What is your opinion?
15 replies (most recent on top)
DE is limited by quotas. Only 2% of engineers can be DE.
PE is just a g12 to g13 promo without scrutiny from a company-wide committee. Those are quite common because of attrition. A senior director can approve and it's done. DE and Fellow is by nomination only after a long series of requirements are met, and the promo goes through a vote by people who might not know the candidate at all. Requirements aren't light and the large majority of DE and Fellow know their schitt.
Depends on the BU. Some BUs at Cisco hand out PE or tech lead titles like candies and you just have to do the bare minimum. Some of the PEs and alot of the tech leads have no idea what they're doing and they were promoted only because of politics and these guys are mostly Indian. In other BUs it works the opposite where you have to go above and beyond to even get promoted to tech lead let alone PE.
They make it soo difficult to even get to PE most people leave.
I've worked at many good companies and Cisco and most people never become a Principal Engineer during their career which is why so many people move to the management ladder. If anything Cisco hands that title to far too many people. The irony is Cisco had many people over 60 who never made it to Technical Leader.
However, that is what many of the higher level technical positions in large tech companies like CISCO are all about.
As Cisco's leadership "joked" for at least 15 years, "we need to be a systems company, not a box company. Do you want to buy a box? Heheheh." Systems work involves being able to lead a collection of projects which may occur serially or in parallel to form larger programs and make sure everything fits together and performs correctly. Doing this well requires both a breadth and depth of experience and as programs scale you need to be able to work effectively with other principals with vastly different experiences to bring everything together, and you need to work with all the lower level engineers to make sure they stay on track and ideally help them to grow. Cisco is fundamentally structured to prevent any of this.
At Cisco most software engineers spend most of their time fixing bugs. They get promoted based to make them feel like they're advancing when they aren't. By the Principal Software Engineer level at Cisco you have people who couldn't actually lead a small 18 month program which is being done by Engineer 1s at real systems companies. Instead of working together they hide alone in their cubicles plagiarizing white papers that make no sense because they don't know enough about the problem to understand why the pieces they stole are self contradictory and not applicable to the problem at hand. Some couldn't even write trivially short programs that would clear a compiler. As a college sophomore or junior level software engineer class fail, this isn't "you shouldn't have 'principal' in your title," it's "you shouldn't have 'engineer' in your title."
Their skills were vasty[sic] out-dated, ...
Cisco's major routing and switching operating systems are all decades old built on a 45 year old programming language. The problem isn't old technologies, it's the lack of the most basic skills, many of which haven't changed over time, and the ability to apply them. With Cisco's Scrum training saying the ultimate goal is two hour sprints I expect this to get worse, not better.
Bet you most of the current lot of senior “engineers” and engineering directors at Cisco could not explain the TCP three way handshake. That’s how d-mbed down it is and customers have noted. As noted before, politicians these days.
its a total popularity contest, many cant hold a good elevator pitch, play the game , kiss the behinds of your management, work your way to LIVE and kiss some more, then combat and write a book or blog , bo-m promoted. Such a racket, but congrats for playing the game.
I don't know why people are bitter about some PE, DE, and Fellow in CISCO. Like any other big tech companies, you have to be "well-known" in the circle to become one of those. The amount of socials engagements you have to do is a lot. I am sure some of them are one of those - "style over substance" guys cause they are no longer able to design/implement a decent software module. Their skills were vasty out-dated, and they can only go to all those conferences/presentations to get buzz words. However, that is what many of the higher level technical positions in large tech companies like CISCO are all about. Of course, not all of them were useless, some of them are incredibly talented and maintained a high velocity of developing new things to verify his/her idea. Of course, some can only sweet talk to VP/SVP/EVP and only platform they were comfortable is slide projector.
So, chill up...
Days of the fellows like Fred Baker are long gone. Light weight politicians and sycophants these days.
They make it soo difficult to even get to PE most people leave. I left 3 years ago after spending 3+ years in G12 and no sight of getting to PE. Pay raises were lower so I do not crossover the G12 high end salary range and they need to promote me.
I don't know about Fellows but i used to know some DEs are they were not DE deserving.
I agree if they are so great we would not missed the cloud boat . Maybe stronger in networking IOS than innovative technologies .
DE and Fellows are based on tribalism culture. All hail Nepotism.
Lol Csco's current DE or Fellows are jokes. Far cry from the late 90s and early 2000s.
Company will not be in this sinking boat mess if quality leaders are in the helm. Company cannot even protect its own IT infrastructure from entry level hackers.
Finally a constructive post with a strong argumentative opening. Not.
Met a few Fellows. They seem to be old school, are outdated, but seems to be good friendly people. Saw a few presented. They were pretty bad, probably very smart?
Some of the PE and DE think that they are hot S...T and gifts from god. Lol. They are not really, but just company person that follows their leaders, nothing special, no creative thinking and just focus on a specific technology. They do not seem to think out of the box or come up with any creative ideas. Just so so. The criterion for these positions seems to be check box based with some favoritism.