I'm quitting very soon.
Fed up with Meraki. Fed up with upper management. Fed up with no direction. Fed up with my manager who constantly pings me when anything comes up.
Meraki has lost its culture, drive and innovation ever since Cisco has really started laying their foot down in our business.
We're constantly putting out fires that don't need to exist and have no direction whatsoever.
What should I do between now and then?
@5mxd+1sqHmPFa
Yeah and Cisco teams can't articulate a value proposition or stay away from death by PowerPoint or BGP
Many tried to jump ship to Meraki not one of them could sell on outcomes or talk about a platform
I was actually startled at what a rarity it is for a Cisco AM you know to actually call the customer
That one commit call a week must take a lot of recovery
All products have pros and cons
How can you beat Fortinet with Viptela? Sorry this is not even a consideration tbh
Meraki does have faults it is getting better
Catalyst on their DB is a huge step
The GUI I would argue is the most important thing, you could have all the features but if they are not customer friendly then who cares it will not be sticky
Try to make a report on CLI LOL or see an end point more Like
Say what you say they have more licensed devices than dnac ever has or will
Meraki is white box running open source Linux software (BIRD routing, FREESWAN IPSec, etc.) The value is the slick and simple cloud GUI that is pleasing to the eye. Under the covers it is just instrumenting all this open source software/configuration. When there is a feature gap with IOS or other products, the PMs will arrogantly say "why would you want to do that?"
@5mxd+1sqHmPFa
Makes sense to generalise an entire org from individual experience
Equally so we could say Cisco teams being 70 page slides with zero relevancy to customers
Bottom line Meraki renewals are superior to DNAC and more sticky
MEDDPICC started with Meraki now it is on Cisco take it on the chin improvise adapt overcome
Meraki is a total joke, the Meraki leadership is literally a 5th column working against Cisco leadership and getting away with it (wake up Marco, Jonathan et al). Technically speaking the Meraki teams are some of the biggest clowns I've ever worked with but they think they are special, it's d-mbfounding to watch. But Cisco software has become bloated and is not user friendly like the Merkai dashboard. So customer say be like Meraki not realizing what a hollow joke Meraki is techically speaking. The current situation is a madhouse, and will collapse under it's own weight. Will it finally catch up to Morgan or will he win the the game due to Cisco leadership's also impressive incompetence? Time will tell but it will be a train wreck to watch for sure.
The title journey at Cisco is VERY LONG and very political.
A company with titles like Principal Engineer 43 has a title journey that's arguably far too short. Far beyond just Cisco most engineers will never develop skills that justify anything beyond Senior Engineer (Engineer 4 at Cisco.) Few managers will ever develop skills to be an effective director. A lot of people reach higher titles at fast growing companies that hire from within because they want continuity but over time it can cause real problems.
At one point the goal was 12 reports per manager at Cisco. If I've done my math right (and call me out if I got it wrong) a hypothetical director with 12 second level managers, each with 12 first level managers, each with 12 employees is 1,884 reports to that one director. That means the odds of any randomly selected person from the entire stack being a director is 0.053%, so the idea that everyone just moves up the ranks, one title per N years doesn't make any sense.
Your real goal should be to develop the skills and deliver at the highest possible level you're capable of. Staying at one company doing the same thing year after year is the best way not to accomplish this. Join an aggressive company with great management that can leverage what you know and grow you to do new things. For development, stay through multiple releases so you can see both what didn't go right and what obstacles you created to growing a project over time then actually correct them. As the growth of the program ultimately slows, move on, rinse and repeat. You'll not only get the money and the titles, but you'll actually be able to justify both on each job jump.
Meraki team is awful. Lazy, arrogant, muppets- the whole lot. Sure, they have a nice UI and a decent poor man’s WAN- outside of that, very little IP. We loose deals to Mist- that should tell you all you need to know.
I’m going to guess you are on the upswing of your career (in your 30s). My advice is get out now. Don’t stick around to find out if it gets better. It’s not going to. Cisco stock is going to continue hover at low $50 meanwhile your coworkers who jumped long ago are getting their Director and VP titles. The title journey at Cisco is VERY LONG and very political.
What do you do when you’re waiting for your offer letter for another company? Two words: Skill. Up. Take advantage of Cisco’s tuition assistance or their training programs.
@3adk+1sqHmPFa
I hear this, I can't speak for the San Francisco office but London was always inclusive to all
No org should be a walled garden
That being said their growth was propelled by their culture and attitude, a little bit like Dennis Rodman wild but effective.
It is an interesting time for sure an effective one only time will tell
Oh boo hoo, Meraki losing its culture? Cisco left you alone almost to a fault. Meraki isn’t the secret garden with a no entry sign like it used to be. Jeez, getting into the SF office was like getting into studio 54, a meraki employee had to say you were cool enough to let in the office. I wouldn’t exactly call Meraki the “inclusive for everyone” culture.
It’s about time you were brought into Cisco. Cisco purchased you. Stop crying and go back to work. “Sniff, sniff…what should I do between then and now?” Bro, look for a new job, grab a tissue and get back to work. The Meraki culture days are over. Welcome to Cisco.
@fbw+1sqHmPFa you just about missed the ambition boards
People are not going to the office so now time things like MX and Demos are being put on boards name shame and micromanage basically
Culture and people are burnt out it doesn't matter how much leadership try to get people in the office, it is mostly empty this is very sad given what it was like 4y ago
Over targeted over burdened under paid
@nsc+1sqHmPFa
It was procured because our renewals business on DNAC is terrible
Their sales philosophy and productivity is very unreal in some regions have seen EN contribution as high as 60 percent
Lots of the old guard enamoured with CLI don't like them but this is all changing for the better
Blame douchebag Nightingale for jumping ship.
A number of engineers have joined Meter, NAAS startup in San Francisco. They lost a number of engineers.
Meraki has been hiring in Asia instead of local San Francisco or San Jose. Cisco laid off good engineers in controller campus AP group in Feb. they could have assigned them to meraki.
@nsc+1sqHmPFa Wrong on so many levels. It was bought because we didn’t have a cloud platform offering. It’s overall a great product and customers still to this day love it. Meraki also books more than Cisco security if you can believe it. Also finally,they actually didn’t get a lot of funding and especially lately it’s been running with very little budget
@nsc+1sqHmPFa weird people oh you mean they actually sell not just press approve?
Terrible switches yes now they have catalyst with their OS
Their dashboard is very very good
Try to build a report on CLI it isn't possible you need a 3rd party API
Want to beat Fortinet Meraki MX is your best bet
Meraki was always a weird purchase. Had the SaaS buzzword but a terrible product. Got tons of money thrown at it by Cisco and it never got better. Weird people, weird products, tiny revenue.
Meraki code used to be crazy nimble and spaghetti-like, but it worked. As it scales to more needed features, will take longer due to collateral impacts. The merging of the platforms is like two titanics slowing smushing. Overall, Meraki does have the lead motion though, I would stay on that ship.
Splunk is the shiny new object. The other things you mention aren't shiny anymore.
Same with TE, Mohit left because he understands in Cisco only politics wins not innovation.
I was once fortunate enough to visit the Meraki office before COVID before Cisco spread it's filthy culture
Energy, vibrance, skateboards most importantly deals being won
I visited very recently their London office was like a morgue no skateboards, empty office you have some extremely passionate people being handcuffed to poor culture
One questions if the acquisition was any good
The same is happening in DUO... so basically whenever your organization is infested by individuals from a certain demographic; kiss it goodbye. I bet your manager belongs to that demographic huh??
Honestly the answer is politics. Many don’t want to see Meraki be successful so they influence decisions like unrealistic goals, lack of headcount for product development, and put in poor leaders who know nothing about the culture
What kind of fires? Is it a code quality issue, lack of customer requirements being sheparded?
Meraki..had potential..but that does not matter when you have a greedy short term owner micromanaging every step along the way. That means micromanaging without direction or vision.
Cisco is exactly the opposite of customer centric — in all decisions they take! Even when field sales/ or technical teams try as hard as they can to listen to customers needs..the business just won’t support them in any meaningful way.