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A Rather Unpleasant Intern Experience

Intern Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Cisco for less than 1 year
September 22, 2016
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
3.0
Negative OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Great Benefits High Pay Work from home Friendly People

Cons

Lack of control over anything that you do. "Architect" teams in the marketing department make all decisions and promises without consulting the engineers. Due to management structure, these decisions cannot be appealed.

As an intern, I was put on a team that was in no way prepared to take on an intern. They had great difficulty giving me anything to do. The one real project I had took me 3 weeks. After that, despite asking for more work, I was barely given anything to do.

My entire team was very upset with management and the decisions being made, but was powerless to even voice these opinions.

Satellite locations get overlooked a lot. You are a second-class employee if you're anywhere but San Jose.

I saw multiple instances of people being hired as developers and then being placed into a sysadmin job under the guise of DevOps.

Oh yeah, and they're laying off 20% of their workforce.

Advice to Management

Give engineers a say in decisions.

Stop with the absurd leadership structures that prevent teams from cooperating.

If you need sysadmins, hire sysadmins. Don't hire devs and then make them work admin jobs.

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