Cisco

• They pay well.
• Opportunity to learn lots of networking technologies if you are willing to put in the effort.
• Flexible hours and easy to telecommute (everyone gets a laptop).
• Good employee stock purchase plan (decent discount on out-of-pocket stock purchase).

• Flex hours and a laptop quickly become an excuse for being asked to work anytime, all the time, even evenings and weekends.
• Life/work balance sucks.
• Culture of micromanagement and lack of trust in employees, even experienced ones.
• Outdated/broken processes and tools, which makes all those additional long hours spent seem like a waste.
• No periodic salary increases unless you get promoted, which can take forever. It's not uncommon to find people with the same salary for over 5 years, even some up to 10 if they started high.
• No stock options or RSUs unless you are at the top of the food chain.
• 4 weeks of vacation never increase regardless of tenure. If you or family get sick, there are no sick days, so you need to use vacation days. You are also forced to use vacation days during the mandatory company-wide Christmas break shutdown.
• A lot of legacy systems and technologies, so there could be very few opportunities to work on the latest and greatest tech depending on the organization you are in.
• Support heavy load. Most developers spend > 50% of their time fixing bugs.
• Lots of politics, and I mean A LOT. Most times politics win over technical merit or even common sense.
• Some tendency for upper management to "bully" employees (public shaming, escalating up the management chain versus one-on-one discussions and alternatives).

Empower your employees and give them space to amaze you.

If you use command and control, you are really bottling up people.

Leadership is about motivating people and helping them grow, not forcing them to do things that enhance your own career prospects.