Cisco

• Name recognition
• An inside look at some big companies' work (I hope not all of them are like this)
• An inside look at how NOT to manage a team
• Experience working with a global team (not recommended unless you're a masochist)
• Increased ability to detect insincere people
• Ability to practice inherent lawyer skills every engineer never knew they had
• Increased tolerance to abuse (I decided no more for me; I did not go to school so I could work 24x7)
• Ability to test your level of patience with being uncreative
• Increased ability to push work to others (I don't like this, but the system encourages it)
• Ability to practice detaching passion from work (I actually like engineering, but this place just destroys the engineering spirit; I am moving on before it dies)

• Useless exercises
• Tedious
• Primitive infrastructure; I was actually assigned to do regression, just pressing buttons.

Very stressful since I wanted to create something.

• Infighting for resources (machines, disk space, tools)
• Worked through holidays; I value my free time.
• THIS IS A SALES COMPANY; ENGINEERS ARE NOT VALUED.
• Very monotone makeup of employees, very subservient employees.
• Low morale
• A lot of knee-jerk reactions, no long-term planning, no foresight.
• Management is totally disconnected from engineers, living in LALA land.
• Human Network my kabooze, more like the Slave Network.
• Too many contractors doing okay jobs and leaving employees to clean up the mess.
• Impossible deadlines, constant pressure.

Work/life

• Indian higher-ups pushing work to India.
• Continuous breach of contract: salaried for 40 hours, working 60++

Cut the fat and invest in your engineers. Stop buying technology and slapping the Cisco logo on it.

This is the sign of a non-engineer-centric company, but more of a sales, image-centric company.

Invest in infrastructure for engineers. Stop hoarding cash. In a family, if one member suffers, others rush to help, i.e., willing to make less when times are tough instead of laying off people and offshoring work.