Cisco

The best place to learn networking technologies at a level you won’t get anywhere else.

Depending on which team or technology you support, the skills you obtained here can take you to a next-level position with a lucrative salary elsewhere. People from TAC have moved to companies like Amazon and Google, if that interests you.

Colleagues are friendly, nice, and supportive.

There are free exams when attempting any Cisco certs, including CCIE.

Many opportunities exist to move to a different team or technology within the TAC theater, but not as many outside TAC.

• The salary in TAC is below par. Many times, I have raised this issue to my direct managers and even to higher bosses during skip-level meetings about considering an increase in the overall pay across all grades, but not a single cent has ever increased!

Oh, and those eNPS surveys as well. I'm not sure if the bosses who read the surveys ever showed some sympathy to the suffering TAC engineers.

• The kind of work you do in TAC is very narrow. You can be highly skilled in X technology, but your knowledge in other technologies can be very poor (unless you have gained experience in these "other technologies" from your previous roles).

• Favouritism! TAC has a funny system to get a pay raise or a grade promotion because managers value you merely based upon what you have shown off to them or what they saw from the metrics/stats, and not so much with the depth of the technical knowledge and experience you have gained over the years, plus the challenging issues you have resolved on your own, plus the number of times you have helped your colleagues with difficult cases. These are things the managers have failed to notice!

Whoever read this may disagree, but they disagreed because they never understood, and they always thought they were right.

This place can be awesome for newbies/grads because if they showed off their little contributions here and there, worked hard, stayed in the office after hours to either study or work on cases, and were nice to the managers, they will surely get the cool stuff, travel to other Cisco offices for BU rotations, etc., and get promoted to a higher grade very quickly, even surpassing the salary of the seasoned TAC engineers.

• Politics everywhere! I have always wanted to stay in Cisco (outside TAC, of course), and I have applied for many other internal jobs before moving on. Of all those many internal positions I have applied for, 95% of the time, I got NO interview invitations at all.

Did my resume fail to impress the recruiter? Was there some kind of favouritism in other departments as well? Didn't they like TAC engineers at all? Was there some kind of politics being played out? I don't know the true answers, but whatever the reasons are, it's funny how I got an offer upon my very first external job application from one of the Big Four tech companies. Funny, but this is the reality!

• Constant and very high numbers of employee attritions due to the above reasons.

• High-pressure work environment because you are basically a support engineer, which means that you are there to resolve problems after problems, and for every customer, their problem is always urgent to be resolved. And because TAC always lacks engineers (due to constant resignations), it creates constant burnout mentally and physically.

This review & rating is only for the experience I have had as a TAC engineer in the Sydney office. I have moved on, but will you read this and ever do something about it? I doubt it.