Cisco

Telecommuting is encouraged.

Teams are competent and unified.

Internal transfers are easy.

Code ownership is shared to relieve pressure against vacations.

Training and higher education are supported.

Micromanagement is rampant and backed up by a culture of fear.

External tools are poorly chosen, overvalued as silver bullets, and not optimized to fit the needs of developers.

The employee evaluation system is based on an individual's reputation for working long hours, oratory skills in meetings, PowerPoint skills in presentations, and popularity with upper management.

The advice of developers is disregarded by technical leads and managers, yet failure is always attributed to a lack of effort and communication among the team.

Project marketing and team size are used as leverage among management, leading to unhealthy competition between teams, code redundancy, and useless features creeping into requirement lists.

Hard work is not rewarded as much as shameless self-promotion and socializing outside the office.

Deadlines and milestones are decided without any input from the developers implementing the requests.

Remove political roadblocks by deferring to developers instead of a senior manager or a committee to make design decisions and technical requirements.

End reprisals against employees who disagree with management so that pressure to give unrealistic estimates and hide issues in failing projects becomes a thing of the past.

Reward employees with freedom to move to exciting projects rather than with bonuses.