Cisco

Cisco pays reasonably well for entry positions in my area. Good support and patience for ramping up new grad hires. Good culture inside teams; coworkers have always been pleasant to work with. Work-life balance has been good within my team.

Most testing is done in India, meaning there is poor overlap in working hours, which hurts productivity.

We are heavily pushed to use internally developed tools that end up losing support without any viable alternative in place, which leaves teams maintaining it for themselves.

Typical tech company "we're prioritizing AI" without any clarity of what that means.

Constant layoffs hurt morale, especially given the dissonance of huge acquisitions like Splunk.

Between layoffs and turnover, teams are understaffed for the work expected.

Far too many "hurry up and wait" moments in development.

Pay raises do not occur fast enough or at a rate high enough to retain good staff.

Management is poor at recognizing problems (refusing to admit how far we are behind competitors, acting like the customers are wrong), but even when they do recognize an issue, no solutions are proposed.