Pros
Cisco has historically been a great place to work. Management does care about the employees and their personal well being. The work is challenging and can be satisfying and rewarding. More recently with the troubles in Cisco's business the company is changing for the worse. There has been massive attrition of key engineers and engineering leaders and Cisco doesn't seem to be able to stop this trend. While the company is certainly not a disaster and the problems it faces are recoverable it needs to move quickly and decisively which is something it has not been able to do for the past 3+ years since it implemented the boards and councils management structure a mistake John Chambers is directly responsible for. Since then most of this structure has been removed and now its about getting the right leaders in place. Compensation is relatively fair especially if you have a good manager who recognizes who the contributors are. Benefits are really good to...
Cons
Attrition is a major issue right now and Cisco needs to stop the bleeding quickly and figure out not only how its going to retain the top talent but attract new talent which is especially difficult in Silicon Valley where there are many startups wooing the top talent as well as employees leaving to join the red hot social networking companies. You need talented engineers to build the best products and solutions in the market and while this won't effect the company in the next 12 - 18 months you will see the impact outside of that. The executive team is a group of extremely bright and talented business people but that is also the biggest problem is that there are no true Engineers at the top of the company and this is a technology company who needs great executive technology leadership!