Cisco

Great benefits for employees outside Silicon Valley. Respectable benefits for Silicon Valley companies.

Generally higher than average local salaries than other companies in RTP.

Many opportunities to learn and grow professionally, so long as you drive your growth.

Top-notch people to work with in the US.

Complex technology.

Cisco culture. Have a serious family emergency, or even a minor one, most groups understand and always say, "Take care of your family." Wonderful examples of employees out for five months with medical issues, and Cisco and individual teams took care of them and their families. A child out with a serious illness, again, most groups really pitch in to help out.

Long-term, short-term disability outside California is not as good as in California, but better than most companies in RTP. Parental leave meets local laws, but is not equal throughout the company.

ICs allowed to make decisions.

PTO at four weeks starting can't be beat.

Cisco is very risk-averse for long-term projects. Some are ahead of their time, but the company is not willing to develop the market or save a product for when the market is available.

New products only seem to build on existing ones. Market share is lost to cloud vendors, etc. New Security Services, along with Advanced Services, are pulling in most of the money.

Workloads can vary by group. Yearly layoffs are becoming a thing. It seems quicker and less expensive to lay off top technical people and hire new ones with some new expertise, rather than really invest in and develop current dedicated staff.

Mobile worker cubes and open work environments are not conducive to burying your head into work.

I'm sure there are far worse places to work in North Carolina.

Please change risk attitudes from the top down, please! Take the big risks – ones that may take several years to pan out, just like Google, Amazon, GE, Tesla, and Microsoft.

Please stop being afraid of leaving core competencies. Use your world-class engineering staff to dream, and dream big. Develop products that rival the success of Cisco IP Phones, CCM, and Unified Communications; capitalize on it; and promote the company brand with the public again, so that they notice the Cisco phones in Petsmart and Home Depot.

Finally, the mobile worker cubes don't actually help morale or productivity for core engineering staff. Most of us couldn't hear ourselves think. Engineering staff need to collaborate, but at the same time need a dedicated location (not at home) to think, plan, and code. I had a difficult time staying focused, plus no room for my Webster's dictionary, Thesaurus, Marketing, and Technical Doc Style guides.