Cisco

Flexible work schedule. Great benefits. Good work/life balance. "Family first" approach. Diverse workforce. Many opportunities to attend training and conferences. I worked there for 9 years and was promoted 3 times with 2 raises outside promotions.

Engineering management varies widely between locations. My first 7 years were with a business unit where I had a great experience and was appreciated and promoted several times. Management was supportive and seemed truly invested in my career development and work/life balance. Development was team-oriented with lots of collaboration and support from peers.

Then I made an unfortunate lateral move to another business unit in another city with some major issues I did not anticipate. Engineering staff there had serious morale issues. My peers were constantly "joking" about how terrible the product we were all working on was. At first, I wondered why nobody did anything to just fix the issues. After working there a while, I realized it was because the engineers have practically zero ability to effect change in the product. So, the senior engineers there are basically just going through the motions because the pay is pretty good, the benefits are basically second to none, and they don't want to lose that. Meanwhile, the younger engineers are leaving because the environment is pretty awful.

Having your own hard-wall office seems great at first until you realize you hardly ever collaborate with the people on your team. On my project, the standard practice was to assign a single engineer to develop a feature, write tests, and perform QA in practical isolation. As you can imagine, this was pretty stressful and didn't work very well, resulting in buggy products due to lack of a dedicated QA team. Asking for help on an engineering issue was usually like pulling teeth because you had to pull other engineers away from their work to collaborate. Management was not receptive of suggestions to change the status quo to alleviate these issues. My manager frequently missed our weekly one-on-one meetings, sometimes for several weeks in a row. When I attempted to reschedule these missed meetings, my requests were frequently ignored. I know of at least 5 other engineers that left the org within a few months of when I did due to the increasingly toxic environment.

Let go of the status quo that is clearly not working. Reassign or let go of engineering managers who can't cope with change and are clearly not effective. Adopt a collaborative, team-based model where employees support each other and feel included instead of isolated. Address the product issues that engineers bring forward. Encourage candid feedback that is addressed in a transparent and timely fashion to remedy the morale issues.