Cisco Systems Reviews in Boxborough, MA

Pros

Good pay and friendly coworkers. Flexibility to work from home and come in late as long as you are willing to work late and from home in the evenings.

Cons

Cisco supports a work-work culture, there's practically no work-life balance.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop making ridiculous schedules that force "crunch time" for dozens of people over several months

Pros

Great team, good pay, nice managers (at least in the BU I work for).
Plenty of new technologies to learn, with Gurus around you.
Tons of cutting edge equipments to work on.
1 month of PTO for fresh, plus virtually unlimited choice of WFH via company paid broadband service.
Top school districts around the campus.

Cons

Too many low level managers from a south Asia country and they are mean, mean, mean!
Where goes the stock options?
Not as well paid as Yahoo! and Google... especially by stock bonus.
Relatively long working hours, although it's normal in the industry.
No free lunch, like Google, and no free dinner, like Juniper.

Advice to Senior Management

diversify... not just in the market, but also in mid management team.

Pros

Its a fun place to work.

Cons

Promotions are not given fairly across teams

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees

Pros

Large company, diverse product line, focus on growth and attacking new market opportunities. Strong corporate focus on growing worldwide markets and new greendfield opportunities, which should keep overall company growth on an upward track in the future.

Cons

Excessively political environment, where information is often controlled, withheld and used as a weapon for personal and political advantage. Finding a good group is the KEY issue for you having a good assignment, and job/salary growth and career advancement. Internal visibility - often over actual performance - is becoming a necessary element for job survival, never mind advancement.

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of the excessive overhead in Cisco at the VP and Director level. Often, spans of control are completely ridiculous for a senior individual - Directors who have 1-2 staff is a frequent occurance, and are clearly a 'reward for a friend' situation. John Chambers needs to pick key individuals in key functional roles who will exhibit leadership and a focus on change to reinvigorate the culture, and then the overall company environment. Too much 'sloganeering' and top-down 'rah-rah' PC soundbytes and a lack of hard focus on the working environment for the rank and file staff.

Pros

Work experience gained is excellent.

Cons

Workload is pretty intense. Some managers are better much than others.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire more talent.

Pros

professionally networking, global, impact, trustworthy company

Cons

subpar compensation, bnot growing as fast so advancement limited

Advice to Senior Management

communicate career paths

Pros

Your software gets used by lots of people. They've got the marketting and sales machine so
if you write good software it will get used. I worked for a LOT of startups and Cisco's major competitors and developed good code which never succeeded in the market. (One bridge won prizes as the fastest in the world at the time, but that company only sold a few hundred, while Cisco sold hundreds of thousands of switches in their Catalyst line.) At the end of the day you really want your work to matter.

Cons

IOS is supported on dozens of platforms so often bugs have to be ported to dozens or (for rare critical and pervasive bugs) even hundreds of software branches. While there are tools to help, you can feel like a drone when you have to work on maintenance.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the great work.

Pros

Solid company, will be around for the next 10 - 20 years. Lots of places to find a niche. Lots of locations worldwide, wide variety of software and hardware positions. Flexible work hours, telecommuting, easy to stay connected 24 x 7. Highly educated workforce, lots of very smart people to hang out with and learn from. Market leader in many many categories. Free popcorn and drinks. Engineers have access to state of the art computers, labs and networks, and access to some of the biggest customers in the world, you wouldn't have this level acceptance working for a startup or a mid-level company.

Cons

It is a large company. 2001 brought some tough downsizing but there are still a lot of people failing to live up to their potential. This is mostly due to incompetent middle management on average, folks who have gotten promoted because they've stuck around for a long time and will put up with the crap that goes on with politics and maneuvering. No more HR department, the first and second level managers are expected to "do it all", lead the way, set the example and motivate and train as well as be de facto technical leads and pollinate projects across groups and locations.

Advice to Senior Management

Cut out the layers, evaluate the middle managers on more than just longevity. What innovations have been fostered? What risks have been taken, regardless of succes rates? The badge cards say we are supposed to take risks, but the reality is far from it. Who is looking forward vs treading water and avoiding conflict? Who is reaching out across groups and getting customers excited about Cisco solutions?

Pros

The company is continuing to grow, creating many new interesting technologies to work on. Compared to other companies the salary is good, even better when you factor in bonuses. The work schedule is very flexible, and they allow telecommuting. Lots of perks like free soda, coffee, popcorn, gym usage, etc.

Cons

Some employees must work for remote managers since there are so many different offices.

Advice to Senior Management

You're doing a good job, keep it up.

Pros

Reading many of the other reviews I can't agree more with the comment that as with any large company your experience will vary greatly from group to group. As a senior manager I get a bit more exposure to the behind the scenes than many of the other posters. Some of the positives:

- Ability to balance work/life - From my experience the lack of work/life balance is largely self inflicted when it occurs. It's also far from universal. I have had zero problem ever with taking time off. Making my weekends my own and shutting down after I go home. Based off of the empty parking lots in Boxborough and San Jose after 6:00 at night there are many others who have the same experience.

- Ability to communicate upward honestly - I'm not only encouraged but absolutely required to communicate up to my director the real state of things. He doesn't want things sugar coated he wants to know the real state of things. When there are problems he trusts me to handle them and to escalate when I need help. Then he provides it.

- Attempt at a fair rating rankings process - Every attempt is made to assure that the twice a year ratings/rankings process is done fairly. In my organization every manager is required to be able to justify in detail their stack ranking of employees. We then go through a laborious process to merge the stack rankings across the managers. While from an outside perspective it can seem like people aren't being rewarded from an internal perspective the reality is we have a highly talented and competitive workforce. Most of the employees fit into the "Core" grouping. The core grouping are people that are very good at their jobs but not "excelling".

- Renewed investment in College Hires. Cisco has a major initiative going on for the past 2 years to hire both interns and full-time candidates. This includes a fantastic sponsorship program for H1 students which employees them outside of the US if they don't make it through the lottery. They are employed outside the US until they can be eligible for an H3 or other means of coming back into the US. That's as good as any company can offer.

Cons

That being said Cisco isn't perfect. Far from it.
Ratings Rankings - It's simple math. If you stack rank your employees you can always identify a top 10% and a bottom 5%. That doesn't mean that the bottom 5% are employees you want to get rid of or who are not good at their jobs.

More than a few people focused on their careers to the exclusion of all else - Of course not only a Cisco problem but with the driven type A people we hire there are many that will stop at nothing to advance careers.

Ratings Rankings at odds with teamwork - When you know you are going to be ranked against every member of your team you are not incented to make your teammate look good at your expense even if it's the right thing for the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Scrap the get rid of the bottom 5% directive. Get rid of poor performers. If that's 5% that's 5% if that's 2% it's 2% if it's 10% it's 10%. Allow replacement of any person who leaves. (Current guideline is only bottom performers are automatically replaced).