field will hire as fractional architects in six months, billing twice the rate, telling whoever asks that yes, they know exactly how the legacy systems work, because they wrote them. The vocabulary keeps shifting. The work keeps moving toward whoever can actually do it. The market eventually catches up. It always does.
Sources: TechCrunch and Bloomberg coverage of GM IT layoffs, May 11, 2026; Cisco corporate communications, May 14, 2026; Alpha Apex Group and Fractional U.S. market data, 2026.
Cisco and GM are not eliminating experience. They are taking it off the W-2 line and putting it on the open market, where it will compete for the projects somebody at headquarters will need fixed in eighteen months. The number on the press release is the cost line. The market for what those people know is somewhere else entirely.
When knowledge is everywhere, wisdom is everything.