Pros

Flexible work schedule depending on your immediate manager -- but if you are expected to work 20 hours -- does it really matter?
It might be possible to use your time spent at Cisco in lieu of course work towards Political Science degrees.

Cons

Not a technology-oriented company.
Not many US educated employees, nor many people with advanced engineering degrees.
Employees are usually Indian with a typical background (Indian education from unknown universities); get on the boat using India Consultancy Inc.; jump ship to Cisco and hang around there for a long time to become part of management -- continue hiring new people off the boat -- build empires and bask in the glory of sycophants.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue firing more engineers and take more fat bonuses; this way, you can accelerate the demise of the company. Atleast, this way the networking world will get a fresh start!

Pros

- Flexible working hours: it does not matter when or how long you work as long as the job gets done
- Work from home: you are given the flexibility of working from anywhere as long as what you are asked for is done properly
- Good benefits

Cons

- HR is inexistent: they never answer employee inquiries, never answer phone, email or voice mail left to them by employees
- HR avoids answering any questions with regards to salary increase, grades....
- Managers find it smart to pay as little as possible to employees and not promote them
- Too tactical and focused on the commits of every week
- You will close to never get a salary increase or promotion: there is always a freeze
- Finance and HR do their best to cut benefits and salaries if possible
- HR keeps reminding you that you are lucky to work for Cisco
- Unfair in terms of equal employment opportunity: a lot of new positions are not announced and are arranged by managers to be taken by certain people before you ever hear about any of them

Advice to Senior Management

- Take care of your employees: they are all you have got and competition will be more than glad to hire them
- Focus on strategy on the regional and country levels instead of the narrow sighted weekly commitments
- HR to frequently review the status of employees that have been with the company for more than five years and got no promotions: try to understand what is behind it and do not leave this to first line managers only
- stop bragging about being a top company: you do not pay like one
- Be FAIR

Pros

The ability to work remote if necessary. The extensive benefits for an employee including 401K matching and Employee Assistance Program, and onsite health and fitness center. Many of the people I worked with as peers were intelligent and fun to work with

Cons

This company has changed dramatically over the past decade. Internally it can now be a very political environment where promotions and increases were awarded to those who bought into empire building within business units and not people doing the real work essential to the success of the company. The focus on process and metrics is only effctive when everyone either agrees or is aware of the metric targets, without that it seems like evaluations are subjective and unfair. Anyone who had been managed out due to restructure is more likely to have been targeted for being more of a thinker than the management wants.

Advice to Senior Management

Clearly communicating and appropriately weighing the elements of the role for which people are being evaluated is key in not only being successful but in motivating and improving your workers. The Executive level ofmanagement is great, but the intermediate levels of management are not leading the rank and file, they are managing though fear and intimidation and taking advantage of the current economy and the fact that no one wants to be out of work right now. I am a bug fan of John chambers and his vision, but I beleive that lower levels of management are undermining that ideal.

Pros

nice gym, nice heath center, work remotely (but by paying broadband by yourself)

Cons

After I passed the exam, I got 5k bonus but no matching/raise/promotion to market CCIE salary.

More cons:
No career growth, like me.
work even on weekend, 10pm-1am (meeting with engineers in India) no life.
called layoff as Limit Restructuring.
7-9 management layers to CEO from engineer.
Ranking system is not transparent

Advice to Senior Management

Stop the ranking system and ePM, that is useless.
cut your 5% bottom directors/VP please. Stop cutting engineers and giving yourself a fat bonus.

Pros

I enjoyed good benefits, and flexible working hours. I go in the office at 10 and go home at 6.

Cons

Company layoffs are frequent. If you are considering to work for Cisco, make sure that you are working on a good product.

Advice to Senior Management

Leadership is secretive and not enough information gets trickled down to the engineers. Second level managers are usually hollow and do not reach out to employees.

Pros

Cisco Systems is the industry leader. You will have access to a vast amount of knowledge accumulated over a long period of time. Employees at Cisco get the benefit of a strong infrastructure, such as IT support, HR, benefits etc.

Cons

Cisco is a very political environment. Your success will depend mostly on how well you get along with your manager. Emphasis on bonus puts a lot of power in the hands of the mangers, which often ends up being abused.

There is a lot of bureaucracy. Groups are always fighting turf wars. Therefore information does not flow well across group boundaries.

The processes at Cisco are over engineered. Even doing the smallest amount of work has a great deal of overhead.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce the amount of cronyism prevalent in Cisco. Have checks and balances in how managers exercise their power. Reduce the overhead caused by excessive processes, and make the work environment more efficient. Improve the flow of information across team boundaries.

Pros

Ability to work from home
Opportunity to grow professionally (although not in pay)
I've had kind managers that actually care about their employees
While not true for everybody, the ability to pick my own projects has led to some interesting work

Cons

- The strategy is to move 85% of the IT work to India.
- Technical knowledge is considered completely unnecessary for IT managers. This leads to them setting directions to trends that don't make any sense. Right now we're chasing "cloud computing" and my manager has no idea what it is. He lights up every time he hears SOA and Web 2.0 community although he doesn't understand when it's appropriate to do those sorts of things. Nearly every IT manager is like that.
- I've been promoted every 2 or 3 years, which is much better than average. Having said that, my purchasing power has dropped. Some promotions come with $3k raises that barely impact cost of living, especially when you consider that you waited 3 years for it.
- Benefits used to include your home ISP bill and cell phone bill. Cutting those were simply thinly disguised salary cuts.
- About 75% of my co-workers are h1b guys shipped in from India. Their talent level is generally much lower than my American counterparts and in many cases they weren't even interviewed before hiring. HR and management isn't really qualified to tell who is good and who is bad.
- Cisco is addicted to cheap labor and it's had a material impact on our IT systems. Many of my co-workers are actually dumb while I used to be amazed at the brain pool of engineers I worked with.
- I get the idea Cisco thinks they pay too much for labor so they stopped giving cost of living raises and my promotions come with lousy raises. I'm a top ranked guy (3 out of 80) so I have to assume it's hitting everybody. I did get a $10k stock allotment but I'd rather have a $10k raise.

Advice to Senior Management

Your addiction to cheap IT labor is going to destroy this company. Also, you need more knowledgeable IT management. Promote technical people to the management ranks.

Pros

Though Fortune 100 status, growth company
Great executive management and CEO
Diversified product and technology portfolio

Cons

Salary can stagnate unless you leave the company and rejoin

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the job

Pros

Good salary
Great people
Woking with a well-known and hghly respected organzation
Working witrh an orgranzation that is global

Cons

Very political, it's not if you do a good job, it's how others think that you are doing. Getting ahead isn't really about doing the job but by doing pet projects that aren't related to you job but show that you think "outside of the box" and take initative..
Almost impossible to get a promotion, easiest way is to be in direct sales. As long as your team is making quota (on the direct sales side) they give them out like candy. But if you are in any tupe of support role they are very hard to come by. I was with the company 5+ years and never promoted even though got good ratings. If you have a team of ten or fifteen you better be ranked #1 or #2 in your group to get the promotion, which is hard to do b/c there's always a superstar.

Advice to Senior Management

No advice, b/c things will stay the ways they've always been.

Pros

Working here will give you an opportunity to work on state of the art leading products in a very high fast paced environment.

Cons

The environment once you are in the upper circles if very very political. I've seen much back stabbing and controlled communications wich are closed to some players.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open on an equal basis. Encourage the sharing of ideas and plans. Distribute new opportunities to those other than 'the same ole' players'.