Cisco

The company has great benefits and seems to truly care about its employees. There are lots of opportunities inside, and the work-life balance is okay.

100% remote and flexible time.

Benefits:

• Childcare vouchers
• Annual bonus
• Pension plan
• Stocks (discount of 15% for employees)
• Health insurance (extended to family, partner, and descendants)
• Life insurance (42x base salary)
• All Cisco certifications and trainings available and paid by Cisco
• Training platforms (O'Reilly, LinkedIn videos, Udemy, Harvard training, Pluralsight, MasterClass, Coursera, getAbstract)
• 400 euros to spend on personal classes, health, medicines, etc.
• Car and gas for tech leads (grade 11)

The management is really poor.

Everyone that wants to be a manager can become one. It doesn't matter if you'll be a good manager or not; if you want it, you just work your way out to it. And that's how you become a bad manager and end up ruining a whole team :)

The problem is that we have lazy and poor managers managing senior and high-performing engineers.

Micro-managing, tons of bureaucratic processes, and a lack of transparency make the life of engineers frustrating and pretty damn boring.

But it's a matter of luck. I had one good manager, a so-so manager, and now a terrible manager, so good luck with that.

This lack of transparency and bureaucracy is making Cisco lose its best talent to other top companies and competitors, but the guys at the top probably don't see that.

Well, I like the company. I like the colleagues, but I don't trust the management, and especially my manager, that's why I'm looking to move out :)