Pros
Good compensation & benefits if you have an upper hand.
Cons
Once you have accepted the offer & joined, it is quite difficult to move up or get appreciated, unless you are good at kiss a** to succeed. Lot of engineers with mediocre talent perhaps the budget dictates the quality of people. Bureaucracy & process bogs down everything. First skill you should need is politics and how to derail others work. Cisco internal Pulse employee survey meant to get candid feedback about their boss / management & Cisco. But it is one big phony trick, you will forced to give a positive feedback abt boss & senior management, if not you will have to face the same consequence on performance review, because the management will indirectly warm you that they have a mechanism to identify what the individuals response are. We are developing a product for past 4-5 years under the excuse that the customers absolutely rely on it for their day to day network operations, but in fact there is only a handful of actual users using the system out of 1000's of projected users, and we haven't even added any net new features for more than past 2 years with 20+ team just doing bug fixes, because the code & standards are so poor. There is not much respect/value for engineering, which leads to high attrition, it is like a revolving door. I have seen more than 25 people come join & leave in my team alone... Decided its time to move on..