My longtime former colleague, who eventually managed to get a job in a better company that offers more prospects for employee growth, recently complained to me that he is under enormous stress since starting his new job. It turned out that in a very short time he had to learn many new things that he did not have the opportunity to learn at Cisco. Apparently the longer you stay here the more atrophied your skills become?
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I’ve worked at many companies big and small and the burden of learning is almost always on the employee to do on their own time. Many move to management to more “successfully” avoid having to learn and in the process hold distain for the idea of learning, often chastising employees who take the initiative even on their own time (“we have an infinite number of bugs to close, why are you doing THAT on your own time?” Where do you think all those bugs came from Zippy?)
At Cisco Technical Leader is equivalent to what other companies called Senior Engineers and if you were good you could legitimately reach this 3 years out of school if you were on a top development track. Cisco had masses of people over 60 doing nothing but fixing bugs who never reached this rank. Some of these people could have been far more but a lack of opportunity and the willingness to learn new things and jump jobs to advance caused them to rot on the vine.
Few know the old days when compute time was hundreds of dollars an hour and a compiler license was more than a senior person’s salary. What you can do on a Raspberry Pi for tens of dollars was almost unimaginable when Cisco started, as was the ease of finding information online. The resources are there but it’s up to you to take advantage of it.