While the work may not be exceptional, peoples helping nature and the unwavering dedication to customer satisfaction and the absence of concerns about layoffs or discrimination suggest that Arista is on track to eventually claim the top spot in the datacenter industry.
Mgmt is working hard with programs such as “achievable by 2025” task force
The issue is so systemic and ingrained at Cisco that nobody knows how to fix it.
Maybe it could have been fixed starting in the 1990s if CIsco could have found real development talent instead of creating IOS-XR, NX-OS and IOS-XE, dramatically increasing Cisco's technical debt. Since then they've spent a fortune not stabilizing these systems when they could have starved Juniper, not given Arista something to walk off with and improve, and had far more free development dollars to take the fight to the security vendors. Now? You need talent you can't afford and who won't sign on to be janitors.
Random LRs just worsen the situation.
For the talented already at Cisco most will find better work and money elsewhere so LRs are forcing them to improve their careers. For the talented considering joining Cisco it's a giant flashing clue not to work there. Churning the untalented is better than letting it rot and start to smell where everyone really will want to leave. The customers have been overpaying for low quality since long before LRs started so there's no change for them. I'm seeing neutral to positive here relative to the real problems.
I'll tell you why people come back. Because they know they can get away with doing mediocre work here. Cisco just has no will to do things right. Ship junk, let customers run into bugs we know are out there, blame the customers for not having paid an expensive CX contract, half-fix the bug and repeat the cycle. That's why Arista, PAN, Zoom happened. All founded by ex-Cisco motivated by doing better. The issue is so systemic and ingrained at Cisco that nobody knows how to fix it. Random LRs just worsen the situation.
Cisco must be doing something right.
For software development I'd say the opposite. The good companies I worked for would never accept the kinds of failures that define Cisco. If a 1-3 month project overruns it is either cancelled or restaffed long before the 3 year mark where so many of Cisco's projects were still incomplete. Branches that fail one nightly build are an issue. Restaffing will occur long before it's been broken for multiple months as they were at Cisco. They don't spend most of their time trying to fix the code they couldn't write correctly because no one figured out what they were actually trying to do before writing code. Their customers can't afford to build whole labs to test images for years as Cisco's customers have to.
Cisco's margins are good enough to allow such failures and since management is as clueless as many of the individual contributors few even know how they are failing. This means they won't recognize a worse company and might be overrun at a better company until it is too late.
Everything is great when you first get someplace new. Come back in 3-4 years and let us know if the "culture" is still fabulous. If the grass was always greener, there wouldn't be so many "boomerangs" back to Cisco. Do we have issues? yes. Do things pi-s me off frequently? yes. I still look around at how many people come back. Cisco must be doing something right.
Mgmt is working hard with programs such as “achievable by 2025” task force
Am I the only one that thinks catch phrases like this are the sign of a downfall?
Update: Webex already lost to Microsoft - which is free on O365 and "good enough".
Cisco has nothing left except WebEx. DC business lost to Arista and cloud. Security is PAN for business, Fortinet in public sector. Traditional telephony is RingCentral. One more generation of LAN engineers to go and Cosco will lose the LAN/Wan footprint.
@OP you may still be in your honey-moon phase. Please report back after 12 and 24 months. I'm serious. I and, I believe all of us here would like you doing so.
Arista is already #1 in Data Center networking for USA. Cisco is #1 in all of world. Arista keep growing new logo accounts. Big number of business growing Data Center and move back from public cloud. Arista is winner and Cisco can not catch up too many Cisco mistakes and bad people making choices.
Wouldn’t want to join them while they’re still an ankle biter though. Give me a decade.
That's an interesting strategy. My friends who went to Arista when their business unit at Cisco was shut down have seen Arista's stock increase over ten fold.
More than likely they will be scooped up in the next 12-18 months. Good luck with that.
DC market is small and shrinking. Their campus products su-k. I have no doubt they will improve though.
FWIW…according to Arista’s investor deck…they already have twice the market share of Cisco in the DC market. You could argue they are the leader and Cisco is basically watching them pull away.
Start on slide 14:
https://s21.q4cdn.com/861911615/files/doc_presentations/2023/Jul/FINAL2_IRDeck_Q2-23Highlights.pdf
Wouldn’t want to join them while they’re still an ankle biter though. Give me a decade.