I wouldn’t even mention the changes over the past 10 years because this company has been unrecognizable ever since. How much harder is it to work here now than it was, say, five years ago?
Unfortunately, I have no hopes that in the next five years the situation will not be even worse here.
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but Cisco is the #1 IT company in the world. that's our goal and no one can beat us. we the best, we the greatest, we the smartest.
A classic case of The Emperor's new clothes, they all bow and scrape to a leadership that does not properly understand technology. They literally are all aftershave smelling, smart suited sales people on the ELT from what I can see. AWS, Google and others have engineering staff in more senior positions like someone else said on this chat. I was shocked to discover how much less money my very experienced SE made than his AM and why he was looking to move elsewhere. Maybe that is part of the Cisco's cultural problem, that they do not reward the right people properly.
I have to think that execs were warned many times on key transitions (not just c level,let's talk about this set of vps we have). Most have purposefully, negligently put their head in the sand and chosen to do nothing. Almost criminal.
I feel sorry for the once mighty Cisco. Yes, they are still mighty but for how much longer????? John Chambers and his yes-men totally missed critical market transitions such as cloud, DC, programmable networking, application level firewalling and as a consequence allowed credible and capable competitors into the Cisco installed base. He fired those who tried to warn him. His smug arrogance was nauseating. He was hero worshipped inside Cisco by their sycophantic culture as a visionary but most will tell you he was a lucky CEO at a time when the Internet and IT was exploding in growth. Anyone else could have achieved the same. The die was cast long ago regarding Cisco's problems in adapting to the current IT world.
Cisco could have practically owned the whole of cloud but they completely missed the transition in their desperation to protect on-prem legacy revenue and so now they follow cloud and do not lead it. They sat on Webex as a cash cow for years and did almost nothing to invest in it and allowed Zoom and Teams to eat their lunch. Now Zoom is a verb known by everyone and most outside Cisco never even heard of Webex. Microsoft and Cisco never really crossed paths that much outside of collaboration. Now they do - they pose huge threats to the Cisco security portfolio and Cisco's SASE. And they have greater C-level relevance with stuff that is in-the face of the C-suite whereas Cisco is geek stuff in the back-end that no one sees or knows about and so is, unfairly, seen as a commodity that no one cares about. This is a big part of Cisco's problem.
Lots of very eager and capable competitors and startups that have Cisco in their sites. Cisco still have brilliant engineers that their culture despises and they do not reward properly. They are losing engineers and talented staff in droves. These problems have always existed. But the current prevailing circumstances are now exposing Cisco's pulsing jugular vein like never before. Cisco needs to be restructured root and branch. Very few companies can ever pull that trick off though.
UncleBen has posted the truth of the matter. Systemic issues from the start, exacerbated by a quickly evolving market and savvy new competitive entrants.
Cisco is running on fumes now.
The problem is that Cisco hasn’t really changed. The market has shifted and Cisco failed to position itself to capture key transitions. You can all thank Chambers for that. It was all fun and games when Cisco surfed the wave in the 90s and early 2000s. Little to no competition, biggest market cap in the world, everybody buying Cisco because anything else was much too risky. Then one day Public cloud happened and proper competition materialized (Microsoft, Zoom, Palo Alto, Arista, Huawei, HP). Cisco caught off guard and red handed snacking in bed! What actually made everything worse is what was already broken before: internal divisions, political fights, no push to make cross-BU products work better together, reorg after reorg, no real long term strategy (only this quarter matters). That’s always been there hidden in plain sight, now it’s sticking out like a sore thumb.
I couldn’t recognize Cisco from the time I started by the time I resigned. It was less than 10 years that began in the 20 tens. In my time there I was rarely able to secure a CIO/CTO meeting. Now I have them on a weekly basis (in my FAANG role)…with the same accounts as before. Why? Because Cisco is not viewed as C-level relevant. It’s sad to see Cisco go from a darling everyone wanted to talk to or work for to where it is now.
We are in a quiet managed decline. Missing out on the cloud was the nail in the coffin.