Pros
- You often get to shape and decide what exactly it is you're working on - Comfortable environment for interns & new grads - The people are generally nice
Cons
From my perspective, nobody at Meraki (or at least in my group) has any idea what is going on. Put really broadly, we are understaffed, bleeding talent, and slow to hire. Nobody is in charge from a product or project management standpoint - as a developer you're tasked with defining your own features, writing the code, and testing it. If you are lucky enough to have a "Product" person on your team, their main responsibility will be Sales, and meeting with potential customers to give demos. This is contrary to the impression I got when interviewing - I expected heavy involvement from Product and Design to drive the process. I interviewed for a Technical Lead position, which in my previous experience means you make high level tech/architectural decisions to shape the codebase and mentor junior developers. At Meraki, it actually means you are thrown into an entirely flat structure where you are expected to full-stack development as part of your daily tasks. I like doing development, but I think it just bears pointing out that a title is just that, and carries no additional responsibility. The pay is bad if you're remote. It's company policy to pro-rate salary based on where you live, so you will have a huge pay gap with your colleagues working in San Francisco. I was told I'd get a huge automatic bump if I were to move, which while I think was intended to be encouraging, I found insulting and unethical. They have nearly weekly webinars or email blasts about the future of hybrid work while ignoring their own people. On top of all this, headcount is a fixed number. This means that no matter how much money is saved in hiring remote employees, you can't get additional team members. A single QA person probably could have averted several disasters in my tenure there so far, but as they put it, "that's not how things are done at Meraki". Meraki seems to source a ton of hiring straight out of college / internships. I don't have a problem with this, but this seems to make up also 100% of the long term employees. Most managers have just been there forever, so you need to ask them about the insane decisions made in code 8 years ago. This makes the ramp up very steep when it comes to onboarding. I've heard our Dashboard be called "the largest ruby on rails codebase in the world". Come marvel at the decisions of hundreds of individual contributors made over 15 years, exploding way outside the scope of what I personally think a framework like this should support. I don't mean to sound too down on the place. Lots of people are really nice. I think if you are early in your career, you should jump in and not worry about most of this, because it's still a good place to get experience. If you're farther along in your career, you could make a bunch more money and work on more engaging problems elsewhere. Finally - if you hear them say something about "retaining the Meraki identity under Cisco" or "keeping a start-up atmosphere", what this actually means is that it's a bunch of people milling about with no strong direction while they eat snacks, in combination with crappy bureaucratic policies from Cisco, along with sub-par PTO, pay, and other policies.
