Cisco reviews

Lack of control over anything that you do. "Architect" teams in the marketing department make all decisions and promises without consulting the engineers. Due to management structure, these decisions cannot be appealed. As an intern, I was put on a team that was in no way prepared to take on an intern. They had great difficulty giving me anything to do. The one real project I had took me 3 weeks, after that, despite asking for more work I was barely given anything to do. My entire team was very upset with management and the decisions being made, but was powerless to even voice these opinions. Satellite locations get overlooked a lot. You are a second class employee if you're anywhere but San Jose. I saw multiple instances of people being hired as developers and then being placed into a sysadmin job under the guise of devopts. Oh yeah, and they're laying off 20% of their workforce.

-Visibility is really the most valuable skill anyone can have. If you expect that just doing good work and working hard will matter you will be disappointed. Making Excel spreadsheets and copying nearly everyone on an email is a far more useful skill. -There's always a negativity from managers and false stress sent down from them. I had four different managers and even the best ones always seemed to be negative about something. I didn't realize this until I changed companies and realized just how much better the environment could be. This must come from higher management because even the good managers were like this. My new job just doesn't have this nonsense. -Annual layoffs just seem to be part of the culture now, enjoy July and August as the rumors start. - Forced rankings is terrible. Most groups that I was in don't really have weak people but you knew someone was going to "need improvement" with whatever that entailed. Make sure that your boss likes you so that you're less likely to be the victim.