In another illustration that a good earnings report doesn’t equal job security, Juniper Networks announced it is cutting 280 jobs – 3 percent of its workforce – despite meeting its third-quarter targets. Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson said during his company's earnings call that the layoffs are part of the cancellation of the MobileNext project, the company’s effort to build new mobile service provider technologies, according to Enterprise Networking Planet. MobileNext was intended to compete with Cisco’s ASR 5000 LTE gateway, but struggled to gain traction in the market. It said when that project was cancelled, though, that its mobile strategy remains intact. Bloomberg, however, reports the jobs will be cut across the company. Johnson also announced plans to leave the company, saying the board is in the final phases of a search for the next CEO. As the industry moves to software for handling tasks -- rather than just routers and switches -- enterprise telecommunications equipment vendors are feeling the pain. Juniper remains focused on Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) capabilities. And it topped Glassdoor’s recently-released list of companies paying the highest salaries for software engineers, with an average base salary $159,990. Its closest competitor, Cisco, has eliminated 12,300 jobs over the past two years, including 4,000 cuts announced in August. At that time, Cisco CEO John Chambers said, “The economy is more mixed and unpredictable than I have ever seen it.” In the earnings call, Johnson reported mixed demand from large service providers in Europe and U.S. customers holding off on spending due to the debt-ceiling fight in Washington, D.C.