Do not fear the Reaper.
I drew the LR card now somewhat long ago.
It was honestly probably the best thing for my career.
I received a good nine month payout. Thanks Cisco.
I had a better paying job even before my sixty day final PC LR turn in.
It was really weird because I received a very good and management visible award about two months before my LR; only to then get LR'd.
I then went to a job migrating customer firewall platforms.
Sad to say for Cisco, but the past four years have been the most fiscally rewarding of my career. Backlog of customers turning in their ASA and Firepower firewalls for 3rd party.
I sincerely do feel sad about that. Cisco missed the boat completely on two things: Firewall and Virtualization. Once an enterprise migrates it's firewall away from the main networking equipment provider, it is only a matter of time before the rest of that enterprise's gear up for renewal goes to a competitor.
Cisco could have been AWS for 2023 if they bought someone like VMWare (instead of creating Flip and other delusions), and put good old-style effort into integrating virtualization and cloud into existing IOS.
Too late, sad to say. There were a good ten years it all worked.
Enjoy the decline.