Cisco Systems FAQ

Pros

agile, transparent, work with great team members. have the opportunity to learn the advanced technology in the Routing and Switch industry.

Cons

a little far away from the cloud computing area. salary is not competitive compared with other Internet companies. do not have a good restaurant and no free food nor free drinks.

Pros

- The bonuses are really good, if you work hard - Not expected to work after it's time to clock out - Weekend/Holiday pay is fantastic. You can earn so much more if you work a lot of weekends - Culture is all about being yourself, so you can be POC or LGBTQ+ and be in a welcome environment - Great benefits for health and dental, onsite medical and therapy - Certification discounts for any Cisco Certifications - Can use up all your PTO straight if you like, some people take a month off at a time - Good place to start for either those getting started in their career, or those that want to get their CCIE in a product. This is the fastest way to learn.

Cons

- You only learn the product you're meant to support, rarely the entire solution - No learning resources for the product you're supposed to support on smaller teams/products - Company is excited to promote products, then lay off team members *FOR* that product - Quarterly layoffs, but yearly promotion cycles - Weekend shifts are voluntold to you if you're on a smaller team, and aren't necessarily on a cycle (and you can expect to work every weekend. I just worked 2 months straight with 6/7 day weeks) - Business Unit/Escalation team will withhold information from TAC, which can keep us from being able to do our jobs - Any training will be sales training, and not support training, which means we won't know how to fix/tshoot problems any more than when we started. - The products we support are upsold and underdeveloped. You'll constantly find yourself saying "that feature isn't supported until a future release, even though the buttons are there and the documentation says how to set it up. Please don't use it as it's not production ready." - Burnout/turnover is high. It's nonstop when you work for Cisco. Don't expect to take time to study at home unless it's your passion, as everyone was usually too mentally drained at the end of the day. - Any time to study for certifications on smaller teams is impossible due to the sheer amount of work to do. On larger teams you can get time off the queue to study with management approval. Personal Experience: Was strung along for two years about a promotion, contributing to python IC and being the top case taker, but was still told "I can't promote you yet, even though you're at a starting pay grade. Next cycle, though." After being told that 3 times, and seeing two layoffs in two quarters, I broke out the resume. Because of all of the above, you'll find yourself working in situations where different levels of upper management will start to have daily calls on how to keep customers from pulling Cisco from their deployment, when in reality the product just wasn't ready to be sold to them.

Advice to Management

Help the BU push troubleshooting training to TAC so we actually know how to fix the product. I've been on multiple teams and this was an issue on each of them. Also, if the product has a database in it, teach the team MySQL. Other technologies exist to troubleshoot out there other than Cisco products, and we need to support all of it.

Pros

The best CEO in the world. Fantastic management, flexible working, great culture, good pay and options, car allowance, private health, pension.

Cons

Annual redundancies are part and parcel of working for such a large company.

Advice to Management

Keep going, thank you.

Pros

Great culture amazing benefits and initiatives. Flexible working

Cons

Not the most competitive of salaries

Advice to Management

make the right decisions for customers and employees while serving the business

Pros

Great work-life balance, flexible PTO, amazing benefits, great leadership

Cons

Too horizontal, slow to innovate, reorganizations every 4-6 months.

Advice to Management

Come up with a better gameplan and stick to it.