Cisco is very successful in marketing for hardware devices, but has a very bad and extremely expensive way for management. Try to develop innovative software product here is so tough, just like a "group constipation": Many people works very hard on it, and takes very long time, and it turns out little -- s**t. They keep on deliver software product which makes little or no money and abandon it later, and no one say any thing bad inside Cisco for those garbage software products except their customers. Cisco has to use their famous strategy : keep on buying good technology from other company, to make up this shortage.
Cisco's performance system over require so called leadership & influence no matter what your position is and how much you actually need it. This encourages people spending too much time on virtual work, spending endless time on meeting, phone calls, writing emails and not much useful documents. The more time you spend on real solid work, the less time you may spend on increasing your "visibility" or "influence", and worse performance you will get. My whole team was acquired by Cisco from another company. In my previous company, my performance never drop below top 15% for a few years, but in Cisco, with the same boss, same team members, same kind of excellent project I lead and accomplished, my performance drops under average. Cisco is full of mediocre engineers. The reason is not because they hire mediocre engineer but they make their engineers mediocre, they are encouraged and forced to be mediocre. If you stay long enough in Cisco, you will probably become mediocre even you are excellent before, and you will find it is hard for you to find a decent job outside again with what you learn in Cisco. Cisco is a "traditional" big company, not Google, or Microsoft type. Motorola, Lucent, Nortel's today will be Cisco's tomorrow.
