Cisco

Good benefits and lots of different opportunities to move within the company. They do a good job of recognizing and rewarding extra effort put in to help customers and internal processes.

Mediocre engineering talent.

There are not enough really good engineers to interact with and learn from. This can make the environment very exhausting or isolating, as you have to explain the basics over and over again.

Many of the development processes are very manual, which makes things time-consuming and error-prone.

The acquired companies don't always integrate completely and tend to stay off in their own world instead of leveraging existing infrastructure already in place and in use by other parts of the company.

Hire and retain good engineering talent. Really good engineers need other really good engineers to talk to and learn from. Just because you can hire more engineers in Bangalore than in San Jose for the same amount of money, doesn't mean it's worth it. Just hire the best people for the job, regardless of their location.