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Is it that Cisco sucks at this, or do all big companies suck at this? At some point "Getting along with others" trumps "Bringing in money" and "Building great
by mathattack 12y ago
Is it that Cisco sucks at this, or do all big companies suck at this?
At some point "Getting along with others" trumps "Bringing in money" and "Building great things" (or combined, "Building great things that people will pay for") at big companies. The result of this is a bunch of "Well rounded B+ employees". Well rounded B+ employees don't change the world.
For every company that's 20+ years old with 10,000+ employees who does a great job managing top engineering talent, I can point 5 that do it awful. (ok, let's not go through that exercise, but it's the point...)
- salem 12y agoWell, you'd probably find that those 1/5 companies that don't suck at managing engineering talent are probably run by former engineers, not former sales guys. The best career options for engineers in Cisco are: * sales engineer (not really engineering) * become a manager * jump ship to juniper * go to a startup, maybe even get bought back by Cisco with a career boost * shoot for the moon, stay and maybe become a Cisco Distinguished Engineer, which are like unicorns Ergo, rank and file engineers are not valued by management, like they are at Facebook/Google/etc.
- mathattack 12y agoInteresting that you comment on that. One ex-Cisco engineering friend of mine went to both Facebook and Google. I think the CEO does set the tone of which types of employees a company values. I recall a quote (I thought was Joel Spolsky or Bill Gates) around why the CEO of a tech company needs to be an engineer. It's basically that only they can understand the important technical details to make big changes in corporate strategies. There's also a component of knowing who to value.