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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

My impression from people who have been involved is that it's not just a self-enriching racket; mainline Cisco is actually really bad at building new products that aren't just minor variations on old ones. Sometimes they innovate through acquisitions, but if there's no external company to acquire sometimes you have to make your own to get your good engineers out of that environment of "sandbagged targets and guaranteed payouts" for a few years.

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This.

(At the risk of getting down voted) Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being generous) there is absolutely no innovation or drive to build new products. It's a terrible place to work if you are an engineer with aspirations to tackle engineering challenges.

> Cisco is a sales driven company not an engineering company. > Barring a few business units (and that too I'm being generous) > there is absolutely no innovation or drive > to build new products.

this is _exactly_ right. for example, nick-feamster (formerly gatech, and now at princeton) hosted a google hangout with nick-mckeown (stanford) as part of his sdn mooc on coursera. the hangout video is approx. an hour long, and is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abXezfJsqso

initial 15-20 minutes of this video describes the experience of these n/w researchers (mckeown, cassado etc) when they presented their (sdn) idea to execs at csco, their (exec's) rejection of the said idea, which indicating to them (the researchers) that it (the idea) passed the so called 'idea-smell-test' :)

if you have time to spare, watch it !

What is wrong with your punctuation?

Some people speak with a lot of parentheticals.

We don't need speech to be a monoculture for people to understand one another.

Nothing wrong with the parentheses, I find myself doing that a lot as well. The issue is that the majority of the parenthetical statements are not useful information and not necessary to the point they are trying to make. That compared with seemingly nonsensical abbreviation and overall lack of coherent punctuation makes it an experience to read.

I don't see how disliking that poster's writing style translates into advocacy for a speech "monoculture."

I read the comment above as disapproving of the all of the parentheses in the gp post.

If you remove the posts from people who write that way from the total we are closer to a monoculture.

The difference between having one fewer way of writing and literally having one way of writing is the size of the rhetorical exaggeration in my comment

She might be a dyslexic, twelve year old whose first language is not English, has only one hand and is using a mobile.

On the other hand....

Perhaps s/he is on mobile.

"they"

Lisper?

Also, see the reactions from companies with big datacenters who have had to internally evolve off Big Netgear in a similar fashion to moving off Big Iron years before:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/12/networking-the-last... http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2010/10/datacenter-networks...

Out of curiosity, what do the acronyms "sdn" and "n/w" stand for?

Software defined networking, and likely just network(ing) I guess?

I used to work in one of the cloud/virt groups there. The management (from the first line to the top) lack vision both technically and otherwise. You have many teams, many directors, managers, and about 200 engineers working on some product, and this product has become so bloated. The engineers don't know what this product is meant for, except doing their part. This lead to resume enhancing technologies, which end up bloating the whole product. I can't provide more details here.

There is no way you can provide honest feedback.

I used to work at Meraki (pre- and post-acquisition). Even internally, the message coming down was that we were being kept in San Francisco so that we would not get bogged down in, well, being Cisco. Even after couple of years of 100% year-on-year growth, the engineering team there was still smaller than the Cisco teams working on some individual product launches.

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