Cisco

The work was technically challenging, and my coworkers were a great group to work with.

The benefits were decent, and the bonus was nice.

I was provided the tools needed.

There is a ridiculous amount of churn at the SVP level. I had 4 SVP leaders in 32 months. The churn just below them is the same. One VP lasted 2 months. No one is on the same page, but the big bonuses stay the same. They also contradict each other. Our SVP said to focus on quality and a group meeting. The next week, the group VP said to focus on time to market, not quality – the exact opposite. You tend to get siloed, and management does not seem able to figure out how to get workers access to the numerous training programs, or worse, this lack of access is intentional. Tell your manager to figure out how to get access to "Chuck" bucks for training. Intergroup working relationships can be difficult, probably due to the Cisco HR stacked ranking mechanism. People do not want to help out when integrating different products/functionality together. There's definite ageism in labor reduction practices. They buy other companies, then start killing the product, even when it's still achieving 20% growth. I'm sure the tier 1 telcos are going to be happy about that.

Clean up the churn in upper management.

Get your people access to the training programs that exist.

Stop the ageism.