Cisco

• Big company with lots of great resources available to perform your job efficiently.
• Decent food at a reasonable price.
• Working for such a well-known global company makes you stand out as far as your resume or in networking events.
• Amazing products and solutions.

• Extremely hard, and depending on the group, impossible to grow within the company.
• The ecosystem of multiple companies and vendors makes communication among departments and groups very difficult.
• 70% of the people I know in the company are contractors who, like me, have no benefits.
• Below-average salary for contractors, but it will depend a lot on which group you are in.
• The company is not as diverse as it claims: Basically, you have few "whities" in management and corporate, and a massive troop of engineers.
• The majority of the open positions listed on the website are not really open; they are there for another reason.
• If you work by hours, be prepared to work a few extra hours for free, as Cisco usually negotiates project prices with third-party companies, and many of those companies squeeze those projects into fewer hours. My whole team is paid for fewer hours than actually worked; I don't know how Cisco gets away with it without trouble.

If the strategy is saving costs on benefits by using contractor workers as your major workforce, make sure to watch each of the vendors closely to avoid major lawsuits.