Cisco

Work-life balance. Opportunity to interact with big names in the industry (if you take the initiative); you get to learn a lot from such experiences. Fairly open management. People are helpful. I loved working with the people here.

Opportunities to grow are few. Cisco is a sluggish mover. People tend to be on cruise-mode. There's a lack of innovative initiatives from within the company. To be fair, platforms have been created, but somehow the products/ideas which come out of them die. This is often because of the bureaucratic, sluggish nature of the process to productize them.

We need to be more nimble. There are certain products which are cruising. Move the best engineers out from them and put them in more challenging roles. If a good engineer is not challenged enough, either he/she would get rusted or just move on. We need to work to bring back the "COOLNESS" back into Cisco. From being the most sought-after company to work for, it has turned into an archaic, old-school company to work for.