What role, such as Sr Fellow or similar would you eliminate at Cisco and why?
19 replies (most recent on top)
Leaders of CX Center GC
When I was Cisco, I only met one "fellow". The person was the equivalent of a board member.....only in the position for their industry connections. Otherwise, they did no actual work.
Leaders of CX Center Japan
Sr Fellow must be a sweet position to milk and go to conferences year round the world
name 1 Fellow that has done anything meaningful in the last decade?
I asked around, seriously, cannot find any names of current active duty CISCO fellow right now. I just overwhelming majority of CISCO engineers have no interaction with CISCO fellows. People did interact with principle engineers all the time and at least in the software area, some of them are really good on hands-on. Of course, there are principle engineers can only sweet talk to SVP level up and cannot even run a simple test.
Are you doing it on purpose so you have job security or you're just totally clueless 'n incompetent.
Some are innately incompetent in a way the sane will never understand, and the fact that many have risen so far up the ranks is astonishing.
The rest look at it as job security, not in the sense that making perpetual busywork will require perpetual employment but in the management driven “if you don’t keep doing the needless and keep my dashboard lights green I’m going to fire you.” Sadly some great engineers have fallen to Stockholm syndrome and could no longer do good work if simply given the opportunity.
Bad management is at the root of both cases. Great management (good won’t cut it) and a lot of training could revive many engineers in the job security bucket. As Elon Musk recently pointed out about Twitter’s CEO position, no one who could do the job successfully will take it, and the same applies to the kinds of leaders Cisco really needs.
Engineering is spending 90% of its resources on bug-fixing.
Look at the bright side, it hasn’t gone up much in the past decade!
All Software Engineers should be chopped, they make way too many bugs in all of Cisco's code. Hire new ones straight out of college. Engineering is spending 90% of its resources on bug-fixing. What's up with that? Are you doing it on purpose so you have job security or you're just totally clueless 'n incompetent.
I'm in Sales but spend close to 60% of my time chasing DEs around to fix bugs. I should be spending that time with customers to help them add value to all the h/w and s/w they bought from Cisco.
Look at Arista 'n Juniper, they are doing well, not many bugs to fix. Maybe all the dummy engineers ended up at Cisco or there is nepotism/favoritism hiring going on in Cisco Engineering.
name 1 Fellow that has done anything meaningful in the last decade?
Fellow gets nearly 1million in total compensation. how cray is that cushy role
%50 of the sales, cisco needs to remind itself its an engineering company not a sales one
Cisco is an acquisition company, not an engineering company. It’s been that way since they walked off with the first products from Stanford.
As a customer a sales person who can explain all the non-obvious architectural limitations each product has and will work through my requirements to find the ones which will actually solve those requirements is worth their weight in gold. The people who produce external documentation which helps us better understand the internals and where things can go wrong should also be lauded. Cisco has won many contracts because their competitors couldn’t do this and finding an uncorrectable limitation late in a big project is not an acceptable risk.
Now if Cisco’s monkeys could introduce far fewer correctable limitations in the form of bugs that delay customer deployment for over a year at a time we might start referring you as engineers. After nearly 40 years it’s past time and you continue to cost your customers a fortune beyond what you bill.
Titles are the dependent variable. The independent variables are capabilities and responsibilities and having 20 levels of Technical Leader followed by 20 levels of Principal Software Engineer who just like Software Engineer 1s spend their time doing small bug fixes should all be called Software Engineer 1s because they haven’t the experience nor the opportunity to contribute at a higher level. In well managed companies higher level people actually have to demonstrate capabilities to earn a title and once granted are given work that best utilizes those capabilities.
I was amazed how many “engineers” in their 60s at Cisco still hadn’t passed Engineer 4. The job description for that title it is similar to Senior Engineer at many other companies and the best and brightest can rightfully earn that in under three years when given the right opportunities. McDonalds doesn’t have a Senior Principal Burger Flipper 12 because they can get people to do the work for far less money. McDonalds fires flippers if they don’t learn to cook the burgers safely. Software engineers can make mistakes costing millions on up and yet be promoted for it because their management who also failed has just as much to lose as the employee if they don’t provide cover. Sadly this happens at many companies.
Anyone with the word “Success” in their title.
All the whiners that complain on this forum
Agree with the Sales fat to be reduced. I was in UK sales and the amount of useless people and layers of fat in there are astonishing. Sr. Directors, Directors, Sr. Managers, Managers - all of whom do absolutely nothing to generate revenue but collect fat paychecks, RSUs and vacation time. Anyone who was actively engaged in customer projects were culled in the purge of 2020. Post that, all we saw was a bunch of Managers reporting to Directors, none of whom does anything to generate any business - their job is to sit somewhere, click on excel sheets, talk at team meetings and manage upwards to try and get promoted.
And then there are the so-called Business Solutions Architects. No one appears to know what they do, but they show up on calls and talk endlessly about nothing. Customers actually asked a few times about their roles. I managed to moved away from that environment and albeit am still inside Cisco and customer focused, thankfully, no longer at UK sales.
%50 of the sales, cisco needs to remind itself its an engineering company not a sales one.
- Most of CX can go.
- Virtual PSS, because it's impossible to do real sales and relationship building with customers when you're only ever over a video screen, phone, or email it's a dead end
- Renewals can go because they're a waste of space and provide no added benefit
- Aside from Virtual PSS, most PSS personnel should also be cut because most of them are nowhere to be found and are collecting easy paychecks but some really do add benefit.
- All of GVE should be eliminated because the only benefit provided is so minimal it's painful to think how much money is spent on that useless division. If the Sales Engineers and the TSAs cannot do the mindless job of building a BOM then you need to replace them.
Everyone that's actively participating in the "SafeSpace" Webex room can be cut. Y'all don't have day jobs.
75% of CX can go. There is extreme overlap with multiple roles. I moved from CX to Sales 3 months ago because eventually this fact will be found out and folks will be cut.