I worked at Meraki for 13+ years so far, and its sad, but I will be leaving shortly. I am planning my exit now, which is what motivated me to write this.
Don't get me wrong: Meraki was incredible, I loved Meraki, but unfortunately Meraki is now dead. I watched Meraki get acquired by Cisco and then slowly ruined. There were a good ~7-8 years there where Cisco just let Meraki do their own thing, and those were the glory days! Small teams, free brainstorming sessions lead to multiple production codebases, beer fridges, music/meditation rooms, open minds, everyone just did whatever was necessary to make the product's great & solve customer problems. Job titles were just kind of a guideline, no one really cared who was what job. No hierarchy, no red tape, just pure fast moving innovation from everyone. There was no "its not my job" attitudes; everyone just worked together for the greater good and treated each other as friends & equals.
During the pandemic Cisco took over everything Meraki and literally everything is worse. The SF office used to be great with Meraki only, now its a hodge podge mess of random people from the "Cisco" motherland farting away in every conference room. No inner team synergy anymore. NPCs in suits.
Tiny pet peeves: I need to Cisco "Single Sign On" about 50 times a day, sessions are about 10-20 minutes long, my Gmail 15 year+ history is being deleted for "Cisco Microsoft suite" which is pure trash. Meraki Jira was migrated to "secure" Cisco Jira and everything is lost and a mess now. Slack will be gone soon for Webex chat only (already in the works). Decades of incredible product context lost in the name of "security". Meetings are too formal and nothing get done in them anymore. We have multiple 1 hour weekly meetings daily, and they're all just status quo "yup" meetings that should just be an email. My days became filled with these meetings to the point I lose huge chunks of my day where ultimately nothing happens. Everyone is afraid to speak against power, because if you do you're literally just ignored. New ideas are not welcomed at Cisco.
Cisco just follows the executive leadership team (ELT) who are all a bunch of clueless talkers ("AI, AI, AI!!!"). Its impossible to make change with all the red tape. Cisco is a "security" company but takes itself too seriously to innovate and create anything good, which is why they need to acquire and enshitify every other startup.
RIP Meraki. Thanks for all the good times friends
