Pros
- Flexible work environment. You can pick from a menu of projects pretty much every quarter and work on what excites you the most on the said menu. - Smart colleagues. They've done a good job of hiring mostly smart people. - No QA bs. There's no QA organization. Yay. - A culture of tools to solve everyday operational issues. People like writing tools and it's encouraged. - Potentially big equity upside. The company is doing well and may in the near future go IPO at a decent valuation. The market they're in is huge and growing.
Cons
- Insular culture. There are basically 3-4 people (Directors now), who run the engineering organization. They went to school (Stanford) together. Worked at a prior startup together (that Cisco acquired), together. Pretty much every engineering / management decision is made by these people. They've either driven out (or tend to drive out) every other engineering manager that has come on the scene. For someone fresh out of college, they're something to admire and look up to and maybe even worship for their wealth of knowledge and all that. For someone with a little bit of experience, they can come across as patronizing at times. Expect a lot of sermons in your interactions with The Directors (and sometimes, downright rudeness, unfortunately). - Not a whole lot of hard problems to solve. There's hardware (asic) drivers, routing protocols, standard L2/3 protocols, cli, etc. There are enough Cisco features to implement on their platforms that you'll be busy for a while doing just that.