I know i can go on glassdoor and other sites and ask this question but I also know the hr and comms groom those sites so it's fairly hard to figure out what the real situation on the ground. I work for a different company who have a lively site on layoffs.com but I am considering interviewing w/Cisco - judging how frank people are on my company's page here I am just assuming i'll get some good responses from Cisco folks as well
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If you like woke hunger games it's your company.
It's a great place to work, if you like working with wannabe politicians who like to talk much and do actual little productive work. They are masters as building their own baloney branding and kissing up to maintain their own jobs and egos.
If this sounds great, you found the right place.
The culture is mostly fake at the corporate level. However, Cisco is known for suffocating acquisitions. So if you join a good org, it’s probably gonna be short lived.
(whispers) GET OUT.
It all depends on the org & function you work in. I’ve worked in 2 Orgs & 3 teams within those Orgs. We had very little LR impacts to our teams. Other Orgs get decimated.
Younger people tend to leave in 2-3 yrs. Older people tend to stay. Especially if they find a good team. But the good teams tend to be stable so they don’t have many opportunities to join them.
By unethical do you mean they offer certain services and will do anything it takes to keep their job ?
They keep/promote unethical secretaries in north america with no education and get rid of highly skilled engineers with several degrees.
Unethical secretaries? Are you from the 1980s Soviet Union?
Functional decomposition and refactoring are taught in junior high school programming classes, and those skills are actually far more important in the design of large scale systems than they are in small projects. I worked with multiple teams of PEs at Cisco who couldn't do these things. They teach the Pigeonhole principle in the first freshman or sophomore Introduction to Computational Theory course and yet those same people not only didn't know of it, they didn't have the brain power to understand it when presented to them. There is much longer list of first principles skills missing at the highest levels in Cisco despite degrees and titles. The result has been serious yet avoidable functional and performance problems in both hardware and software which delayed programs by years and play a significant role in the 40 years of vast technical debt across at least four routing and switching operating systems.
Because so much of the development budget went to maintenance the few competent people were drowning in the failure of others so leaving Cisco by anyone's choice often meant better work and pay elsewhere.
They keep/promote unethical secretaries in north america with no education and get rid of highly skilled engineers with several degrees.
if you join Cisco you will become the type of worker you probably now despise
if you are not part of an acquisition, you will be directed to managing Cisco's mountain of tech debt, and you will be put in the presence of nice people who are simply watching their lives pass them by
you may attempt to break the mold but eventually the lack of rewards and the lack of motivation from your peers will reduce you to the same state - doing the absolute minimum. I don't blame here, Cisco undercompensates so there is no reason for anyone to do anything but the minimum
this is fine if you are a grey-hair with your nest egg already set up and no career aspirations post-Cisco (which is why Cisco tends to be so "old" for a tech company), but if you are young and want to work somewhere else eventually, you are committing career su----e at Cisco, the company has a terrible reputation and you will find yourself trying to explain away your years wasted
Cisco has somewhere around 85,000 employees working in a wide variety of business segments with a wide variety of job types spread around the world. If you expect a homogeneous culture you're Cisco people.
People are at Cisco for 2 reasons: visa or coast. If you don't fit in those 2 categories, you're in the wrong place.
turnover rate like
People get laid off faster than they can leave on their own.
Every second year or so an engineer from our team leaves on their own. We are underpaid but have work-life balance and hence we stay till we get laid off.
Cisco lays off 5 to 7% every year. Why do you want to work for Cisco???
As always, your experience will depend entirely on the team, the mgr, and the leadership chain. If the job is aligned to a particular product or technology, ask some deep questions about strategy, investment, and contingent worker impact b/c you don't want to go into an area of decline.
If u can build a strong network with senior management you will survive. Or else you will just feel miserable after a year or 2
Cisco is great if you have strategic relationships outside of work with Sr Directors or VPs. It's a relationship based culture with semi-annual layoffs...
Also most technology, processes, and strategies are stuck in 2003. If you enjoy working on non-marketable legacy projects Cisco is a great place.
Stay away from the McDonalds of tech
In my 24 years at Cisco I have found vastly different experiences from the different groups I have worked in.
Turn 180 degree and undo any progress you have made, unless you prefer to make this site your new home.