Cisco

Great brains to work with.

Very flexible working hours. Nobody will even care whether you are even coming to the office a day. You can use the WFH lavishly. Overall, a great work culture anybody can dream of.

Salary is not up to market levels. It's understandable for a company like Cisco, having a huge headcount. But the problem here is that when they decide to give increments, they decide to give a higher percentage hike to the individuals at the upper level, or whoever is earning more. Overall, the scenario is that the rich become richer.

One more bad thing is the hardened processes. It doesn't matter whether you are doing a small, silly task or not; the number of processes you have to complete consumes way more time than it takes for the actual task itself. These repeated, unwanted, bureaucracy-driven processes will make you terribly bored and give you a headache and dizziness every single day.

I doubt the India team still has a proper direction for its growth. Everyone still relies on the big SJ team, and folks here are somewhat considered second-grade people. Whenever good work comes into the wider team, it goes to SJ. And you get bored, continuously doing the same old maintenance work. Just to keep your mouths shut, once in a blue moon, you get some crap new stuff. After that, you again do the same thing.

This is not advice to middle management, but to upper management.

Consider that the people here in India have the same amount of brain as whoever sits in SJ office. SJ office has got no special grace from God. After all, more than 70% of the folks sitting in SJ office are also Indians.