Cisco

Everyone I interacted with was friendly, helpful, and professional.

Although management pushed for hybrid working from what was previously full remote, it was a 'come at your own time' culture, so long as you met your responsibilities.

The break room had a fancy coffee machine, and management would cater lunches once a week.

Most days I would come into the office to do any work that needed hands-on configuration of our testbed in the lab, grab lunch, then continue to work from home.

Well, I was laid off after 6 months, so obviously layoffs.

The late-night or early-morning meetings to catch up with the India team were tiresome.

An incredible breadth of information you have to have a working knowledge of: every protocol, the custom OS's and commands on the devices, and how to work with Cisco proprietary systems like SD-WAN. You have to learn the CLI commands before you can move onto GUI, since you can't accomplish many things with a GUI alone.

Personally, my manager was outright adversarial with me as a junior.

I was put under the wing of 3 different people in trying to acclimate to the job; it was highly stressful trying to get up to speed.

Few transferable skills: I worked with a Python library that was eventually made open source, but there wasn't too much documentation, and few employers care about my experience with a library that's solely used to test networks.