Gone are the days of SEs and SAs. They will be LR-ed and pushed out of the company while the BAs and fake CTOs will run the business. Hooray for Cisco ELT! Hooray for DM in U.K. may his beard get a thousand lice.
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We started with 20 features, but when you work with the model described below, after 5 years you end up with 250.
If your roadmap is counting 250 features, you're a pretty terrible PM.
It’s a little bigger and more complex than a few lines of python.
Cisco will never layoff SEs. They aren’t that d-mb. Lots of back office and AM fat to cut.
If your roadmap is counting 250 features, you're a pretty terrible PM.
@2adc+1dY1VTSA "Cisco listens to big customers too much and implements they’re stupid corner case feature requests"
Amen, but it’s finance’s fault and not the PMs. You can have 250 features on your roadmap, but there’s only money to do 100 and 80 of them are escalations from big customers or VP commitments to the same small set.
@2adc+1dY1VTSA "Cisco listens to big customers too much and implements they’re stupid corner case feature requests"
That. Pure truth right there. The problem is simple but severe: incompetent product management. Take an MBA and you'll be a PM. Doesn't matter if you know jack about the vertical you're serving. Doesn't matter if you were in QA before. Can you calculate a margin and make a forecast? Welcome aboard!
@2wly+1dY1VTSA Sort of. Cisco listens to big customers too much and implements they’re stupid corner case feature requests which just complicate the overall product. And you think they actually react to what the competitors do? Then why are they still years behind?
Cisco spends too much time focused on what Arista, Palo Alto, Microsoft, Zoom, Aruba/HPE and Zscaler are doing. If the focus shifted to ‘listening’ to customers and delivering on what customers truly want…they could rise above the current perception most Enterprise customers have. The foundation to do so is there but too many decision makers are vested in running the train off the tracks.
The sad fact for customers is that Cisco has been degrading the value they deliver to customers for 20 years. In the early days, SEs worked closely with the Development Engineers to ensure technology was being deployed appropriately. Cisco knew it had to make customers successful because they were the unknown in the industry.
Once Chambers and Justice decided that Cisco was the incumbent within the majority of their top customer accounts, the strategy switched to maximizing Cisco wallet share within a customer. At that point, quality and customer success became a secondary concern. Since then, given the pressure on margins, Cisco is being forced to lower their cost of sales.
It's going to be interesting to see how a company that worships complexity and has used it to win so much business agains the competition will execute in a the new environment where simplicity and ease of use will be required given that the level of technical support for customers is going nowhere but down.
C2E and Agile TSA do not solve problems, but rather create problems for customers and careers for the SAs and TSAs.
Customers have been very clear in they want technical relationships. Customers are tired of telling all the history and background to every technical pre-sales that gets assigned to them via C2E or Agile TSA. They are going to the competition more and more due to this. Unfortunately, EK does not want these metrics tracked.
SAs and TSAs will be paid less in the C2E and Agile TSA model. That is one of the primary goals of C2E and Agile TSA is to lower the cost of pre-sales engineering. Of course, they are focused on lowering the pay of the field SAs and TSAs. EK and all these Directors continue to increase their pay at the expense of the field. Ask yourself, why is EK and these Directors that are supposed to be representing us getting bigger pay increases but need to lower the cost of pre-sales engineering. Why do you see so many jumping to competitors. They are getting paid what they are worth.
@1avn+1dY1VTSA That’s why most SEs will become TSAs in C2E. Small commercial customers will get VSAMs, better customers will have SEs replace AMs as TAMs. Everyone here is kissed about that, but it solves so many problems.
Part of the reason engineers are less technical today is the customers. Now that every organization has a network we aren’t just selling to knowledgeable customers engineers. We’re selling to the thousands and thousands of id--ts too. Back in the dot com era customers were more sophisticated.
@1lwu+1dY1VTSA Good observations.
What follows is a broad generalisation, there are always exceptions.
I first started dealing with Cisco, as a customer, in the mid-90s. At that time the portfolio was small and the account SEs were Cisco’s best selling engine. They really understood the technology and were a great example of Cisco delivering value to customers. I never bought anything because of a good AM, I bought a lot because of a good SE.
As we progressed into the ‘00s and the portfolio expanded that knowledge and quality dropped off and SEs went from having deep technical knowledge in a narrow field (R&S usually) to having shallow knowledge across many fields. As a customer we started to rely more on the overlay specialist SEs and the account SE was simply the gateway.
Today’s portfolio is too big for any one person to understand it all. The role of an account SE/SA now is more that of a Technical Account Manager, understanding just enough to know which ‘expert’ to bring in. The flaw in that premise is that we haven’t invested adequately in those ‘experts’. There are simply too few of them to match the workload.
Cisco SE’s have been bartenders for a long time. Nothing new.
I remember the days where a CSE (consulting systems engineer) was the holy grail. CSEs knew bits from bytes and spoke with authority. It all went downhill when the first post dot-com crash cost-cutting measures appeared. At that point, there was a strong push to align the CSE/SE role to a pure sales oriented job with far less hands-on (because labs cost money, and a CSE in front of a terminal doesn't generate much profit). Many SE/CSEs became AMs or PSS. A TSA today is at best half as technical as a late 90s CSE.
Eric Knipp and his absurd C2E is an absolute disaster and train wreck. He has single handedly destroyed the SE/SA role along with decimating the TSA's. His flat out lies to reporters are unbelievable to top it off. How on earth he is still employed at Cisco is mind boggling. The entire ELT and senior leadership needs to be purged and flushed down the toilet to save cisco.
Is public sector also getting pooled?
Agree, SAs and SEs are no longer valued. Starting with EK all the way down to the SEDs and SSEMs, they have done nothing to help the SA and SE cause especially in the US Commercial segment. The SEDs in US Commercial will not stand up and call it out as they are trying to position for their next promotion or move. They are only backfilling a small percentage of the reqs as SAs and SEs leave for Enterprise or the competition. It is now starting to consolidate to virtual and will eventually will be supported by GVE therefore no longer requiring customer facing SAs and SEs. It is all about specialization which is why EK is shoving C2E and Agile TSA down everyone’s throat even though customers are complaining about it and taking their business elsewhere. SAs and SEs are moving to pool, that is a fact. SEDs are trying to communicate it is not but they are only trying to look out for themselves by communicating it is not. The best time to look for a job is while you have one.
The portfolio is too big and complex anyway. BAs are just a worse form of SEs though. What we really need are mainly TSAs.
Most were useless anyways. The problem I have is the SDE and sales dropping that function on other competent groups that are already overloaded (this does not include the centers as they have an issue even doing tool based work better than a 6th grader).