Cisco Systems Reviews in Raleigh-Durham, NC Area

Pros

Abundant opportunities to learn
Ethical
Relevent
Flexible work at home opportunities
All business resources are automated allowing for increased effectiveness and job satisfaction.
Wonderful new tools to support collaboration.

Cons

Moving to reduce expenses- most perks have stopped and salaries are capped for strong performers in order to invest in employees whose salary is below the benchmark. Feels pretty socialistic.

Advice to Senior Management

Reorganization is a means to an end- it is not an end in and of itself. The habitual reorganization that occurs is a deterrent to progress and completion of goals. I Initatives are "re-born", "under new management" when a more direct path would have been to expect and inspect results.

Pros

If you're raising a family, and are looking for a stable employer with decent pay, good benefits and flexible working arrangements (in at least some parts of the company), Cisco is a good place to work. While there is a lot of big-company bureaucracy, much of it can be safely ignored by engineers.

Cons

Cisco is very slow to adopt new technology, and its development strategy, when there is one, is plodding at best. Product direction is more political than strategic, and much of the development effort is to play catch-up with what is already on the market. In many cases, internal wrangling prevents us from delivering the best product, even if we've already developed it. If you're looking to blaze new technology trails, Cisco has limited opportunities. You're better off working for a startup and angling to be bought by Cisco.

Advice to Senior Management

Cisco's senior leadership often has very good strategic ideas, but it fails in driving those through the political quagmire of middle management. More than once I've seen senior management and individual contributors on the same page, ready to drive forward in an exciting direction, only to be derailed by mid-level directors with turf to protect. This is often due to what Cisco rewards. A team can develop a terrible product that no one wants, late and over budget, and still declare success (and receive large bonuses) as long as it can spin the right story about how hard everyone worked. So we create an organization of arsonist firefighters. When a team goes completely off track, we pull people off of other projects and give them to the manager who caused the problem in the first place. At Cisco, you get an empire by mismanaging what you have, over-committing to ensure a crisis, and carefully managing the blame.

Pros

Promotes innovation. Offers opportunities to work across boundaries. Promotes collaboration!

Cons

Complicated organizational structure. Some overlap in group responsibilities.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work! Focus on user interface for end user products.

Pros

If you are curious and self-motivated, this is a great place to work. Learning is limited only by what you choose to do or not do.

Cons

24-hour global schedule can be tiring at times. The work never stops. Hard to find the elusive "work-life balance" that is spoken of so often.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to employees. Don't work them so hard that they decide to go elsewhere. I have seen true talent leave and many stay only because they could not find a position in another company or another part of Cisco.

Pros

Lots of opportunity for advancement.

Cons

Transparent guidelines for what it will take for advancement and promotion are inconsistently available. Some part of the organization have two year pipes for promotions; others are promoting more frequently.

Advice to Senior Management

establish bona fide guideliens for promotions across the company.

Pros

Great work experience for students getting into the networking field. Sure the work is very basic but it really lets you get to know the inner workings of all Cisco has to offer in its products. I learned so much while working there.

Cons

Unless you take a year off to work for Cisco it is very difficult to get more indepth into the learning process. You start out with the basics but you get what you put into it.

Advice to Senior Management

Let the more senior interns help and teach the newer ones and let them run the trainning programs. The newer classes of interns still say they learn more from seniors then from training modules.

Pros

smart coworkers, fast paced, challenging

Cons

very large and sometimes slow to change

Advice to Senior Management

pls remember it is just a job

Pros

Stable company - could spend your life and retire at peace. But it has lost all its charm of the good old 90's

Cons

Not enough employee development opportunities
Not a fair promotion process
Employees are not rewarded for good work
Long standing loyal employees are starved for promotion while those that come in with acquisition get a jump
Overall low employee moral!

Advice to Senior Management

Start recognizing employees for good work
Stop scaling back on benefits
Shutting off electricity at 5:00 pm is a bad idea. It doesn't provide an environment to succeed
Recognizing employees for 5 years of service with 1 glass ball, 10 years of service with 2 glass balls and 15 years of service with 3 glass balls was ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS!!!

Pros

-Great Culture
-Flexibility
-Work from home option
-Great place to learn

Cons

-Promotion process is bad.
-Not able to move forward which leaves you discouraged.
-Compenstaion could be much better. Paid less than competitors

Advice to Senior Management

Please do something about the promotion process and the salary increases.

Pros

- Steady paycheck
- Benefits (though slightly below-average)
- Good at leveraging market dominance for quick profit
- Salesman/marketeer paradise (engineers bane)

Cons

I've spent more than a decade and a half working at Cisco trying to improve quality:

- *Nothing to offer an innovative, competent, honest engineer who's looking to effectively apply their hard earned technical skills* If you take pride in your work, look elsewhere. CIsco's so-called "collaborative" environment focuses primarily on CYA tactics dominated by political motivations to manipulate image. In these meetings you'll see discussions center around how to make project "look good" and how to hide issues that "look bad". No discussion or activity on doing the right thing for customer and for quality of product(s).
- *Cheapest solution is synonymous with best solution* With such low skilled engineering and management talent in place there is no understanding of common processes such as trade-off analysis between quality of work, time and cost. You are expected to produce the quickest, cheapest solution under all circumstances as long as it looks good on a slide when presented to execs. This is culturally pervasive throughout the organization.
- *Impossible to exert influence* Staff and management are so unsophisticated about the industry and market realities that they don't even know what they don't know. There is no possible way to influence in this type of environment. Your years of finely honed technical skills and field experience carry no weight among the myriad of sales and marketing execs who can't think beyond the current quarter. Short-term sales goals trump every argument under all circumstances.
- *Poor quality work is rewarded* The formula for success is say "yes", do poor work, hide tracks, wait for next re-org, get promoted. There is no follow up on effectiveness or quality of work - ever. You are simply measured on how quickly you get a task done and how well you "make yourself look and your boss look" for quarterly ops reviews. If it looks good on a single power point slide, then it is good - reality is nothing.
- *Factory worker mentality* Management overly obsessed with the adage "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". With marketing and sales dominating executive ranks, the metrics used to measure performance are nothing short of comical. Not only are such metrics easy to manipulate through unproductive activity but often encourage adversarial internal relationships (for example, tester performance evaluated positive on bugs found per week and developer performance evaluated negative on same metric). This makes managements job easy when it comes time to rank and lay off employees but severely hurts product quality, employee moral and the corporate bottom line.
- *Unrealistic expectations* Other than sales opportunities, execs are years behind in product deployment strategy and customers quality requirements. Execs haven't a clue what it takes to roll-out production ready products and continually ignore people who know and can prove otherwise. As a result, engineers are expected to make up difference in totally absurd time frames and that can only be achieved by producing poor quality work. And if you don't meet expectations, you will hear about it next review.

Advice to Senior Management

Executives at Cisco don't listen to anyone unless they are telling them what they want to hear. As cliche as this sounds, they truly surround themselves with "yes men" and have no tolerance otherwise. They succeeded in a dis-functional corporate culture and can't even conceive of anything different. The only way things will change is when the company starts losing money. Of course, by that time it is too late. The people who got you in that position are exactly the wrong people to get you out of it.

I've wasted over a decade trying to dispense advice and give up trying. Good luck.