I’ve heard We need this ASAP a thousand times lately. Indeed, deadlines have never been more pressing and unrealistic than they are now. I wonder why this is happening and how do you deal with it? I'm under a lot of stress and struggling to meet the deadlines. I would prefer to give notice as soon as possible. Total burnout.
21 replies (most recent on top)
Chicken Little
Some free pizza motivated you? Wow.
Not really. I was generalizing in order to remain anonymous.
In our role, there was a group of us that had to do "quarterly maintenance" outage work where we had to do tasks between Fri night at 6PM until Mon morning at 6AM. The most critical work always began at 6PM Fri and went through the night and early Sat. Some tasks that involved 100's of Terabytes of data or moving racks between data centers took the whole weekend. There were IT teams, Data Center support teams, electrical teams, app support teams, etc. involved, and each had their own tasks to do, but due to the nature of the work, everyone had to coordinate who was doing what when. App support teams can't upgrade their apps if the network is down. The network team can't do their work if electrical work is being done and the power is down. So on and so forth.
My team's work was usually done between 6PM to midnight and we were done for the weekend other than final sanity checks Monday morning. As a team, we'd vote on what type of food we wanted and the PM would place a catering order for us. But it was easier to just say pizza party. Sometimes, if we had Sat AM work, we'd decide if it made more sense to work in a "war room" or just WFH. In the event we went the war room route, the PM would cater in bagels and breakfast pastries, orange juice and coffee.
It wasn't much, but if you have to work during dinner hours or breakfast hours, it's nice to have the company provide the food that you'd ordinarily have to provide for yourself.
Yes, the rush to get things done generally precedes end of FY & pending LR. Last year was much of the same.
We are 'CIsconians' not 'Cisco-ites'.
Some free pizza motivated you? Wow.
If you have to pack a sandwich do it. No big deal. If you don't like working over 40 hour weeks then go be a school teacher. The one thing that I learned from having a parent work at Apple is if you only work 40 hours a week then there's someone else in the world working 80 and they will beat you to the deadline.
You're right, it's not a big deal when it happens occasionally. I didn't say I didn't like working over 40 hrs. I've been at Cisco over half your lifetime and I have a lot more work experience than you. And if you think school teachers only work 40 hrs, you're an iD10T. They spend hours creating lesson plans and then hours grading papers. And parent/teacher meetings and responding to emails from parents. They don't do that during the class day while they're teaching. Maybe tenured college professors get away with working 40 hrs, but not K-12 teachers. Grow up dude.
My comment was about how, back in the day, if project managers wanted teams to work "non-business hours" to do system rollouts or upgrades, maintenance, or even put in extra group development time, they'd book a conference room and cater in dinner. Now it's "pack a sandwich" instead of expensing meals. Used to be, there was budget for compensating us for working over 40 hrs with minor perks like a pizza party in the "war room" that evening. Now, it's "do more with less" and we're cutting costs by burning people out by working them overtime w/o compensation.
Cisco is no longer a cash-cow, we are in managed decline mode. The new strategy is to take on debt to acquire startups with revenue growth. Artificially inflating revenue to keep the stock afloat.
Rinse & repeat.
The apple guy. This exactly what is missing in Cisco. A fresh new perspective. All the way from management to the top CEO is all cisco'ites and thats whats been flushing cisco down the drain. "You Either Die a Hero, or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become the Villain" But you are the one to steer the ship, if at all possible. Put it this way, cisco is a cash-cow waiting to be milked. Any ideas is welcomed, just got to find an ear to listen which you will. Spend 20% of your time on the next gen, regardless of deadlines.... I hope we dont cisco'ite you.
You think that doesn’t happen at Cisco as well?
Have you ever heard of Insieme? The Nexus 9000 group was a notoriously like that between 2015-2017.
I worked in a BU where the developers were in a war room daily for months on end (probably most of a quarter). Management bought them dinner daily to keep them working to 9-10 daily. Some of them were working Saturdays as well. Luckily I’m not a software developer so it didn’t effect me but being under that particular director I used to get tagged in their daily emails wrt what was getting ordered for dinner.
I’ve worked 22 days straight (including saturdays and sundays) one December to meet an objective before a holiday shutdown. My manager gave me a nice bonus though.
Some of it is just a part of the game working in Silicon Valley, but other times it is not right.
Stick around Cisco longer, eventually you’ll see it for yourself.
Absolutely. Our VP gave six of us a three month project around 2003. Never worked as hard as that since then. At end of project he gave each of us 4,000 options (the days of the regular non-RSU options). That chunk of change paid for most of our kid's college once vested.
People work like that when given stock options that might be worth something.
LoL. Look around, Cisco ain't building iPhones...
I would like to comment on this post. In my personal opinion Cisco doesn't have impossible deadlines. They have short deadlines for a myriad of good and bad reasons but definitely not impossible. The reason why I say this is because I grew up working in California. I'm in my 20s now and while growing up my father worked at Apple and was selected to be a engineer on a top secret project that the world would come to know as the IPhone. As a kid growing up I vividly remember there were days at a time when my father would go to the office and I wouldn't see him until later in the week. He and those involved in the engineering were under such tight deadlines they literally slept at the office. It got so bad and so stressful meeting deadlines that engineers were getting divorced. My parents included. And my father will admit it to this day his work ruined his marriage. I was 13 at the time. To this day I've never owned a iPhone as a result. So yeah Cisco doesn't have impossible deadlines. If you have to pack a sandwich do it. No big deal. If you don't like working over 40 hour weeks then go be a school teacher. The one thing that I learned from having a parent work at Apple is if you only work 40 hours a week then there's someone else in the world working 80 and they will beat you to the deadline. I will never work at Apple. This is what it's like having impossible deadlines. Cisco is nowhere close to this. The engineers couldn't cut it.
Pre Covid they’d throw out any target date, herd everyone into a war room, and buy everyone dinner at 4pm to milk you for another 3-4 hours into the evening.
I'd almost forgotten those days.
I was recently told to "pack a sandwich" when a task was scheduled between mid afternoon and late evening. :-(
S—- rolls downhill and first line and middle managers get away with it by pairing overachievers with under performers on projects.
They know the dependable, the masochistic employees who want to do a good job because they feel their work is tied to their reputation as employees will work day, night, and weekends to meet the target while they look the other way.
Pre Covid they’d throw out any target date, herd everyone into a war room, and buy everyone dinner at 4pm to milk you for another 3-4 hours into the evening.
Another reason for the rush is that LR is coming. Whenever LR is on the horizon, managers like to push and squeeze the last bit of work and knowledge out the worker bees. This is just in case they won't be around after the FY.
The reason there is big rush for everything to meet some customer deadline is because our roadmaps are stagnant. When your ex-CFO (KK) starves engineering for investment dollars, your product falls behind on the feature velocity. Then when it comes up as a “gap” in a big customer RFP, it becomes a crash action to complete. Of course, when you have to do that, you stress out development and testing and end up doing a half-arsed implementation with many corners cut.
The OP is right. Seems like there is a big rush all of the sudden.
Sometimes you hear that a certain customer needs something by a certain date and everyone will go the extra mile to get it done. But for times like now when there is no clear explanation for the rush I think it is just managers/VPs playing games. It makes them lose credibility.
Let’s be fair Cisco needs to hurry up even more because it’s so slow. But that means hiring more.
I'm finding it funny how a BU that my team recently moved into has some initiative. We weren't part of it before switching BU's. Now we have a short deadline to implement this initiative.
The problem is that a team under our BU made some policy change that affects our infrastructure. No one went back and did an audit to find the teams/apps that were not compliant with this new policy, so we had to make changes to meet the changed policy. That put an extra hurdle in our way to meeting this short deadline.
The team that owns the policy, and the team that has to implement the changes required by the policy ARE IN our BU. Can we get escalation or additional help getting these hurdles out of the way? NO.
Does our Sr. Director want to look good in front of his new SVP? He-l yes.
Why we can't get an extension or get moved up in the support queue since all this cr-p is now all within the same BU instead of cross-BU support, I don't know.
But I'm getting burned out stressing on making this sh-t show work when someone in our new BU dropped the ball and left this big a$$ minefield in place for us to have to navigate instead of doing their due diligence and having all the teams affected by the new policy fix it nearly 2 years ago when they implemented it!!!!
Why is lack of planning on someone else's part always an emergency on my part?
It's the same where I am - middle managers trying to prove they're indispensable (they're not), and making everybody else's life miserable in the process. They also know you cannot go anywhere on a real vacation, and can't interview easily to escape the torture.