TAC has been horrible for a while ,first they outsourced to india, then it got even worse when they added mexico, its not their fault but customers suffer and no one cares often senior leaders and architects have to jump on tac calls to get some resolution, very sad now.
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TAC failed to learn....just a tech support cost center. Either move to services or move out. Your management (Mexican flag) only thinks about replacing you with AI.
TAC have been living off of arrogance that they are product engineers. Either customers will pay only for top tier TAC to fix or just accept the low cost center RMA handlers in order to keep the costs low. It is not MM...but global economics. Do you pay to have things fixed or replaced?
It's astounding to me that Maria Martinez is still employed in the Silicon Valley. She hired colleagues from SalesForce that would have been fired without her there. Their main qualification is that they do whatever Maria tells them without question. Very few of them would actually be successful at any other company on their own. This isn't just my opinion - almost everyone I know at SF told me this when they heard who was coming over. Maria gutted an exceptional organization in TAC that used to be the pride of Cisco. She has spent over $1B on a product that has no adoption. No growth at Cisco? Blame Chuck and Maria, who have missed every growth opportunity in tech while chasing windmills.
TAC FW is dying really bad... Employees on H1Bs cry in the bathrooms all the time since they have no choice.
Tac is at the mercy of the horrible documentation...
But Agile says "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." Back when you had 10,000 people working on the same code base it was only 49,995,000 connections between team members. Of course, most of those moved on and are no longer available for chatting. D'oh!
Tom B got pushed out of TAC too! I am constantly amazed how Sr leaders like MM bring in their friends instead of promoting good folks within!
HTOMs are great, but paid for. Only the top customers that pay extra get great support. The rest are being outsourced to lower cost centers. The last frontier of good TAC engineers are the TLs. Every customer should ask for a TL to be engaged if they aren't getting great support.
The US TAC engineers should be worried. Everything is going to China, Mexico, or Poland. The few left in Sydney are toast!
Tac is at the mercy of the horrible documentation and non existant support from the BU's. Almost every problem I dealt with turned out to be a software defect. Buggy copypaste code with conflicting or non existant docs.
you don't own this company. why do you care so much? just let it die as it should be. work on your own company. never others.
Tac is dead is the water…. And is in an eternal downward spiral. It is sad to work there thinking status quo is the biggest achievement you can have.
TAC is no longer necessary, we have Success Tracks
Agree Joe Pinto was the BEST! Whip smart and knew everything about good customer service. Worked with him in the TAC back in the mid 90s when he was still a mgr; worked his way up to SVP and well earned. Cisco lost a gem when he left. All these years later, TAC sounds as bad as Cisco's internal IT group (aka "an experience in frustration").
When did TAC start to go downhill and accelerate? Exactly, when Maria Martinez came in and pushed out Joe Pinto. He got results, customers thought TAC was amazing, and she pushed him out. She's flat out, no question, to blame for the massive decline in TAC. She gutted TAC and took its money to create CX. Her CX, if anyone can recall, was going to be the growth engine for Cisco. How's that working out?
Worst leader Cisco has ever had. I'll bet 80K people would agree on how bad Maria is. There are about 400 people that think she's amazing. Those were the lower-level managers at Salesforce, who she brought to Cisco with massive promotions and incomes. They love Maria, very few and far between. It's not a personal thing; she's not a leader.
The customer complaints about TAC are at an all-time high. The Sales team is having a hard time defending TAC to customers. Our customers are the big losers with Cisco and past layoffs. It will get a lot worse, too, with the lack of Leadership in CX.
If you are new and in TAC, I can just give you career advice to run.
In the event you stick too long, you will be trapped. Sadly TAC has become all the talk, arguing and little working ( Indian Culture). We want to be cheap, underpay compared to same grade in different functions and are unable to keep people. So the cycle starts all over again every 2 years.
We look at short term results in favor of long term strategic investments and just live from workaround to workaround.
Sydney TAC was the only site with knowledgeable TAC engineers, anywhere else it's a hit or miss.. I used to stay late so I can open cases with them rather than wasting my time opening in EST hours only for my cases to be dragged for weeks. I was told Cisco decided to lay off everyone there, very sad.
Well, I'm HTOM and I can tell you most TACs are burned out... Hector and Yadira brought a really toxic [overworking] culture and folks are no longer interested in working here. MM doesn't seem to care