Duo at this point has an identity crisis, being stuck with the worst of Cisco’s policies and having a culture that does not work well with them.
Promotion opportunities are scarce in engineering, and is often times used to up level people who are drastically under-leveled from their date of hire instead of appropriately leveling people from the outset and using promotions to appropriately reward people performing at the next level. This is exacerbated by the fact that Duo is rarely given appropriate budget to promote even those people.
What’s worse is it seems like Duo management is frequently misled by senior management (Unsure if this is as high as Cisco leadership, but at the very least it seems as though VP’s were misled). During the transition to annual reviews the story went from “this will fix all of our leveling problems” to “we should have enough to appropriately reward high performers” to “we can change the titles of under leveled people and barely get them to bottom of band”.
Tech at duo is also geriatric. Nobody else in the industry uses Twisted Python, so you’ll end up amassing quite a bit of useless knowledge that will not be remotely useful at your next job. Recognition of the fact that using esoteric frameworks for the majority of internal development is met with derision sprinkled with sugar. Incrementalism will not ever result in solutions that Duo needs. This is the core of the reason why so much key talent has left.
I waited a while after leaving to make sure I wasn’t just upset about the situation, but here I am months later still feeling the need to warn others who are lured in by the “kinder than necessary” value that you will be continuously beat over the head with. Companies who are actually good to work for don’t have to make it one of their values to play nice. Duo is in denial of exactly how difficult it can be to work there and uses it’s own values to dismiss criticism. Ego sum auctoritate, ergo erratis.
