https://marker.medium.com/why-dont-tech-companies-pay-their-engineers-to-stay-b9c7e4b751e9
"Why Don’t Tech Companies Pay Their Engineers to Stay?
Staying in a role builds valuable, company-specific domain knowledge. Leaving often results in a pay day."
In a managed decline, Cisco doesn't care about quality issues. The cost to switch network equipment providers is far too high. Cisco wants cheap employees that do not threaten the job security of decision-makers.
Internal Cisco engineers are merely "maintenance" workers that are easily disposable
They may be easily disposable, but they are not easily replaceable. There's a lot of back-end stuff that goes on behind the scenes. There's a lot of old legacy code. And it's not always well documented via comments in the code because the guys working on it know what it does and don't need the comments. New people coming in don't know how the "process" works due to the back-end stuff that does stuff or understand the code. Can they figure out the code, sure. How long will it take them? How many new bugs will they introduce while figuring out the legacy stuff? With the loss of efficiency and the increase in defects, or the sudden breakage when some back-end process stops working because some host got renamed, moved or shutoff because no one knows what it does, Cisco isn't saving money replacing people with the "tribal" knowledge they've accrued over years at the company with several junior people.
Cisco left the business of creating anything decades ago. Cisco is more like sears. Buy other companies and sell a catalogue of products.. They need sales & marketing gimics not engineers. Engineers make a living wage. All corporations are eliminating any position that pays a living wage if they can.
The hard truth that many companies struggle to wrap their heads around is that they should be paying their long-tenured engineers above market rate. This is because an engineer that’s been working at a company for a long time will be more impactful specifically at that company than at any other company...”
The Cisco (best place to work in the galaxy) mentality is that if you’re sticking around, they don’t need to pay you to stay.
Cisco acquires engineering talent through Mergers & Acquisitions. Those engineers are highly compensated. Internal Cisco engineers are merely "maintenance" workers that are easily disposable
Cisco is in the churn business.
Cisco is a tech company?
Hey, hope my English is ok. this will never happen at Cisco I afraid to say. SE/SA and other tech roles has poor respect and recognition in Cisco culture despite what Cisco may say. Chuck may say stand up and say clap for the SE's at global sales meeting but where is the money Chuck????? I need money to spend on house, food, kids, not your claps.
Tech people at Cisco always get paid badly for the work they do in winning deals. I know lot of SE's and no raises for years - some brilliant SE but they not company BS guys so they are ignored at Cisco. So they leave and get paid better at Google, FB,AWS and other places where they respect tech people. That is what I had to do. Cisco SE is a low paid AM assistant. SE loses skill set because have to sort out stuffs like TAC, renewals and licenses for 50% of time! SE should own room, talking about technology but constantly wasting time with licensing and TAC issues. Very sad what it has become.
"... The hard truth that many companies struggle to wrap their heads around is that they should be paying their long-tenured engineers above market rate. This is because an engineer that’s been working at a company for a long time will be more impactful specifically at that company than at any other company... "