These have grown like cattle and consuming too much capital budget doing nothing or same old useless work. Cisco promoted lots of useless employees to these positions as a feel good notion, for lack of salary raise or other incentives. Data is being collected on age, grade, salary, work priorities and tenure length to sort out a list. First hand info from a senior VP.
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If you’re grade 13 and still coding...
I gave you an upvote with the following caveat: for Engineer 4 and above there is still a need to have some hand in the details so you can understand how high level concepts map onto low level details which evolve over time. Otherwise you're more disconnected manager than engineer.
Going further up the hierarchy, some Principal Engineers are coordinating across many to all programs in a company, and some company's Principal Software Engineers become rare specialists who are trying to come up with some combination of extremely complex and highly optimal solutions to math and science problems even highly rated little S senior engineers can't tackle even with a lot of time and training, and in many cases they're also the ones who actually write the code which is both correct and fast for those kinds of problems. If you're still technical above that you may get a scientist title instead of an engineering title as you're exploring far ahead of product development where the goal is more understanding what might be possible, although inappropriate uses of "data scientist" seems to have diluted the value of the word.
Lol hire more managers to manage some projects. Hopefully the new ones don't have significant others as ex Cisco employees (or ex cons) who may have used the system to share info with competitors or hackers.
Exactly post - 1
With rare exceptions, baseline coding is grunt work. If you’re grade 13 and still coding, I’d fire you for wasting the company’s money.
It takes so much effort & planning, as well as an intense application process - to become any of these roles.
In software at Cisco it's about schmoozing, not technical skills, and if they ever had skills Cisco burned them away. The few great talents I've seen at Cisco were all Technical Leaders and once they had a public win they leveraged it to move on.
Our technical abilities at Cisco are low enough without firing the last few people who can actually code.
At other companies coding is a skill set that should have been mastered before becoming an Engineer 2. By Engineer 3 you should be taking technical responsibility for whole projects from conceptualization to delivery, and by Engineer 4 you should be doing these things at the program level. They should still have a hand in coding to suffer the consequences of their choices but the lion's share of the work on significant programs is communication, coordination, conflict resolution, working around risks that become actual problems, growing the talent of all the associated teams, and a host of other tasks to produce the least amount of code while making sure everything works together as a system, not just for the current release but by not tying a rope around your neck for future releases.
Cisco avoids all of this at all costs which is why you have so many broken routing and switching operating systems, projects that overrun budgets by factors of dozens, programs that overrun schedules by multiple years, and customers having to spend a year and sometimes far more testing images before fielding them only to roll them back almost immediately. This is why Cisco is a box company that forever dreams of being a systems company.
...the people who already have these roles, are the ones who should be making decisions on the technical contributions of their peers.
The people who should be making these decisions are people who have held those roles and repeatedly delivered on time, on budget and produced excellence all along the way. We work at other companies.
It takes so much effort & planning, as well as an intense application process - to become any of these roles.
Our technical abilities at Cisco are low enough without firing the last few people who can actually code.
(I am not any of the mentioned roles myself, but it'd be a crying shame to remove these individuals when we severely need technical minds who understand software, coding, and engineering).
If there are any people that aren't helpful to Cisco - the people who already have these roles, are the ones who should be making decisions on the technical contributions of their peers.
Amen
Next target is red badges. Next month or early Dec.
Everyone is all themselves and pointing fingers on why this company is so fu---d. This work culture reminds me of Amazon.
From the comments it’s clear that a lot of DEs are posting here, instead of doing anything useful, making my point
And “Fellows” aka Politicians at Cisco
There is no doubt that some (many ?) VPs, SVPs, Directors, Sri. Directors have little to no skills in people management, project management, budgeting, hiring. Most are working on behalf of their managers with no sense of innovation and process improvement. Too scared to say anything upwards but a lot to say downwards. That pile needs a cleanup desperately. I don't think we have many Fellows or DEs but they have earned that title with long experience, papers, patents and mentoring. Some are highly technical those i have worked with.
- PE here
From the comments it’s clear that a lot of DEs are posting here, instead of doing anything useful, making my point.
Who do you want left here @OP ?
I'm not OP but I want engineers to understand scaling enough to be able to grasp the concept behind the Pigeonhole principle. I'd like to see white papers that weren't plagiarized self contradictory nonsense. I'd like to see people who can grasp that things have both capabilities and constraints and how to balance them to manage risk rather than spout easily disproven dogma. I'd like to see someone who got through the first week of an Introduction to Software Engineering course to know requirements, design and coding to the minimum degree of what, how and product so when we need a much better understanding of what needs to be done we don't get blocks of profoundly broken code, presented as actual working code, that can't be made useful. While we're at it, I'd like people at that level when they are absolutely wrong to stop jumping up and down as high as they can with their arms and legs violently flailing as they scream profanity at more junior people who are entirely in the right. While so common in industry they had to invent the phrase "prairie dogging" to describe the resulting reaction, it occurs far too often at Cisco. I worked regularly with many PEs and a few DEs at Cisco and I can point to a grand total of zero who pass every element of this list.
Most universities expect the above in addition to much more before handing out a degree. If you want a complete minimum baseline for the most senior engineers, much of which would still apply to more junior engineers, it would require a vastly longer reply.
If management had a clue they'd wish they were only useless. They've severely damaged or outright destroyed programs to the tune of $10Ms per bad decision and they made many bad decisions. While Cisco has disposed of people at the PE and DE level they haven't done so nearly enough.
They were allowed to do that because of bad management at the Director, VP and SrVP levels and those need a major cleaning as well.
@OP is at most a G10. Low level employee. I bet they never have spoken to a VP 1 on 1
Confirmed @OP is a janitor. Closest he got to the VP was taking out the trash in his office after hours.
You misspelled “Fellows”
clowns 🤡 the lot of them
Complete loser @OP. Got nothing going for them and keep making such posts. I'm beginning to sense it's a handful of stupid people in the company are making these posts
What kind of a total loser do you have to be to post this nonsense!?!
“First hand info from a senior VP”
What a clown.
Who do you want left here @OP ?
If you believe this I have some magic beans to sell you
Too many titles doing nothing taking Cisco money.