Why are people in their 40s looking to get out of Cisco? I am told Cisco has a very chill environment and people are happy to work there. I am seeing posts here on people voluntarily leaving and it’s scaring me, as I am currently looking to join the company. Do you guys still recommend Cisco?
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Do you guys still recommend Cisco?
Get a time-machine and go back to 1998.
Its chill - for the 60-65% who literally do nothing.
When I was there I loved deadwood! If it weren't for them I'd never have time for new development. Going back years after FCS my code in critical sections remained unchanged so it had sufficient functionality, performance and quality the first time. I could have done far more of this if I weren't cleaning up after others.
It was the people spending 80 hours a week writing complete garbage requiring many hours of bug fixing on the part of the rest of us for each "hour" they "worked." With deadwood you only lose their salary, but with these people you lose many people's salary even if most of those many people were actually good. Given 75% of the development budget went to bug fixing these people made up a significant part of the developer base, and with managers not holding them accountable critical branches often failed nightly builds all but 1-2 days a month.
Ironically many of these people creating massive damage couldn't grasp the concept of negative contributions so they still complained about deadwood never realizing the deadwood were outperforming them.
Chill?
You heard that because a very large % of people barely work. At all.
The actual workers are the technicians. They are the blue collars.
The rest need to be paid hourly. Meaning only for working. Would cut a ton of bs jobs and tech debt.
They keep saying union - the ones that do nothing will take a massive pay cut while the actual workers would likely get raises.
Pay hourly. Balance the scales.
Its chill - for the 60-65% who literally do nothing. All day. At home. Working but at Costco.
@k4 oh yes..so hard to enter prompts into an AI platform. Lol. You missed the point of why people are leaving Cisco. The point is experienced engineers don't need to lookup sh* in AI. AI is a tool and it's a great time saver, but it's not a replacement for great and experienced engineers. Cisco will learn the hard way and reverse course like they always do
@ff You got some blue kool aid residue around your lips bro
@jy anti-AI sentiment is always “ I don’t like it so no one should like it”
It’s a new skill, it’s helpful and if you just want to p-o p-o it because you’re grumpy about having to learn a new skill, I would say you have gone soft.
@ck+1m05avedw I Agree 100% this is exactly how I describe the mentality now its no longer a networking company or even security its just an AI cult and the degree that every manager is stressing its use is sickening at this point as well as the people who actually are using AI and act virtuous bragging how they have.
@jq I was exactly the same as you. Retired early aged 58. Coasted for the final ten years. Before that I worked my a-s off hoping for raises and promos that never came. Fu-k that and that’s why I coasted. I had one promo in 18 years and know many people the same.
One thing to keep in mind if joining later in your career... Cisco loves the hard working employee with house payments/kids in college, as they feel they are not going to leave. They don't need to give you pay increases for 5,6 or 7 years regardless of how hard you work or how important you are to key customers. Don't like that? We have two H1B's ready to fill your role. Plan to have enough to retire by age 50, then you can play the game of just coasting and doing less and less work each year to match your slowly eroding $ purchasing power of a stagnant salary. Coasting was not in my DNA, so I put up with it until I didn't...then just walked away.
Whether you have good work-life balance largely depends on which org you're in. I'm in Sales but have worked in Eng'g and they're two different worlds. I don't feel like there is good work-life balance in Sales. I recently took 2 weeks off but worked briefly every day because the work doesn't stop, I had deadlines & no one to back me up. Did I feel like I could disconnect? Uh, no!
Cisco has talentless Cling-ons at Sr levels.
Until that changes, nothing else will.
The Cisco Fellows lead the loserfest.
I joined Cisco by acquisition (Splunk, non-USA) and definitely things got worse, however I must say in my org there are really great people, people that respect what I do, also my manager and director and US-colleagues are really great. Bonuses are good, RSU are good, however the only thing that break a bit the work-life balance is having meetings with folks from California at basically 21:00-22:00 my local time, also 12h on-call shifts during weekends su-k.
One thing that’s true is about clueless leadership (in particular those reporting to the CEO). Last week we were all forced to listen to a narcissist for 4 hours, and when during Q&A it was asked “do you see any ROI with AI spending” guess what? The id--t just ignored the question.
Is it the best company? No. Is it the worst? I don’t think so either.
What then inspires people to spend time and effort detailing their thoughts on this site?
People often express in writing, what they cannot, or will not say in person.
So to people disputing the content on this site, ask yourself, what would lead intelligent people to comment the way they do. They have ran the gauntlet of this sh-tshow, and maybe are somehow wanting to spare someone the same cr-ppy existence, that they have either lived through, or are currently working through.
Or, people can believe what @ff says
95% of what you read on this site is Bullsh-t - most of these posters either dont work here, left/got let go some time ago, or have a personal axe to grind. if you are really interested in understanding work life balance at Cisco - this is the LAST place you should check.
Ex-Cisco here - it is definitely team dependent, but there is a lot of fear mongering with managers. I saw two hard working and much needed people get laid off out of personal spite (one dared to take his full paternity leave), saw an indian co-worker quit because they denied his promotion after he busted his a-s for years, all for his backfill to be the grade he was asking for, in the same location (and posted BEFORE he left). There is very much an overwork, underpaid, underappreciated mentality at Cisco, and they hide it by paying for high rankings on "Best Place to Work". Cisco was awesome at one point, but it hasn't been that way in like 7 years at least.
The problem with Cisco started when they started hiring for "soft skills" and then went full DEI. It used to be the team picked and elected their manager...the manager was technical. But now, your cisco manager can't network two cans and a string together and when layoffs come , your manager has 0 say in it. So that's a double whammy, your manager makes bad hiring/promotion decisions and when layoffs happen, the good people end up getting laid off....or at the very least, have to pick up the slack and do even more work.
You have to look at the evolution over time. If it was still 30 years ago Cisco would have been a great place to join. The quality of the much of the work was still extremely poor which is why they had to execute endless acquisitions but the stock grew so fast the salary was merely the bonus. The parking lot was still more than half full at midnight.
By 2001 when Cisco jettisoned 27% (48,000 to 35,000) many people realized the work they were doing was career ending and the lot was empty not long after 5pm. Pockets of real competence left with the Ferraris and Lamborghinis that used to be in the parking lots. Quarterly layoffs, PIPs, wage freezes and other things Cisco did because "we're family!" weren't well received. By 2008 management was so abusive people were begging for a package during the greatest economic collapse in most of our lifetimes and I knew people who couldn't get a package who quit to take up to 40% pay cuts to do career building instead of career ending work. As a customer the quality never improved so clearly Cisco never reinvented itself into an effective development organization. It's why articles report NVIDIA is #1 in AI data center, Arista is #2 and Cisco "makes products for other sectors." That's quite the back handed slap!
It reads like you think it's a good idea to coast in your 40s. This is a path to working in the paint department at Best Buy in your 50s. You need to be looking not only at what you can bring that others can't to the next job jump, but what skills you'll build there to get the job after that. Like many I got the bait and switch (here's great new clean sheet development using skills others here don't have! Oh, by the way, we just need to help this team over the hump, then this team, then this team, then...) and left when it was apparent not only that I wasn't going to grow new skills but the skills I walked in the door with were atrophying.
Why are people leaving? Does being told that you'll be on thin ice if you don't use AI enough make you wanna hang around? How about being given an AI career coach that will track your every move? It's becoming an AI cult. It may be fine for some but it's sure as he-l not for everybody.
This entire thread is GOLD. Holy fu-k cisco is a shithole 🤣
Some orgs are decent. Some are bad.
I put in 54 hrs this week with on-call.
@c2 did I hit a nerve? Pucker up for Monday's new PowerPoint deck crafting. Make sure you use the right fonts for your Emperor.
stfu
Claude & Codex are doing your job and they still pay you for whatever reason
@c1 ok grand pa.. are you an AI or some j fr?
Here's what to expect with working here:
You will always be afraid of making any long term family plans, or large purchases, as you will constantly be worried about being restructured.
No matter how good a worker you are, the potential will exist that you will be restructured. Great team, super busy? So what, you can get restructured. Cr-ppy boss, poor team? Now you get to also not only worry about getting restructured, but also PIP. PIP is method that cr-ppy managers use to justify their own existence, by placing those under their watch on a PIP, so they can have people lined up for the next LR.
Dealing with mindless narcissistic people who have mastered the art of kissing their bosses a-s, so that they will somehow feel that they are "protected" from a LR. Guess what they aren't. Guess what? You need to, in addition to above scenarios, now deal with their cr-ppy behavior. It is much like a high school popularity contest.
You will hear people say they are staying for the RSUs, the bonuses, the ESPP. Go ask ShatGPT how much you will retain on your RSUs after you pay taxes. It is not worth it.
Bottom line, you will see a bunch of jokers who somehow paint themselves in a corner, buy big houses, drive nice cars, and then are stuck in Hotel California. They can't check out, they really aren't that technical, so can't do much beside work at this shithole, and they realize how much in debt they are with Tesla and BMW payments, that they become incredibly narcissistic and are simply looking to be a parasite attached to Senior Management, and make the rounds for them. You will be able to identify these people as they like to have weekly status calls with you, on your projects, and then say "Send me your slides, and I'll add them to our stakeholder deck". Worthless sc-m.
If the above sounds like fun, enjoy your "career" at Cisco. It could be six months, or six years, or if you kiss a-s, you could be in Hotel California, and never check out.
Definitely join if the ONLY choice is starvation AND homelessness. If you can get ANY other job then do that.
I’d stay away from Cisco if absolutely possible. I came in through an acquisition, and I regret not leaving sooner. Just clueless leadership.
absolutely su-king culture
@OP stay away. The culture is deteriorating, management is extremely bad and they may lie to you about the conditions.
@ab 1.22 cpf
It's basically a LR risk the day after every single fiscal quarter. The best FY we've ever had, with blockbuster raised outlook resulted in a 1.22 IPF
Make that make sense
By visiting this site, you have come to an end of your Cisco career. Don’t torture yourself further and move on. AI is the magic wand, nothing else matters.
I actually do agree that the work life balance is good, but we have a c-suite that only cares about AI (without explaining real down to earth innovation), & they don’t care about employee experience, now that is is exhausting.
One of our execs wears Gucci belts while laying people off. Another exec wears Chanel. Layoffs have been constant. It’s really tiring and NO Cisco didn’t always do them this much. I’ve done the research and it’s only last 4 years. We have some really questionable leadership and the pay is mediocre compared to other tech companies- BUT we are still remote friendly and some good teams exist
Isn’t every company like a he-l hole now due to AI? What differentiates CISCO?
Find another job elsewhere
ELT pays for "best place to work" rankings.
Every time you think they can't make it worse. It'll gets worse.
This place is a he-l hole.