I was reading a Reddit thread bashing Cisco today. It’s a few months old. Some of the commentary is fair enough. Some of it might be a bit unfair. But I do think all vendor execs should spend time reading customer Reddit threads to understand how they’re perceived and what they can do better. […]
Tag: TAC
HPE Buys Juniper
In 2007, I left Cisco after two brutal years in high-touch TAC. I honestly hated the job, but it was an amazing learning experience. I draw on my TAC experience every single day. A buddy of mine got a job at a Gold Partner, offered to bring me in, and I jumped on the opportunity. […]
Goodbye, Building K
I haven’t written anything for a while, because of the simple fact that I had nothing to say. The problem with being a writer is that sometimes you have nothing to write. I also have a day job, and sometimes it can keep me quite busy. Finally, an afternoon drive provided some inspiration. There’s a […]
Product Management
It’s impossible to count how many people at my college wanted to be “writers”. So many early-twenty-somethings here in the US think they are going to spend their lives as screenwriters or novelists. My colleagues from India tell me most people there want to be doctors or engineers, which tells you something about the decline […]
Are coffee and networks the same?
I shall avoid naming names, but when I worked for Juniper we had a certain CEO who pumped us up as the next $10 billion company. It never happened, and he left and became the CEO of Starbucks. Starbucks has nothing to do with computer networking at all. Why was he hired by Starbucks? How […]
TAC Tales #18: All at once
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 large US service provider had a Packet over SONET (PoS) line card […]
Interviewing #2: Why do we interview?
In 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, I’d like to start with a very basic question: Why is it that we interview job […]
TAC Tales #17: Escalations
When 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 not-so-brilliant, and everything in between. Let me give an example: I worked at HTTS, or […]
TAC Tales #16: To microburst or not to microburst
I’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 isn’t; either the pings go through or they don’t. Even when a route is flapping, that’s just […]
Network Engineering Jobs
I’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 before that. I often see younger network engineers posting in public forums asking […]