> those who have worked there in the past constantly raved about how little they actually have to work and how empty the office is on Fridays among other aspects that give the impression that much isn't expected from their engineers.

Cisco is a huge place and this varies by person/team/BU. Fridays a lot of people work from home.

> Fridays a lot of people work from home.

A lot of my coworkers work from home on Fridays too. Which means a three-day weekend / nothing to show for their time on Monday.

I never understand the animosity shown towards people who choose to work from home. Nothing personal, but I see attitudes like yours in a few of my scoffing coworkers as well.

Do you really know what your teammates are accomplishing? Or how they are spending their workday? Do you go to their homes and peer inside the window? Or is it just some sense of self righteousness you feel by being a good employee who wouldn't ever choose to work from home like those other lazy bums.

> Or is it just some sense of self righteousness you feel by being a good employee who wouldn't ever choose to work from home like those other lazy bums.

Wow, I must have touched a nerve. Actually, I semi-regularly work from home. My issue is with the people in my organization who take advantage of working from home, treat it like a three-day weekend, and will likely cause the work-from-home privilege to be revoked.

My experience is similar to freyr's. I've had Friday-from-home periods where usually I'd end up not doing much. Sometimes this was my fault; it's just too easy to see it as an early start tothe weekend. But at other times it was because people/code/decisions I needed were not made because employees in the office also seemed to have much lower output on Fridays.

And my experience with coworkers is no different. I actually checked commit histories at some point to confirm that indeed most of those who worked from home on Fridays didn't produce any significant output. The sneakier ones would commit stuff, but clearly 'little stuff' that I sometimes suspected they had ready on a Thursday specifically to show something on a Friday.

Of course, you're completely correct that this doesn't mean that this is always the case. But if I were an employer, based on my experiences, I'd be hesitant to allow people to work from home on Fridays. Not in general, but specifically only on Fridays.

The margins in particular are something I cannot understand from Cisco.

Technology in general comes down in pricing. I'm constantly amazed at the vendors that introduce newer, more powerful product lines, with a reduced price tag from anything previously seen.

Cisco here, are a huge outlier. Despite HPE and Juniper creeping much more competitive options into their enterprise space, twice or so times a year we get alerts from Cisco about "across the board" price increases.

Maybe it's like MS and SQL Server. More and more installs are getting replaced. So they raise prices to focus on their customers that have no choice.