Cisco

Cisco has fairly good employee benefits (health and financial). The company covers an incredible breadth of technologies, from core networking to fringe peripherals, such as the Flip camera, allowing people to switch to new technologies without leaving the company.

How enjoyable your work is frequently depends on your first few lines of management (up to the director level); fortunately, switching to a different group is easy enough (HR can light fires if needed).

There is a generally accepted notion among management that things only get done if there is at least one manager constantly "driving" an issue.

What winds up happening instead is you have multiple managers that are not communicating with each other and are contributing very little to the actual work being done, yet are given credit for the work that gets done.

There are definitely areas of the company that are better to work in than others, where the above con is not a problem, but it's hit-or-miss.

Poor communication between managers can mean that you're given conflicting priorities or asked for status updates repeatedly.

At the end of the day, your engineers are what make you money. Treat them like people, rather than things to be squeezed dry.

You constantly talk about work-life balance, but never practice what you preach, setting schedules that cannot be met with the resources you invest.

As an engineer, I feel like management should exist to offer very high-level project guidance and to strive to enable engineers to focus on their jobs. Project details and fine-grained schedules should be left up to the technical people. This seems to be the intent of the parallel tech/management tree, but somehow the ball was fumbled somewhere along the way and we now have managers providing oversight of technical issues at very low levels and directing engineers in technical decisions.