Is this slow start towards for demoralizing and a PIP? Others seeing this as a trend? Could be related to change of re-focus, Cisco is retuning as an AI company?
Does this surprise you when manager suddenly seem to target direct reports?
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same thing occured with well established, successful older person in security.
"she wanted to retire" was the story.
complete vacuum of help from the clown prince who pushed her out.
it's certainly not performance, teams are hitting above their goals.
As a customer that has to deal with the bugs still coming out of Cisco the person setting those goals needs to be fired immediately.
it's actively happening. (NE)
age is the target
it's certainly not performance, teams are hitting above their goals.
after they have been shoved out, managment claims they 'retired' and wishes them well.
If you have been an id--t for the last few years and skating by you can bet the end is near. Those trying to be that grade they were moved to with all the money recently? Better be there in the next cycle because you are going to be tagged. Stupid excuses, and there are a lot, you can cram those. No real manager is going to take the fall for you or kick the can down the road for someone making 30k more than they are with none of the headache.
The layoff culture is so strong that learning the tech stack takes a while and older folks are laid off constantly which causes the team to lose all domain knowledge.
I worked with lots of old folks who moved on to other companies voluntarily and others who outright died. The lifers didn't really have domain knowledge, or any other knowledge needed to be productive which is why they couldn't move on.
For a company that does large scale development of communications technologies across continents and decades its people su-k at communicating in any form. If you knew how to do your jobs at the scale you work at you'd have not only collected all that information but made it easily consumable by those who need it. The Agile monkeys never considered what n(n-1)/2 face to face connections means for n>>1000 in environments when anyone can scribble anywhere in any code base with tens of millions of lines of code and no basic software skills.
I left Cisco a while back and I should say good riddance. The layoff culture is so strong that learning the tech stack takes a while and older folks are laid off constantly which causes the team to lose all domain knowledge.
no one cares about what happened in the 90s
The assertion was the code is cr-p because of bad pay, yet massive technical debt was created in all these operating systems during a time of great compensation. I should know better than to expect Cisco employees to have reading comprehension.
XR was started in the 1990s
no one cares about what happened in the 90s
and stop wearing long tenure at Cisco like a badge of honor, its a badge of shame
ok, you get to be the old man shaking his fist at the clouds while you sat out the greatest bo-m in history at dinosaur.com
agreed, but it is a cycle
low comp -> low output -> low profits -> low comp...
You obviously don't know Cisco's history nor did you read the post you responded to. Cisco paid outrageous amounts to many highly incompetent people creating the massive technical debt we see today. XR was started in the 1990s when massive stock packages were the norm, NX-OS was built from spin-ins which received big payouts and IOS-XE was built by a company Cisco bought which received a big payout, and all of them were done under Cisco's leadership creating massive technical debts of their own. Low comp discredited.
Also, Cisco has total gross margins just over 65% with operating margins over 30% as of nearly a year ago which allows Cisco to pay their development staff far too many dollars for each dollar of working code they produce. If you were paid by the actual value you brought to Cisco many of you would have to pay Cisco to work there. Low profits discredited.
If Cisco is building ten products, each of which has two chips which are common to all products, Cisco will write 20 different drivers, all of which will be extremely buggy and after being forked out on to what were once thousands of branches result in tens of thousands of bugs. They covered refactoring in high school in the 1970s and anyone who has worked on a modest sized project knows to do this refactoring back in the requirements and design stages where possible, so how did Cisco go so many decades without addressing this? The problems go down the stack where static analysis shows Cisco can't write code and up the stack where the white papers are self contradictory plagiarized nonsense. Low output confirmed.
Many successful companies start with low compensation, build competent teams, deliver high output and over time the profits go up, in part by not choking themselves out over time with ever growing technical debt and in part by building useful stuff. Think stable competent base hits instead of wildly swinging for a home run. They're great places for young aggressive talent to take on a wide variety of responsibilities and quickly exceed the abilities of many of Cisco's most senior people. When you have real skills you have job options to get more money along with even better skills to get yet more money. If you're rotting at Cisco doing a poor job thinking you're hurting anyone other than yourself you're severely mistaken.
I can definitely attest to the stock scenario.
Was involved in a big project in the early 2000s. Our VP was very happy with the work of about six of us. Many after hours and weekends for six months. I received an extra 5,000 shares (at under $20 a share, think in like 2003) just for that project. Different times. Those 5,000 shares eventually paid for the complete college tuition for both our children.
Old Cisco was great. Sad things changed. I left.
You should've been fired last year
They’ll mark you as ineligible for rehire
who in god's name wants to return to this place once they escape?
They can use anything to justify the claim that you're underperforming:
- Quality of service or deliverables
- Delays in delivering work
- Missing team meetings
- Not participating actively in meetings – even ignoring silly icebreaker questions can provoke managerial retaliation
- Refusing to share selfies in the Webex team chat
- Not joining team-building events outside working hours
- … and many other trivial reasons.
You might document everything, but what can you really do? File a lawsuit? Even if you win, you lose.
- They'll pay what they must to get rid of you, but the hostility won’t end. They’ll simply switch tactics.
- They’ll mark you as ineligible for rehire
- They might quietly reach out to their network to block your opportunities
- They’ll try to position themselves as a reference in your career path just to sabotage you years down the line
- They’ll provoke you more and more, hoping you'll make a mistake
If you're being targeted, here's what you can do:
- Invest in yourself. Update your skills. Expand your network. Apply internally or externally.
- You won’t win by fighting back directly—it’ll only damage your reputation further.
Instead:
- Take advantage of certifications while Cisco still funds them
- Ensure your customers give you the best feedback possible
- Ask trusted colleagues for reference letters now
The only real win is landing a better position elsewhere. They can’t fight against a valuable, in-demand professional.
You'll get a better salary than at Cisco, a better environment than what your manager offered, and you'll maintain strong connections with the Cisco teammates who truly matter.
Considering how many ICs have skated for years and are now beyond over paid I say BFD. You should be worried, very worried.
If Cisco doubled everyone's salary with no other changes you'd still be as incompetent as you are now
agreed, but it is a cycle
low comp -> low output -> low profits -> low comp...
there is only one way to break the cycle, someone has to take a risk...as in, Cisco fixes comp and then eventually has a case for demanding better output
the cycle remains intact for the foreseeable future
just let it work itself out...its impossible to build a performance culture while chronically undercompensating
Cisco in the late 1990s was handing out total stock to the tune of over $10M to Engineer 4 level people who created far more work for others to fix than anything positive they did making them worse than deadwood which is just the loss of salary.
I've worked at much smaller companies without Cisco's margins which by definition can't financially survive the level of failure at Cisco nor match Cisco's pay packages. Even without the fanciest of degrees or titles they could easily mop the floor with Cisco's engineering and management.
When a project goes off course a well run company it will be noticed and stopped it if they have to so they could evaluate if and if so how it should proceed to correct course. They identify problems, develop best practices and use this as part of an effort to keep growing. Cisco starts with 1-3 month projects then adds many times the bodies for years, and when it's overrun the budget by a factor of 50 or more and the code doesn't even really work they check it in declaring victory, rewarding everyone with bonuses for "going above and beyond for a problem harder than anyone could have predicted." No postmortem is done and most are deluded into thinking they did a good job. These are in every way extreme failures, but Cisco has the margins to keep repeating these over and over and over again. If Cisco doubled everyone's salary with no other changes you'd still be as incompetent as you are now, and we have pre-2000 to prove it.
this too shall pass
I've not seen PIPs but I have seen an increase in arbitrary performance demands
probing a bit, it seems obvious that this messaging is coming down through the management chain
just let it work itself out...its impossible to build a performance culture while chronically undercompensating
at some point, management will realize no one is answering the fire drill
Does this surprise you when manager suddenly seem to target direct reports?
I miss the old days when directors and VPs would call all hands and threaten to fire everyone repeatedly, and other old days when we had rank-n-yank and layoffs, and even more old days with wage freezes and dry promotions. You kids don't know what you're missing!
With 24 years of frequent layoffs, Cisco passing on the last bit of money they left behind for a second layoff this fiscal year and people talking about a significant increase in PIPs a few months back on this website I'm not the least bit surprised.
cisco leadership is clueless. if you are targetted look for a job now. or sue their a-s and get money.
Hmm, interesting. Have you asked yourself if you are stagnating by not learning / educating yourself and showing that you are preparing yourself for tomorrow? Maybe your manager sees this and you are making excuses and lying to yourself? How about some self reflection, writing it down have a plan for improvement and discussion with your manager. See if that improves the situation for ya!!