Personal experience and job satisfaction will vary widely depending on your location and on your manager. I've worked both at a large office and as a remote employee, and large office is definitely a far better experience.
Even though Cisco has thousands of remote employees, they are frequently treated as an after-thought. Mid-level managers do not seem to be trained in dealing with remote employees and many times they act as though "out of sight, out of mind". As a remote worker, my manager should be my main tie to corporate, but I usually got better, faster, more accurate and more complete info from friends who worked in different parts of the company.
Some managers will authorize time out of the office for training, some will not. Your ability to pursue professional development will depend completely on your current manager. Many managers feel that with the number of virtual courses available, then you should never have to take off for training. There is some merit to this postion, but you can't focus on a virtual course if you are not given the time away from your regular job to "attend" it.
Every August at the beginning of the fiscal year, Cisco re-organizes. Teams change, the managers change, the focus changes, etc. July is usually a useless month because everyone is holding their collective breath waiting to see how the re-org goes and in August there is always a giant account shuffle. It is completely wasteful. During one five year period I was re-organized four times. At the end of that time, I ended up more or less where I started but my team had a slightly different name.
The worst part about the annual shuffle is that incoming managers always want to tinker with the structure/focus of their team. As Systems Engineers, we had a technological specialty area that we were supposed to become experts on. Every year, the teams' new manager would change the area assignments. This forced us to set aside our other projects and re-qualify for our new team assignments. There were usually several tests involved and a couple of weeks worth of studying in order to pass them. The upheaval always seemed totally arbitrary and not at all productive.
Cisco does not offer a very good work/life balance. (I doubt that they have ever even heard of the term.) The only time they encourage you to take vacation is when they need to get the hours off of the books for accounting purposes. I have had managers tell me that they want me to take vacation time, but still work on whatever project I was working on. Also, I have seen a couple of cases where an employee was hassled by their manager for taking time off to deal with a death in the family (once for the employee's child, once for a parent.)
Nights and weekends are fair game for emails and phone calls. I have had a manager call me at 11 PM, just to "catch up on things". As a remote worker in a different time zone, I have done several conference calls between the hours of 2 AM and 4 AM . (These were not for emergency purposes, these were just for the convenience of the manager.)
Cisco is definitely a male-oriented company and women face a unique set of challenges. There are almost NO women in management within certain divisions. I was the only woman on my team for years, and it can be a somewhat hostile work-environment. I skipped any "team-building" that took place at Hooters or at strip clubs in Vegas. On one team building event during the sales meeting in Vegas, I asked to be dropped off at my hotel rather than tag along to a Gentlemen's Club . (My manager openly ridiculed me for that in front of the rest of the team.) Going to HR is widely considered to be the kiss of death to your career, so very few complaints are lodged. I believe this sort of behavior is not tolerated in every part of Cisco because I know women who have transferred out of the division that I worked in and they said it was a different world on the outside.
