Cisco Systems – “IT is filled with Indians working cheap”

Pros

Ability to work from home
Opportunity to grow professionally (although not in pay)
I've had kind managers that actually care about their employees
While not true for everybody, the ability to pick my own projects has led to some interesting work

Cons

- The strategy is to move 85% of the IT work to India.
- Technical knowledge is considered completely unnecessary for IT managers. This leads to them setting directions to trends that don't make any sense. Right now we're chasing "cloud computing" and my manager has no idea what it is. He lights up every time he hears SOA and Web 2.0 community although he doesn't understand when it's appropriate to do those sorts of things. Nearly every IT manager is like that.
- I've been promoted every 2 or 3 years, which is much better than average. Having said that, my purchasing power has dropped. Some promotions come with $3k raises that barely impact cost of living, especially when you consider that you waited 3 years for it.
- Benefits used to include your home ISP bill and cell phone bill. Cutting those were simply thinly disguised salary cuts.
- About 75% of my co-workers are h1b guys shipped in from India. Their talent level is generally much lower than my American counterparts and in many cases they weren't even interviewed before hiring. HR and management isn't really qualified to tell who is good and who is bad.
- Cisco is addicted to cheap labor and it's had a material impact on our IT systems. Many of my co-workers are actually dumb while I used to be amazed at the brain pool of engineers I worked with.
- I get the idea Cisco thinks they pay too much for labor so they stopped giving cost of living raises and my promotions come with lousy raises. I'm a top ranked guy (3 out of 80) so I have to assume it's hitting everybody. I did get a $10k stock allotment but I'd rather have a $10k raise.

Advice to Senior Management

Your addiction to cheap IT labor is going to destroy this company. Also, you need more knowledgeable IT management. Promote technical people to the management ranks.