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Comment by michaelvoz | Hacker News Reader

I live down the street from Cisco HQ. I share an apartment building with many of their engineers. Perhaps it is anecdotal, and my evidence comes purely from speaking with them (I have never seen their work), but they come across as absolutely terrible as software engineers. They seem like the kind of company destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant. They have no care for the product, good programming, or their company. Their main goal is to just have a job and fly under the radar.

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I have looked at Android code. It is awful. Now, I don't form opinions about Google engineers based just on that code.

I meant to say, generalizations don't always work well. They may have bad engineers. But they have great engineers too. Kent Dybvig and his team who wrote Chez Scheme works for Cisco. There are many others. Jonathan Rosenberg who wrote many Internet RFCs on fundamental protocols that run the Internet voice/video works for Cisco.

Let's not generalize. It hurts people!

> I have looked at Android code.

You just have to look at the API. From little details (wifiInfo.getSSID() returning either the quoted SSID, an unquoted string of hex characters the SSID consists of, the special string "<unknown ssid>" or "0x") to the overall architecture (needlessly convoluted lifecycle, 2D rendering architecture from 2000s, the whole intra-app Intent bullshit that causes people to find alternative ways of communicating between Activities within the same app ...)

Out of interest, what's wrong with Intents??

As alternatives, do people just end up dumping to an sqlite database and polling it in each Activity? Haha that'd be madness

For inter-app communication Intents are a pretty reasonable solution to a complex problem. But inside an app, I would just love to have constructor parameters for my activities. I make do with Intents, but I don't have type safety, I have to deal with partially constucted objects until I've read my Intent Parameters and any time I have to pass something that's not in the default types that a bundle can contain I have to build a Parcelable wrapper for it, or find some other convoluted solution. Overall I just feel like I'm working at the wrong level of abstraction.

Event bus mostly

Not disagreeing that they have very talented people. But I would not point to the SIP RFCs as commendable work in any way. It's a mess.

I didn't say it is commendable work. SIP is what we have at the moment as a standard and is being used by a lot of products out there and it was written by a Cisco employee. That is all I said. I am not intimately familiar with SIP to comment on its pros and cons.

I'm sure they have some good engineers. However, I will say that friends who work there currently and those who have worked there in the past constantly raved about how little they actually have to work and how empty the office is on Fridays among other aspects that give the impression that much isn't expected from their engineers.

When you buy practically any competitor and control the margins like Cisco was able to do for so many years that turned massive profits there isn't really much expected from the employees I'd wager.

> those who have worked there in the past constantly raved about how little they actually have to work and how empty the office is on Fridays among other aspects that give the impression that much isn't expected from their engineers.

Cisco is a huge place and this varies by person/team/BU. Fridays a lot of people work from home.

> Fridays a lot of people work from home.

A lot of my coworkers work from home on Fridays too. Which means a three-day weekend / nothing to show for their time on Monday.

I never understand the animosity shown towards people who choose to work from home. Nothing personal, but I see attitudes like yours in a few of my scoffing coworkers as well.

Do you really know what your teammates are accomplishing? Or how they are spending their workday? Do you go to their homes and peer inside the window? Or is it just some sense of self righteousness you feel by being a good employee who wouldn't ever choose to work from home like those other lazy bums.

> Or is it just some sense of self righteousness you feel by being a good employee who wouldn't ever choose to work from home like those other lazy bums.

Wow, I must have touched a nerve. Actually, I semi-regularly work from home. My issue is with the people in my organization who take advantage of working from home, treat it like a three-day weekend, and will likely cause the work-from-home privilege to be revoked.

My experience is similar to freyr's. I've had Friday-from-home periods where usually I'd end up not doing much. Sometimes this was my fault; it's just too easy to see it as an early start tothe weekend. But at other times it was because people/code/decisions I needed were not made because employees in the office also seemed to have much lower output on Fridays.

And my experience with coworkers is no different. I actually checked commit histories at some point to confirm that indeed most of those who worked from home on Fridays didn't produce any significant output. The sneakier ones would commit stuff, but clearly 'little stuff' that I sometimes suspected they had ready on a Thursday specifically to show something on a Friday.

Of course, you're completely correct that this doesn't mean that this is always the case. But if I were an employer, based on my experiences, I'd be hesitant to allow people to work from home on Fridays. Not in general, but specifically only on Fridays.

The margins in particular are something I cannot understand from Cisco.

Technology in general comes down in pricing. I'm constantly amazed at the vendors that introduce newer, more powerful product lines, with a reduced price tag from anything previously seen.

Cisco here, are a huge outlier. Despite HPE and Juniper creeping much more competitive options into their enterprise space, twice or so times a year we get alerts from Cisco about "across the board" price increases.

Maybe it's like MS and SQL Server. More and more installs are getting replaced. So they raise prices to focus on their customers that have no choice.

If you have ever had the misfortune to use a software product from Cisco this is no surprise. At least you don't have to suffer through any single product for long because every couple of years they are guaranteed to abandon it and replace it with another system with horrible performance, more bugs than Joe's Apartment (I may be showing my age with that reference.) and no high availability or recovery solution.

I remember working on their Call Manager system. A Windows application that used embedded Crystal Reports to load a single XML file with a query in it, where the rest of the work was done in large and lengthy Informix stored procedures. So you could add your own by writing your own SP and modifying the XML on the client side.

Mixed feelings.

Also, if you asked Informix for the time, it gave you the system time but somehow the Cisco DB tables always logged call times with daylight saving, so you got time mismatches by an hour. Call Manager must not have used the same "ask Informix what the time is" function that I used...

Fond memories, sort of. Trying to debug on an Informix instance the other side of the world with giant nested SPs failing with unhelpful error messages, what fun!

That's the impression I got talking to a friend, who worked at CISCO India, couple of years back. Their C++ code was dreadful thanks to some upkeep by 'engineers' from 'premier' colleges who made a living adding more conditions to existing if blocks.

Some people choose a career just because it's something they can do, and make good money doing it. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Until you have to work with their crappy code I guess

Or use the crappy products they build.

Welcome to the disconnect between business and life. Most businesses are operated with profit as its only real goal. Everything else is just marketing talk. Companies are run by specialists in business - i.e. people whose occupation is turning money into more money in whatever way, regardless of the money source (hopefully within the bounds of law). Product quality is only one of the many factors in making money, and is worked on only as long as it boost sales. The moment the company can sell a crappier product for the same price, they'll do so.

A lot of resentment between developers[0] and managers comes from not understanding that. Management does not care about your engineering concerns as long as they don't meaningfully impact sales[1]. Hell, even if they do, they can often paper over technical problems with marketing cheaper than it would take you to fix it. If they got a confidential memo that the whole country is going to have a sudden diarrhea epidemic, they'd happily sell the product, fire your team and buy a toilet paper factory instead.

[0] - those who haven't already been brainwashed into thinking in business terms first, i.e. into professionals.

[1] - sometimes it doesn't matter even if it impact sales, as long as it does so on a longer term than manager's expected involvement with this particular project.

You appear to have very little respect for your neighbours inspite of not having any real insight or experience with their work.

It would be impossible to come across as 'absolutely terrible software engineers' just from a conversation without prexisting prejudice.

Its not just Cisco but for a large majority of folks a job is a part of their life not their entire life and it doesn't automatically follow that they are not good or passionate about their jobs, and it's sad that anyone would choose to reach this conclusion just from speaking to folks.

It absolutely is. We were talking about C++ pointers. 15 minutes of casual discussion at a hot tub a few months back comes to mind - and I could tell they had no idea of:

What a factory was.

What a unique_ptr did.

The dangers of unclear object ownership in a manually memory managed program.

Difference between when to pass by reference and when to pass by pointer.

Or more possibly that they simply had no interest in discussing "shop" on a weekend or outside of work hours. Or perhaps they were preoccupied with other things being that they weren't at work. Seems quite a stretch and kind of unfair to proclaim how horrible they and Cisco as a company are based on this.

I heard from a colleague that John Chambers walked into one of the Cisco buildings and found that it was mostly empty due to people taking advantage of Cisco's lax policy on working from home. The buildings are now planning to get sold because they no longer need them. Either these employees that were assigned to work in those buildings are gonna get laid off with this 14K figure, or they're gonna be working from home.

I have also found that people get a lot less work done if they're working from home.

Is that due to not making a dedicated working space at home? I find that I am less productive depending on where I sit at home.

And other people's ideas of working from home vary. My friend's wife thought that her husband could do all the jobs around the house on his "day off".

Depends on who you are. Some people say they are going to work from home and just use it as an excuse to do nothing. I'm incredibly more productive when I wfh. Not than I'm unproductive in an office environment, just more productive when I'm in my basement hacking away.

> They seem like the kind of company destroying people that are the death knell of every software giant.

Conjecture: you have never worked for a medium or large software company.

Response: Have worked at Verizon and am currently at Uber.

Is that because medium or large software companies are NOT like this or because of something else?

Look at it this way: why would a lot of the best engineers want to work at Cisco? Maybe when they were the company they were 20 years ago, but today?

Do actual engineers go to work for Cisco? It looks like they just buy up R&D and then monetize the hell out of it.

Which isn't to say it is a bad strategy. Seems to have worked for a while now.

It would be interesting to see the lifespans of people that went to work for Cisco vs those there by an acquisition.

I think its completely off base to conflate "they" the handful of people that live in your building that you have spoken to with "they" an entire company that consists of tens of thousands of people.

I admitted to it being anecdotal and coming purely from limited interaction, and not seeing their work. I think that is enough preface to be the salt with which my opinion should be taken.

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