Cisco reviews

1. Many of the perks are gone - no more free drinks, subsidized cafeteria is gone, you pay for your own DSL at home so you can work most nights, no cell phone reimbursement, no parties, and managers must pay for their employee Christmas lunches or events. Potlucks mean buying from the local market cause who has time to cook. 2. When you come in Cisco folks make it look good for you. Get set for long hours and very little recognition unless you are in the top 20 to 30 percent in ranking. The top >50% might get something the rest are happy with what they don't know. 3. Work in multiple time zones with jobs moving offshore. On the phone from 8 to 10PM or at 7AM. 4. Lots of job overhead and development tools seem outdated but they mostly work. 5. There is much redundancy and product overlap yet there are feature gaps. 6. Good salary to start and minimal raises after you join. Very difficult to get promotions. 7. Stock options for 2nd level managers, directors, and VPs but not the workers. 8. Constant ranking and rating every 6 months and managers up selling. What a waste of time. What ever happened to leading the people to get more work out of them? 9. Must do your 3 to 5 work projects at the same time and accomplish 2 or 3 initiatives. Initiatives are often a farce because everyone has to have them to get their ranking up. Then they compete for resources to do the initiatives when there is not enough people to do the work. So much wasted effort. 10. My director was often gone and we never knew what he did for work. Good manager or leader?

Upper management usually seem to get the strategic vision right but there is a huge schism between upper management and the regular employees. The VP level and above is kept carefully apart from anyone who is Senior Manager level and below. There seems to be a contemptuous attitude towards the people who do the actual work from upper management that is unusual in other high tech companies for whom I have worked. Cisco is also a company that shows a lack of heart and concern for the employees - treating them as commodities to be worked hard and discarded. This comes right from the top and permeates all the way down to first and second line management. There is a coldness and unfriendliness at Cisco that is unusual for a tech company. Cisco also skates very close to illegality in the way it does layoffs. Many people who get sick, even for short term, non-chronic illnesses or have pregnancies, happen to find themselves on the "job elimination" or "limited restructuring" list (the latest euphemism for layoffs) shortly after. CAP awards for excellent performance and top ranked in other years don't matter. Someone always has to be bottom 10 and 5 each year. Not surprisingly, the percentage of women at Cisco is quite low despite the fact that the company consistently makes the "best place for women to work" list. This is most likely due to the prevalence of telecommute and the lack of gender and racial discrimination. People are constantly on edge at Cisco unless they have "protection" which means knowing the right people or having been there a long time. Having an MBA also seems to be a protection, which is amusing because some of the very worst managers/directors have MBA degrees from top schools. It is common for people with newly-minted MBA degrees to be given L1 management positions as a reward. This does not make for a nice work environment although the buildings and cafes themselves are clean, bright and pleasant. A big problem is that if you get a bad manager or Director, of which there are many, it almost impossible to move within Cisco. It is a case of "damned if you do and damned if you don't". If you stay in a bad group, you will get eliminated sooner or later because the group will be killed off but if you try to leave before, the internal job system is open and transparent, so your manager is informed that you are interviewing internally. This means that you don't just have to contend with being in a bad group but your ranking will drop to bottom 5 or 10 because you dared to try to move. This is then a sure way to lose your next bonus and to be managed out. So savvy employees only move straight after ePM/bonus time and don't announce they are leaving until they have secured the new position. However this is against company policy and many interviewing managers will not allow it. Competence, experience, innovation, hard work and technical expertise are not valued at Cisco. Only political skills are.