Cisco

Decent benefits. Looks good on resume. Was great until about 2003-4, but has slid downhill since.

Boxborough is full of dead wood. Most of the talented people have left or are itching to.

Zero balance between work and home life. It's 24/7 stress due to an oversized workload, undersized staff, and too many people who are mediocre at their jobs.

Fair or not, there's a perception from other locations that San Jose is full of people who get paid for doing very little. It's all who you know. For sure the company is dominated by the iOS group, none of whom seem to understand software development.

Brain-dead stress on metrics is driving the company and leading to ridiculous behaviors. Example: rating managers weekly on their bug counts, while concurrently outsourcing QA to a third party in India where worker performance is based on how many bugs they find. You can guess what happened.

Morale at Boxborough is extremely low. Then corporate came up with the PULSE employee satisfaction survey and tied it back-door to managers' compensation. So now the managers are mad at the rank and file for being unhappy. I know one manager that actually made his people take the survey twice with an unsubtle threat that they'd better score "happier" next time.

Managing by metrics is not managing. Get out of San Jose sometime and learn about the rest of your company. You can't manage every group like you would the router group and expect it to work; it won't.