Pay and bonus range for an Engineer with 10+ years of experience in Cisco India?
14 replies (most recent on top)
Cisco US can house 20% of highly talented folks who can fuel Next Gen innovation and pay them big bucks.
Talent doesn't seek to be "housed" and that's all Cisco has to offer. Short of completely replacing both leadership and legacy Cisco will live and die by acquisition alone.
Another great option to save the cost is send sustaining and TAC to Albonia which is having good technical talents. San Jose and California to expensive!
Best Composition for Cisco to be profitable company for long time to come ( Blue Badges only)
Cisco India - 50K engg with avg salary hovering around 22K USD PA(for all grades combined together)
CIsco US - 15K Engg with Avg salary hovering around 100K USD PA( for all grades combined together)
Cisco (Rest of the world) - 15K engg with Avg salary hovering around 60K USD PA ( for all grades combined together)
if we include Red badges and their Salaries
Cisco India - 60K engg with Avg salary hovering around 20K USD
Cisco US - 22K Engg with Avg salary hovering around 95K USD
Cisco (Rest of the world) - 22K Engg with Avg Salary hovering around 55K USD
Cisco needs innovation so they should hire best of talent in US for cutting edge jobs and continued growth.
Cisco also needs to support and maintain lot of its products which are legacy or that will become legacy in few year’s time Those jobs can be moved to Bangalore for very low wages.
Cisco anyways have to maintain certain level staffing in rest of the world for various reasons. Those jobs can be mostly Sales, AS, TAC, FTS, HR and other Business management roles.
Majority of maintenance work should be sent to India, cisco can hire army of low cost engg’s and can easily supplement highly talented 1 G10 in San Jose.
Cisco US has close to 35K blue badges and another 10K red badges so overall wage costs are very high for cisco. Its high time Cisco chose right balance and make appropriate decisions and move lot of high cost jobs in San jose/RTP/Richardson to Bangalore.
Actually Cisco can open one more Center in India where cost of living is far cheaper than Bangalore and overall its saves lot of wage costs. its gives lot of engg’s another option other Than Bangalore. Cisco should house more than 60% of Red+ Blue Badge staff in India to stay profitable otherwise its doomed to fail. Cisco US can house 20% of highly talented folks who can fuel Next Gen innovation and pay them big bucks. Cisco can run their Entire TAC/AS/FTS operations from Bangalore in 24/7 model. Its saves like hiring 5K(blue) and 8K(Blue + red) extra employees in US/Western Europe/Australia/Canada and other high cost areas.
45k USD is the max salary any G10 can get ( that includes everything company can contribute). Most of G10s make around 35K to 40K USD (that includes everything company can contribute) . You only said Company will move away if salaries increases. 45K USD max any engg can reach. Enggs in G11/G12 are rare so their salaries doesn’t matter.
But in Cisco India majority of Enggs are G4, G6 and G 8 and their salaries are in range of 8K USD to 35K USD. Inflation in India has stabilized and now thanks to demonetization and other factors, Inflation is kind of stabilized. Yes there was period(2005- 2013) when India's inflation has increased exponentially but it has cooled off a lot. Rents in all major metros have stabilized. Real estates prices have cooled off as Govt is cracking down on Black money. Its highly unsustainable for India to have to such high inflation with so many people living in poverty. Please note India has 1.3 billion and companies will always find enggs working in the range of 8K to 30k USD. There is no dearth for cheap engg’s in india. India is just over-populated. Those salaries are stagnant for last 5 yrs.
Enggs who are frustrated for lack of salary increase and stuck in G8 for more than 5 to 8 yrs are making attempts to move to abroad. some people are lucky and others are just stuck. I don’t even talk about salaries of Indian enggs in Indian based companies. Most of them get less than 10K USD. US can never match Indian salaries. its just not possible. Companies moving away from India is also not possible because India has army of low grade enggs who can do low grade jobs and companies like cisco need not pay 150K USD for those jobs in San Jose or RTP.
45K may be marginally good today, but inflation in India is near 10% and the US, it's about 1%. Within one decade, Indian engineers would need an equivalent of 6 figure salary in the US.
Think back 15 years. I graduated before the 21st century came about. Those days, Rs. 10000 per month was considered to be a great salary in India. The US norm for a good salary was about $60K.
Now, the US norm has maybe moved to about $90K for a good salary (not in California, but Cisco exists outside of California even in the US), but the Indian norm has exploded. Now, even Rs 1 Lac is not a good enough salary. Unless the rupee depreciates to the true extent of inflation (which it never does...Rupee has depreciated maybe 15% TOTAL in 15 years, but inflation keeps rising 10% every year), effectively, the sub-standard talent in India will get very expensive to the point....ahem...suddenly, those engineers at San Jose will sound like a bargain.
15 years ago, Indian Engineers were paid some 1/20th of the US engineers. Today, that factor has already risen to about 1/4. The day is not far when it will cross the 1/2 mark. There are instances where call centers and medical transcription work is returning back to the US, because now, you can hire high school graduates in the US some $15-20/hour to do superior work, and that's cheaper. Reverse globalization!
But who is thinking long term? Not Cisco. Cisco's management is in it for the short term. That's precisely why Cisco will fail.
www.glassdoor.com
I am G10 egg in India and salary starts from 19,00,000 rupees + 15% bonus and If you are in Global TAC you make another 3 to 4 lacs in shift allowance for weekend/holiday/early morning shift/euro shift. Top fixrd salary can go upto 25 lacs but that is rate. Over all your total salary including social security/medical and other perks would be around 45K USD. And in San Jose it would cross 170K USD including every possible cost to company from social security, medical etc. 45K USD is really good money in India.
20 Lac per anum is the max for grade 10 in India as per my information. I have a couple of friends at grade 11 (Technical Leader as they call them) between 25 and 27 lacs.
About the SJ engineer voicing his/her fear, it's 100% correct and on the money actually. That's precisely why I left Cisco. I was seeing a disturbing trend where all engineering work was being sent to India, and the US people were kept in dark (I won't name which product/team/site this was happening). It was pretty evident that eventually we were all going to be made expendable. What a way to treat your engineers Cisco! You will get what you deserve in the end, which is a stock price crash and a total wipeout from the market Yahoo style.
About the world being a big place, sure as hell, it is. I am from India myself, and the difference in education between India and the US is quite stark. Of course, you can send all software development to India, and it will get developed. It doesn't mean it's good. Anyone who has spent any considerable time in software will know that grasping the complexity of the problem and coming up with the proper solutions takes skill. The work that was sent to India resulted in spaghetti code that required even more engineers to debug, maintain and take sh-- from customer at hours at times - I sat on some of those customer calls, and literally, the customer would unload for more than 2 hours, and 3 Cisco engineers in the background would keep entertaining him. It was some joke.
In any case, why even pretend you are an American company? Just move your office to India and be done with it. I guess the next wave of innovation is going to come from India with Engineers that are paid < 1/4 that of the US engineers? For that matter, African engineers might even be cheaper, why not move there anyway? (I hear Facebook is trying to do that).
The US is a free country, still has world class infrastructure, still has some education that spawns creativity, still has a fantastic corporate culture where collaboration results in some amazing products and ideas. But hey, the world is a big place, so let's just undermine all of this, and seriously engage in a race to the bottom. Have you heard kill the goose that laid golden eggs?
Cisco is a f---ed up company. There is no vision. They keep purchasing these stupid little companies (Vitpela? LOL. That's just a joke...Cisco is done in networking, Arista and the real SDN players are going to slay this dragon as soon as in the next 4 years) in the hope that something sticks, but nothing's gonna stick. The management will try to prop up the stock to $40 (that seems like their magic number), and once there, they will start offloading the stock and get the hell out. Cisco will crash, burn and sink, and they will deserve it.
If you are a competent engineer, get out now while you still have some value left. You don't want to be fired in your late 40s under the guise of limited restructuring.
"CSCO can replace me here in SJ and get 4 guys in Bangalore for the same grade".
I think you will find it can replace you in Bangalore and get 4 times the productivity. That makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
Hardly a race to the bottom. Why employ someone in the US at $100k when you can get someone with the same skills at $34k. It makes no sense. India, Europe, Asia...all have cheaper, equally well educated workforces. Its about time the good ol USA woke up and realised the world is a big place. It needs to stop being quite so arrogant and inward looking.
22 CTC lacs per annum is equivalent to only 34,300 USD. With that kind of low pay, CSCO can replace me here in SJ and get 4 guys in Bangalore for the same grade. What a race to the bottom!
Hey, don't rag the gal/guy, in all probability she/he is being shafted by their manager, and that's why they are asking here. Help if you can.
If you need to go to a layoff site to get this kind of information you should really reconsider your options mate.
As per my college seniors, it is 20 - 22 CTC lacs per annum, with 12% or 15% bonus ?