What interests you about it? This isn’t a flame post I’m just honestly curious.
Rest and vest lifestyle especially if you are Grade 10 with good comp
Cisco on an average has the best work life balance and effective hourly rate (better than FANGs) The 4-5 peeps I know currently working for Cisco have TC >= ~210-250K and they work ~ 30 minutes per day on an average (most of weeks/days WFH)
Are you serious? How many YOE do they have?
30 min. Lol. That's impossible to justify keeping someone. There's yearly reviews where you get rated based on work produced.
I'm only 27. I make 200k a year, working the equivalent of 30hrs/week. I get 21 days paid time off (no questions asked, not the phony unlimited vacation), 4.5 percent 401k match, 15% espp and ability to work remotely from wherever in the world. I worked a month from Thailand last year. I have interesting projects and my boss doesn't stop me from having a life or unnecessary on call pressures. I also have high visibility up my management chain because they really reward innovation (out of necessity to survive), because not everyone is competing against each other. The only other companies that are overall comparable are Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn and Vmware. Maybe pockets of Apple. Or some promising startup where I can use my skills of working in deeper shit than writing a web service. Can I make more money elsewhere? Yes. Will they let me work from my flight to Utah on Friday at noon? I'm not sure. Maybe when I'm married and have a family, I'll consider selling my soul only to work for a higher TC. For now, I value my free time and the respect of my personal desires.
Cisco is an interesting place. It’s a combination of: a) Competitive TC b) Light workload c) Shitty legacy code d) Relaxed colleagues(even the ones younger than 30) e) Weird managers prioritizing empire building After a certain point, you become amazed as to how does this company survive and apparently, thrive. I understand we need to have wlb but not at the cost of being an unmotivated engineer.
It is very hard to generalize Cisco’s work culture, Every group has own culture. I see people spend few hours to late nighters. It is pretty complicated but Cisco benefits are good and I see less age discrimination than rest of companies.
What is the level of difficulty for interviews?
If you understand pointers and have theoretical knowledge of kernel , OS , pointers-memory management, then it’s “easy” difficulty
If you want to create a startup on the side, Cisco is the best company to be employed full time hands down. In the past 7 yrs, Many networking / hw / cloud centric startups are all by ex-Cisco folks
Cisco is the world leader in Networking industry. If networking is your thing then Cisco is the place to be. You get to work on products with a huge customer base without sacrificing work life balance
Cisco paved the way for widespread internet across the World. I take pride in knowing we still do that and are trying to bring it to every person out there. I’d rather work on products that are doing this, rather than something like social media or ride sharing or search engines...whatever. None of it exists without the internet