I'll tell you what's wrong with modern day Cisco. Senior leadership is constantly tolf everything is amazingly awesome. Actual problems are filtered way below and simply squelched. I recently brought up an obvious problem during a meeting. I kid you not, it's just as if I was on mute. Literally zero reaction, no acknowledgment, nothing. VPs no longer have the courage to say things as they are to their leadership, and everything slowly deteriorates. Culture of omerta. Reward those who hide junk under the carpet.
8 replies (most recent on top)
What is funny is before Cisco when Agile, there where already competitors doing it and failing hard, Cisco was profiting from competitors failing, Somehow they had to join the failing boat , of over glorifying code development/developers
One of the most funny things i saw in years lately is a slide somewhere that states "accept failure as normal".
Vps have become neutered mutes. Won’t say much for fear of being kicked off the golden ni-ple. Heck one Legal VP has been here for 24 years and still wasn’t offered the GC role. The other one that went after it was fired for incompetency.
As long as they can throw together a PowerPoint all seems OK, which is sad.
Most publicly traded companies are in markets with limited competition, which makes product quality and innovation inconsequential. VPs are just trying to hide until their stock grants vest, and quietly move on to the next company for another enormous stock grant.
rest and vest
Agile is a failed methodology. Deep down, everyone knows it.
Management = sales people and they were told the miracle of Agile solves everything. Cisco evolved from a tech company to a financial company decades ago. Only the few actual engineers still think it's a tech company.
Currently working on a trainwreck of a project. At weekly meetings I can hear some leads try and broach the topic that a schedule or feature is off track or not working. Then a lot of push back/agitated questions from the VP until he hears something more palatable. Weird. Also, An Agile project with hundreds of stories and dozens of contributors doesn't really work.
This is not only on VP and higher levels. It is the same thing down on level of individual contributors, engineers and level of their first line managers.
If you say something is wrong, even your teammates will keep their mouth shut and look the other way.
In my org, the only time some problems were recognized, was when some new higher level leader came and said that we had problems with product quality or some procedure and he wanted to change it. Only in those few occasions engineers talked details related to these issues and what was wrong with it.
This is what happens when you have a company of dead weights, who know nothing about technology and the only way they can get themselves noticed is feeding BS upwards. Hence all the nauseating "go Cisco", "you look great Chuck" sycophantic drivel on check-ins.
That's why doing a ton of woke/CSR sh--e, or attendance on a business architecture course means a whole ton more at Cisco than being an ace at BGP/MPLS for example. No one at Cisco gives a sh-t about technology. They know they need technical people, for sure. However, those technical people such as SE's etc are lepers at Cisco.