Don’t let the nice office space or free food fool you. Cisco Meraki was the worst workplace and work experience I had a chance to experience in my career so far. I will regret for the rest of my life accepting a job offer from them. The company’s culture is absolutely AWFUL! Your opinion doesn’t matter if you are not a manager or director. There is a big “Diversity and Inclusion” push from HR and Corp, but you will not find grounds to be yourself. The company management style is stuck 15 to 20 years in the past. Expected to be asked to go to the office in the afternoon if you have a doctor’s appointment in the morning. Expect to have your manager monitoring if you got to work ten minutes later than anyone else or left a few minutes before 5 pm. Expect to have your managed call you into a room and ask for an explanation of why you didn’t spend 9 hours at the office or if you decided to work from home. They cultivate a “through under the bus” type of environment and coworkers will tell your boss if you are not in compliance with their ridiculous imposition of being at the office for 9 hours. Expect to work with negative, blaming, gossipy, and immature people.
After 2 months working for the company, I had my first work trip and I have to say that was the most unpleasant work trip that I had until this day in my life. We had team dinners everyone single day, which is completely acceptable for a work trip. What was unacceptable was the fact that what people wanted to talk about during those dinners were “Who they HATED in the company”. It was very unpleasant and a demonstration of how awful the culture is.
Leadership is extremely weaky and all the decisions are made from top to bottom. All the managers and Directors operate as if they are supervisors - They don’t do anything and will micromanage absolutely everything that you try to do or deliver. Nothing gets done! And you rarely get any praise for a job well done.
I only worked there for 9 months and I couldn’t spend any other day there. I had to deal with people (Directors) making inappropriate jokes about coworkers with disabilities. I had to deal with people taking pictures of coworkers from their backs and sharing on text message thread exposing people’s personal data (bank account information). I had to experience people misusing the company’s money for personal favor and to obtain personal information from other people within the company. I had to deal with explicit favoritism, harassment, and bullying since the day I joined.
Cisco Meraki is not a fun place to work. It’s very negative please and if you by chance find somebody willing to help you with anything you are having a lucky day. People are extremely rude, entitled, and arrogant. The products are good! And That’s the only good thing you will find there. Don’t do the same mistake I did. I wouldn’t recommend Cisco Meraki to friend and not event to my worst enemy.
