Cisco was a behemoth with roughly 80% of the market share in the switching market and 10 different players owning the remaining 20% with each owning around 2% market share. Because of it's dominant position in the industry Cisco attracted all the best talent in the Valley and kept innovating and executing at a blazing speed. As a large company, it had too many processes put in place such that it made very difficult to execute even mundane tasks. There were thousands and thousands of engineers working for each business unit within Cisco and that's how it churned out it products through this process machine. I felt like I didn't belong to this place and sometimes I felt I'm lost in the crowd. Work was more or less monotonous and the scope for learning and development was very limited. Each BU acted like a separate company and wouldn't exchange ideas, innovations among themselves. After my contracting job at Cisco completed I decided to join Foundry Networks.
Foundry Networks was a very small sized publicly listed company but operating more like a startup. It was very nimble and agile with one man making all the decisions and setting the directions for the company. It was none other than the founder, president, CTO and CFO of the company Mr. Bobby Johnson. Foundry was executing at a much faster pace than what Cisco did. But it was lean and mean in all fronts. It had zero tolerance for failure to execute but complete disregard for quality. There was no process or quality control. Fire fighting was the norm but no finger pointer or blaming others. Fix things and move on, otherwise get fired by Bobby Johnson. I my own words, I always felt that Foundry products was like that cheap Chinese designed ( not made ) iphone remake of Apple's iphone, when compared to high quality Cisco products. One big thing I learnt from Foundry was that, if you execute faster and leaner than the incumbent, you can win market share. I definitely enjoyed working for Foundry because it operated more like a startup - very flat hierarchy and decisions were made quick, and the short release cycles we had for our features.
Foundry was acquired by Brocade in 2009 and that's how came into Brocade. Brocade was an entirely different world. At Brocade, quality was more but not at the sacrifice of quantity. So they added more resources and engineers to focus on the quality and quantity. They were not as mean and stingy as Foundry. We had a wonderful work culture and they treated employees fair. I was able to manage my work-life balance. It was during my tenure at Brocade I got married and started my family. The biggest mistake that Brocade did was it didn't have a clear vision and product road map. The top management didn't have clear product vision. So we spent 2 years time on inventing our inhouse ASIC which we didn't tape it out and later decided to buy Broadcom chip instead. We spent another two years time to build a linux based OS from scratch and scrapped the project. The stock price tanked. In the end, the CEO, CTO and the VP of product management was all fired and new CEO took over. He sold off some business units and made the company lean and cut costs everywhere possible. He used the savings to buy new companies. While this was all happening, I decided it better to leave the company for good. now than later.
At this juncture I decided that I'll work for a small sized company that has a clear vision, focus and execution, instead of joining some lousy company in the Valley. Second, I wanted to work for a company where people with great talent, right attitude, spirit and mindset work. And that's when I learnt about Arista Networks and went for their open house. That day I decided, this is the company I should work for even if I were to sacrifice to some extent on my compensation. I cleared the interviews and got the job. Arista was a different beast altogether, unlike Cisco, Foundry, or Brocade. I'm proud that I worked for Arista. I have never felt proud for having worked for any other company. There are several reasons why I felt so about Arista Networks:
1) People and their culture: Very highly talented people with zero ego. Everyone treated everyone else with respect and courtesy. Employees were more than willing to help others.
2) Quality is more important than Quantity: Every engineer was strictly informed that their performance will be measured by the quality and not by the quantity. One will not be punished for not completing a project and shipping it before the quarter ends but will be punished when shipped with poor quality. So employees took time to write a better code and test them thoroughly.
3) Automate everything that can be automated. We didn't have a QA team at Arista because the development team automated all the testing, which runs 24x7 and 365 days a year. Arista uses so many open source tools than every other company I have worked so far.
4) Key decisions of the company were made by the founders themselves. For all engineering related stuff, there was just one person to guide and set direction - Ken Duda.
5) Very less meetings and zero micro-management. Engineers don't have to spend hardly anytime in formal meetings. We focused on execution. At Brocade I used to attend minimum 3 to 5 meetings everyday which was complete waste of my time. Also, at Arista, no body breathes over your shoulder.
6) More important of all, engineers were empowered to do anything and everything it takes to do the right thing in the right way, irrespective of their age, years of experience etc. No managers could block it. Infact, engineers didn't have a strong reporting structure to their managers. Engineers used to work on a different project that was not owned by the manager at all.
6) More important of all, engineers were empowered to do anything and everything it takes to do the right thing in the right way, irrespective of their age, years of experience etc. No managers could block it. Infact, engineers didn't have a strong reporting structure to their managers. Engineers used to work on a different project that was not owned by the manager at all.
7) Performance assessment was not done by the managers but by the peers and everyone in the company. So managers cannot influence the performance related decisions much and employees don't have the obligation to please their managers.
I would strongly recommend anyone to join Arista Networks for their work culture and the opportunity to learn. In the long run you would make more money working for Arista but in the short run you may be making lesser than what you are already making.
