Cisco

Good technical work. Workspace facilities. Cafeteria food. Opportunity to work with talented engineers.

At SP Routing BU in India, engineers work at least 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no weekends or holidays, and you would even be indirectly asked to work on the days when you file a leave. There is no respect given for engineers, and work-life balance is completely unheard of.

In the days when we talk about abolishing keywords like "Slave" even from technical jargon, the engineers in SP India are treated as if they are "owned" by Cisco and expected to be available 24x7.

The entire hierarchy of senior management consists of an egoistic and narcissistic lot who treat engineers like some sort of tools to be used and disposed of. They don't like any engineer saying he/she is overloaded with work; that's something they hate to hear.

So, engineers are expected to not complain and just continue working on their stretch targets during their entire life, sacrificing their personal lives and health, so that the Management can claim to get more work done by fewer people. If anyone complains, they would be pushed back saying that we are not working "optimally," or we should think of "automation" instead of doing "donkey's work," etc., etc. That would certainly not be motivating at all, after working on complex technical problems. The management seems to be totally clueless when it comes to understanding the value of the technical contributions of engineers, and they just go after some jargons and fancy terminologies and metrics.

The main responsibility of the Management is to use the whip and constantly apply pressure on employees to squeeze the maximum out of them, which is a strategy that is systemically pushed down from top to bottom in the hierarchy of management. They would often be hypocritical and "encourage" the employees to give "open comments," but all they are expecting is that engineers should just "align" themselves with the general labor strategy and directions from the top.

Project schedules are derived based on a sort of "bargaining process" between the engineers and management, resembling some sort of civil construction work. The engineers go with a particular effort estimate which will be outright rejected by the Management, who would want "justifications" for every single day projected. The implicit bargaining process results in engineers cutting down the effort projections by half, agreeing to "absorb" the work.

Eventually, the project tends to slip, and engineers work 24x7 to meet the targets, only to get constantly criticized and tortured with sarcastic comments regarding the delays and slippage. Even though the quality of technical work done in the BU is superior, there is never a sense of achievement, and it appears like the management constantly wants to make every engineer feel that they are failures.