Will Cisco also follow this trend? There is redundant middle management(director, manager, PE) who are like messenger to their upper management. Lots of useless meetings to understand and then explain their higher ups. Literally doesn't make any difference to product delivery. PEs are supposed to be hands on but they are also enjoying their time.
Absolutely non technically. Doesn't even understand product and keep giving non constructive ideas 💡
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...the wage slaves.
Technically most of you are salary slaves. Now that I'm old and a member of the owner class this means the overtime money you are not paid goes to me. If you are lucky someday this could be you!
Why would a VP want to chat with a lowly individual contributor? Do you realize how awkward employees with mortgages can be? Those layers are to keep the VPs away from the wage slaves.
There is a very interesting phenomena where a VP will ask for something done, and the request moves down through two or three layers of directors, down to the the leader level, and down to an individual contributor to do the actual work.
By the time it's gotten to the worker - the message of what is needed, has been changed 7 times by each leader on down the chain.
We could remove several of the director levels entirely. They are just passing the buck. We have so many pointless director and above positions.
Musk is an emerald mine fund baby who takes credit for other people's work and the good things that happen in his companies are IN SPITE of him and not BECAUSE of him. Zuckerberg was smart to bring Sheryl Sandberg who was the real person running the business and the reason for its success.
Now these two incompetent leaders are firing people and leaders to make up for the absurd amount of money they are losing due to their own bad decisions. Yes, Cisco has too many middle managers but to mention those two Bozos as examples of good management is a joke.
Yes, a sea of PEs are very high level...
Where were these people? I worked with many PEs at Cisco and they had no architecture, systems, software engineering, computer science, programming language or operating system experience but they did waste everyone else's time with plagiarized yet self contradictory white papers which were completely inappropriate for the task at hand. They were flawless examples of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
Yes, especially managers, Sr. Managers, Directors, SEDs. Sales and business curves ofSEDs and the managers that they have hired since 2021 woke drive should be focused on. Loads of low level inexperienced managers hired who caused experienced people to move out of Cisco. I am at Cisco U.K. and saw this happen first hand in hordes. Time someone paid some attention to these useless time wasters and raised some questions about their utility in the company.
In our group, PE's mostly work on architecture and politics... Lots of fancy product ideas, which get attention but eventually get dumped due to no market or no resources.. and then the loop continues 😍
In Cisco’s case its the directors and sr. Managers that need to be culled.. Directors esp.
I’ve shied away from management/leading bc I want to focus on building but every single incentive funnels you into that path
"If you see people in directory with a manager, sr manager, director, sr director, VP, SVP and EVP in their reporting line, you got to ask what’s the added value of all those people?"
The objective at Cisco is to have authority without accountability. Those layers provide job security for someone that doesn't want to be responsible for failures.
CR has authority without accountability.
Span of control is the even bigger problem. “Leaders” with zero reports, or only a few.
This is also true in sales and CX. Somebody get the Bobs in here quick.
Yes, a sea of PEs are very high level, do not know the in and outs of product details, just doing demos out of work of young engineers. You don’t need PE for that, any not so technical manager can do the same thing. I agree to your point that code is the easier part, but the bigger aspect is the technician depth both of the market and your current product. There is a lack of that.
If you see people in directory with a manager, sr manager, director, sr director, VP, SVP and EVP in their reporting line, you got to ask what’s the added value of all those people? The answer will be zero to none. Half of those could be easily eliminated.