“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?” he said."
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This would be an interesting approach for a bleeding edge startup that's betting big on producing something novel or going bankrupt. If you're going to bet the company on one guy and some AI, that's bold. He'd better have some serious chops and not be merely a slick salesman.
However, Cisco is an infrastructure company. Status quo is what most people want from an infrastructure company. You don't want your Cisco stuff to suddenly start doing new, innovative things that require a complete redux of everything built on top of it. This, of course, assumes that having one guy do a refactor of your entire code-base produces something "innovative" rather than a cavalcade of snafu's.
It's probably not the best time to be holding CSCO.