Pros
- Steady paycheck - Benefits (though slightly below-average) - Good at leveraging market dominance for quick profit - Salesman/marketeer paradise (engineers bane)
Cons
I've spent more than a decade and a half working at Cisco trying to improve quality: - *Nothing to offer an innovative, competent, honest engineer who's looking to effectively apply their hard earned technical skills* If you take pride in your work, look elsewhere. CIsco's so-called "collaborative" environment focuses primarily on CYA tactics dominated by political motivations to manipulate image. In these meetings you'll see discussions center around how to make project "look good" and how to hide issues that "look bad". No discussion or activity on doing the right thing for customer and for quality of product(s). - *Cheapest solution is synonymous with best solution* With such low skilled engineering and management talent in place there is no understanding of common processes such as trade-off analysis between quality of work, time and cost. You are expected to produce the quickest, cheapest solution under all circumstances as long as it looks good on a slide when presented to execs. This is culturally pervasive throughout the organization. - *Impossible to exert influence* Staff and management are so unsophisticated about the industry and market realities that they don't even know what they don't know. There is no possible way to influence in this type of environment. Your years of finely honed technical skills and field experience carry no weight among the myriad of sales and marketing execs who can't think beyond the current quarter. Short-term sales goals trump every argument under all circumstances. - *Poor quality work is rewarded* The formula for success is say "yes", do poor work, hide tracks, wait for next re-org, get promoted. There is no follow up on effectiveness or quality of work - ever. You are simply measured on how quickly you get a task done and how well you "make yourself look and your boss look" for quarterly ops reviews. If it looks good on a single power point slide, then it is good - reality is nothing. - *Factory worker mentality* Management overly obsessed with the adage "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". With marketing and sales dominating executive ranks, the metrics used to measure performance are nothing short of comical. Not only are such metrics easy to manipulate through unproductive activity but often encourage adversarial internal relationships (for example, tester performance evaluated positive on bugs found per week and developer performance evaluated negative on same metric). This makes managements job easy when it comes time to rank and lay off employees but severely hurts product quality, employee moral and the corporate bottom line. - *Unrealistic expectations* Other than sales opportunities, execs are years behind in product deployment strategy and customers quality requirements. Execs haven't a clue what it takes to roll-out production ready products and continually ignore people who know and can prove otherwise. As a result, engineers are expected to make up difference in totally absurd time frames and that can only be achieved by producing poor quality work. And if you don't meet expectations, you will hear about it next review.