Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

Cisco is an example of a place where you have the opportunity to rise to the top...

I never saw it. Managers want dashboards to be green and if you stray from the tasking required to do that you'll be publicly beaten for it to discourage anyone else from doing it. Cisco isn't the only company which punishes people for doing anything with their waking hours other than the tasking they're spoon fed which is why one should leave as soon as this becomes evident at any company.

Good job pointing out what should be obvious - that you are responsible for your own career. If you take the easy path you'll atrophy. Ever so slowly you'll be going down the curve.

Cisco is an example of a place where you have the opportunity to rise to the top, push yourself and you'll likely get as much growth as you can handle. Don't push yourself? No worries, there will be others more than willing to step in front of you. Yeah, there are groups with lousy managers, teams with self-promoting but do nothing team members. Cisco doesn't have a monopoly on that.

Folks need to take responsibility for their own growth. Cisco will give you plenty of opportunity. School never ends but its on you to not transfer over to community college.

@3pgv 21 years ago a G12 probably earns what a G8 or G10 earns today. So double that is really not a flex.

21 years ago I was let go. Cisco will be bankrupt in 12 months. Now I make double what I used to earn at Cisco as a grade 12 s/w engineer.

There is a reason you are EX Cisco @OP. Provided no value add in your post. Mumbo jumbo like any Cisconian

New grads/first job out of college: Stay no longer than three years. Move on and bag your 20-30% pay increase.

If you start off at Cisco, even at the PhD level, you'll be doing bug fixing almost exclusively until you quit a few months later as so many others have. Having received resumes from kids who started at companies like Cisco which list what they did in college courses it's clear they figured out they didn't do anything useful in those first few months or years after graduating and are at a real disadvantage at that point.

If you can start at a small company, post startup with stable growth so they know how to do development for the long term, with a development role in something new, you have a chance to work in every aspect of project and program development and may also get some real customer contact in the process. Suffer your own dog food for a few generations so you have a deeper understanding of a program life cycle and you can easily beat that 20-30% range.

New grads/first job out of college: Stay no longer than three years. Move on and bag your 20-30% pay increase.

You will never get market value pay increases or equitable promotions at Cisco. Ever.

Get the experience and move on. I repeat - do not stay.

Warmly
20 year Cisco veteran

I don't know which orgs work 2-6 hours a day, but it's certainly not Sales.

Stay at Cisco and join a group with good mentors and manager.
Take as many training in the first few years. spend some time in the lab, connecting devices and building test labs.

I worked for groups that built products from scratch…. daily grind, meetings and lot of design reviews, and test result reviews.

Stay with a group with good revenues and road map.

I worked at a remote site on many of Cisco's high end products and since they were so sc--wed up any development we started locally was always preempted to help teams in SJ. Everything was patching over small parts of other people's mistakes in two day strips and the hours were brutal. We weren't complacent but the work we were doing was career death from the other side.

The common theme is Cisco's management did nothing to extract the best from its people and those that didn't study outside their assigned duties were left to rot on the vine.

some context

I have been at Cisco for about six years, and basically joined the company to coast...err, enjoy "work life balance"

When I joined, I had five other written offers (remember those days?)

Each of those offers was from a company that is either completely gone now or has suffered serious layoffs or is just on death's door

So yeah, keep an eye out for other opportunities but don't just assume that any place but Cisco is an automatic upgrade

Keep in mind also that tech stocks are still operating in bubble mode...all markets reverse and when the pendulum inevitably swings back, we will likely see industry-wide layoffs even at the untouchable companies like Apple, Google etc

Have some money in the bank, you might need it

Thank You for being honest. Indeed true; in the good times, in a good group, it is easy to take advantage of the freedom of working remotely, and then getting permanently complacent. The sad reality also is, nowadays having a long stint at Cisco is akin to having a tainting mark on one's resume; other employers aren't impressed. Lastly, once LR'd, your chances of finding another job at similar pay, are increasingly less and less.

Good luck and appreciate the truth.