Cisco Reviews

- Strange location for an IT company, in the middle of an industrial park, outside of town. Not a very pleasant place to go for a walk with trucks and forklifts roaming around. Oranmore village is at least 20 min walk away, which is a bit far if one wants to go out for lunch. That's also where the bus stop is, so it's something to consider if using public transport to get to work. - Canteen is very bad. The catering staff are trying their best, but are very limited with what they can do because the kitchen is very badly fitted out, so they can’t prepare any half decent meals. - Cisco is ultimately a sales, not an engineering company so while good engineering practises are appreciated by some, it’s not what necessarily gets people promoted. - Salary, promotions and opportunities are good if one knows how to play the game and gets noticed by the right people. - A somewhat weird/cringy ‘we are an amazing company’ attitude from some people. It’s disheartening how much self-affirmation we received from winning the somewhat irrelevant ‘Great Place to Work’ survey last year while conveniently forgetting that we were competing against some small insignificant companies. We are unlikely to stand a chance if the top US software companies (i.e. companies we should really be compared with) decided to participate in a survey like that. There was a time when they decided to start giving us a free bowl of fruit every day, which is a great initiative if it wasn't sold to us as the greatest thing ever i.e. on the same level of getting a free house. - Because we don't really having any real proper competition in Galway, the company gets settled in the virtual security offered by ‘we are good enough for Galway’ mindset that hinders any effort or initiative to continuously improve and yet wonders why it is so difficult to attract experienced people in the field to work here.

No career progression. Very possible to get stuck in same position / salary for years on end in this company. Seem to have no budget for career advancement at the moment. Very difficult to stay motivated. Good engineering practices are not always recognized. Management say they care about quality but only seem to reward engineers who produce at speed but cause many bugs in our products. Actions speak louder than words. No team structure. You don't know what you will be working on week to week. Very varied. Can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the person. Not what I like in a work place environment. Very frugal in general with employees i.e Don't help pay for Christmas Party. We used to have release parties but since we are releasing on a continuous basis this has all dried up. Again no recognition to the dedication of employees. Since we develop communications applications there is a culture of always being online and it can be common to seeing people replying to messages at 11 - 12pm at night. Can be very difficult to switch off. Management don't directly encourage this but also don't try to curb this behavior. Canteen is expensive for what you get. Cisco didn't provide the catering contractor and canteen staff with the proper facilities so they have to make do with pre made factory food and microwaves. Food seems highly processed and as such the quality isn't very good. Vending machines have no healthy options. Senior Management are more obsessed with image i.e Winning Great Place To Work instead of actually improving the work environment for employees. I feel that management don't listen to employees concerns. I had many experiences of engineers on the team voicing common sense concerns about the direction of the product to management only to fall on deaf ears. Eventually the customer voiced the same concerns and so we ended up wasting countless engineering hours backtracking on previous work. This has happened on many occasions. Over the last number of years there has been annual redundancies with out fail. It has actually affected the Galway site a couple of times. One year a whole team was let go. This was without consideration to the performance of individual members of the team. So it doesn't matter how good you are you could still be let go at anytime.