Cisco

Great work culture and managers. A lot of projects (work) is available, and people are available to help everywhere. The team culture in general is great across all teams. If you have to do anything with networks and networks are your long-term career goal, then there is absolutely no better place than Cisco. There is a lot of training available, high-end labs with tons of devices, and opportunities to earn so many industry-level certificates, and all this is free of cost.

At the end of the day, it is a network support role after all. Even if you might take up a lot of automation Python projects, you have to take care of your cases/backlog. You might feel burnt out in a few high-severity cases as well (very similar to what software devs face when their 'feature' is about to 'go live'), but that gets easier with time and experience.

The nature of the job can be viewed in two ways:

• Positive: You are Sherlock Holmes, who has to investigate and use your skills on multiple cases.
• Negative: Your work basically starts when things are going wrong. So you are almost always dealing with a mental 'timer' as people are waiting for you to provide solutions or answers, and most of the times it is not easy.

Multiple logs, timestamps, data correlation – and since you are not the one who has written the code, except for a few rare days, mostly you will have a lot of emails to write and multiple logs to check.

Salary growth can be slow (as far as I am aware, 10-18% is standard); however, if your communication with management is positive and your manager assures you, then it can be worth the wait. Exponential increment after a span of 2-3 years is common, I have heard.

This will vary a lot based on an individual's experience and the work they have put in, so not really a con.

Lot of mandatory trainings :-P

Try to form a strong technical leadership team in Bangalore for all BUs, so that engineers can learn and grow at a fast pace.

Interaction between TAC, BU, and DEVs has a long way to go across the whole CX.