What on earth is going on with this new thought that everyone has to now partner with everyone else, partner with colleagues, their own team members, partner across teams, own areas and partner with similar areas across multiple teams and think about partnering with a view across teams we don’t usually work directly with across Cisco . It was hard enough having a few focus areas but this sounds like a a complete nightmare to manage and I fear it’s going to be hard on already strapped employees after all the recent. LRs!
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Yeah. The only partnering I'm going to do for Dell has to do with my a-s and a toilet.
The non-stop LR culture from highly toxic chuck prevents people from being open and sharing cross functionally across teams.
For the kids, Chambers was the person who introduced or did nothing to stop:
- Quarterly layoffs
- Wage freezes
- Dry promotions
- Forced "vacation" particularly when he needed a bigger bonus when he failed to meet his numbers
- Saw an average stock price around $25 over nearly 14 years
- Forked out groups of incompetent people into their own companies then bought them back in with massive payouts expecting those that stayed to actually make their cr-p work
- Commanded that people "don't fall into the trap of helping other people" which management formally and publicly refined as "we don't know what you do and don't want to know, so if you help someone and they look better than you we're firing you so don't help other people."
- Created three more broken routing/switching operating systems
- Made endless missteps from buying a camera company where the camera stopped recharging after three minutes due to overheating, did a home video conferencing product with a $60/mo charge when the world was moving to texting, added a box in the range of $1K to make the tiny screen on a desktop phone which itself wasn't far from $1K itself into a proprietary terminal, took longer from announcement to release of a "business tablet" than competitors entire development, release and end of production cycle whose key business application was "flashlight", and so on.
- "Development" often overran many times over and even with that the vast majority of the development budget still ended up in bug "churning" (when the same bug is filed for the same exact instance of code on one branch and put in a non-R state over 20 times before the one line fix was actually developed "fixed" is not the right word.)
- Broken code was cut and pasted dozens of times in one branch then pushed into hundreds of other branches meaning a single bug became thousands
- Management measured productivity with KLOCs rewarding more bad code and punishing cleanup resulting in a reduction in total code
- Many branches on multiple operating systems didn't build for months or more at a time
- When the number of build warnings on some operating systems exceeded 100,000 everyone was pulled off actual work to hide the warnings without actually fixing anything so when they became real problems in the field many clues were hidden
- The company endorsed many individual decisions costing the company tens of millions each and even when the cost was discovered Cisco rewarded those who caused those losses with promotions. Cisco is a Dilbert Principle company.
- People without high school "Introduction to..." skills like creating data structures with the ability to deterministically remove elements, putting stuff on separate lists with timers hoping when they were pulled off that list when the timer went off they were no longer being referenced, crashing whole systems when they were which was often
- The output of static analysis for decades showed how little most people at Cisco knew about C at any point since the founding of the company
- There is a strong case to be made that Chambers did a great job with acquisitions that filled every niche starving out many now dead networking companies, but he didn't invest in building actual development talent required to keep the company at the forefront when all the low hanging fruit was picked
Particularly for those working in software, given all this, why do you think things were great until just recently?
That's how real companies work, effective cross functionally. It will never work at cisco. Cisco is the most siloed company ever with everybody on power trips to keep things private. The non-stop LR culture from highly toxic chuck prevents people from being open and sharing cross functionally across teams.