So what’s it like for those of you who were managers of software development teams and would like to continue being a manager beyond Cisco? Is your experience more rewarding, more difficult? How does your experience as a manager in Cisco you help you elsewhere post-Cisco? What skill sets were you lacking? Just interested in others’ opinions
6 replies (most recent on top)
I call bullsh-t. No one has done this in over 30 years non-ironically.
Well, no one at a company with competent management, which is what I had implied with my consistently negative commentary.
One of my managers had his head ripped off by his director when I committed negative KLOCs because “we only hire the top 10% and they could never do something so poorly that you could remove that much code without reducing functionality.” The director only knew about the negative KLOCs because the dashboards provided him with that information (he wasn’t exactly inquisitive.) Going forward I was ordered to leave junk code in place and simply call around it and it turns out there’s a massive amount of vestigial code in the shipping products (I’m explicitly not counting code from the EoL platforms.)
Management in routing and switching for all four major operating systems continued to use KLOCs and bring it up in meetings up until at least a few years ago when I left because there was no other metric. Note that the KLOC count does not differentiate new development from cut and pasted code so there is a lot of the latter. In high school in the 1970s they taught people how to refactor those blocks into single instances, but, well, Cisco.
I had worked bugs that were repeatedly filed then moved to a terminal state dozens of times without actually being fixed because that whole system is just as easily gamed. When management says all bugs of any complexity have to be fixed in 1.5 days regardless of complexity this is what results. I fixed them correctly which is why I was repeatedly and sternly informed there was no metric for working code.
Do you still have The Tomb of the Unknown Bug? Do you still grandfather decades of critical static analysis warnings? Do bugs in PI code that take weeks just to isolate have to be found and fixed not only by each platform but by each branch of that platform because even the platform owner won’t correct all their own branches so they don’t have to keep eating the isolation costs? These are all self inflicted wounds due to poor management and it’s the customer who pays.
SW Mgr (Cisco) = email sender and someone who likes to do this: +Jay, Lin
The “quality metric” is KLOCs.
I call bullsh-t. No one has done this in over 30 years non-ironically.
I did both software engineering and management before coming to Cisco. The short version of my experience is Cisco doesn’t train management, few have real technical chops, and fewer still care about providing value to the customer instead of appeasing the dashboards. The “quality metric” is KLOCs. Cutting and pasting along with endless branching increase the need to fix bugs exponentially which is why the vast majority of development dollars go to bug fixing. Major programs often falter because there was no communication between interdependent teams. Schedule overruns by a factor of more than 5 are common. Managers demand people make frequent checkins of broken code because ISO9000 process requires more time than the dashboards allow but the dashboards don’t track build breakage. The fact the my summary could go on for pages should be telling.
If you look at the list above and think that’s the best that can be done there may be no hope for you. If you have clear ideas along with the will to improve things but don’t have the freedom and resources to so it’s time for some serious changes.
Funny, I have personally interviews a few ex-cisco managerial candidates over the past few years. One question I ask was to describe how they utilized Teamspace to maximize the productivity out of their teams. Anyone who doesn't straight come out and say it's total sh-t is shifted left immediately.
It was awhile ago, but I was a technically strong first line manager when I left Cisco with not a lot of connections across the industry. When I had the title SW Manager on my LinkedIn profile, nobody cared and non reached out. I then changed my profile to SW developer (which I'm also damn good at) and I immediately got tons of hits and easily found another position. IMO, nobody really cares about Cisco Managers, unless you have connections out there who wants to hire you. At my current company, if I was going to give input to a manager hire, with all things being equal, I would go with the non-Cisco one.