Cisco laid off essential workers and the sh-t shows are getting worse. Who the fu-k is making the decision on who to layoff is an id--t.
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Zero personnel at Cisco are "essential workers" Tell this to first responders. Lol just wow
Cisco, as a family...yes I could say that when it was just coming up. Year 2k...working for Cisco was a prestige. What happened....bribery. SM would let the decision maker in sales that Cisco would get them Managers position if sale went through. Yes, and it did.6 months later a new manager would turn up managing the guys who designed, installed and sold the products. And if you go against their poor decision making, you are on chopping block. It started around 2010. Since then, all went south. Quality guys left. CCIE became a marketing thing. And people would study books to pass rather having field experience...then you are just a number. Good luck
I started as a TAC engineer grade 4 two years after completing my engineering degree. At that time, cisco was everyone's dream job. Then joined Advanced Services as a NOS engineer. After few years became a PM. Then few years in sales as a TME. My final 4 years I spent as an escalation engineer for the BU.
Out of the all the jobs I have done in cisco, TAC is the most stressful job. The clueless ELT especially the ones like V2MOMA thinks that its a call center support. Its much more than that and TAC is the real differentiator when compared to competitors. Unfortunately, during the past 5 years, the quality of TAC has deteriorated drastically.
@3wb you sound like one of those non degree folks.
...you more than likely don't have a college degree and def not a post graduate degree.
Cisco has many people with those degrees who still aren't as smart as a fifth grader. It turns out barfing back what the mama birds barfed into your face does not mean you are capable of actual engineering.
A TAC, Sales person, PM, Junior engineer,FLM are not essential . Who was let go / grade ?
@2dnh the reason you do TAC is because you more than likely don't have a college degree and def not a post graduate degree. Get one of those and maybe you'll get a job that is not a night shift.
@2dnh It's a fu---n customer support assistant job. You are a call center. Pick up phone, read from a playback, if no answer , escalate. high stress job ? Jfc
Yeah that is the problem, most of company thinks TAC are glorified janitors.
The reality is most people in this company could never work TAC. It is akin to living life in permanent stress. It is an incredibly stressful job. Very few can tolerate it long term. It will burn most out.
But the tariffs on TAC!
If you ever worked at a good company you would recognize this as a sign they were extremely poor at their job.
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This is why Cisco will never have the talent to dig out from under their technical debt.
@exq thanks for letting us all know the migration process. Stupid useless TAC get paid 100k a year and still overpaid. Now go clean some bathrooms
If they were laid off they were clearly not essential. Especially if no backfill in place. People here at Cisco think if someone does their job they are highly essential. Standards are very low here
We had to start the project from scratch - lost 6 months of technical understanding.
If you ever worked at a good company you would recognize this as a sign they were extremely poor at their job.
Cisco also removed the wrong people. Two of the most technical people in our teams, who were managing a full project together, were both let go.
We had to start the project from scratch - lost 6 months of technical understanding.
The teams are too small to function and every team is trying to grab people that just arn't available from other teams.
Imagine being early in your career and to be stuck doing nothing but powerpoints and perpetual stakeholder assessment webex meetings; thinking you are somehow even anything technical. It isn't even actual work; it is just pretending that you actually are honestly capable of demonstrating anything of knowledge on technology, beyond powerpoint fluff. Now go play your Xbox before the next webex; then maybe a nap.
my team can do nothing more than keep the lights on at this point
if there was any desire to actually invest for actual growth, the team would need to double in size or more
I get paid either way
Imagine being that late in your career and to be stuck doing deployment work for an MSP
LR'd years ago, would have stayed. Cisco's loss.
Working on managing mid-sized networks on MSP side now for eight years.
Many of us also ex-TAC here; we have made careers with helping migrate Cisco gear to other OEM providers.
Working some of these networks now for the whole eight years, the normal routine is to first swap a portion of the existing network to a Palo or Fortinet firewall, as a testbed. After a few months, most environments start converting. First enterprise firewall usually, then switches. Cookie cutter process.
A good eighteen or so 18,000+ ethernet end port networks, most of their firewall and campus moved off of Cisco.
Nexus was sort of a staying point, after the migrations, but over past two-ish years, not sure what happened with Nexus support in TAC; but it is now truly garbage and has been repeat reason several of our customers finally cut the cord on Cisco Datacenter side. Several customers, multiple day outages, clueless outsourced TAC who repeatably can't get the right C4P Nexus working for days. Customers end up doing Disaster Recovery exercise because TAC drags feet, and is not even on same side of the earth for a P1 outage for first 24 hours.
Getting LR'd was probably the best thing to happen to my career financially.
Sad to say, if TAC was the same as it was in early 2000s, and all this Cisco train-wreck of changes never happened; I would have most likely still be on the case queue. Really stupid Cisco, you canned many of the people that cared the most, and could really fix the stuff, and were good with working with big customers.
We just took our marbles and started another game elsewhere, at places that realize how the business model really is supposed to work.
Added to this, is people that are leaving of their own accord
It's becoming very difficult to do our job
It's not the quantity but the quality. Yes, those left behind can learn new skills but it will take months or years to learn what people accumulated in a few decades at Cisco. And its not just 'technical' knowledge (that is the easy part) but 'Cisco' knowledge that is more difficult to replace.
The useful will get better jobs and the rest won't be missed. As a customer over the past 30 years the software quality remains consistently miserable so the consequences aren't as extreme as many seem to think.
A bunch of yes men following orders just to keep their jobs.