Meraki reviews about "middle management"

* Lots of middle management and not enough IC's * Approval processes (either from management or things like IT) are frustratingly slow * Projects tend to move pretty slowly

= blame cultures = No career progression offered = No pay reviews ever = Uncompetitive pay = Middle management issues disregarded and overlooked = They request us to do feedback then make us feel uncomfortable by pushing to find out who is telling what = People speaking bad of each other all the time = Many stories talked about manager who says how staff are there to pay their mortgage = UK partners seem to always know the latest story on bad comments made by managers and gossip = Salary information shared

-The pay is abysmal. Any of the other benefits are not worth what they will ask of you for what they are paying -No opportunities for growth. No annual raise. -Any employee outside of the headquarters in San Francisco is functionally ignored by Leadership. No job growth outside of the San Francisco Office -Leadership is obsessed with returning to office and actively disparages employees who choose to work remotely -Middle management truly is an inefficient nightmare -No cross organizational vision or management -Business systems and architecture are outdated and inefficient -Onboarding was a disaster; very little support for new employees

- The pandemic has reduced the culture to nothing. Key players that drove enthusiasm during Meraki's growth period have all resigned due to lack of opportunity and recognition. Focus has shifted from cultivating passion to overcomplicated bureaucracy which bears no fruit. - The extreme turnover in middle and upper management (every sales director and manager in the Asia Pac region is "new") has left entire teams unsure of what their job actually is, while business critical teams struggle for headcount and resources. - Middle management is confused and overworked with very little direction due to rotating doors at the upper management level. - Pay is severely below market average while job progression opportunities are non existent. - Cisco continues to absorb defining characteristics of Meraki into their core product. It won't be long before Meraki folds into Cisco completely

As said before “all the downsides of a start-up, with none of the corporate benefits.” 5 years tenure across multiple different departments, I have observed some of issues since the start. Check other Glassdoor reviews for specific departmental problems (they still persist). The feedback below, focusses on wider organisational issues, and due to the lack of material change forced me to leave: 1. Identical roles in wider Cisco get paid more. 2. Identical roles at competition paying 30-40% more. 3. Annual performance / career review meaningless. 4. Training budget and process obscured (not clearly defined). 5. Leadership dragging heals on new WFH arrangements post covid. 6. Majority of power and roles reside in the USA. 7. Internal conscious culture in response to other Glassdoor reviews is virtue signalling activity. 8. Slow strangle and assimilation of Meraki into Cisco. Point 3 - Annual reviews are tick box exercise, to satisfy HR process. Across the different departments I worked, no member of management able to agree or give measurable goals. Subsequently makes it very difficult to hold the company to account at next review, or demonstrate achievements to get a raise. Furthermore, they are pointless because there is no annual budget allocated to performance reviews. Pay rises rarely if ever happen (and are marginal %). The only way it happens for most is to change role. When it does happen it’s not based on any metrics, and is down to managers opinion. Wider Cisco has clear processes etc established so this does not happen. Point 4 - Cisco has clearly defined L&D budget and process for all employees. Except Meraki, which is excluded. Meraki has its own L&D budget and process. It’s not clearly defined, or publicly available for employees. Its ad hoc and on a case-by-case basis. Point 5 - Cisco has for years embraced flexible working. Meraki prior covid was mandatory in the office. For the duration of Covid leadership has praised teams for continually driving revenue and growth. Teams have proven they can work effectively from anywhere. However, Meraki leadership won’t match the wider Cisco policy, and does not trust individuals to do the work they have proven they can do. Point 6 - the chances to get relocated to USA is very rare. That leaves very little meaningful career progression or roles outside the USA (wait for someone to leave). Point 7 - Virtue signalling activity, no material changes made internally or externally. The business unit (& Cisco for that matter) still very happy to sell into what most would deem to be unethical industries. Point 7 – Treated like we are at school: Role play meeting of what is, or is not acceptable inside or outside the workplace with colleagues. Example of work place comments colour coded to the severity of inappropriateness. Point 8 – This topic is far too complicated to go into full details. Cisco and Meraki leadership both frequently praise the BU as one of the growth engines, the best acquisition, or one of the darlings of Cisco. From product innovation, internal process, sales motion and culture. However, they can’t give any certainty as to what will happen with Meraki long term. Not to mention a contradiction that Meraki employee face the above issues in comparison to Cisco employees. Free food (not available during covid for obvious reasons, but historically was frequently referenced by middle management as an excuse for the above issues) is not important to employees as getting the basics right.

- With anything that scales the quality unfortunately changes, the beautiful office feels extremely crowded and beat up (lot's of chipped furniture, scratched walls, cabinets with broken doors) folks are less warm and more entitled treating the space and the facilities staff like a hotel and maids instead of participating as a community. This can be seen by the trash and dirty dishes left in meeting rooms, plates full of food left in sinks, trash bins overflowing onto the floors in high traffic bathrooms -What used to feel like a tight knit community feels much more tribal/clique like with folks only interacting with their own teams even within departments. This also affects cross department communication, folks are almost hesitant to speak to people outside of their teams for fear they will be asked to take on more projects or have to help someone with a process or system. The open floor plan makes it really hard to focus with drive by requests and chatty teammates. - Morale is pretty low across the board according to our internal yearly survey, folks don't feel recognized with growth or pay. The benefits may have made up for the below market rates, but so many other companies have blown us out of the water with in house catering, clean facilities, community events, a health benefit or gym larger than a small hotel gym. When these topics come up in company wide AMAs the answers from leadership are very vague and hand wavey. - Also the negative to the dogs - speaking with the ladies that clean the office they very often pick up dog poop off the Sales floor as there are tons of poorly behaved dogs who's owners are too busy working to watch them. There's also a decent amount of scared dogs who growl if you go near the desk or if another dog walks by, which is tough considering how many people and dogs are in office at any given time. - The work life balance here really depends on your role and your manager. Most of my experience was on teams that had an unspoken culture of working through half or all of lunch and working late both in office and at home. I often had teammates from other time zones pinging me between 10pm-6am looking for immediate responses (mostly forgetting time zones I think). - Management and career development are probably two of my biggest cons here, the managers until recently were usually young inexperienced ICs who were really good at their IC job and then were promoted to manage 8-12 ICs including weekly 1:1s. I'd say most of my 1:1s and reviews were missed without reschedule or months late. I rarely had time in my roles to work on career growth, and compound that with the lack of a career ladder or metrics to help you argue for a raise or grade change. I honestly felt most of my managers over the years cared, but either didn't know how to advocate for the team or didn't have the power to affect the changes we needed to feel supported and appreciated. - Legacy Merakians (the big names who have been around pre Cisco Acquisition) are usually positive in that they have tribal knowledge and brand history, but more often than not their ideas and tactics are outdated and they are given a lot of freedom and power simply due to their tenure and not necessarily in alignment with their output. To put it bluntly there are a lot of old timers that are stuck in their ways causing an extreme tech and process debt unlike anywhere else I have worked. There have been so many times when looking at a tool or process that a teammate or I asked "Why do we do it this way?" and literally no one knows as the people who put the system in place are gone or moved to different departments. We had accounts being billed to Merakians who had not worked at the company for years. Because of this, there are many pieces that are known to be inefficient or costly but we did not have the bandwidth to overhaul anything either because it would require starting from scratch or because the very tightly staffed teams could not spare the cycles.

lack of vision from upper management, increasingly corporate and HR-led culture, increasingly difficult to drive impactful change and receive recognition, some ineffective people in middle management, relatively low salaries for Bay Area