Pros

I spent over a decade at this company and here are my thoughts.

- USE TO BE a great company
- USE TO have great compensation
- You USE TO be appreciated
- You USE to be empowered

- If you are wanting a divorce or more time away from home, then this place is for you
- if you are Upper Managment, then you still have great pay and bonuses

If you still decide to come to work for Cisco, then be sure that you negotiate a great salary prior to starting. This will be it for at least a decade.

Cons

- They brag on how they value a balance of personal and work.. But if you are an engineer, then this does not apply

- Pay freeze since 2001
- Merit Increase freeze
- Bonus are a fraction of what they once were and shrinking every year
- Benefits are shrinking

Advancement is non-existent
Training on new products is a joke
Taking personal time off is frowned on (considering mgmt thinks that it your an engineer you should not have a personal life nor want to be home when you are sick) What you need sleep too?

Imagine if you can, taking a simple situation then have management put the most convoluted, backward processes on it so that it hampers any progress and makes your job harder by a thousand fold. Then when the project takes too long, or just fails it can not be their fault. (Even though they have you are doing the work of three engineers. ) Nope it has to be you did not prioritize it right. " What you want to get 4 hours sleep? "

Advice to Senior Management

Wake up and smell the coffee. You are loosing all your technical talent by believing your own rhetoric. You have Sr. managers that tell you exactly what you want to hear and do not let facts stand in the way. You let all the "outside talent" come in and demoralize and strip Cisco of its culture, motivation and innovation as these folks attempt to recreate the environments that they left.

Pros

Looks good on the resume.

Cons

A bad psychological experiment gone wrong. Management is enamored with its GE style of management. You will fit in fine if you like back stabbing and brown nosing.

Advice to Senior Management

Apologize for middle level management's lack of competency.

Pros

Very good place if you are a manager , you do not need to adhere to any software process, you do not need to plan for the project, just the dump the project to engineer and ask them to deliver it in 2-3 months time , ask them to work 20-24 hours per day , once the project is delivered , there will be hundreds of bugs due to lack of clarity and time , you move most of the engineers to another project and hire one new engineer and ask him to fix all the bugs , if any customer escalation happens just fire him and inform the customer that you have taken action.

Cons

Managers use foul language regularly, also they will motivate you by saying if you cannot do it by end of this month , you will be fired.

Project transition happens in a day , like in a day 4 people working in US in a project gets laid off , and people working in india are asked to handle this extra project as an extra assignment

You get work of 3 people without any knowledge transition , since management decided to lay off 3 peoples in your project, just after few months , they will forget you are working day and night in a project which had 4 people in it, your manager will ask you to stretch you 20-30% more to take up more work

If you fix a bug but cannot test it properly because of lack of infrastructure in your place , but if it comes back from the customer site , you will get fired

If you complain to higher management about your project managers , you will be removed from your current project and dumped into a more horrible project

Many cisco engineers have lost their family , child ,etc as they are forced to spend all of their time working for cisco

Cisco's Work from home policy sucks , like you work from office for 12 hours , rest of the time you work from home.

No software processes are followed , I do not understand how cisco passes software quality audit

In a quarter if there is less profit , layoff 20% of the people , in next quarter if there is good profit hire 20% new people, your company cannot sustain you even for a quarter.

In 24X7 call center there are at least 2 shifts , but people working in support and sustenance projects in cisco are asked to work 20-24 hours regularly by the management, like in your daytime you support customers from india , in night time you work for US customers , manager says Cisco globalization means you need to be available 24x7 and handle customer across the world.
You are expected to be available at your night time just to answer trivial queries which your manager gets after waking up in midnight just to check whether you are online or not.

Consultants are prefered over employee for development projects, employees are made to languish in horrible 24x7 support and sustenance projects until and unless they decide to quit the company

Whatever money cisco is saving by laying off people across world are used to acquire new new companies worth billions of dollars.

Advice to Senior Management

Dear Cisco managers,
Stop trying too hard to screw your engineers, do not expect to people to work more than 12 hours per day, it does not help your company
Stop treating employees like slaves, a slave can produce a slave product only, you are winning since there is no competitor, your product as well as support sucks big time, for the simple reason if you ask people to work more than 12 hours, he will do a shitty job
Make 2 12x7 shifts for engineers and work 24x7
Take off welcome to human network advertisement , 90% of your customer does not understand , and your engineer calls it a slave network , whatever money you save , try to improve employee's work life
The human resource and software quality teams are invisible in Cisco , do something so that they are readily available to engineers

Pros

Name recognition
Good benefits - besides salary, the benefits package is very good including severence
Insight to new technology and products
Great people (in general)

Cons

Terrible middle management - way too many managers who are just clueless
Too political - expected at big companies such as Cisco
No chance for career advancement - due to combination of terrible management and useless performance review
Unfair and awful performance evaluation - what you get 100% depends on your manager, it has nothing to do with how well you performed.
Zero innovation
Zero respect for engineers - even though technology is what drives this company, management typically has no respect for technical folks. Engineers are treated like warm bodies under managers who have no clue about what they do.
Terrible place for superb talents - superb talents doing superb work are almost never recongized unless he/she kiss a**. Your manager generally takes all the credit for the work.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognize the good people and get rid of the dead wood. Infuse capable middle management and make this place a fun environment to work again.

Pros

Legacy leadership in networking
Positive on resume (for now)
Still some astonishingly smart and talented people
Interesting view of technology industry

Cons

Increasingly internal focus
Customer satisfaction declining
Innovation acquired from outside rather than developed inside
"Boards and councils" lead to management by committee

Advice to Senior Management

For all the talk of collaboration, the boards and councils approach is creating a toxic environment, eroding accountability and slowing progress. Make accountability clear and credible to reverse the political kudzu choking the company.

Pros

It is incredibly stable and nothing will ever happen. Its great if you want to make sure you have job and income stability.

Cons

Just like the pro, nothing ever happens. You will not advance despite your skills and performance. They are a merger company and gain talent through acquisitions. Unless you are upper management avoid at all costs.

Advice to Senior Management

I would strongly suggest making the people who work for you feel appreciated. I came via acquisition and watched the morale and talent plummet from the previous company.

Pros

I started working for Cisco thinking that this is the company that I wanted to retire with. It had the name and the market share to prove. The reputation of treating employees fairly and rewarding them based on performance was also high on my list.

Cons

During the bad times, the true Cisco came to light. Bad Managers were promoted. Wrong decisions were taken and good people either were let go or simply resigned, like myself.

Advice to Senior Management

Get to know your people and your customer, and stop being arrogant and claim that you want to change the world.

Pros

* Good name recognition
* Breadth of non-engineering opportunities
* There are some really smart people
* Every so often, cutting edge tech

Cons

* Lots of maintenance
* Very slow moving company
* They're more than willing to cut benefits
* They turn off half the lights in the buildings
* Middle management is expanding
* Senior management seems clueless most of the time

Advice to Senior Management

* Listen to the engineers
* Respect the engineers
* Don't forget the engineers exist
* Let engineers do good work without being hampered by some arcane "process"
* Stop with the councils and boards
* Refocus on the core of Cisco, not the peripheral crap

Pros

Lots of opportunities in all areas of the business.

Cons

Most directors just float. Promote the same kind of people. Culture of conflict avoidance. Do not rock the boat here!

Advice to Senior Management

Needs a major shake up at the middle management level. especially in non engineering/sales functional areas.

Pros

>Excellent work ethics
>Excellent culture
>Great attitude of peers seniors
>Good Pay
>There is not prejudice and shifting jobs inside cisco.

Cons

>Company is too cautious
>Importance is not given to engineering. Its more of a excellent marketing company
>Not very research oriented

Advice to Senior Management

>Take more risk and improve engineering.
>Taking over companies are not always the solution
>Be open to new ventures in consumer market as well