Where to go? All other vendors are even more ****ed up. Ericsson is praying it can make 5G a massively difficult technical boondoggle for SPs. They will layoff 10x more people than Cisco. Huawei is finding thier customers have woken up to the business model, and want control of thier core assets back, killing thier services business. NokAlcaLu are doing a bit better, but are pushing mostly legacy. Juniper is pushing legacy or essentially whitebox.
So it comes down to Arista or Adva as vendors making smart moves and growing. But they are small compared to Cisco and jobs don't come up much. VMware is an option, but thier time will be up soon.
Customers are all ****ing moving to the cloud.
If you wanted to work for a cloud SP, too late. They are full of ex Cisco and don't want many more.
A startup can't offer Cisco package. And they are even more risky than Cisco.