What's MM, Buffy and Hector smoking now??
Apparently, they feel TAC engineers have been relaxing for many years thus starting this October, they'll be increasing the case volume by 10% in AMERICAS; i.e engineers are now expected to get 4 or more cases per day...
Just because Cisco BUs use agile dev, and software quality assurance and testing is a mirage?
No, it's been a mirage for the near 30 years I've used Cisco gear.
TAC sadly is a log parsing gig, and that creates a big problem, if the issue is not in the logs, or if it cannot be logged for TAC it does not exist.
Forgetting that getting certain logs cannot be collected in a busy operating networks
Forgetting that by encrypting traffic you cannot collect the logs you want
Forgetting that logs are not always deterministic in root cause analysis, knowing how a network operates and knowing the impact and seriousness on end-user experience of a failure
What is the benefit of escalating Cases to P2, if you just end up with a non-ending stream of Tac engineers in a 4h shift rotation, that cannot fix or identify your issue, just to end up in a month long BU escalation with Dev accessing the environment and running custom scripts on a root shell?
Just because Cisco BUs use agile dev, and software quality assurance and testing is a mirage?
1 thing is for use as long as Cisco uses Customers as testbeds to test 0 day software, customers will not implement latest and greatest, regardless of the security narrative.
Quite frankly, the issue is tac does not really provide good solutions or root causes, and the troubleshooting process is not good. most of the things fall into 2 cases.
1 - Missconfig
2 - Bug
In case of 1 is mostly because of bad or incomplete documentation that is not acurate in referencing the use-cases of the features ir their limitations, limitations on documentation is practically non-existent.
In case of 2 it takes months to get anything done, and the troubleshoot needs weeks to complete most of the times spanned over multiple sessions, tac eng going on leave and , tac eng that don't have a clue and don't have a shred of common sense and just follow a guide without really understanding the tech what they are working with
I belive more than half of the cases should be escalated to the BU's do to poor development, however tac is acting as a buffer for that and most of the cases just end up with Customers giving up and finding workarounds for themselves.
Having the BU's accountable for the sh-t software they develop that would do it.
CXC, formerly known as TAC, in APJC, should be restructured.
It's a nest of far too many low-level young childish kids.
the people need to be laid off are cloud tac, they are just frontline of Business Unit, they barely have something to troubleshoot, 90% of the work can be automated. Honestly I am confident I can close 100 cases per month if I were a cloud tac engineer.
who is buffy
Laid off from Cisco in 2015 but I don’t have an axe to grind. Started off in TAC in 1997 and worked there for several years. It was and always will be a meat grinder. Great place to learn. Put your time in and move on. I am certain that this is not really news to anyone.
case volume goes up, reqs open up
5%+ of GDP employees (India, Costa Rica, Sofia) are getting fired starting October 2nd. If you know anyone, please alert them.
Just another cost cutting exercise packaged with some flavour of the month on words which are “good for you” . The harsh reality is that overloaded teams get more work. So soon we will have to do analysis on why our customer sat metric of the month took a hit. Welcome to the new level of insanity where we do the same thing over and over again and never ever learn. Godspeed to those still in tac.
@1vxi+1oHJFOJu What utter hogwash. Stop playing LoL all day and get back to work!
Post from TheLayoff.com
The cases that TAC takes, aren't "How do I," or "Where's this button" level cases.
They are taking cases that individually take between 4-8 hours to sort out. Things like the network of a company not allowing 15 people in the company to log on to the Cisco services. Or complex technical engineering issues with the products themselves integrating.
Software isn't like other business models, where acquisition makes sense. Every software is like a book of code, written in its own format by it's own engineers. The engineers have a connection and understanding of that book.
But if you take 20 books of code and try to mush them together - you just get a mess that is hard to work with, understand, or fix issues in. Anything you change can break 15 other things. The TAC engineers are working with nightmare spaghetti code and software in some cases.
A case load of 4 a day is insane.
"i.e engineers are now expected to get 4 or more cases per day..."
This is a joke right? It has to be. I also saw a reply from someone complaining about people with no skills. If you are complaining about 4+ cases a day, YOU have no skills. 4+ cases really?
I have read about how bad TAC is now but disregarded those posts. Now it is evident how bad TAC has become.
4+ cases a day. GTFO now.
As a Cisco customer, I can tell that the TAC experience is generally negative. So long to resolve cases, very rarely do TAC engineers want to show some ability and jump on a Webex... always saying "collect more logs": and drag cases on for weeks and weeks.
What do you mean? LOL Buffy, just like Chuck and Fran, is great and traveling around and getting her photo posted on LinkedIn with the smiling troops. Isn't that all senior people do these days? They travel and make a big deal about it, yet we can't travel or at least have our travel micromanaged !! So frustrating! No leadership by example here.
I could not agree more. Cisco is all about nepotism, favouritism and nothing related to skills or experience.there are folks sitting for 20+ years with no skills just because some relative is a CTO
Although much of the info here I agree with, I hate to break it to you, but this has always been the TAC plan and will continue to be. Provide great tools and allow TAC engineers to be more productive and the tickets per engineer go up! Be glad you have work, some of us got laid off!
Now, how they treat people in the LRs, show favoritism and promote their friends, that's where the dysfunction is. And yes, Chuck did loose it. He's now doing anything he can to fill the pockets of his ELT, travel the world, and tell you all how Cisco is the best place to work so you look the other way when they treat people the way they do.
Never in my 10+years in tech have I seen such an incompetent leader. Why is she getting favoritism from Chuck? Did Chuck lose his insights? Double minority at its best?