Cisco

Cisco is a great place to work. It has a pretty good culture too. It offers good benefits to employees.

It has a severance package if you are asked to leave. It offers 3+ weeks of vacation, so you are well covered.

Cisco pays a good base salary to start, but the increments are extremely small (lower single digits), and they don't do well when it comes to salary hikes. So, you may start high, but over time, you will see the difference.

My team does have some outdoor activities, which is a good thing to break out of your daily schedule and do some team building.

Overall, Cisco is a good place to work, and I would definitely recommend it. But if you are willing to work hard, make a difference in your life, get ahead in your career, and not waste time and energy on processes that don't benefit anyone, then you should consider some mid-size companies as well.

But unfortunately, because of its organization size and team size, there are too many people and too many processes. I know a lot of this is typical of big companies, but Cisco isn't any different. The problem I see here is the typical old saying: "Too many cooks spoil the broth." Cisco sometimes has too many people in one big team, rather than splitting up the work among different teams. This causes several issues. One is that everybody is here to succeed, to be promoted, and there is too much competition. (Healthy competition is good, but when your peers cross the work-life balance, it's difficult to meet the same expectations; it's unhealthy competition.) (Yeah, I know, it's all about hard work being the path to success, but a work-life balance is very necessary, trust me).

My team has poor management of resources, and the upper management never gives a clear message. Everything is a secret. I think it's important to present decisions to your employees with clarity. Basically, you will take a really long time to make a difference because you will be entangled in politics and processes.

Also, some teams have a poor experienced employees to new employees ratio. They have too many experienced employees or too many new employees. In either case, the competition is really ugly. I think a balanced blend is necessary.

Cisco says that they want to be in the 65th percentile payscale when compared to their peers. This statement should give you a clear picture about the pay. Cisco makes you slog but doesn't offer the compensation as per the work-reward formula. It's all about how many more hours you can put in compared to your peers. I thought they hired us for a fixed number of hours. Of course, I'm not debating that. If you want to get ahead in life, you have to produce results above and beyond expectations, but not at the cost of zero personal life for extended periods of time.

I hope I could give you all out there a clear idea.

If you expect your employees to go out of their way and work long nights and weekends, then I think you should also go out of your way and reward them accordingly (pay hike, good bonus, CAP awards, stocks, etc.).