From asking around. Cisco has a back end monolith that's being slowly transitioned to cloud. Meraki seems to have pretty good engineers. Everything new is cloud monitoring related. Engineering driven deadlines. Long tenure. Tc 20% lower than fang. Maybe a bit slower career growth than fang. Anything a fang /startup engineer should consider? Are you guys content with your tech progress? Is revenue stream diverse enough for you to feel safe next 5 years? How's old timers vs younger people culture? Of course what's wlb like. Personal info. I have older relative moving in with my wife and I for a year or so while they build out their retirement home. This means I'll have less time. I have extreme imposter syndrome. Aka I choose to make small insignificant moves to show " progress" when I'm micromanaged. Im technically content with my current position. It has really good wlb and interesting tech but wayy too understaffed, half the fang salary and unstable revenue source so my paranoia is kicking in. Kind of fomoing about all that crazy tc increase this year and dreaming of working with a bigger team to bounce ideas off of. But I want to stop feeling imposterish and stay at a stable place for 4 years a hone my `craft` . Ex. I can do API design, performance tunning and bash script np(aka I'm just a tool). But I have no idea anything front end. tcp vs UDP in practice. and how certificates /auth even works or how to write good test cases or to even write good SQL queries and super slow at reading documentation and code reviews. I also don't have a habit of for ex. like standing my own graphql cluster up to explore myself so I can propose a design. It because im afraid of not meeting deliverables timeline on what others want from me. Ive kept up with my leets because of paranoia. Any advice? Tc: 180 Yoe: 5
Meraki is quite different from the rest of Cisco and operates autonomously. Bonuses are also only determined by Meraki's performance and not Cisco as a whole (does seem unfair but that's what it is). Let me know if you have any specific questions about Meraki but I think it's an amazing place to work. Very smart folks, peers are always willing to lend a hand, very high impact. The profit/engineer ratio is quite amazing.
@yuabaja where is all the revenue from? Am I missing anything besides cloud monitoring? I actually have no doubt that it's full of smart engineers. But aren't they discontent with the lower tc? Or does the profit related bonuses often make up for it?
Hard disagree about Meraki. Cisco is taking over, the years of autonomy are gone. Ask anyone in sw management, hardware, or pm. We might have a couple years left of M bonus at best (confirmed for FY22 and FY23, after that seems unlikely). I don’t recommend anyone join now, given where the company is as a whole.