- The salary in TAC is below par. Many times I have raised this issue to my direct managers & even to the higher bosses during skip-level meetings about considering to increase the overall pay across all grades but not a single cent has ever increased! Oh, and those eNPS survey as well. 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 payrise or a grade promotion because managers value you merely based upon what you have showed off to them or what they saw from the metrics/stats and not so much with the depth of the technical knowledge & experience you have gained over the years + the challenging issues you have resolved on your own + the number of times you have helped your colleagues with difficult cases. These are stuff 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 be nice to the managers, they will surely get the cool stuff, travel to other Cisco’s offices for BU rotations etc, and get promoted to the higher grade very quick 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, 95% of the time, I got NO interview invitations at all. Did my resume failed 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 & very high number 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 lack of engineers (due to constant resignations), it creates a constant burnout mentally & physically
