The Australian published its quasi-luxurious occasional magazine The Deal with this morning’s edition. On page 1 of the main paper it promoted content in the inserted magazine with “Why Cisco is a dream employer”; on pages 16 and 17 there was a big picture and gushing story about the tech company being named “best of the best” in some corporate back-patting competition …

the oz cisco page 1

the deal cisco

But on page 26, buried at the bottom of a left-hand page deep in the business section (not as well read as the right-hand pages) was a story headlined “Cisco axeing season claims 5500” …

the oz cisco page 26

That wouldn’t be ideal for the world’s best employer:

“Cisco Systems is cutting 5500 employees — 7 per cent of its workforce — in the networking company’s latest reaction to market shifts, including customers favouring software over hardware.”

Oops — didn’t see that in The Deal story, which finished:

“What we we’ve started to see is people who had left Cisco wanting to come back”…”Across the Asia-Pacific and Japan we’ve rehired more than 400 people back into Cisco.”

Awks.