Cisco

The CIE group has a lot to offer, including lunch three times a week and a well-stocked fridge. More importantly, the office culture is excellent, and everybody works together to get things done.

At higher (technical) levels, you can become very much a master of your own destiny. Working hours can be flexible, and working from home is pretty much unrestricted (in non-COVID times).

Compliance, red tape, and bureaucracy are destroying the organization. As a highly experienced tech, I get to spend less and less time on technical issues each day, at the expense of attending meetings and arguing the effectiveness of mandates being imposed on our group from above. Between 2015, when Cisco bought OpenDNS, and now (2020), the burden of conformance has become too heavy to shoulder. Velocity, imagination, and ingenuity are all casualties of this huge organization.

Listen to engineering. Really listen.