Cisco reviews

Management is a disaster, incompetence is rife, and you always know that your product is being run into the ground with executive management thinking about when, not if, they are going to cancel it. Cisco is a machine for extracting value from acquisitions: it buys companies and then strip-mines them. Good people leave to find better jobs and the people who can't find better jobs are promoted based on tenure rather than ability. Every Cisco office starts out decent and gets progressively worse. There's a running joke that if you're ever handed a brief for a new product then you should quit and start your own company to build it, because Cisco will buy your company for a lot more than they would have paid you and you'll get to take all the good people (and only the good people) with you. Don't look for career advancement here; if you don't enter the company as executive management then you are an expense to be reduced.

Management is mostly clueless, and cronyism is rampant. It's more about personal relationships than actual ability. It's about the personal bottom line, and 98% of management cannot handle constructive criticism. This is killing company growth and profitability. Too many people who take credit for, and are awarded for, the work of others. Watch your back, who you share information with, and be aware and wary of those who view you as a threat to their desire for recognition and upward mobility. Always have a powerful rabbi. Preferably in the Sr. VP range to provide protection from the Director level.