You appear to have very little respect for your neighbours inspite of not having any real insight or experience with their work.
It would be impossible to come across as 'absolutely terrible software engineers' just from a conversation without prexisting prejudice.
Its not just Cisco but for a large majority of folks a job is a part of their life not their entire life and it doesn't automatically follow that they are not good or passionate about their jobs, and it's sad that anyone would choose to reach this conclusion just from speaking to folks.
It absolutely is. We were talking about C++ pointers. 15 minutes of casual discussion at a hot tub a few months back comes to mind - and I could tell they had no idea of:
What a factory was.
What a unique_ptr did.
The dangers of unclear object ownership in a manually memory managed program.
Difference between when to pass by reference and when to pass by pointer.
Or more possibly that they simply had no interest in discussing "shop" on a weekend or outside of work hours. Or perhaps they were preoccupied with other things being that they weren't at work. Seems quite a stretch and kind of unfair to proclaim how horrible they and Cisco as a company are based on this.
It would be impossible to come across as 'absolutely terrible software engineers' just from a conversation without prexisting prejudice.
Its not just Cisco but for a large majority of folks a job is a part of their life not their entire life and it doesn't automatically follow that they are not good or passionate about their jobs, and it's sad that anyone would choose to reach this conclusion just from speaking to folks.