Thread regarding Cisco Systems Inc. layoffs

cloud and saas degrade the value of TAC. BU brands cloud first but what they do is cloud only.

Everyone has to start somewhere.

And that's what Tier-1 help desk agents are for...beginners who read from scripts asking the user if they've tried rebooting first, then slowly working their way up through the other obvious steps. Then when they've reached the end of the script, they transfer the user/customer to tier-2 who can actually troubleshoot, and then ultimately to tier-3 who are supposed to be SME's.

The TAC isn't supposed to be Tier-1 help desk agents.

Quota hire

Everyone has to start somewhere.

If customer ask my troubles shooting on the linux, I would tell them to go learning on internets! Such brain problems not for helping desks!

You don’t need to learn it in school. Any good technical person is so interested in these topics they would learn Linux on their own at home.

@bxe+1nMfW0Qu, I'm showing my age here, but they didn't teach Linux in High School when my kids were in High School, much less when I went.

They were teaching IBM "Basic" in High School when I went, although one school had Franklins which were Apple IIe clones and the other school had Apple IIe's that they replaced the next year with IBM AT PC (80286 processors). My kids basically had the same "basic" or DOS class learning objectives I had 15 yrs prior.

In college, I was one of the last classes to take Fortran on a main frame and got to enjoy the experience of using punch cards for the first half of the semester.

I can definitely see universities taking advantage of using Linux since it's open source and free. They also use Git / GitHub since it's also free. Yet somehow they don't manage to pass those cost savings down to the parents or students who are paying the tuition. I would have loved to have had the opportunity to learn Linux as a student. My Fortran teacher didn't teach programming concepts. He just taught the program syntax, which you could get out of the book. There was nothing about coding best practices, abstracting steps into functions, etc. You could brute force code instead of using logic and loops, and as long as the program you wrote gave the output that was asked for using the specified input, you passed.

I ended up learning a lot more on the job about Linux scripting and optimizing code than I ever did in college.

Even in high school they teach about Linux. So assuming this newbie TAC is a university or community college tech graduate, how come he/she never learnt Linux there? Maybe he/she is a graduate from a non-tech program? A forest major like our former CTO David Ward?

Because no one wants to come and work in the tac, so we hire suboptimal at times and hope there is a growth mindset.

But how long will it take them to get to be good enough to troubleshoot a customer issue? I know how I hate opening a case, especially via chat, with the help desk because they don't understand the issue and make you go through their little check list of "tried and true" instructions which start with "Have you rebooted?" moving towards "Have you uninstalled and re-installed the application?" and end with "You need to backup your data and reimage your machine." I've already performed the reboot and the app removal and reinstall before opening the case, and I'm looking for help to avoid reimagine my machine, so why would I contact them if that's all they're going to do?

The TAC is supposed to be filled with Engineers to actually know our products, know how look up to see if an issue has already been opened and skilled enough to verify that it is or is not the same issue the customer is having, and be able to work with development engineers to get the issue fixed.

By the time this person learns enough Linux to be remotely useful in troubleshooting Linux issues, they'll have left TAC/Cisco and moved on to a better, and better paying, job. Why not offer a wage that attracts skilled talent in the first place and try to retain them?

Not to mention asking to be spoon fed how to learn it.

I didn't see it as asking to be spoon fed. They did ask for learning resources, and not just to be taught it. I see no harm in asking for good online classes. I've taken both good and bad ones, so if someone can share the ones that are worth my time and steer me away from the ones that aren't, that's a good thing.

Not to mention asking to be spoon fed how to learn it.

Because no one wants to come and work in the tac, so we hire suboptimal at times and hope there is a growth mindset.
The example you mentioned might not be ideal but atleast he/she shows interest in growing. Which is not always the case