- With anything that scales the quality unfortunately changes, the beautiful office feels extremely crowded and beat up (lot's of chipped furniture, scratched walls, cabinets with broken doors) folks are less warm and more entitled treating the space and the facilities staff like a hotel and maids instead of participating as a community. This can be seen by the trash and dirty dishes left in meeting rooms, plates full of food left in sinks, trash bins overflowing onto the floors in high traffic bathrooms
-What used to feel like a tight knit community feels much more tribal/clique like with folks only interacting with their own teams even within departments. This also affects cross department communication, folks are almost hesitant to speak to people outside of their teams for fear they will be asked to take on more projects or have to help someone with a process or system. The open floor plan makes it really hard to focus with drive by requests and chatty teammates.
- Morale is pretty low across the board according to our internal yearly survey, folks don't feel recognized with growth or pay. The benefits may have made up for the below market rates, but so many other companies have blown us out of the water with in house catering, clean facilities, community events, a health benefit or gym larger than a small hotel gym. When these topics come up in company wide AMAs the answers from leadership are very vague and hand wavey.
- Also the negative to the dogs - speaking with the ladies that clean the office they very often pick up dog poop off the Sales floor as there are tons of poorly behaved dogs who's owners are too busy working to watch them. There's also a decent amount of scared dogs who growl if you go near the desk or if another dog walks by, which is tough considering how many people and dogs are in office at any given time.
- The work life balance here really depends on your role and your manager. Most of my experience was on teams that had an unspoken culture of working through half or all of lunch and working late both in office and at home. I often had teammates from other time zones pinging me between 10pm-6am looking for immediate responses (mostly forgetting time zones I think).
- Management and career development are probably two of my biggest cons here, the managers until recently were usually young inexperienced ICs who were really good at their IC job and then were promoted to manage 8-12 ICs including weekly 1:1s. I'd say most of my 1:1s and reviews were missed without reschedule or months late. I rarely had time in my roles to work on career growth, and compound that with the lack of a career ladder or metrics to help you argue for a raise or grade change. I honestly felt most of my managers over the years cared, but either didn't know how to advocate for the team or didn't have the power to affect the changes we needed to feel supported and appreciated.
- Legacy Merakians (the big names who have been around pre Cisco Acquisition) are usually positive in that they have tribal knowledge and brand history, but more often than not their ideas and tactics are outdated and they are given a lot of freedom and power simply due to their tenure and not necessarily in alignment with their output. To put it bluntly there are a lot of old timers that are stuck in their ways causing an extreme tech and process debt unlike anywhere else I have worked. There have been so many times when looking at a tool or process that a teammate or I asked "Why do we do it this way?" and literally no one knows as the people who put the system in place are gone or moved to different departments. We had accounts being billed to Merakians who had not worked at the company for years. Because of this, there are many pieces that are known to be inefficient or costly but we did not have the bandwidth to overhaul anything either because it would require starting from scratch or because the very tightly staffed teams could not spare the cycles.
