Pros
Many of the folks there are good to work with, trying to do good work in a tough environment. Lots of resources for learning, but there is very little in terms of formal training. If you can find the information, it is there to use. Interesting and original problems occasionally pop up. Working from home is a great benefit. However, individual managers are free to dictate how employees do it. Some groups are allowed to work from home or the office at the employee's discretion. Other groups are given the tools to work from home, but the ability to do so is highly restricted. Fairly generous PTO. However, keep in mind that the company requires all employees to use between five to seven days of it at the end of the calendar year, even if you do not have enough, forcing you to go negative. Contractors don't get PTO, but are forced to take those five to seven days off unpaid.
Cons
Management talks about doing the right thing and most employees believe in doing the right thing, but the management prevents people from doing the right thing at times. Customers are often kept in the dark about potential issues. Meetings are held discussing customer issues or bugs the customer may hit and then engineers are told to keep their mouth shut when talking to the customer. The company is so obsessed with the numbers and stock price and stockholders, a lot of bizarre cost management edicts and processes have started to appear. The phrase "penny wise, pound foolish" is very apparent at Cisco. Layoffs are a tool used regularly by management. People are paralyzed by the fear of being a boat rocker and getting laid off which results in low morale. Employee dissatisfaction is obvious. Compensation is okay, but raises are rare. No cost of living increases. Promotions are also rare. There ere people in the same position for years. If you want to advance your career, it won't happen at Cisco. One tactic is to work there, get Cisco on your resume and go to a partner or another company and get a much better title and compensation, coming back to Cisco after a year or two. Too many contractors. Cisco is trying to hit a magical number of contractors so that they can terminate them without notice instead of laying off employees. Contractors that are currently working there get strung along for months and years. To add insult to injury, instead of offering current contractors employee positions, Cisco hires outside folks without offering the open positions to the contractors. There are so many groups at Cisco, you will do one narrow range of tasks. This leads to many jobs, especially in TAC or HTTS, being highly repetitive and un-challenging. There are a many "experts" who are not. Working at Cisco will illustrate that having a CCIE is only proof that someone can pass a test and a lab that in no way reflects the real world. There are plenty who "earned" the certification by attending "study" sessions where people memorize questions from the written exam and scenarios leaked from the lab or by using brain dumps of questions smuggled out of the exam. Additionally, the CCIE is valued above real world experience; an employee with decades of experience and CCIE-level knowledge will not be treated as well as a newly minted CCIE with little to no experience.
