Cisco reviews

The lack of coordination across projects is appalling. It seems like I work in a giant crowd of project managers who do nothing but run around in circles looking for projects to manage. There are waaaay too many 'boards and committees,' the function of which is mainly interfering and delaying projects. People at the middle-management layers are simply not incented to work together, despite all the talk about collaboration on the part of Sr. Management. As such, political skills pass for leadership and the people who have the best political skills get promoted. The political realities often ignore development realities, which leads to a scramble of ass-covering. The collaboration technologies are over-hyped. While telepresence is good for demos and meetings where people just talk to each other and show presentations, the lack of interactive whiteboarding and 'working' collaboration technologies cripples my ability to do 'real work' with my colleagues across the globe. Product development processes are also crippled; there's either no process at all or people use process as a tool for delay and obfuscation. This is the bureaucracy at Cisco.

The compensation has been going down in recent years. I say that for several reasons. First, the salaries have not been going up in general but cost of living, of course, has. Second, the benefits are slowly getting worse. The primary one being stock options which have all but been terminated now except for the management and highest level technical folks. But in addition, the various medical and dental plans offered are covering less and costing more year after year.