Cisco

The work culture, driven by mid- and lower management, is extremely good and healthy. They are very supportive of employees' career growth, work-life balance, and project timelines. There are silos which work in an extremely aggressive start-up mode (with their own benefits), but this is more an exception than the norm. The flexibility given to employees in terms of telecommuting and work-from-home is very encouraging—cab services, VPN on laptops, home broadband reimbursement, etc.

The Cisco India campus has blossomed over time into a nice cocoon of sorts. It has multiple food cafeterias, a big health centre, a state-of-the-art medical centre, and several games/sports facilities, including:

• basketball
• badminton
• cricket
• table-tennis
• carrom
• Foosball
• gaming arcades
• massage chairs. The company has a great healthcare plan for employees and their families, including free annual health checkups.

Even though management harps about innovation from India, some groups/teams are working on maintenance-only projects.

If you're a programmer who loves to work on bleeding-edge technologies and likes (re-)designing entire new products, this may seem a boring place. Lots of Cisco's products work on legacy technologies, and it is impossible to rewrite them when they earn billions of dollars for the company.