Cisco

Cisco is the industry leader, and you get exposed to all the technologies needed.

The company is too big, and each team is more concerned about short-term budgets and goals rather than planning for the long run.

The idea of "getting fresh blood" and "restructuring" that pushed experienced ones out (either voluntarily or involuntarily) is a big loss to Cisco's investment.

While there is a need to adjust to ever-changing industry needs, the negative spiral and the huge loss of intellectual assets were really invaluable and hard to replace.

I personally had to witness a good number of colleagues go in the last couple of years. They were all smart and important to the team. Letting them go were really wrong decisions.

Employees are not commodities.

Domain expertise cannot be easily swapped out, especially in networking software.

The management team needs to work harder to treasure the real assets... the engineers.