I don't have many years of work experience. I was overjoyed when I got an offer at Cisco. Now I am surprised that after only two years here I got an offer in a better company. I couldn’t have imagined that would happen. Some say that their experience here was not valuable at all and that they lost time, but in my case, everything I went through here was totally worth it.
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The quality of skills you develop there depend on the work and the group. Some of the brightest I’ve ever worked with were in hardware. The worst I’ve ever worked with were in software. Management ranged from pleasantly inert to caustic.
In the old days if you wanted to tackle problems requiring a supercomputer and a 56K ARPAnet connection you needed a job in academia, government or a few rare companies. Now you can do far more with a $70 Raspberry Pi. Companies can offer technical, systems and managerial skills that are otherwise hard to come by so no matter what level you are you should be considering these things. Many PhDs who came to Cisco learned the one metric for their work was resolving, junking or closing 150 bugs a year and the code bases were broken for months at a time as people shoved in code that wouldn’t compile for the wonderful bonuses paid for exceeding this one metric. All I worked with quit in their first year. It’s best to learn bad practices vicariously.
Two years and out. Good for you! That's exactly what you should do early in your career. Do your job well, improve your skills, move on and move up with the next company. It's unwise to stay longer than 2-4 years at any company early in your career; your best increases come when you change jobs.
Cisco is a good place to start your career (spend no more than 2-4 years) or end your career (10-15 yrs before you clock out, hide your gray hair, go along to get along)
Outside experience has no value to Cisco. They are not interested in what you did outside and only pay it lip service. You are pigeon holed and siloed when you come to Cisco. Your qualifications and experience count for nothing.
Indeed; avoid getting comfortable, always push, and don't let yourself be taken advantage of financially. Especially if you know that you really know your stuff, which you will know when you are at that point when others look to you to fix the big problems.
The most important part through all of it is pay yourself first. Put as much away in your retirement account as you can, as early on as you can.
When you get to be over 50, you will so glad that money is there, because you can start scaling back as far as workload and pay demand.
Have been driven to push since starting working thirty years ago. Since getting LR'd three years ago, I have scaled back considerably on workload; purposefully.
I just recently left my third contractor job post LR. It was at a lower rate and lower demand, on purpose. They started throwing much more responsibility and hours at me because I am good at Cisco hands-on operations. I asked them for a considerable rate bump to reflect the deliverable scope.
They told me it was not possible.
I gave them two weeks notice and moved on to something else more aligned with my current goals.
Enjoy the challenge, and put yourself first, especially if you give 100%. Otherwise, you are just padding the wallet of some overpaid executive by not taking your rightful share.
Depends on how many reorgs your area has dealt with. It's not easy to accomplish anything with constant reorgs.
You get what you put into this place. I have been here 5 years now, and I have hit a brickwall.