Beside the layers of Directors and Managers, the Distinguished and Principal Solutions Engineers should be heavily trimmed. They are just high-cost project managers or coordinators. Lots of fat that provides no values with a lot of lip service like CX.
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I'm a PE and work in a BU team with a few other PE/DE. Many are recent promotions - it's very hard to get PE in our BU. We aren't all old fossils lying around resting on achievements of decades past.
These PE people literally run the place--without them, we'd be hosed (many of them just back from giving presentations in Cisco Live - the sessions that score 4.8/5.0 and above).
To all the "real" engineers that think we are all parasites, dream on. You talk to customers much? No, you know why that is? Because you're not house trained and we cannot trust you in front of a customer unless the discussion is limited to an extremely narrow topic.
Being able to talk to a customer means being able to hold a conversation about something of value to the customer, not some FPGA register value.
The only PE at Cisco I knew that was worth his salt resigned and started his own company. The rest are just parasites.
Who is left as good Distinguished eng. anyway? The valuable ones left... b/c they could.
The problem is people dont understand that PE/DE have knowledge from different domains, practical industry experience.
Not at Cisco. I've been a PE at systems houses that deliver on time and on budget over and over and over again and there is a reason Cisco's top executives kept crying "we need to be a systems company, not a box company. DO YOU WANT TO BUY A BOX? HAHAHA." Requirements? Design? Code? Testing? Not only could they not do these things, they didn't even understand what the difference between them was, so they just plagiarized bits into wildly self contradictory "white papers" which meant nothing and wasted everyone else's time ripping them to shreds in "reviews."
If Cisco did have systems skills you would have one working OS instead of four perpetually broken ones and the volume of code in that one would be far smaller than its equivalent in the other four. Hardware and software rarely talked, and if they did it was extremely ineffective making the joining of the two drive overruns measured in years. With real technical leadership the few inevitable problems never rise to this degree. They would have started on a meaningful system to manage large networks decades ago instead of having assorted failed internal attempts then attempting to acquire endlessly hoping to find one complete solution. How many people think Splunk will be that solution?
The problem is people dont understand that PE/DE have knowledge from different domains, practical industry experience. You may have more depth of a particular component but they have more breadth than you usually think. So it may appear that you are smarter than a PE|DE but that is usually in a very restrictive domain.
Not saying there arent dead weights in cisco but dont just discount people and some really talented engineers because you feel you excel in a single area.
Not just a parrot. An expensive parrot!
That really tell us how smart you are. I can walk circle around most of them. They get information from us then distribute it to the field. Nothing more than a parrot.
@skc+1r3eb7VU Citation required
This is the d-mbest thing I've read on this site... and that says a lot. Not only are the PAs and DAs a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the headcount costs... not even a rounding error. But, they are the brains, the geniuses behind a lot of our cutting edge development.
There is not one PA/DA that I have met that has not left me impressed by their knowledge and influence.
Just lump them in with CX. Provides no values, costly and provide lip service.
Yeah, cut everyone except me!!!!1
What do even do any more these days? The corporate DSE were good back then. What happened?
Talking about waste. this is one big area that never get noticed. All they do is play politics to get ahead like the Directors. I met a few that were nice, but clueless. Better use of our money elsewhere.