Cisco

• Steady paycheck.
• Benefits (though slightly below-average).
• Good at leveraging market dominance for quick profit.
• Salesman/marketeer paradise (engineer's bane).

I've spent more than a decade and a half working at Cisco trying to improve quality:

• Nothing to offer an innovative, competent, honest engineer who's looking to effectively apply their hard-earned technical skills. If you take pride in your work, look elsewhere. Cisco's so-called "collaborative" environment focuses primarily on CYA tactics dominated by political motivations to manipulate image. In these meetings, you'll see discussions center around how to make projects "look good" and how to hide issues that "look bad." No discussion or activity on doing the right thing for the customer and for the quality of products.
• Cheapest solution is synonymous with best solution. With such low-skilled engineering and management talent in place, there is no understanding of common processes such as trade-off analysis between quality of work, time, and cost. You are expected to produce the quickest, cheapest solution under all circumstances, as long as it looks good on a slide when presented to execs. This is culturally pervasive throughout the organization.
• Impossible to exert influence. Staff and management are so unsophisticated about the industry and market realities that they don't even know what they don't know. There is no possible way to influence in this type of environment. Your years of finely honed technical skills and field experience carry no weight among the myriad of sales and marketing execs who can't think beyond the current quarter. Short-term sales goals trump every argument under all circumstances.
• Poor quality work is rewarded. The formula for success is: say "yes", do poor work, hide tracks, wait for next re-org, get promoted. There is no follow-up on effectiveness or quality of work, ever. You are simply measured on how quickly you get a task done and how well you "make yourself look and your boss look" for quarterly ops reviews. If it looks good on a single PowerPoint slide, then it is good. Reality is nothing.
• Factory worker mentality. Management is overly obsessed with the adage "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." With marketing and sales dominating executive ranks, the metrics used to measure performance are nothing short of comical. Not only are such metrics easy to manipulate through unproductive activity but often encourage adversarial internal relationships (for example, tester performance evaluated positively on bugs found per week and developer performance evaluated negatively on the same metric). This makes management's job easy when it comes time to rank and lay off employees but severely hurts product quality, employee morale, and the corporate bottom line.
• Unrealistic expectations. Other than sales opportunities, execs are years behind in product deployment strategy and customer quality requirements. Execs haven't a clue what it takes to roll out production-ready products and continually ignore people who know and can prove otherwise. As a result, engineers are expected to make up the difference in totally absurd time frames, and that can only be achieved by producing poor quality work. And if you don't meet expectations, you will hear about it in your next review.

Executives at Cisco don't listen to anyone unless they are telling them what they want to hear. As cliché as this sounds, they truly surround themselves with "yes men" and have no tolerance otherwise. They succeeded in a dysfunctional corporate culture and can't even conceive of anything different. The only way things will change is when the company starts losing money.

Of course, by that time it is too late. The people who got you in that position are exactly the wrong people to get you out of it.

I've wasted over a decade trying to dispense advice and have given up trying. Good luck.