[Note: this column originally appeared on www.republic-of-gilroy.com on 04 June 2004. Several years later I continue to recieve emails from Cisco veterans confirming these observations. -- Doug]
The world’s largest networking equipment manufacturer, Cisco Systems of San Jose, has released the world’s most powerful network router, code-named HFR (for Huge Fast Router, but more ribald definitions were used internally). The HFR can process information at 92 terabits per second. It could probably forward all the Internet spam ever created in a single nano-moment.
I worked on Cisco’s HFR project for two years -- an eternity in Silicon Valley time. Startups flared, telecoms sank, hot new technologies were integrated or ignored, markets mutated or vanished entirely, but like old man river the HFR project just kept rolling along. It was rolling for several years before I came on board as an information developer, and it rolled on for another year after my contract ended.
Sidenote: Cisco is perhaps the only company in the valley that could afford to dedicate so many resources for so many years to the development of a product that has but one truly significant new aspect. The awesome processing power and the smorgasbord of routing and switching features are important, but the main development task -- and the real selling point -- was re-architecting the Cisco operating system so that customers don’t have to take down the router every time a new feature is added or upgraded. Changing the clunky, monolithic OS to a modular OS is what made the HFR project take forever.
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The release of the world’s fastest router by the world’s number one networking company is an appropriate time to describe Cisco from the inside. After all, you, your kids, or your grandkids may someday work at Cisco, and you’re never going to get an accurate impression of Cisco culture from regurgitated press releases in the Mercury News, or from the scorecard-keeping that goes on in the technology press, or from profiles of CEO John Chambers in Forbes magazine.
So what’s it like inside? At the risk of never being asked to wear a Cisco badge again, my lasting impression is of nice yet mundane people who have learned not to care too much. Don’t get me wrong. Cisco treats its employees decently. Cisco is no Oracle, where the dark lord Ellison views workers as unfortunately necessary yet contemptible vermin.
But at Cisco, the impulse to respond creatively to challenging problems -- the thing that makes work enjoyable -- is stifled by layers and layers of suffocating process. Process rules at Cisco, and the rule of process has created a unique-to-Cisco employee caste system.
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The highest caste of Cisco employees are the lifers. Lifers tend to be managers or self-managing individual contributors. They have six or more years of service, are completely vested in a considerable nest egg of stock options, and have no desire to work elsewhere.
At Cisco, lifers are considered highly evolved. They are beyond simplistic, product-making endeavors. They have mastered the arcane complexity of Cisco process management -- that is, clogging the productivity pipeline with processes that others must attempt to follow.
Lifers tend to be dullards utterly lacking in curiosity, experts in the art of remaining unfazed. A re-org or a change in managers barely raises a lifer’s eyebrow. Yet talk of layoffs will create sopping half-moons under his armpits. Lifers live in fear of looking for work outside of Cisco, where their deep knowledge of internal Cisco tools and processes is considered laughable.
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The second caste of Cisco employees, the clones, were hired after the peak of the faux Internet economy. Clones are lifer wannabes. They occupy management positions with little authority or work as individual contributors reporting to lifers. Clones are also heavily vested in Cisco stock options, but their exercise price remains higher than the current stock price, so their options are worthless. Clones remember what it’s like to work elsewhere, which is good because they are the ones let go during quarterly downsizings.
Clones tend to be more interesting and creative than lifers, who remind them to be sullen and miserable. When a clone has a good idea, the lifer will smugly let him or her know that “We tried that six years ago and it didn’t work then and it won’t work now.” Clones have learned that trying to improve something in a process-dominated system is like being in a tractor pull -- the sled only gets heavier the further you try to drag it.
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The lowest caste of Cisco employees are the contractors. Common Cisco wisdom holds that while contractors constitute 30 percent of the Cisco workforce, they are responsible for about 80 percent of the work that gets done. Management of contractors is left up to the clones, which accounts for the other 20 percent of the work.
Lifers avoid direct contact with contractors, lest they be drawn into some work-based activity. Occasionally a newbie contractor breaks protocol and asks a lifer for some help on a work project. This results in an awkward moment for both parties until a clone is inserted to relieve the awkwardness.
Lifers and clones view contractors as disposable and powerless, which they are. Yet contractors help maintain the balance at Cisco by providing an important venting outlet for clones, who spend hours griping to contractors about lifers.
At day’s end, contractors are the happiest people at Cisco. They have actually accomplished something tangible -- a bit of code, a test routine, a set of user instructions. And their calendars (and psychological states) are unburdened by mind-numbing Cisco process events. Contractors are left out of quarterly performance reviews, team-building exercises, task forces dedicated to making Cisco tools more unintuitive, and group reviews of revised Cisco processes -- and that’s perfectly OK with the contractors.
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I make fun of Cisco’s addiction to process, but I have to note that it serves a purpose. While the rule of process explains why it took Cisco so long to create the world’s fastest router, that commitment to process may also explain why Cisco never gave up trying.
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