Cisco reviews

- Flex hours + laptop quickly become an excuse for being asked to work anytime, all the time, even evenings and weekends. - Life/work balance sucks. - Culture of micromanagement and lack of trust in employees, even experienced ones. - Outdated/broken processes and tools, which makes all those additional long hours spent seem like a waste. - No periodic salary increases unless you get promoted, which can take forever. Not uncommon to find people with the same salary for over 5 years, even some up to 10 if they started high. - No stock options or RSUs unless you are at the top of the food chain. - 4 weeks of vacation never increase regardless of tenure and if you or family get sick, there are no sick days, so you need to use vacation days. Also forced to use vacation days during mandatory Christmas break company wide shutdown. - A lot of legacy systems and technologies, so there could be very few opportunities to work on latest and greatest tech depending on the organization you are in. - Support heavy load. Most developers spend > 50% of the time fixing bugs. - Lots of politics, and I mean A LOT. Most times politics win over technical merit or even common sense. - Some tendency for upper management to "bully" employees (public shaming, escalating up the management chain vs one on one and discussing alternatives).

Our executives are out of touch with the general employee population and if you aren't in the right circles, it is difficult to get heard or get promotional opportunities. We talk a lot about our People Deal and how each employee matters but it feels like it is really The Some People Deal, depending on who you know. We do layoffs of good employees instead of managing our vendor population and don't facilitate moving impacted employees to open positions within the company. As a manager and leader, I usually feel the good outweighs the bad and support the leadership but I'm starting to wonder.