I’ve been here for 20 years and I can’t recognize this place anymore. What happened to this place. tc=$350k
I owe lot of my professional development and help during family emergencies to Cisco . Left 6 years ago after brutal layoffs.
That all the smart people have left and the only ones remaining are dead weights.
If there was one company that was best positioned to champion the transition to the cloud , it was Cisco. They made a mess of it. And now , there are reduced to selling low margin networking hardware to big banks and the governments that are wary of public cloud. And it’s a shrinking percentage.
Cisco is selling to the hyper-scalers: Google, Facebook & MSFT and they in turn sell to their public cloud consumers.
Facebook builds its own switches. And msft is buying nexus 9000 and also some arista stuff. Google is also mostly white box. It’s a drying revenue stream. These switches last for 10 years in fire and forget mode. Nothing compared to recurring cloud revenue
Just started, So far I’ve only heard that a lot of people have left and the ones that are here are re learning what knowledge left with others, the culture seems good. But I come from working with government. Any insights as to how it was vs today?
It was the Google of its time. That was 20 years ago. Everyone wanted to join it. I look at it now and I don’t see it having any relevance into the future.
That was more than 20 years ago
Constant layoffs
People who can influence real change (PE, DE, VPs) don’t have the vision to do so. They’re always sticking to how things have been traditionally and feel out of comfort zone when pushed.
Influence would require a personality that motivates others, and the presence to drive out the lower levels refusing to change.
Competencies is the issue. This day Cisco DE or PE are no longer industry leader but followers. PE is more or less tech lead in the good old day. I have no respect to those talking head
What’s the TC for a senior manager role at Cisco?
Tldr, nobody ever got rich with Cisco. It was a reputable company in the 2000's but ruined itself by outsourcing, and importing foreign workers regardless of skills.
Cisco has produced it's share of mm's. When are you guys moving to Tasman? We could grab lunch.
Was it John Chambers’ fault?
JC has a good time in rising internet up to year 2000. After that he has stupid vision. Stupid Telepresence shit, Flop video, buy Atlantic cable box. We used to have many top schools alumni. Now those graduate from MIT, Stanford, etc won’t join or they are idiots or leaving soon after acquisition. Cisco is now an Indian quality company
Culture shift.
How has the culture shifted? When I joined there was a desire to kick ass and have the best product out there; now it feels like the company is just punching in the wind. The talent pool seems ok; not the worst, and there are still geniuses around but they don’t seem to be able to move the needle. Did the market just pass them by? I can’t quite place my finger on what the exact problem is.
Well, without putting too fine a point on it, the biggest shift has been shifting to a more left leaning view of the world. Between that and the cancer that is nepotism, things are not recognizable.