Cisco

If you're raising a family and are looking for a stable employer with decent pay, good benefits, and flexible working arrangements (in at least some parts of the company), Cisco is a good place to work.

While there is a lot of big-company bureaucracy, much of it can be safely ignored by engineers.

Cisco is very slow to adopt new technology, and its development strategy, when there is one, is plodding at best. Product direction is more political than strategic, and much of the development effort is to play catch-up with what is already on the market.

In many cases, internal wrangling prevents us from delivering the best product, even if we've already developed it. If you're looking to blaze new technology trails, Cisco has limited opportunities. You're better off working for a startup and angling to be bought by Cisco.

Cisco's senior leadership often has very good strategic ideas, but it fails in driving those through the political quagmire of middle management. More than once, I've seen senior management and individual contributors on the same page, ready to drive forward in an exciting direction, only to be derailed by mid-level directors with turf to protect. This is often due to what Cisco rewards. A team can develop a terrible product that no one wants, late and over budget, and still declare success (and receive large bonuses) as long as it can spin the right story about how hard everyone worked. So, we create an organization of arsonist firefighters. When a team goes completely off track, we pull people off of other projects and give them to the manager who caused the problem in the first place. At Cisco, you get an empire by mismanaging what you have, over-committing to ensure a crisis, and carefully managing the blame.