Anyways, Cisco hasn’t done great engineering pretty much since the dotcom bust. They’re now essentially a giant PE firm that grows through acquisitions and then milks them dry. It’s a classic case of the accountants took over.
I was at a startup they acquired ~4 years ago, by now it's just about milked completely dry.
Even though our product is close to industry-leading, they laid off our product manager, then another one, the QA team, and half of the devs. Unsurprisingly the product is falling apart.
It's not a company that attempts to produce value, as with so many others the product is the stock price.
The MBAs are showing some kind of savings on a spreadsheet somewhere though, so I suppose all the sacrifices are worth it.
That was by far the most egregious example I’ve encountered of “we are trying to get unpaid labor from our interview process.”
EDIT: it seems like it was an acquihire of Dybvig and the team working on chez for something under NDA.