Which is a better company?
5 replies (most recent on top)
There is no comparison. Having worked at both, Cisco is a technology Sales machine, that really looks after their people. Juniper lost its way a long time ago, and treats people appallingly. They are deluded enough to think this year is going well, when revenue is down almost 20%. Cisco has its own issues, but is still the leader
Juniper has better developers. There's no way they have gotten as bad as the terrible, awful, incompetent, finger-in-nose coders that Cisco has on the competing projects.
Juniper sales, marketing and management, on the other hand, are all deeply bad. CEO, COO, CMO, everyone immediately below them, bad CTO, astonishingly bad marketing, terrible sales, and then Andy. It's pretty rare to see a company so infested with has-beens, weasels and disconnected and incompetent management drones manage to keep shambling along for as long as Juniper has without getting bought out or going full zombie like Extreme. That is the future of Juniper, though, without a serious upheaval.
It is the people that make a the place worth while. Both have great people. Yeah the are t–ds, software, hardware issues at every company. Having been at both, I prefer Juniper.
None.
I am ex-Juniper, now at Cisco. Cisco has a problem with LRs (layoffs) . The stress of that is considerable sometimes, especially in a down economy when business is bad as it is.
However, given the fact that I left Juniper due to arbitrary , random management practice, no respect for employee career growth and general lack of opportunities to move internally (not sure if that is still the case), Cisco is a much better option. You have open possibilities of getting patents funded by Cisco, loads of internal projects you can participate in without restrictions as long as that does not cut into your day job - some projects are truly cutting-edge (AI, ML...) and if you put in some extra efforts then you actually get noticed by the upper management - Cisco is by far a better place to work in. Only downside and I am NOT saying that is NOT a considerable one, is the culture of constant layoffs which is not well understood internally. Happening every six odd months, either a large one or a small one, quite stressful as sometimes high performers are fired.