Pros

1. The Name "Cisco" on your resume.
2. Get experience of working with Global Teams across the world.
3. Being in Silicon Valley.

Cons

1. Absolutely non-transparent management.especially management in NSSTG.
2. In the downturn economy, upper management just wants to see money on the balance sheet. So each business unit competes with other business units within Cisco resulting in bloodbath of project cancellations and fights for who is best with disregard to innovation with collaboration. Funny thing every group claims or assumes what they are doing is the cutting edge.
3. Zero or Negative chance of any sort of promotion or salary raise or career development changes for Software Engineers regardless of their current grade. Reason: The economy. Always how much ever an employee performs, even if he gets excellent ratings in the performance review, the blame is put on the economy for no raises, promotions - and the a big FAT statement is thrown: "You better be happy that you still have a job, other are much worse than you...."
4. Extreme back stabbing within employees.
5. Regional politics - Indians promoting Indians buddies, Chinese promoting Chinese buddies etc, if at all some promotion happens.
6. Extremely and Stupidly frugal. Productivity increasing equipment purchases (even $50 valued) not approved by first line mangers. Absolutely no training (even internal) is approved for engineers. So skills will become absolutely extinct for engineers.
6. Extremely incompetent first line managers - several long timers who just don't care or have the power anymore to fight for their groups visibility in the upper management and just worried about their fat 401ks and bonuses.
7. Big time ass-kissing by first line managers to their upper levels and so on. In the recent rounds of layoffs (called limited restructuring) not a single manager got affected. The manager is always safe. Only the employees were given pink slips.

Of course things were good 1.5 years ago when economy was good - if they were this worse when the economy was good, people would just move to other companies. Since people don't have much jobs on the market now and are basically stuck with Cisco, Cisco takes employees for a ride - particularly the engineers in grade 6, 8 etc.

Advice to Senior Management

Be Transparent. Don't be extremely frugal. Try to spend some money to keep the employee morale up. Reward good employees. Don't just reward only executives and cut all the benefits, raise and promotions of all the other employees, because when the economy is good, 30 - 40% will just jump the ship.