Cisco

Large company, lots of different opportunities. You can go into Cisco as a nobody and leave as a professional networking guy with 5 Cisco certs under your belt. You have to take advantage of the situation.

In the group I worked in, there was no work-life balance; it was all work. I've heard that's not normal for Cisco though. With the group I was in, it wasn't the pursuit of knowledge; it was the pursuit of getting it done. I would try to understand more about how things worked, but would often get back the response from someone of, "I don't know, why do you care?"

Don't let your group get kicked around. Other managers would shove problems onto our group, and we had to deal with them. A good manager would have pushed back and not let us have to do others' work.