Cisco reviews

Layoffs ,“LR”s multiple times a year.. this really delays projects when you’re regularly losing a stakeholder or team member to LRs. During the beginning of the pandemic I was told repeatedly there was no guarantee my role was secure. The ceo claims he wont lay people off during the pandemic.. then 2 months later say theres going to be a massive layoff of 10-12% of the company in October. The additional stress and attempt to normalize the fear of losing your job constantly.. NO THANK YOU. Also huge RTP presence means lots of conservative, christian republicans. Lots of work needed in the D&I space. No formal review, no chance of promotion. People are treated as replaceable resources. 3 managers in 2 years. Didnt see a single team mate promoted in 3 years, even people that had been there 6+ years. Employees have Stockholm syndrome, “feel so lucky they survived the last LR”. The pay is horrrrible for the bay area and they do not give annual increases.. period. If youre lucky youll get a promotion every 5 years. If you are able to keep the same manager for more than 8 months. How this place makes it to the “best places to work” list..... they're clearly bribing someone.

Cisco's definition of culture in my brief 4-year stint was "everything is about money". That is good and bad - good because you can make some serious dough here, bad because there is no sense of community in the workforce. Cisco has limited restructurings in spring and fall. The lifers refer to avoiding a layoff as "being safe" which is in my mind an oxymoron. There is no such thing as safety at Cisco. If you come here, be prepared to move on when you hit the wrong set of cost lists. High performance is no guarantee of "safety" either; I earned 1.3x-1.5x multipliers on my bonuses every year for 4 years - still impacted by an LR. Most restructuring affects older (highly compensated) workers. There is no other logical conclusion to the restructurings than they are meant to cut already well-trained long-term growth employees and replace them with a younger untrained workforce. These LRs create intense stop energy in the company nearly all the time as everyone is in a state of panic. This "Fog of War" is difficult for innovators to execute in making Cisco pivot like an Exxon Valdez rather than an Eagle. Cisco completely doesn't understand open source and evidenced by the latest round of LRs in 2018 that impacted nearly every engineer doing any sort of open source work. The engineering workforce is far too compliant resulting in high degrees of passive-aggressive behavior rather than assertiveness.