In 1998 Cisco could do the Barefoot like architectures.
Tend to complexity the architecture. Instead of abstractions and simplification of the design and architecture, tendency is to export Millions of Register andTables to SDK and End User.
So there is a Forest which is difficult to master and there is no documentation and the details are in the heads of few engineers. In Architecture there are few principles of which very few are used there. There is a Forest of Trees and one only remembers Main Frame days with back plane of Forest of Wires - but even that was documented! And you are not allowed to focus on any feature or code which you could master soon. Ask for focused area over long period to work on but the management is incompetent to think that crystal clear. It is always in Forest Fire Fighting mode. In Trident3, they have Flex Parser and Flex Editor which are 100% Turing Complete - like Von Neumann Architecture, or Compiler Friendly. The Flex Flow tries to maintain indirection approach to be flexible but it then hard-codes the rest of implementation like its predecessors! So it is not 100% Compiler Friendly. The SDK would still have personality like its predecessors.
Trident3 would be more buggy than other predecessors! For example, while I was given low level cleanup jobs of many different kinds, I found that many bugs introduced in cleanup did not get detected in their AV Golden, Silver and Total Regression. It is a different matter that during RTL DE and DV process, the issue may have been caught but there is a good chance that bug is passed on. For example a feature like ECMP itself has a world of its own with many paths untested in AV Regression Run.
After the merger, they will screw you if you fall sick working long hours, or near collapse near finish line. They will even cut your benefits and Medical Insurance - and lay you off.
