The biggest reason why I'm leaving here (besides huge workloads) is that I really can't stand the fact that the management is constantly changing direction. It is not only demoralizing, but also terribly frustrating. Why is that? Why the constant change in the direction?
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Cisco's culture was created during the Internet growth years. During that period, the biggest challenge was delivering enough product to keep up with demand. Cisco literally had customers taking sales people out to lunch to get their orders into the queue before other customers.
As the Internet growth phase ended, Chambers believed he was going to create another demand-driven, growth phase by promoting all kinds of nonsensical product/technology ideas - remember routers in space? Unfortunately, that hucksterism ensured that Cisco never figured out how to intently listen to customers' actual business needs and deliver against them. As an example, the company spent an inordinate amount of time and resources fighting the industry's usage of the term Software Defined Networking (SDN) instead of figuring out why customers saw value in the concept.
Every new leader they bring in and every promotion they do - needs to "make their mark". Which at Cisco really just means they need to look good to their boss whether any real work is happening or not. No accountability - just pretty lights.
So a new leader has to come in and shake things up.
And that at Cisco seems to mean - get rid of all your predecessors plans and projects (which were also garbage, so no big loss) and rename some things, make some powerpoints about it, have some meetings about it, rinse and repeat next year.
Nothing useful gets done.
It boils down to one problem. Terrible product managers. Many come from QA or non-customer facing roles. They go through a MBA and get hired as product managers, with zero knowledge of their target market and competition. They can't prioritize features and simply follow whoever shouts louder than the next guy. Result: broken products that we throw away within 12 to 18 months.
Why put effort into carrying through when you can just turn whatever direction your whim takes you? It's not like there's accountability for managers.
The management is a huge problem here. There are numerous managers who have no idea how to be a good manager and only exist to promote themselves. Having worked for several other companies over my career this is one of the biggest failures of Cisco. I'm giving notice tomorrow and I don't have another role lined up yet. That is how tired I am of putting up with the constant mismanagement here. It's still laughable to me that Cisco continues to taut their "top employer" awards. Once you are in you can see what goes on behind the scenes and what a sad state of affairs the company is in right now.
Because we get about 3 quarters in and then realize one of two things:
- Customers don't want it or see no value in it
- Competitors either do it better than us, or "well enough" while being 30% cheaper
That, in a nutshell, has been the story of Cisco for the past 7+ years, and will probably continue for the next 3-4 before the chickens finally come home to roost.