Pros
Excellent work life balance. Culture of understanding and encouragement for people to not be workaholics, for taking time off, for not getting burned out etc. There were regular top down decisions from the CEO to randomly add new company-wide holidays. Layoffs are never fun but when they happened across Cisco due to covid, a lot of effort was put into providing employees options. e.g. long-tenure employees were offered buyouts, almost all employees were offered the option to switch to 4 day work week (for 80% pay with full benefits)
Cons
Pay was ok but not amazing, especially for security people. Promo and raise process was a black box (even for managers sometimes depending on where you were in the chain). Company is slow to align resources to stated objectives. For example, there's lots of listed objectives to double down on security and recurring revenue streams (e.g. saas like Duo). Despite this, security saas employees may not receive a full bonus if sales targets were missed. Since Cisco's current sales are overwhelmingly from their traditional business of switches, routers, etc., even if the newer segments of Cisco knock it out of the park it's more than possible they won't be rewarded.
