Cisco is an amazingly poorly run company at every level. What I don't understand is why engineers come back...
Yes for the amount of work required the pay is good - but time is short and there are only a finite number of projects you can work on in your life... Why spend years building something JUST for a paycheck?
My skills had atrophied badly working there for several years and it took months to bring them back up to par, but when I did I was able to land a job at a top tier company. The pay is much better, the coworkers smarter, the boss is busy trying to build a product not an empire... No way in HELL I would go back to Cisco now.