After 18 years with Cisco I got the axe last week along with a quite a few members of my team and my boss. Even today I still have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand I'm relieved. Relieved to not be dealing with the politics, the lack of a strategy, rewarding incompetence, and leaders without a backbone. On the other hand I made the mistake of getting comfortable in my job. Intellectually I know that I should have moved out of the company years ago, but when the money is good and you like the people you work with and who work for you it's hard to work up the motivation to do so.
Anyway for my observations:
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There is no long term strategy. Sometimes there is some vague long-term vision. e.g., we're going to be a SW company. But changing that to a strategy is anathema.
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Leaders are afraid to lead. Even most first line managers are afraid to make a decision. Those that do are regarded as "rebels", or "pains in the a--" by their management teams because they "didn't consider the political ramifications of making a decision".
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There is no accountability. Deadlines get missed, features get pulled and nobody says or does anything.
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Managers don't manage. Probably my biggest pet peeve. A good manager manages his/her team. I used to laugh every time I saw a new initiative that said things like "meet with your team at least every quarter individually." Every ****ing quarter? There are people on my team that I would meet with individually 3 - 4 times a week when the situation called for it.
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They don't teach new managers how to be managers. They get promoted, but they never get the fundamentals taught to them.
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The reward managers as ICs not as Managers. Awesome you wrote that great white paper and presented to this customer, but you have a 40% turn over, your employees hate their jobs and not one of them can tell you why their work is relevant.
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They are still stuck in the 1990s regarding compensation. If you have a strong performing team sure there should be some variation on rewards, but saying that some people need to have a 2.0 IPF and others below 1? Bull****. If you have that large of a discrepancy in performance, then you should have fired someone a long time ago.
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Well I guess you should have fired someone a long time ago, if the stupid policies allowed it. I've had bad employees, that I inherited (not ones I interviewed and selected), that could not be trusted to tie their own shoes. It took me 9 months to get rid of them. I had to create work that they would fail at so that i didn't give them things I actually needed for them to screw up enough to justify a PIP.
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They give no meaningful training in how to interview people. In my former company I went through an intensive 1 week course where we did dozens of practice interviews that were recorded and critiqued by the instructors and class, to learn how to interview people. I still use those techniques today.
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The basics of resource allocation are lost on the entire leadership chain. Concepts that are basic to even personal finance, are met with blank stares, "How much do you want to allocate to low risk, high success but low reward activities i.e. your cash cows" vs "How much do you want to invest in high risk low success but high reward"? is often met with idiotic statements like "we only want to invest in low risk, high success and high reward". ***tard, it doesn't work that way.
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While they "encourage" people to take risks any time a risk doesn't pay off it's punished, with a low IPF, or loss of a job.
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The concept that when your revenues are very low high growth rates are easy is lost on people. If you sold $1M of something last year, and you sold $1.5M of it this year, that's a great growth rate. But is that really better than going from $1B of something to $1.1B with the same resource investment? let's see for the same investment I could get $500K or I could get $100M hmmmm... Let me think about that. What do you mean that you can't assume linear or exponential growth rates long term? Why not? Idiots.
Cisco has stayed alive for this long based off of feeding off of the dying corpse of the routing and switching business. From what I've hard at least 2 Cisco Fellows were hit in this round. If that's true then they've just put the entire R&S portfolio into maintenance mode and they don't have a damn thing to make up that revenue.
Oh well enough ranting. Off to find a new job and to see what I opportunities I can find for my former team. I expect to find one long before my severance is used up.