Cisco Sr. Software Engineer reviews

Highly political, takes too long for decisions, kiss ass culture for better ranking and promotion, Dictatorial executive management in some BUs, Sr. management clueless. Experience and results doesn't count for compensation and promotion.

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.