Cisco

Cisco is relatively stable due to their success in business.

Cisco pays a little higher than the market average, offers good benefits, and competitive, high bonuses.

Cisco is good for those:

• New graduates with weak technical skills and no work experience.
• Immigrants who need visa & green card sponsorship based on employment.
• Lazy engineers who do not want progress in technology and their career.
• Ass kissers who enjoy spending 90% of their time on office politics.

Cisco is very successful in marketing hardware devices, but has a very bad and extremely expensive management system.

Developing innovative software products here is so tough, just like "group constipation": Many people work very hard on it and take a very long time, and it turns out little – s**t.

They keep delivering software products that make little or no money and abandon them later. No one says anything bad inside Cisco about these garbage software products, except their customers.

Cisco has to use its famous strategy: keep buying good technology from other companies to make up for this shortage.

Cisco's performance system over-requires so-called leadership and influence, no matter what your position is or how much you actually need it.

This encourages people to spend too much time on virtual work, spending endless time in meetings, on phone calls, and writing emails, and not much useful documentation.

The more time you spend on real, solid work, the less time you may spend on increasing your "visibility" or "influence," and the worse performance you will get.

My whole team was acquired by Cisco from another company. In my previous company, my performance never dropped below the top 15% for a few years. But in Cisco, with the same boss, same team members, and the same kind of excellent projects I led and accomplished, my performance dropped under average.

Cisco is full of mediocre engineers.

The reason is not because they hire mediocre engineers, but because they make their engineers mediocre. They are encouraged and forced to be mediocre.

If you stay long enough in Cisco, you will probably become mediocre, even if you were excellent before, and you will find it hard to find a decent job outside again with what you learn in Cisco.

Cisco is a "traditional" big company, not Google or Microsoft type.

Motorola's, Lucent's, Nortel's today will be Cisco's tomorrow.

For those managers who feel comfortable in Cisco, no advice for you guys. Keep on enjoying whatever you do as long as possible.

For those managers who claim to change Cisco's culture and management way, forget about it. It will end up with you either getting changed or getting out of there in two or three years.