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Great possibilities, but lacks executive management direction. Happy being #2

Engineering
Current Employee
Has worked at Juniper Networks for 2 years
August 13, 2012
Sunnyvale, California
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Good benefits, nice work surroundings, and some really great people.

Cons

If you don't come from Cisco (the Costco of networking), you and your opinions don't count. VPs come in and bring former employees from Cisco with huge promotions, while existing employees stand still. Lots of favoritism.

Still a "HW Box" silicon company with routing bigots. Little sense of applications, web, or end-user.

Geo-political mess. Multiple business units have great difficulty working collectively together, and there is definitely a class structure inside the company. Again, ex-Cisco VPs rule.

Too many Cisco VPs. Hire more engineers so the work can get done right, and don't hire them all in India because they are cheaper. It takes three times as long to get the same amount of work accomplished, and the overhead for both the US and India is extremely high.

EVPs have become AT&T whipping boys.

A lot of talk about quality improvement, but little done in the front end of the development process to encourage better development practices. Test guys have their act together but keep getting overruled by VPs. PLMs... where are they?

Advice to Management

Simplify the company. Start hiring from companies that know how to develop, market, and sell applications.

Form a partnership and/or acquire new technologies to differentiate from Cisco.

Strive to be more than the number 2 "plumber" in the industry.

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