Vantaggi
Depending on the role flexibility in hours and ability to work from home. Large company ability to rotate and learn new things Excellent pay - Cisco strives to pay at the 75th percentile, pretty good benefits Great place to work and advance for women Bonuses are usually paid out or in bad years a portion of the bonus. If you do get laid off and are a blue badge (non-contractor employee) you will get a generous severance package - in 2011 it was a 6 month payout for most, but for long term older employees it was 1 year. In 2013 the package was something very similar two months on the books - paid with a four month payout. If you don't have a brand name school on impressive company your resume, people will take you more serious after doing time at Cisco. The possibility of driving important initiatives of very significant size - the ability to impact millions of dollars of revenue or be part of a billion dollar business unit or enterprise. A great cross cultural - world-wide and cutting edge technology experience.
Svantaggi
If you are a red badge (contractor) in the USA- odds are you will never become a full time employee with benefits. Back in 2011, 40% of the company was contract, today it is higher. Many have the dreams and desires to convert from contractor to employee but your odds are almost as good as playing the lotto. (If you are a women, your odds will be better - as you will help the desired diversity metrics). Raises almost never happen. They are the exception and not the rule. Continual layoffs of higher paying positions - almost every year - cost shifting of higher paying jobs to lower paying areas outside of Bay Area/USA. Each job has very limited role responsibility because they are typically structured in a silo - so after two years you might get bored and will want to go through the job rotation program. Some departments had VERY inflated job titles compared with the outside world. I have met Directors and Senior Directors that I wouldn't let them run a McDonalds (if I owned one). As they say in Texas - all hat and no cattle. If you are a straight white male not in engineering it's not the best place to advance - you will have difficulties in advancing because you will not meet the desired diversity quota. Because engineering is so heavily weighted toward men, the other areas of the business are being strongly encouraged to hire women. I've seen entire departments shift from 50/50 to 75/80% women. Many of the women prefer only to hire women. The women dominated departments are creating new issues which I had never seen before in any organization and in certain cases slows down progress. While I support the advancement of women, some things are hard to challenge, change or modify without coming across as a Neanderthal. (I hope they balance things out better in the future). The LGBT agenda can create a hostile environment after the inclusion and diversity on the annual review implemented by a previous HR exec who is now at Twitter. The review now can be used against those that have more traditional views of the world. It creates and Orwellian world where the word inclusion means exclusion. If you work at Cisco too long you might become immersed in the slow "collaborative" bureaucratic way of doing things where nothing gets done and perhaps lose your ability to act and think quickly.
