I was interested in someone’s post which said that most people are who are still at Cisco are there because they are not marketable. Unfortunately, I think that's true.
I partially blame myself as well, mainly for staying here for so long. Cisco is stuck in the past.
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I think Cisco people are in good demand- I speak as a partner. You can't blame an employee for working at a company that has lost some direction. if anything, it may show that this job looker is aware of this and wants to "jump back in the game". Let's face it, cloud computing has changed the game but with a strong background in networking etc you can shift sideways and reinvent yourself. You will then have a strong networking background which most cloud people do not have (apart from setting up internet connection and kinda understanding VNets and VPCs).
Resumes from long term Cisco employees are in the same category as long term Nortel or Lucent employees. They are a real risk from a culture perspective. How good are they if they were willing to stay in a completely toxic, political games, no innovation environment!
I can't speak to Lucent, but Nortel employees had real retirement benefits. That's why they stayed around. Those benefits were not like 401(k)s that you could transfer to another financial company when you changed employers.
From the Nortel people I knew, and I knew at least a dozen, there wasn't a toxic, political game environment there. Or at least, they never whined about it.
Cisco diaspora have a very damaged reputation. Resumes from long term Cisco employees are in the same category as long term Nortel or Lucent employees. They are a real risk from a culture perspective. How good are they if they were willing to stay in a completely toxic, political games, no innovation environment!
If you want to be marketable you need to learn skills and not just hang on and do your job. For example, VMware hires Cisco people who know networking to compete with Cisco. If you know things like ACI, this is a great skill to have. You you try and go to AWS or any of the niche tech companies like Zscaler they don’t need your skill set. Bottom line working at Cisco is like working anywhere in tech, if you don’t stay current and grow your skillset you are doomed to end up working for the dreaded end customer... 😂 I like to read these to stay current with Cisco as I now have a way better role at a partner after rotting away for nearly a decade at Cisco. I left in 2017 and by reading these forums reinforces the need for good parters because Cisco still sells great products but the culture is fundamentally flawed, and Chuck put that into overdrive.
Cisco people often bring Cisco culture to the new company. Sick culture of ugly politics and backstabbing.
I learned the hard way being loyal to a company and fitting a mold that they want is wrong. The best way to make your self marketable is to do it externally. These big IT companies do not care about the employee, their growth, or viability within the company. You are an expense number to them and nothing more. Find out what is needed for companies outside of Cisco (or where ever you are). Treat all jobs as a paycheck. That is all they are now. They will get rid of you once you hit a cost point, age, race, or gender.
If you're passively waiting for your Cisco boss to tell you what to learn, you're going to fall behind. Most managers don't know relevant trends and aren't going to lead you in the right direction. Now this is _your_ career we're talking about. I see way too many people inside Cisco totally incapable of using public cloud, industry-leading automation platforms, APIs, essential Linux sysadmin. But IMHO they've brought this on themselves through years of complacency.
Don't be one of them. Be curious, learn, try new things, break them and fix them until you really understand how they work. Cisco gives you access to learning platforms. Make the most of it and you'll definitely be valuable on the market.
I manage a security team and get offers. Have not pursued but they seem to be out there.
What is the market demand now?
On a serious note, I have been interviewing and boy o boy I do poorly on them not because I don't know the material is that I never work on the latest tech stack out there after a couple of years. I would highly recommend that you keep you skills up to date with certifications or side projects because my current job doesn't.
The bean counters are leaving and getting cut as well.... This is all on ELT
Cisco has a reputation of churning out incompetent bureaucrats in the Bay Area. It's a bit of an uphill job hunting.
If you're looking for management roles, that's a definite fact. But at the IC level it's different especially for someone in IT, Finance, or some other function that's just part of any business rather than routing/switching/webex development.
A lot of people at Cisco are just hanging on for small amount of work, pay and benefits, blend in, wait for the package. It isn't for the innovative spirit , raises, options, or RSUs anymore. Some other threads are saying current attrition is very high - so maybe there won't be enough left to LR.
It's really sad to read all the posts here from people bragging about working 1-5 hrs per week and waiting for their package. The lack of loyalty that Cisco had to employees pre-2005, the stock options/RSUs, and just the lack of team cohesiveness has turned Cisco into the sinking Titanic that it is now. Yes, there's plenty of attrition. Some of it from people getting fed up and leaving. Some of it is from the constant LR's that cut teams by 10 or 20 percent and expect the rest of the team to just suck it up and keep on doing more with less. But the bean counters don't care about the long term effects of attrition and they'll keep cutting 5-10% across the board and making bigger cuts in BUs that don't show a profit. And as the company makes less profits because of the loss of skills, talent, and just years of knowledge of how systems work at Cisco, they'll make more cuts to cut costs to boost revenue and it just keeps getting worse. More talent gets tired of it and voluntarily leaves for greener pastures. More people with knowledge of the back-end stuff that people just don't see/deal with leave or are kicked out, and then problems arise when no one knows how to maintain them because no one was aware of what they did in the background. Man hours are wasted figuring it out and fixing it when those hours could have been spent on tasks that actually generate revenue. So on and so forth, I could rant all day on this.
A lot of people at Cisco are just hanging on for small amount of work, pay and benefits, blend in, wait for the package. It isn't for the innovative spirit , raises, options, or RSUs anymore. Some other threads are saying current attrition is very high - so maybe there won't be enough left to LR.
Cisco has a reputation of churning out incompetent bureaucrats in the Bay Area. It's a bit of an uphill job hunting.
If one can hop to a Cisco partner, either vendor or reseller, that is pretty straightforward. But a long stint at Cisco used to be a selling point for other positions. In my experience talking with Cisco alumni, it has been perceived by employers more as a negative to be overcome in interviewing.
If you are interviewing outside your Cisco network of contacts who have moved to other companies, I think landing a similar or better position is more difficult than it used to be overall.