The H1 Indians in Cisco initially were under paid but managers and HR know to raise they pay to satisfy the prevailing wage requirement before filing the immigration paper for them. At the end it is funny to see these Indians actually get paid a lot more than their American colleagues who are In reality more competent and productive. If You wonder what happens to the budget of pay raises? You now know how screwed-up Cisco is in business operations .
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In India there was time when people thought it will become costly and of late we see salaries getting stagnant in India and inflation is stabilizing. So that is good news for companies like Cisco who can now hire engineers with such low salaries and fewer pay raisrs. Cisco will survive by hook or crook. Cost is major factor and companies have to outsource or offshore work in India.
In our branch, Cisco hired some cheap Indians to replace workers who got LRed. An "engineer" who went on a 1 month programming course replaced an engineer with at least 6 years experience. Any fool can see this was a bad decision. Cisco is full of incompetent managers who only judge $$$, the heck with everything else.
India is here to stay. I guess there will be more work coming to India if Cisco is unable to improve its top line and bottom line. In India we can hire resources for extremely cheap prices on red badges. Yes quality might take a hit but overall cost saving by off shoring work is too tempting.
There are lots of smart Indians working here in the USA and offshore back at home. No question about it. I only wonder if the 'cultural complexities' out weigh all or most of that upside.
It is beyond the level of small intricacies of a specific team or its people. We have a real issues of quality, productivity and a clear and present danger to any resemblance of a corporate culture that made this company a titant of the industry.
When you treat product development as a commodity and you focus on who comes in at the lowest price to your RFQ and quality be damned, then you asked for sh!t and you get sh!t. Stop paying those same bad contract developers to fix their own code and see what happens. Let's try that first.
India is a symptom, not a cause. I work with many fine people from India. My only gripe with this is the time zone difference. It is a pain in the a--. It also causes a lot of loss of momentum because working issues requires a day turn around. This is a real unseen cost that is a daily morale killer to everyone on both sides of the pacific.
Chambers started this mess with his obsession on cheap engineering labor. He ramped up way too fast with little thought. There were a lot of plans in place to expand in the USA (Coyote Valley, RTP buildings 13-14-15 [sold to NetApp]), and he dropped them all in favor of Indian expansion.
You can look at the current leadership situation as the problem, but it isn't. The reality is our dear former CEO sowed the crops we are gleaning today. And the seed corn was never replaced, only eaten in the form of executive compensation. Now we pay.
Not sure if India offshoring is a cause of Cisco's problems or is just a side affect of Cisco's out of control expense cutting. Cisco offshores very badly. I've worked elsewhere where it has been very effective. The key is to pay more to get better talent and to export strong management talent to run it in country. Cisco is just trying to get workers cheap by offshoring. Cheap workers offshore are as bad as cheap workers onshore. You have spend more to get quality.
hope customers enjoy their world class products developed and supported by Indian contractors who don't give a sh--
why would they care? Cisco gives a sh-- about them too.
it is not about indians or whereevers it is about the kind of poeple cisco attracts and employs.
If you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
Excellent Engineers are available in india but these neither work for peanuts nor at cisco...
Before you blame Indians for Cisco debacle don't forget all decision makers are still Americans, those greedy Wall Street hawks are Americans, 401K and Pension funds investors often haunt CEOs if stock is down, 2008 Sub Prime crisis that pushed the US in multi year depression and cost US economy $800B+ is caused by Americans. George W Bush who spent $125M/day on Iraq War for several years was an American. So Americans have caused more damage to the US than any other foreign ethnic group. It's your racist mind set that is further dragging you down. So stay calm and focus on making yourself competitive than trying to put blame on someone else.
Decades ago in the 1990s ISPs used to post all the major events in their networks to their customers, and every few weeks like clockwork we'd (as ISP customers, not as Cisco employees) get the "we tried to upgrade the Cisco software on these devices and had to roll back to the previous release after the new software failed catastrophically" e-mails.
Run any of the zillions of branches of the major software system from that era through any decent set of quality metrics and you'll see it's always been a horror show.
These were both before there were high speed intercontinental links which made offshoring possible on a large scale so the problems are clearly corporate, not ethnic. Do I blame college hires in any area of the world where there has been significant hiring for taking the TOIs and code they were handed and told were best practices or do I blame the US leadership who allowed, nay mandated all the bad practices to occur in the first place? Unfortunately the whole snake is now infected so you can no longer cut off the head and fry up the rest.
I guess Cisco is not able to recruit and retain good engineers anymore even in India.
And that's the sad thing about a once great company. It's moved on from the culture that made it great.
Not just red badges in India. I spend many sleepless nights to do their works for them so they can claim how much they have achieved to the senior management. I am really surprised that some of them don't use computers very well, while others appear that they just start to learn coding. I have worked with many brilliant Indian engineers before. I guess Cisco is not able to recruit and retain good engineers anymore even in India.
Here is a story. Imagine if shareholders or customers knew: Priority-1 ongoing customer outage. North America and Europe teams quickly isolate problem to code area in India, which is staffed only with contractors. 2 months go by with daily emergency meetings listening to India deflect and deny. Customer is unbelievably upset at how long resolution is taking. NA mgmt goes easy on India team to keep the peace but meanwhile wastes TONS of NA eng staff time to try to get India to fix.
So, yeah, hope customers enjoy their world class products developed and supported by Indian contractors who don't give a sh--.
The coding keeps getting worse. We out tasks to crap code factories from the sub-continent. Meetings become and endless barrage of grandstanding of how good the code is followed by the usual at the end of the day." As a female developer, I find my Indian male coworkers to be very s-xist and downright threatening at times. They never take advice from female peers. I'm glad to be moving on
In my experience at Cisco, it's not the folks in India (or China) wh--e the issue (among blue-badges, that is -- red-badge SOWs are an entirely different story), but hands-off management that doesn't ensure that the offshore team is delivering the whole time, etc. You can't treat a team like a black-box that just emits product but requires no management and expect it to work. Scrums are scrums, no matter where people work, and if you don't talk to folks, you won't get a good result, irrespective of whether the folks delivering are in Cedar Rapids or Pune.
Yes, you have no idea how the development process changed from US based to China based and now to India based engineering. This can NOT be overstated. It used to be real two-way collaboration and real creation of IP = you could feel you were creating something amazing and it was a wonderful feeling. Now, they will question everything you ask for (err, business case isn't your problem) and produce only the absolute minimum (you didn't ask for release notes!!!) to claim it's delivered. And recently, they only deliver 50% of what they committed to anyway. Thoroughly gutted the company if you ask me.
or there's a relationship between the fall of Cisco and the rise of racism. Just sayin'
For sure it is a direct relation, during the last 5 years they got rid off the "old" tech guys that made Cisco great and successful, the ones that had the right skills and knowledge. They preferred to replace them with cheaper indian ones less skilled, but as everybody knows " good enough " is the new politic of Cisco now....and unfortunately not only Cisco, so they will have what they pay for, meaning sh--t quality, sh--t strategy, sh--t delivery, sh--t products and no future!