Cisco reviews

- base salary can be really low for those hired during the dot com bubble and as a result the increments are low. new hires at cisco are being brought on board at base salaries that are anywhere between 15-25 % higher than a comparable job for a veteran. - seniority matters....even though on paper job rotation is encouraged in reality the longer one stays in a group and does an average job the better the chance of being promoted. Of course proximity to your boss and bosses boss is important - lot of deadwood...a.k..a directors, senior directors, manager, and senior manager......you can recognize these logs by the ways they speak (pretty much what they do) and the words they use (out of the box thinking and whatever other latest TLA....three letter acronym that is floating around) - lack of timely and adequate recognition for individual contributors....the joke around the company is that the new logo of cisco has fewer bars on it because there are fewer individual contributors doing the actual job (as compared to management) and they are carrying the burden of the company on their shoulders :-) Every tom, dick and harry in IT wants to be a manager, regardless of his/her capabilities and competence. the folks above are sitting tight in their position. the last time IT experience such a situation was when many folks wanted to get to IT project manager position and to take the steam off the program manager job family was created. Go figure! - too much IT bureaucracy....even to get a small change on non production environment one has to get tons of approvals and emails .......unless you have the right connections. or use authority.

Boxborough is full of dead wood. Most of the talented people have left or are itching to. Zero balance between work and home life. It's 24/7 stress due to an oversized workload, undersized staff, and too many people who are mediocre at their jobs. Fair or not, there's a perception from other locations that San Jose is full of people who get paid for doing very little. It's all who you know. For sure the company is dominated by the IOS group, none of whom seem to understand software developement. Brain-dead stress on metrics is driving the company and leading to ridiculous behaviors...example: rating managers weekly on their bug counts, while concurrently outsourcing QA to a third party in India where workers performance is based on how many bugs they find: you can guess what happened. Morale at Boxborough extremely low. Then corporate came up with the PULSE employee satisfaction survey and tied it back-door to managers' compensation. So now the managers are mad at the rank and file for being unhappy. I know one manager that actually made his people take the survey twice with an unsubtle threat that they'd better score "happier" next time.