Cisco

Cisco has great benefits, decent compensation, and is generally a great place to work.

The company is greatly held back by the weight of its previous successes. Its flagship products (router/switches) are powered by an OS written in the early 90s. The groups that work on these products are typically 10 years behind the rest of the industry and are so large that the rest of the company is held back by them.

Management has been aware of this for years and has been acquiring other companies to do the development work that its core engineering groups are simply incapable of doing. This makes the company a bit schizophrenic, as there is no real coordinated effort to move the company in a specific direction.

This is not a condition unique to Cisco; Microsoft famously has similar problems with Windows. It does not make the company a bad one, but it's certainly not as forward-looking as you might think. The siren call of several billion dollars a quarter for basically not changing anything is tough to ignore, and I certainly don't blame them for it. But as an engineer, it's frustrating to watch this happen.

Embrace public cloud technologies for Engineering as a whole, not just the switching/routing groups. Most modern teams desperately want to use AWS but are constantly held up by ancient Infosec rules.

Recognize that dog-fooding UCS is very difficult for engineering groups without huge budgets. UCS is a premium product, with premium prices even with internal discounts. The current approach of centralizing UCS support to a single team is not allowing teams to actually use it the way Cisco recommends using it to customers.

The old-guard IT teams need to be shaken up. There are far too many IT teams composed of hundreds of contractors that do nothing but answer cases. There is barely any automation in the core IT areas (compute/networking). Whatever you are being told by the VPs/directors about "modernizing IT" is either not happening or happening much more slowly than you realize.