Cisco

The office in Bedfont Lakes is beautiful, with sleeping pods (which no one uses), a cafeteria, and a subsidized Starbucks coffee.

Everyone I've met was friendly.

The company cares about its employees.

They championed work from home before COVID.

You feel like a small cog in a machine.

Progression in my team was purely based on how much the boss likes you.

Same with projects; some projects run for years in isolation, costing millions, just because the main people working on it are good friends with the boss.

It's hard to give advice for a company that's 70,000 people, but systemic issues such as objective-based career progression and more 1-on-1 meetings between managers and staff would help.

The company needs to have confidential manager review surveys to gauge how each manager is doing.