Pros: Great people, flexible work environment, and a lot of good projects to work on.

Cons: Compensation is not good enough. You need to join Cisco at a higher salary initially.

Pros: Awesome work culture, flexible timings.

Cons: The technology stack is very traditional. Growth is very limited.

Pros: Cisco has fairly good employee benefits (health and financial). The company covers an incredible breadth of technologies, from core networking to fringe peripherals, such as the Flip camera, allowing people to switch to new technologies without leaving the company. How enjoyable your work is frequently depends on your first few lines of management (up to the director level); fortunately, switching to a different group is easy enough (HR can light fires if needed).

Cons: There is a generally accepted notion among management that things only get done if there is at least one manager constantly "driving" an issue. What winds up happening instead is you have multiple managers that are not communicating with each other and are contributing very little to the actual work being done, yet are given credit for the work that gets done. There are definitely areas of the company that are better to work in than others, where the above con is not a problem, but it's hit-or-miss. Poor communication between managers can mean that you're given conflicting priorities or asked for status updates repeatedly.