Cisco reviews

Very political, poor communications, very "need-to-know" information flow. Constant re-organizations, you are told, not asked, what you new position will be. Vice Presidents surround themselves with allies and the allies surround themselves with allies. You need to be in San Jose and in the right building to get promoted. A lot of full-time yet part time workers, do the minimum to stay hidden.

The management and culture is just poisonous. They have no culture of innovation or risk taking. The development team is just focused on short term gains. As an engineer I was bored out of my mind porting crappy work from other divisions that were favored even though more than once we have developed a better solution. Five years later they relented and let us rework that project to produce better reliability. But it was after the issues that caused them to lose customers. I worked in a BU that was managed by one culture and unless you went to the same temple and were part of that dynasty you were passed up for promotions and good projects. They cleaned up some house since 2009 but the same issues take place that I discussed earlier. I can tell the issues I raised still remain to this day when I interview unhappy Cisco engineers that sound defeated and frustrated and want to work elsewhere. My sign should have been when we could not attract college grads to join. I have to say I learned very little as a development engineer in the 10+ years I worked there. I did learn a lot about networking however.