Just got back from my first day in a new place, after few years spent at Cisco. Managed to avoid afternoon commute rush hour on the tube.
My last day at Cisco was last week, and now I'm back after my first day in my new place.
It's good moment for reflection - I think.
I was not made redundant - I left on my own, and even the mid-year bonus cut wasn't a big factor in my decision.
I was just fed up with all the BS around, our lying upper management from US, and overwhelming feeling that we're in constant and irreversible decline.
But it wasn't always like this. We were a rather small acquisition which Cisco bought a couple of years ago. After the deal closed for a while we remained quite independent. We kept our office, our culture and most of our people. But it all started to fall apart, when Cisco started pulling us further into the madness. First - we were given a VP who didn't have a clue what are we going, as he was deeply rooted in the old-Cisco world of boxes. Don't get me wrong - boxes are important; Ultimately, they're what runs the Internet. But it's something different to run a business which releases a new batch of refreshed boxes every six months, then constantly evolving cloud based SaaS product. It's different at each level - but our brilliant US management team couldn't figure this out.
So what they did? They threw on us one of their directors, specialized at driving groups to the ground.
The way how they did it - was beyond comprehension, and was really more of the Game-of-thrones style then billion dollars company. That was the inflection point. From this moment, the morale dropped, culture degraded, people started leaving and business results went downhill. Then redundancies came, throwing most of the few remaining folks who knew what they're doing. The heart of the group has been broken at that point. And that's how this story ends. Without talent, without culture and without product, but with a Director happy he "transformed us".
Enough for me. I decided I don't care about the package (which I'm sure I would get the next time redundancies hit, since I was now one of the most senior engineer on deck). It's just not worth it. Staying in the toxic environment, where everyone in our office is afraid of our mighty dir in SJ, where personal development became virtually nonexistent and where general sense of defeat prevailed.
Will I miss anything from Cisco? Of course. I'll miss car-allowance, leaves of absence and few other perks. I'll miss some smart people I met here. But these people are no longer there, and money isn't worth putting up with this anymore. So I had a small farewell lunch with a couple of folks, swiped the badge for the last time, and closed this chapter of my life.