Dear Cisconians, this is the first time in my long career that I have left the company without having secured another job. The moral decline is inevitable. I was part of it; I started doing the absolute minimum and found that I could still deliver the same or better results than 90% of my colleagues. One day a manager will blabber about "Cisco Values," only to completely disregard them the next day. Good people are leaving, while the mediocre ones stay and play politics and produce AI slop. With every fu--ing layoff, more and more people start to pretending activities, commenting on tickets, pushing spreadsheets, and organizing meetings... Only a minimum number of people are getting promoted; it is a complete career disaster, and the longer you stay, the more your salary is behind the actual labor market. Good luck to you!
13 replies (most recent on top)
People are angry and they want to be heard, that's all.
I'd suggest with no path in house to make any of a number of critical process changes trying another venue is a desperate attempt to find another channel to someone who might make a difference. I've seen whole teams try to explain things to management so it wouldn't come off as a single malcontent but arrogance prevents most in management from considering the possibility there might be a better way to do things.
Cisco's leadership doesn't even listen to itself. Under Chambers when the executives said publicly annual layoffs were a sign of incompetent management they never took that to heart.
@at Id--ts like you posting? Haha. Why are you here then id--t? People are angry and they want to be heard, that's all. People like you are brainwashed into thinking you have to defend Cisco from people who don't like it. You do know you don't have to visit this site right?
Clearly everyone still here is 25 years too late. In 2001 when Cisco went from 48,000 to 35,000 the parking lot was largely empty by 5pm instead of well after midnight and there were plenty of other companies which were growing and hiring as Cisco's stock flapped around $25 for 14 years. Cisco was so bad by 2008 that people who couldn't get a package still took a 40% pay cuts to go somewhere else.
For the life of me I can't understand why each year people come here going on about how "Cisco was heaven until the preceding 6 months and everyone will now quit" when both have been proven false for a quarter century. Getting out for many will be the right answer, but be wise in managing the next jump and make sure it sets you up for the jumps to come after that first jump.
Whether you chose to stay or leave, I wish the best for all of you. Either way, don't be complacent.
@OP this place is a he-l hole. I cannot wait to depart. There is a serious problem when the CPO and President of GTM won't speak.
After less than 5 years, I came the the same conclusion about Cisco and left. Clean break, best decision, never looked back! Life is too short to work corpo-slop for a company whose business model seems to be laying off their employees en mass. All the extra work fell on the few good employees who do not get recognized, do not get raises or promotions, while the rest of the team makes an art form of padding their daily scrum with fantasies about how they're too busy to get any work done. It became unbearable. Projects would all be P-1 for the devs known to deliver, then their projects would go to the outsourced Infra team where they'd get stuck for months with no progress and no accountability. In my former team of 18, there were only 2 Americans and 16 members from the tribe. No thank you. The grass is indeed greener. Good luck all.
@bq ditto here. planning to do so in ~3 months. finally had enough after 25 years in Cisco.
I look forward to leaving too, in the very near future.
oh boo hoo for you, ya bi--h
This is so backwards. Straight to jail.
@OP Soo many of us are exactly this close to pulling the same tigger. You are spot on.
We all know is bad. The id--ts who are posting things like these either they confirm what they are, or, if we give them credit for some minimal intelligence they posses, they post these things to depress and to irritate those who are still with the company (unlike the OP)
We are now all depressed. The LRs don't even matter, this story is so sad that I have installed windshield wipers on my monitors, they are crying
Cool story bro.