Cisco

The benefits are outrageously good. The compensation is outrageously good. If you are a survivor, you will do well here. If you are a high performer, you will do financially well here. If you slack, you may actually do better than the high performers, as management keeps the slackers around to cut them every 6 months when LRs are mandated. When you are impacted by an LR, and you will be, you earn a great exit package (I earned one year of base pay for 4 years of work). The DCP is pretty cool for 13/89s, but on reflection, if I knew Cisco was such an unstable company, I wouldn't have invested in the DCP program, as now all my DCP is paid in one big chunk in one year instead of spread over several years as I had planned. Live and learn :)

Cisco's definition of culture in my brief 4-year stint was "everything is about money."

That is good and bad – good because you can make some serious dough here, bad because there is no sense of community in the workforce.

Cisco has limited restructurings in spring and fall. The lifers refer to avoiding a layoff as "being safe," which is, in my mind, an oxymoron. There is no such thing as safety at Cisco.

If you come here, be prepared to move on when you hit the wrong set of cost lists. High performance is no guarantee of "safety" either; I earned 1.3x-1.5x multipliers on my bonuses every year for 4 years – still impacted by an LR.

Most restructuring affects older (highly compensated) workers. There is no other logical conclusion to the restructurings than they are meant to cut already well-trained, long-term growth employees and replace them with a younger, untrained workforce.

These LRs create intense stop-start energy in the company nearly all the time, as everyone is in a state of panic. This "Fog of War" is difficult for innovators to execute in, making Cisco pivot like an Exxon Valdez rather than an Eagle.

Cisco completely doesn't understand open source, evidenced by the latest round of LRs in 2018 that impacted nearly every engineer doing any sort of open-source work.

The engineering workforce is far too compliant, resulting in high degrees of passive-aggressive behavior rather than assertiveness.

Rethink your tactics on restructuring efficiency. I know the bean counters "think" it's cheaper to cut headcount and pay restructuring charges than to move people around in the company. The reality is you constantly are churning your excellent staff and creating lifetime enemies in the industry in the process.

Pro Tip: Open Source is table stakes in today's business environment. If you see it as a donation rather than influence, do you also see your job as an executive donation, rather than influence? One of the many purposes of open source is to influence business outcomes in a positive way, just like you do in your day job as an executive. I don't understand why this is so difficult for Cisco executives to grasp.

Cisco's products are made up of 50-90% open source components. It was always embarrassing to me that Cisco had such a high rate of consumption of open source, yet such a low rate of influence as a result of under-investment.

Finally, don't wear so much BLING on the beat; it makes you appear tone-deaf after laying off 4000 people and donating $50 million to charity.