The case came into the routing protocols queue, even though it was simply a line card crash. The RP queue in HTTS was the dumping ground for anything that did not fit into one of the few other specialized queues we had. A...
Read MoreIn the last article on technical interviewing, I told the story of how I got my first networking job. The interview was chaotic and unorganized, and resulted in me getting the job and being quite successful. In this post,...
Read MoreWhen you open a TAC case, how exactly does the customer support engineer (CSE) figure out how to solve the case? After all, CSEs are not super-human. Just like any engineer, in TAC you have a range of brilliant to...
Read MoreI’ve mentioned before that EIGRP SIA was my nightmare case at TAC, but there was one other type of case that I hated–QoS problems. Routing protocol problems tend to be binary. Either the route is there or it...
Read MoreI’ve been in this industry a while now, and I’ve done a lot of jobs. Certainly not every job, but a lot. My first full time network engineering job came in 2000, but I was doing some networking for a few years...
Read MoreEveryone who’s worked in TAC can tell you their nightmare case–the type of case that, when they see it in the queue, makes them want to run away, take an unexpected lunch break, and hope some other engineer grabs...
Read MoreA common approach for TAC engineers and customers working on a tough case is to just “throw hardware at it.” Sometimes this can be laziness: why troubleshoot a complex problem when you can send an RMA, swap out a...
Read MoreWhen you work at TAC, you are required to be “on-shift” for 4 hours each day. This doesn’t mean that you work four hours a day, just that you are actively taking cases only four hours per day. The other four...
Read MoreWhen I was still a new engineer, a fellow customer support engineer (CSE) asked a favor of me. I’ll call him Andy. “I’m going on PTO, could you cover a case for me? I’ve filed a bug and while I’m...
Read MoreMy job as a customer support engineer (CSE) at TAC was the most quantified I’ve ever had. Every aspect of our job performance was tracked and measured. We live in the era of big data, and while numbers can be helpful,...
Read MoreI’ve come back to Cisco recently, and I think I can say that I haven’t worked this hard since the last time I was at Cisco. I remember my first manager at TAC telling me in an interview that “Cisco loves...
Read MoreIn this article in my “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I describe my experience going to work at Cisco as a CCIE. Unlike many Cisco-employed CCIE’s, I earned my certification outside of Cisco. A CCIE leads to a job...
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