Cisco

Possible to work from home.

Good benefits: free health insurance.

Buy up to 5 days extra holidays.

Good work-life balance.

Everyone I work with are genuine and nice people.

Get to work with modern technologies, environments, and programming languages.

The products we are working on are very new, and so you do get to spend a good bit of time actually coding new features versus just bug fixing, etc.

Good hardware for work.

Very good to the wider community and are continuously raising money for good causes.

No career progression.

Very possible to get stuck in the same position/salary for years on end in this company. Seem to have no budget for career advancement at the moment.

Very difficult to stay motivated.

Good engineering practices are not always recognized. Management say they care about quality but only seem to reward engineers who produce at speed but cause many bugs in our products. Actions speak louder than words.

No team structure. You don't know what you will be working on week to week. Very varied. Can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the person. Not what I like in a work place environment.

Very frugal in general with employees, i.e., don't help pay for the Christmas Party. We used to have release parties but since we are releasing on a continuous basis, this has all dried up. Again, no recognition to the dedication of employees.

Since we develop communications applications, there is a culture of always being online, and it can be common to seeing people replying to messages at 11-12 PM at night. Can be very difficult to switch off. Management don't directly encourage this but also don't try to curb this behavior.

Canteen is expensive for what you get. Cisco didn't provide the catering contractor and canteen staff with the proper facilities, so they have to make do with pre-made factory food and microwaves. Food seems highly processed, and as such, the quality isn't very good.

Vending machines have no healthy options.

Senior Management are more obsessed with image, i.e., "Winning Great Place To Work," instead of actually improving the work environment for employees.

I feel that management don't listen to employees' concerns. I had many experiences of engineers on the team voicing common-sense concerns about the direction of the product to management only to fall on deaf ears. Eventually, the customer voiced the same concerns, and so we ended up wasting countless engineering hours backtracking on previous work. This has happened on many occasions.

Over the last number of years, there have been annual redundancies without fail. It has actually affected the Galway site a couple of times. One year, a whole team was let go. This was without consideration to the performance of individual members of the team. So, it doesn't matter how good you are; you could still be let go at any time.