I'm not sure what Cisco hopes to achieve by implementing DEI-based hiring or promotions. It seems that promotions are being given based solely on gender, rather than rewarding engineers for their performance. This approach does not seem motivating. I have noticed many talented male engineers leaving the team because they feel neglected. I am unsure how the company expects to achieve high growth and better outcomes if it does not reward actual talent and instead focuses primarily on gender-based recognition.
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Is that an exaggeration that there are people in Cisco who can't code junior high school level stuff? Or is it a freedom of expression?
One of a million examples: a developer wrote a trivial five line function with a massively obvious error with no dependencies from the system in which it would be checked in so they could use any desktop or server that could compile and run a unit test in C with one in bounds and one out of bounds input in a matter of minutes. The second line of defense code reviewer didn't see the obvious error. The next dozens of "developers" and reviewers involved in cutting and pasting that code missed it too, so after two dozen cut and pastes you have 25 copies of broken code that was ineffectively reviewed by 50 people which is mass incompetence. Beyond the bug itself, the refactoring common code to prevent having to fix the same bug 25 times (per branch) is taught in junior high school with modern languages and it was also taught in the 1970s using subroutines in BASIC.
Another example is people who were around at the time with teaching languages with training wheels but required you to manually free allocated objects like Pascal started with their first dynamic data structure of a linked list, and one of the operations they teach you is "delete." I lost a good part of a YEAR of my life dealing with issues of dynamic data structures in IOS with no proper delete operation and all manner of half-a$$ed hacks from others resulting in IOS crashing from an assortment of race conditions and dangling pointers.
Many of these bugs have rare side effects. Also, a system can become unstable and not fail for seconds or minutes until the information you need to trace back the error has been scribbled away before a core dump. These kinds of issues often pass internal testing at the system level and may even work at all but one customer's site but when it shuts down that one customer's network it's CAP case time where Cisco has burned through engineering years before finding a root cause to a single bug. At one point Cisco was spending billions per year which is many engineering millennia per year on customer found defects. That doesn't include the costs and bad will with the customers whose networks are being trashed.
Is that an exaggeration that there are people in Cisco who can't code junior high school level stuff? Or is it a freedom of expression?
@by+1jvdt2q2d
What's wrong with Veterans getting priority? Only 6% of US population has served. That has to count for something. For those that do not think so, perhaps you should have signed up to take part in what it feels like to have the US government essentially physically own you.
I don't care about promotions, because if I cared about career progression at all, I wouldn't be working at Cisco
seek help, you are sick. moderators delete that comment.
As a company policy, this should be winding down, but it takes time. I'd expect to see less of it the upcoming focal cycle, but some extremist mgrs & leadership teams will still allow it. That said, it's illegal in the US, and if/when it happens, people need to file complaints with the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
Straight white guy here again. If I ran the place I'd reward most of the engineers by firing them because they are prima donnas who can't do junior high school level programming not to mention any of the engineering which should precede that coding. The entirely male set of managers I worked for had zero interpersonal, leadership and technical skills. At a well run company the most senior engineers would be driving the technical side while the managers who by definition were not competent enough to rise to those technical levels use skills most engineers do not have in interpersonal interactions and leadership.
Instead of complaining that one woman was promoted why is no one asking why the vast majority of engineers and managers who are male are so astoundingly incompetent?
For our male folks, once you are reaching your 50s. You will not be neglect anymore. You will be the first one under LR Radar !
We need to take action against DEI hiring
who is We ?
We need to take action against DEI hiring and make sure it's merit based only. None of the disability or military or veterans or whatever the sh-t is that gets priority
many talented male engineers leaving
Any public company of this size will have these kind of issues, most of them are localized to some BU/teams, once it reaches a threshold then only any action will be taken at company level, otherwise these things happen.
What your talented people are doing is correct action(leaving).