Engineers are viewed and treated as a commodity, not as the engine of product development.
Career growth is non-existent. There is no benefit to moving within the company because you can't get a promotion or raise even if you get hired for a position that is a higher grade level.
Your direct manager has no say in your evaluation rating, it is all rolled up to executive levels who arbitrarily rank order you.
Cisco loves to talk about hiring the top 5% of talent, then they want to compensate them at the 70th percentile (if that), and not recognize their efforts. This causes low morale and limits the effort that people are willing to put into their work. If everyone in the company is top 5% of talent, why do the rankings have to fit an arbitrary bell-curve distribution. Isn't it possible that you have a high performing organization because they are all top talent?
Cisco wants their employees to work like it is a start-up, i.e. lots of hours, however, there are no start-up type benefits. Individual contributors don't get stock (but execs get lots), there is no career advancement (see point 2). Why should I bust my ass for no reward. Cisco wants you to be "happy you still have a job" in the current environment and they manage by fear. Apple employees are asked to work like it is a start-up, but they still get broad based stock grants.
Cisco talked a good game about open communication and transparency, but when an exec was asked in an all-hands how many VPs and Directors were impacted by the "limited restructuring" (i.e. lay-off) of 3-5% of the company, the response was "we're not going to talk about that"
Cisco likes to think of itself as a family, however, when members of the "family" were going to be laid-off if they couldn't find another job in the company, they didn't even get interviews for open positions that matched their skill sets.
