Cisco

Great exposure for new grads to the industry. Cisco integrates many technologies into their routers, although there is no attempt to reinvent the wheel.

No major R&D seems to be done at Cisco. The high-level proprietary algorithms or digital designs seem to be done by third-party companies, and ASIC designers like Marvell, Broadcom, Zarlink, etc.

Cisco is very large, so it's hard to make widespread generalizations. However, in the two business units I have worked in—a test engineering and a hardware design group—there is a lack of interest in developing the youthful engineer. People are happy keeping them dumb and giving them more menial work to do within the test group. The design group avoids giving them high-priority debug projects. The focus is on time to market for the next-gen routers, so much so that the designs of each generation are becoming cookie-cutter copies of the previous, with just slight variations and modularity added.

Hire and promote more youth. Yes, older, wiser, experienced people will get the job done today and meet that deadline you set unwisely two months from now, but youthful, energetic engineers will out learn, out grow, and eventually outpace the more experienced engineers.

Look at the average age of Google and Apple employees. Still wonder why their stock is worth so much more than Cisco's?