Cisco

Good compensation & benefits if you have an upper hand.

Once you have accepted the offer and joined, it is quite difficult to move up or get appreciated, unless you are good at kissing up to succeed.

Lot of engineers with mediocre talent; perhaps the budget dictates the quality of people. Bureaucracy and process bog down everything. The first skill you should need is politics and how to derail others' work.

Cisco internal Pulse employee survey is meant to get candid feedback about their boss/management and Cisco. But it is one big phony trick. You will be forced to give positive feedback about your boss and senior management. If not, you will have to face the same consequence on your performance review, because the management will indirectly warn you that they have a mechanism to identify what the individual responses are.

We are developing a product for the past 4-5 years under the excuse that the customers absolutely rely on it for their day-to-day network operations. But in fact, there is only a handful of actual users using the system out of thousands of projected users, and we haven't even added any net new features for more than the past 2 years with a 20+ team just doing bug fixes, because the code and standards are so poor.

There is not much respect/value for engineering, which leads to high attrition. It is like a revolving door. I have seen more than 25 people come, join, and leave in my team alone.

Decided it's time to move on.