Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

That's wrong on so many fronts. I have worked for (and seen fail) several companies with great technology, but without a clue how to sell it or more importantly, get people to buy it.

Projects delivered many years late. Cisco couldn't even correctly and reliably operate their own products which is why I had to file so many cases for what were verified by others as real problems. It's a lot easier to sell things that are available in a timely manner and work. It's even easier if those products are made easy to monitor and control. Guess what CIsco's leadership didn't do here?

Most of the SFS and SDS documents I had to reference as a developer were either a template with a title and author filled in or deep disinformation. An astonishingly large amount of code was never referenced either by call or entry in a function vector table was another source of disinformation. The early IOS-XR and NX-OS programmers/reference documentation were often incorrect and wildly incomplete. Many white papers for internal consumption were written by the clinically insane with a lot of plagiarized content, and it's entirely clear that they didn't have enough talent to read what they stole to see why those stolen bits complete disproved what they were trying to say.

Maybe it's the part of the world I work in but the executives up to the C level at Cisco's customers generating far more revenue than Cisco knew far more about the intricacies of Cisco's high end products than Cisco's own developers. They were able to help refine products to better help their businesses. At every other company I worked for I worked on high end systems where again the customers knew what we were doing inside and out and we worked together well to make the products more useful to them. On the low end Cisco Press and what is actually pretty good product documentation written by professional writers covered that world well.

And your swipes at standards is silly enough to not require any comment.

I didn't say every standard at Cisco was stupidly wrong, but Cisco has done standards work that was stupidly wrong. Standards that had to be reissued and still didn't fix glaring problems. Massive security problems. Standards where every possible decision point is described, every possible solution at each decision point is allowed and almost nothing is mandatory so two completely conforming implementations won't interoperate. It's not just stuff straight out of Cisco but stuff that has co-created with other standards bodies. Like with other industries some of this is intentional by larger players that can afford to work around the problems while starving out smaller players. Some is just a complete lack of basic skills.

Cisco's customers buy products, not presentations.

That's wrong on so many fronts. I have worked for (and seen fail) several companies with great technology, but without a clue how to sell it or more importantly, get people to buy it.
That's why we have a thing called marketing and why being able to present your product to customers and the wider industry is so important.
And your swipes at standards is silly enough to not require any comment.

PE here. Don’t code (waste of a PE’s time).

It's a funny assertion from a company which not only has Distinguished Engineers code but sometimes pulls them in for emergency bug fixing. There are plenty of PEs, DEs, Senior Scientists and others in the larger world doing R&D where the science involves prototyping with fast feedback which can't be handed to junior people.

Answers to basic questions like "what are requirements, design and implementation," "what is an API", "what is functional decomposition," "what is refactoring," "what are coupling and cohesion," "what did the text I plagiarized into my white paper mean," "why do I need to specify actual behavior in my worthless 'standards,'" "what does the word 'architecture' mean," "what does it mean to look at a system at different levels," "what does it mean to design a data structure which can be freed deterministically," "when using reference counting why don't I release the resource on first decrement," "why is an O(n^8) algorithm a bad idea," "why is it important to avoid creating yet another example of the halting problem," and a very long list of others are things I expect an Engineer 1 out of school to know, yet none of the many PEs from around the world that I worked with at Cisco understood any of them. Most of these skills must be substantially improved as systems become far larger and more complex.

Given the quality of white papers, PowerPoint presentations and standards I had to suffer most of that work is wasted along with the time of others to discredit it. Cisco needs technical leadership for development and it doesn't exist and that's why you have four very broken operating systems. There have been times when hardware and software have had to go back to the drawing board because they were hacked together without anyone making sure they'd actually fit together the first time. Cisco's customers buy products, not presentations.

PE here. Don’t code (waste of a PE’s time). Very technical in my area. I do RFP responses, provide BU backup to support TAC, direct engineering on details of feature dev and troubleshooting on customer problems, work with Product Mgr on product direction.
I also get asked to do presentations for Cisco Live sessions and industry conferences. I do podcast interviews such as light reading and do videos for YouTube. I do a lot of customer calls which many times involves PowerPoint.
I work on standards committees as well as write white papers for Cisco to publish.
Yes, and sometimes some director or VP will assign me to be PM on some dodgy project that is unfunded and will go nowhere. I hate it, but I have a lot of other things to do, so the project is always on the “back burner”.

Many PMs are deadwood anyways. All they do is create ppt slides and fancy looking xls spreadsheets. I work with 2 PMs and one of them suffers from bipolar disorder. He yaps like a fcuking p1g.

I had to train a couple of PEs myself in my last business group and I was only a grade 8. I thought PE is supposed to be very technical but at Cisco most of them doesn't know anything especially the Indian ones.

This implies (n-1) Principal Engineer do principal engineering work, doesn't!?

I worked with a couple dozen Principal Software Engineers on some of Cisco's highest end products where zero could do any engineering work at any level, and in many cases individuals made mistakes costing the company millions to tens of millions of dollars.

From this you can't say none or all the remaining PSEs can't do the job but armed with no other information than this and years of rummaging through the routing and switching code bases the smart money is on "closer to all can't do the job than none" because these were Cisco's biggest bets where they should have placed their best talent.

In IT , we have a Principal Engineer ( Grade 13 ) doing PM work [..] is this common across Cisco and other companies ?

I assume you know several Principal Engineers, but you only know one that is doing "PM work". This implies (n-1) Principal Engineer do principal engineering work, doesn't!?

BTW: I know not only one software engineer who is writing bad code ... this is common across Cisco :P

I thought Grade 13's were supposed to be giving Vision and Direction to the company and instead we have a lot of Glorified Project Managers.

I've never worked with one at Cisco that could do any form of engineering. "Vision and Direction" were never even a pipe dream. I'm actually surprised that one could operate a spreadsheet which is what PMs at most other companies do.

yes it is very common at Csco. Mostly dead logs, been in company for 20+ yrs. Good talkers, no actions. Well connected to Dirs, VPs and high ups. Very tribal, nepotism work culture hence the rotting products, sinking ship.