I'll never understand why Cisco was so willing to let go of some of the company's top talent. I understand wanting to save money, but the institutional knowledge we lost with them being kicked out is going to cost us much, much more in the long run. Does anybody on the ELT think beyond the next quarterly earnings report?
6 replies (most recent on top)
If you were a top performer you wouldn’t have been cut.
“Top Performers” at Cisco?
Let me know when you locate one. we are all mediocre at best, hence why we aren’t elsewhere, right?
large dinosaur orgs like Cisco just smother talent and effort
if you are under age forty and have some interest in career performance, I have no idea why you would ever set foot in Cisco (or any similar dinosaur org)
I was TAC, and wanted to retire from Cisco. That was seven years ago; after almost two decades with Cisco.
Since then, I have worked for two partners, and now a VAR; there is an informal community of us old-school ex-TAC folks who primarily work migrating large Cisco networks to other vendors. It is a shame, because some of these folks are double CCIE and were canned over the years. It is a whole process. There are companies outside Cisco, that specialize in Cisco Asset Management. The data from those companies (the end customers use their service for Cisco contract management), is then used by the other vendor partner / VAR to develop a migration plan both financially and technically. Larger network migrations have taken three years; a phased approach. I have made a career, post Cisco LR, on this process; and have recruited several ex-TAC engineers also LR'd, to do the same process.
It really is a sad scenario, the money has been great for the pool of us doing this work, but most of us would have stayed. We loved the old TAC of the 2000s.
It is sort of like a country banishing some of its best foot soldiers, who then go to on to fight for the enemy.
Whatever mindset was first formulated to use skilled employees as funding to make the balance sheet align to be profitable; instead of using that skilled resource for new product innovation and true (not the as-is often garbage integration), was a huge mistake.
Amazing those in charge do not realize this scenario; or maybe they do and just do not care about any future except the eventual destruction of Cisco.
I worked with too many "top performers" at Cisco who were far worse than useless, making decisions that cost Cisco far more than anything they did on the other side of zero. Cisco never got rid of enough of them which is why the quality remains horrific over the 30 years I've been a customer.
That’s because they don’t value dedicated staff. No importance is attached to their skills and they are vermin to be cut as needed to meet that quarter’s numbers.