Great comp plan for high-end engineers;don't plan on a long term career here
Pros
The benefits are outrageously good. The compensation is outrageously good. If you are a survivor you will do well here. If you are a high performer, you will do financially well here. If you slack, you may actually do better than the high performers as management keeps the slackers around to cut them every 6 months when LRs are mandated. When you are impacted by an LR and you will be, you earn a great exit package (I earned one year of base pay for 4 years of work...) The DCP is pretty cool for 13/89s, but on reflection, if I knew Cisco was such an unstable company, I'd not had invested in the DCP program as now all my DCP is paid in one big chunk in one year instead of spread over several years as I had planned. Live and learn :)
Cons
Cisco's definition of culture in my brief 4-year stint was "everything is about money". That is good and bad - good because you can make some serious dough here, bad because there is no sense of community in the workforce. Cisco has limited restructurings in spring and fall. The lifers refer to avoiding a layoff as "being safe" which is in my mind an oxymoron. There is no such thing as safety at Cisco. If you come here, be prepared to move on when you hit the wrong set of cost lists. High performance is no guarantee of "safety" either; I earned 1.3x-1.5x multipliers on my bonuses every year for 4 years - still impacted by an LR. Most restructuring affects older (highly compensated) workers. There is no other logical conclusion to the restructurings than they are meant to cut already well-trained long-term growth employees and replace them with a younger untrained workforce. These LRs create intense stop energy in the company nearly all the time as everyone is in a state of panic. This "Fog of War" is difficult for innovators to execute in making Cisco pivot like an Exxon Valdez rather than an Eagle. Cisco completely doesn't understand open source and evidenced by the latest round of LRs in 2018 that impacted nearly every engineer doing any sort of open source work. The engineering workforce is far too compliant resulting in high degrees of passive-aggressive behavior rather than assertiveness.
