Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codemac | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who joined Cisco/IronPort (post-merger) and quit a little over a year later (2011-2012), here's my thoughts:

- Cisco is closing the San Bruno office where IronPort was located.

- Cisco is moving everyone who worked from San Bruno, mostly people who live north of San Mateo, down to the San Jose office for "office consolidation and simplification". Read: 10-30 minute commutes to 70-90 minute commutes.

- Cisco bought Meraki a week after this "office consolidation", but is keeping the Meraki SF office open, many saw this as a slap in the face.

- There is tons of technical debt, no one is lasting more than a year, and it's a toxic place to work. In my year there everyone was running away the moment they could. In one year the VP, 2 Directors in succession, Principle Engineer, two different managers I had, all but two tech leads I worked with, 4 engineers in my team of 7, all left. Many more are leaving with the office move.

Cisco is essentially divesting themselves from all IronPort tech and talent, and it looks like it's on purpose.

I would read this as "how Scott Weiss handled acquisition by Cisco well for himself for 2007-2009" not "how everything went well".

I had the pleasure a few years ago of having an internship with a company that had recently been fully acquired a few months before I started. It took me a bit of time to really figure out just why the office was barely at 10% capacity (they had not moved) and everyone seemed shell-shocked.. They were the survivors.

Quite the eye-opening experience.

That's right: the post is precisely about what the founder of a company acquired by a bigger company should do. As he stated, he was locked in for two years, so he made the best of it, then left at two years on the dot and is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Reread his last two sentences:

> Many of the best people at IronPort stayed at Cisco for many years after their IronPort vesting was over. I believe the main reason the acquisition was a success was because the team engaged and meaningfully integrated into Cisco.

I stated what I stated because these sentences are a false narrative he probably just repeats to himself now. The team was not "meaningfully integrated into Cisco". I arrived 3.5 years after acquisition and they weren't even in the Cisco sales catalog! Anyone who worked there will laugh or cry when they read that sentence about being integrated.

We had our entirely own data center, accounts, email addresses, passwords, office, and LLC that sent our paychecks.

I've been through that mill several times now; small independently successful company gets bought out by 600lb multinational.

So far it's been the same story, I've done well on paper and moved on other interesting work while the assets, contacts, and contracts for the former entity get assimilated into the borg with the loss of various bits of software and personal that made the original what it was (as the larger entity is on a roll sucking up as many small independents as it can and more or less just jamming them all together).

Take the best severance package you can, walk away, and come back for odd jobs at cuththroat contracting rates while doing other work would be my advice.

Probably not a slap, just waiting for Meraki's lease to run out. It's funny how Cisco walks the "networked world" walk in a number of ways (IP phones on the desks, virtual secretaries in some of the lobbies), but still wants to maintain a city-within-a-city with its attendant traffic bombs and mazes of twisty little cubicles.

Meraki is moving (or just moved) into a bigger campus in San Francisco. I was under the impression that they signed their new lease after they announced the acquisition.

The succession plan was horrific. The Marketing GM is a total tool without a clue who basically destroyed everything he touched, hence the toxic place to work you experienced. He's gone, things are much better now, and that San Bruno office is finally being put to rest. When he said he promoted too many of his own people too fast, he nailed it, but not because of some image or trust problem within the new company, they just weren't very good at all.

I joined Cisco after undergrad to work on next-gen ISR platform. There was interesting work, no doubt, but too much BS. I left after 1.5 yrs and now am working on OpenFlow at a much smaller switching company. Boy, you never really know how things really are until you get another reference point.

I think the original post is largely right in its advice but I think your perspective on the longer term results is also very interesting.

The fact that it took from 2007 to 2011 for the mass exodus indicates that the OP actually did OK and I wouldn't overly blame him for the events a couple of years after he left although maybe his succession planning wasn't bullet proof.

Throwing yourself in fully may not always be possible but if there is an opportunity it could be worth a try. You can always shrink back to minimum effort code maintenance through your lock in period if it doesn't work.

Principle Engineers are too principled to stay in the new company. They're bound to leave quickly.

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