What is the truth about the morale there? Is the truth that it just feels like a funeral every day you come to work? Why are you still doing custom silicon? Can't you learn a lesson from Arista? It's merchant silicon. They are out routering you with merchant silicon. Their switches run full L3 routing and they let you get to linux prompt to customize. It's interesting that learn from Arista success.
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merchant silicon has to be backed up by quality sw. cisco and arista use the same jericho broadcom chips but the cisco routers are buggy as hell and have never ending issues in large scale testing with triggers. arista seems to have better sw and uses the same image across some 50 pieces of hardware.
so just using merchant silicon is not a solution. customer does not care what sw/hw so long as they get what they want in features, stability, ease of upkeep and upgrade.
csco ncs5500 is a big fail with merchant silicon.
Yes. Morale in the sewer. Everyone is scared and wants out.
Who cares if it is custom or merchant silicon? Who cares about catered lunches for the ASIC team?
What matters is that juniper continues to try to pivot and re-invent itself by trying various paths, and "failed" over and over again... Taje for example the campaigns around llPacket core, multi-cloud, security, auomation cloud (anything), telco cloud, iot, application analytics, etc etc etc. The list goes on. Now the latest is 5G. These are not very well thought out. My guess is they are being driven by marketing and clearly indicates that juniper is desperately trying to pivot to anything that sticks. Sadly, this type of mission-less / vision-less execution is just going to lead to many more layoffs and no success.
Maybe the arrogance comes from the fact that, unlike software engineers, chip designers are real engineers. Plenty of 12 year old kiddies can teach themselves how to code within a month. A college education is not even necessary. I have never seen a professional 12 year old ASIC designer teaching themselves how to design chips from reading a book and watching a YouTube video.
Speaking of custom silicon. The people who work in this team has got to be the most arrogant group of people who think they own the company just because many of them have been around since the early wee days.
Many of their weeky noon staff meetings include catered lunches. You heard me: catered lunches! Is this a necessary cost?
Funny thing how other vendors fail to do the same.
Any analyst, including Gartner, will say anything if you pay them enough money.
That is the main role of analysts relations - to funnel money to the right analyst.
Well, you can only go only one way, when you're on top.
Gartner said it loud and clear, it's not Juniper's time to kick the bucket yet.
It is true that Custom silicon made Juniper leader. But that was in late 90s. In tech world, things change rapidly. Merchant silicon these days are capable of doing what custom silicon does at a cheaper cost.
Why is Juniper not going the merchant silicon route ?
This is nothing new in the tech world. A paradigm shift happens, existing successful companies rest of their laurels, someone else takes the opportunity and it is game over for the successful company.
It is clearly game over for Juniper. Any tech company needs good engineers to be successful. Juniper is simply unable to hire good talent anymore. Most hires in the last few years are below average engineers, they joined Juniper because they could not get a job elsewhere. Pretty unlikely Juniper can turn around given these circumstances.
The "something big" you feel is coming could be the next big layoff!!!
Custom silicon made Juniper leader according to Gartner. What would they know?
Atmosphere? Never better, you can feel something big is coming.