Cisco

Definitely one of the best companies to work for in terms of work-life balance. At least it’s true in terms of the team I worked for in Bangalore.

I was extremely lucky to have had amazing managers.

Work was okay initially. As a young engineer, I got to learn a lot. But as you grow in your career as an SDE, your opportunities to learn kinda reduce. You have a lot of senior folks around, and you might not end up getting your due recognition and opportunities.

Promotions are difficult as you grow. The same can be said for other companies.

Salary hikes are mediocre, the reason being budget constraints. But the company has the budget to spend billions to buy Splunk.

Opportunities to switch to a team in the US usually get shot down by pathetic executives in the US and India, even if the other team really likes you and wants you there. Basically, favorites of those people might get a chance in the future if an opportunity presents itself.

Overall salary, compared to other major companies in the market, it’s below the market average. I’ve seen smaller and bigger companies willing to offer close to 40 LPA for the same role.

Lots of reorgs and uncertainty. Priorities keep changing. Most recently, in our team, one person had to do two to three people’s work. It would have been valuable if the work was something cutting-edge, but it’s basic UI work and some simple backend services to set up simple API routes to serve content to the UI. I definitely got bored and burnt out quite fast.

Some VPs are just dead weight in the Security Business Group. Just because they don’t have yes-men under them, they fire some amazing, technically sound Directors and managers, and also end up losing a lot of good engineers. Please do keep an eye out for such people who try to do dirty politics and add no value to the organization. Clean them up, and Cisco will see prosperity again, and SBG might get some work done soon. Or you’ll end up with partial work and zero quality.