Cisco gives 27-year-old engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite 98% of the company's legacy code in 24 months — president plucks former startup founder, telling him to 'go nuts'
Cisco's president is betting on Gen Z to change the company
In a world where youth unemployment is growing as AI replaces more and more entry-level jobs, Cisco president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel is going for a different approach. According to a report by Fortune, he's given a 27-year-old ex-startup founder — brought into the company by an earlier acquisition, and previously languishing in a role five levels below — a new job to refactor 98% of the company's legacy code within 24 months.
The employee, Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, joined Cisco after it acquired EzDubs, a translation startup that Krishnamurthy helped build in 2023. While having executive experience, Patel found that "Paddy" was left "buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic."
According to the report, Patel spoke to Krishnamurthy in Cisco's office in San Francisco, where Krishnamurthy told him that he could rewrite Cisco's legacy code in a team of just two people, and that "even the most AI-forward people on [Patel's] own team weren't thinking that way."
As a result, he's now been tasked with rewriting 98% of Cisco's legacy code within 24 months, with four weeks as a proof of concept. "I've given him unlimited tokens because he's going to refactor code," according to Patel, telling him "you can go nuts."
AI coding has skyrocketed in recent months, with GitHub forced to deploy 4 million extra CPU cores and 160 petabytes of storage to cope. However, the practice is not without its pitfalls, with rogue AI agents notorious for taking unsolicited actions including deleting entire company databases, TV show edits, and production setups.
Patel hopes that there are more young hires in the Krishnamurthy mould that he can find, both in the company and externally to hire. He's looking for hires to "challenge the system and the status quo," to be "an energizer bunny that just goes and kind of revs everyone up."
Patel believes that current corporate structures work against this kind of thinking. "If you don't hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?"
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He acknowledges that this will create friction, putting Gen Z employees among decades-old employees. "Tension is good.... I actually try to create tension in the teams because you want to have enough friction on the ideas. You don't want to have friction with the people and personalities."
Patel believes that a combination of experienced, scale operators at Cisco, alongside external hires and "entrepreneurial founders, CEOs and engineers who are AI-native" will bring results. "Either of these groups by themselves aren't nearly as potent as when all three work together. It's what creates magic."
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Ben Stockton is a deals writer at Tom’s Hardware. He's been writing about technology since 2018, with bylines at PCGamesN, How-To Geek, and Tom’s Guide, among others. When he’s not hunting down the best bargains, he’s busy tinkering with his homelab or watching old Star Trek episodes.
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madmalc Interesting question from this will be where do the the intellectual property rights lie with AI generated code.Reply
Cisco has claimed intellectual property rights in the past.
If an AI program generates similar code in the future who do they sue? -
jp7189 Does this mean im going to lose my chance to bore young engineers?Reply
Youngster: "why does Cisco do it like this.. in what world does this logic make and sense?"
Me: "gather 'round youngin' and I'll tell you a tale. The year was 1998 and OC-12 was all the rage..." -
DS426 Sure, it's probably feasible to literally refactor 98% of the company's code in 24 months if there's no token limit. However, actually testing all that code or rather the final applications and operating systems (IOS in networking devices, etc.) -- and Cisco has thousands of them -- and fixing regressions and newly-introduced bugs would take this project well past two years.Reply
The internet is powered by some of these devices. Some dude that had a great AI-based translation company seems like hardly the right guy to ensure that the world's routers, switches, firewalls, etc. are rock-solid in reliability. I can appreciate the status quo being challenged, but I'm seeing the risk being far greater than the reward here. How about trying this first in a much more limited scope first, such as in a department or product segment that is lower stakes? -
King_V Reply
Testing?? That's what customers are for!DS426 said:Sure, it's probably feasible to literally refactor 98% of the company's code in 24 months if there's no token limit. However, actually testing all that code or rather the final applications and operating systems (IOS in networking devices, etc.) -- and Cisco has thousands of them -- and fixing regressions and newly-introduced bugs would take this project well past two years.
The internet is powered by some of these devices. Some dude that had a great AI-based translation company seems like hardly the right guy to ensure that the world's routers, switches, firewalls, etc. are rock-solid in reliability. I can appreciate the status quo being challenged, but I'm seeing the risk being far greater than the reward here. How about trying this first in a much more limited scope first, such as in a department or product segment that is lower stakes? -
salgado18 I think it's possible, and being careful enough the testing should also be covered. Bu tunless this guy started programming at 13 years old and is a genius, I wouldn't trust such a task to anyone without top-level senior status. The most important trait to such a big refactor is not knowledge or talent, it's experience. But well, I guess token-crazy CEOs don't get it.Reply -
gondor I honestly doubt this CEO would entrust such a task to any other (Caucasian, East Asian, black ... take your pick) employee that only just scaled Mt. Stupid of the Dunning-Kruger curve.Reply -
qxp 24 months! I guess the young programmer thinks that in that time either the AI companies will go bankrupt, or Cisco will go bankrupt from all the changes, or he gets hired by a different company. For the rest of us, same business as before - avoid Cisco if you can help it.Reply