Things are not looking good. SAs will not be backfilled when they leave and if not enough SAs leave, then layoffs for SAs coming. Then the remaining SAs will be going Agile TSA.
This is all due to the initiative of driving down the cost of technical pre-sales and the contraction of the hardware business. SAs are not as valued as much as we are told.
Thanks EK 👇🏽
It is Agile TSA, not Agile SA. No plan to pool SAs at this time.
Specializations have been tried for over a decade. ASSET, vCSE, etc. The SEs were all slackers and wouldn’t do sh-t on the teams. But you act like you’ve never even used SAGE?
Cisco should have long ago adopted “specializations” for generalists. Meaning allow for SA/SE community based learning & development in areas of particular technical interest to be additional deep expertise. For example, a generalist SE/SA who has passion for ISE/Firepower/Umbrella. Allow that generalist SE/SA to be part of the TSA orgs, do solution focused demo’s, have access to roadmap, etc… The makings of this were there with SEVT, but needed to be a step further. Had this been done, a potential C2E move would work fine. Everyone could fall into their technical domains.
When?
SEDs and SEMs know that SAs are going pooled model. All SAs should ask their SEM and SED and see what the response is.
We need SAs that know business outcomes. Not all this techno jargon like routing protocols, VLANs, IPSec, etc. All that is automated in a GUI now and works flawlessly.
Let’s face it almost no SAs are good any more. Why? Because the portfolio is too broad, the training too poor, the account base too large, and the bu-----t extra workload too great, to be technical and customer focused like the old days.
What does it even mean for an account SA to be pooled? They’d get a speciality and be like a TSS or TSA right? No more generalists?
Did this all start with the CSAP program? And them moving into the management ranks?
Agreed. Also management ki---d SAs when they started making them more business focused and less technical.
Being an SA is no longer what it once was. It is used to be the standard by all other vendors measured against. Now it is at the lowest and our competitors have set the new standard. Don’t get me wrong, we have great SAs but the SA leadership has done a disservice to the SA organization that will take years if ever to recover from. Why do you think the competition hires Cisco SAs. Think about this, our collab competition hires SAs and train them on collab and they kick our butts. Same thing for security, the competition hires SAs that know how to technically sell and they train them up on security. Our SA leadership has done such a disservice to our SAs and now with the direction being Agile SA, you will not have a career path.
Every SA should ask their SEM or SED. I did and I was told that Agile TSA is the future for SAs and that is the direction that the SA organization is moving. Buckle up. Everyone go ask your SEM and SED.
Totally agreed with first reply - AMs should be replaced by SEs. SEs are better at both jobs, and cheaper.
For the second reply - there are under 6,000 SAs company wide. There are many more terrible programmers than that at Cisco.
There are more SAs than actual software engineers at Cisco. No wonder Cisco is sinking like the Titanic.
I’ll believe it when I see AM’s who can actually articulate the value of the hardware/software they are comp’d on. 🤔 What should be happening is getting rid of a lot of AM’s and transitioning SA’s who have the acumen to AM. Every SA who made the conversion to AM (that I know) has been widely successful. Oops, maybe I should not post my idea here…EK may steal it. 😉