Pros: Technology leader. Management supports family and work-life balance. Work-from-home option available. Great place for people with lots of people skills.

Cons: For a very good engineer, it might take a lot more effort than a person who is good with people skills. Hiring standards are bad. You might have to face and work with below-average engineers sometimes. Unfair promotion, recognition, and appraisal.

Pros: Good full-time conversion rate

Cons: Hire and fire policy at Max

Pros: I was hired by Cisco in a program called the Cisco Choice Program. For those of you who have never heard of the Cisco Choice Program, let me tell you what it is. When I signed my offer letter, I had to choose one of five given start dates. When I came in on the first day, I saw many other new hires like me who were hired as Choice hires. For the next month, we were bombarded with information about the company and different Business Units within the company. After a month, once we had all that information, all the Choice new hires got to choose the BU, the team, and the manager they wanted to work for. Isn't this awesome? Cisco gives you an opportunity to work with so many different technologies, roles, and flexibility to move around. The compensation is also good, which adds to the reasons to work for Cisco.

Cons: The recognition and feedback system could be better. I would like to see some healthy feedback about my job from upper management and recognition for the goals accomplished. I have also heard (haven't experienced yet) that there is always some politics involved when it comes to promotions, passing projects, and things like that. There is no customer interaction between the engineer who actually builds a product and the customers who use the product. Cisco should also try to focus on the overall development of its employees rather than just the area they are currently working on.