Lost Foundation, Lingering Hope
Lost Foundation, Lingering Hope
Cisco has not given up yet. There are enough experienced people to know how to get through tough times. Cisco has a solid run rate that could last them 20 years. The key will be to keep the long view, like they had in the 90s.
There is no top-down leadership any longer.
There has been a culture of consensus where anyone can say no, but no one is able to make a decision.
There is little to no upward mobility due to the hanger-ons who believe that selling boxes is the only way.
The engineering-right Cisco foundation has been lost.
Cisco is going in the wrong direction with consolidation. It needs to become a GE with 10-12 medium-sized companies with full P&L responsibility. The fact that the services org is doing development is a mistake.
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Cisco Interview Experiences
Vice President Engineering
While meetings were difficult to coordinate, involved last-minute calendar changes, and suffered from lapses in communication, once held, they were both informative and productive. Opportunities are vast at Cisco. Some organizational realignments ma
Quality Assurance
It was fairly good and well organized. The team was very friendly and interactive. The interview process was smooth and finished the process in a week.
ML/AI Engineer
It was a one-round interview. It was predominantly on data science and large language models. They gave me a repo of an agent framework and asked me to find the code where reward is calculated.
Vice President Engineering
San Jose, California, United StatesMarch 1, 2016While meetings were difficult to coordinate, involved last-minute calendar changes, and suffered from lapses in communication, once held, they were both informative and productive. Opportunities are vast at Cisco. Some organizational realignments ma
Quality Assurance
San Jose, California, United StatesNovember 14, 2025It was fairly good and well organized. The team was very friendly and interactive. The interview process was smooth and finished the process in a week.
ML/AI Engineer
San Jose, California, United StatesOctober 24, 2025It was a one-round interview. It was predominantly on data science and large language models. They gave me a repo of an agent framework and asked me to find the code where reward is calculated.
