Pros: Best Management and team culture. Always pushes employees to be better and learn new technologies.

Cons: So far, a great place to work for.

Pros: Great work-life balance. There are no strict deadlines for almost all of the work items. Very flexible environment. Enormous work from home options, paid time off benefits. Positive culture in general inside the team. Overall, fun to work at in your day-to-day life. Customer-focused company. Everybody makes sure customer asks are accomplished and served well.

Cons: You will find yourself struggling to receive quality work and project guidance. Lack of long-term vision for products. Comparatively less feature development efforts to make the product great, while comparative newborn products in the market from other brands are bringing a lot of features to the table. Most of the feature asks come from the Customer/Marketing side. Less internal research and motivation to bring new features to the table. Lack of collaboration between teams. Hence, you often find multiple teams ending up working on the same thing. Due to the same titles across Software and Test engineers, the PERM process is getting delayed due to work restructuring. As an early-in-career individual, it is not a great place to be for tech skills learning and career growth. Lot more talking before committing to any project and less doing.

Pros: Everyone I interacted with was friendly, helpful, and professional. Although management pushed for hybrid working from what was previously full remote, it was a 'come at your own time' culture, so long as you met your responsibilities. The break room had a fancy coffee machine, and management would cater lunches once a week. Most days I would come into the office to do any work that needed hands-on configuration of our testbed in the lab, grab lunch, then continue to work from home.

Cons: Well, I was laid off after 6 months, so obviously layoffs. The late-night or early-morning meetings to catch up with the India team were tiresome. An incredible breadth of information you have to have a working knowledge of: every protocol, the custom OS's and commands on the devices, and how to work with Cisco proprietary systems like SD-WAN. You have to learn the CLI commands before you can move onto GUI, since you can't accomplish many things with a GUI alone. Personally, my manager was outright adversarial with me as a junior. I was put under the wing of 3 different people in trying to acclimate to the job; it was highly stressful trying to get up to speed. Few transferable skills: I worked with a Python library that was eventually made open source, but there wasn't too much documentation, and few employers care about my experience with a library that's solely used to test networks.