Cisco Engineering Executive Gets $5.5M for Leaving Company

Imagine getting paid a whopping bonus just for leaving your job.

For Cisco's former executive president, a cool $5.5 million is his reality.

[Image Courtesy of Pankaj Patel/LinkedIn]

Pankaj Patel, also head of global engineering and chief development officer, officially left his position in late October. He served with Cisco for 19 years.

He announced his leaving in January of this year. However, the terms of that departure weren't clear until now.

His termination letter includes $1,041,250 in severance pay. He gets a cash bonus of nearly $1.5 million. He leaves with 99,758 stock units at $30 a share (given Cisco's current share price. From stocks, he collects nearly $3 million.

[Image Courtesy of Wikimedia]

He gets a retirement investing of 474,310 stocks initially restricted as Patel was set to work for the company until 2019. At current share price, those add on a little over $14 million. He'll also get a chance to exercise any other stock options due to him.

The entire situation comes from an executive shakeup as the 25,000 member company continues to get shuffled around.

The guy set to place Patel, Zorowar Biri Singh, also left Cisco after only 15 months of work around the same time as Patel. Cisco leaders have been departing from the company in droves recently. Enterprise engineering leader Robert Soderbery left last month as well. Cisco's most famous four engineers -  Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani - all quit this summer.

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No word yet as to who will become the next chief of engineering. However, with a severance package like that, we wouldn't be surprised if the applicant pool is a little bigger than normal.

Cisco is the largest networking company in the world, selling and developing telecommunication equipment and other high-tech services.

Via YahooFinance