A Day In The Life - Cisco TAC

the moment i clicked accept to take that case that was in the queue it was like like a switch and i started to kind of feel the pressure and now i have to get on the call with the customer and be on a webex and it's a p2 so it's pressing and just all that kind of started to come come down on me all at once hello and thank you for coming to check out this video in this video i'll be talking about what it's like working in cisco tech i've seen a lot of videos out there for working at google or working at facebook or working at linkedin things of those sorts but you don't really see too much of that type of stuff for working at cisco so with that said i decided to do my own video for that and you know i've watched some of these other videos about the day in the life or whatever but i've kind of found them to be boring they show themselves driving into the office they show themselves sitting at a computer and maybe coding for a while they show themselves going to lunch in the break room or whatever i really can't do that now because i'm recording this video during code i can't really go to the office but it's okay because those types of things are boring anyway i'm going to instead of doing a day in life i'm going to do my journey talking about when i first got to cisco attack and i very clearly remember taking my first p2 while uh having been on the team for about a week and then talking about how that progressed and how i eventually got my name a little more well known started working more with the bu started working more with developers some of the technical leaders and then eventually it grew into myself knowing people uh around the world working with people in costa rica among jordan working with people in asia working with people over in india um australia just all over the place so uh let's go ahead and jump into it now remember i'm going to be talking about this from my experience so people in different parts of the world might operate differently they might have different policies or procedures but there are definitely overarching policies and procedures that go across all the different teams in different locations different cx centers but again i can only speak from my experience and talk about things from my perspective so i joined tech back in march of 2015 and i already had a fair amount of experience i was almost done getting my ccmp in the voice track which uh now we call them the collaboration tracks and i was ramping up i was building out my lab which is something we have all of our new hires do all of the new hires have to subscribe to certain email aliases that get communications from the bu or from uh different managers or different tag teams and also for certain types of training like training that comes from the business unit and for those that aren't familiar with the business unit or how tac interacts with them just hang in there because i'll talk about the different teams that tax interacts with all right so uh first week i'm getting through a lot of that type of stuff and then there was a day that was a little bit busy uh busier than what i had seen before because i was watching uh who on the team was taking what cases uh when i first joined the team just to kind of get a feel of what was coming in the queue who was handling what and i noticed that on this day that was a little bit busy there was a p2 sitting in the queue and it was 4 cdr and in my head i'm thinking yeah cdr how hard can it be right so uh i didn't have much experience with linux at the time or anything like that but i'll tell you what the moment i clicked accept to take that case that was in the queue it was like like a switch and i started to kind of feel the pressure and now i have to get on the call with the customer and be on a webex and it's a p2 so it's pressing um and just all of that kind of started to come come down on me all at once now i was definitely in over my head very quickly because we had to go and get into root which is the underlying operating system the red hat enterprise linux operating system and without having much linux background i was having to kind of try to navigate through things and there was i was looking at bugs i didn't really understand how to read the bugs yet and i didn't know about the system for the bugs yet because i've only been there for about a week but it wasn't too long before two or three other tac engineers were in my cube helping me navigate the whole situation helping me manage the customer helping me manage my communications with the customer helping me understand where to go what what sites to look at how to look at the bugs how to read the bugs looking at things within the linux level uh navigating through the directories and looking for certain files and then also with cdr you have to understand that there's multiple different directories that the cdr files will process through and um you know they were helping me understand all of that type of stuff right so that was um that was a really good experience for me because it really let me understand that within tech nobody's alone right even though the team was fairly well busy people were coming over and helping me out now um that specific case took me about a week or two weeks to figure out tons of research i probably read like 50 different older cases just going through and seeing who had done what and then learning different things to check and different logs to collect and how to read those logs and all that type of stuff so um this highlights another thing that i wanted to talk about is that when you when you get to tack even though i had already had two years of really solid experience in the specific field that i was working in within tac and i was about to have my ccmp there's always a very steep learning curve for people that first come to tech and for some folks they'll say most people will say that you know the first six months intact you kind of are sitting there wondering like am i doing things right am i going to get fired stuff like that there's a little bit of some anxiety there and and i would say that that's about accurate around the six month mark is where you start to feel a little more comfortable and start being able to be more independent but with that said i've been intact for six years now and i still have certain cases or certain issues that just knock me down you know they just cut me off at the knees and that's where the escalation process comes into play um again like i had said before this is going to be a theme that you see throughout this video uh we help each other you have to you cannot survive intact alone you have to lean on other people because uh we all contribute we all help each other there's no way to figure it all out on your own and so at least twice a week we will have meetings called case review where people come to those meetings and if you're stuck on a case we will prioritize those on the agenda and then we'll talk about those cases that people are stuck on and you start getting subject matter experts for specific products or specific features weighing in on well you know i've seen this before or did you check this or did you check that get these logs make sure they're set to detail doing these different things and that's how we learn right through taking the cases through working the cases through knowledge transfers through helping each other i've learned a ton by helping other people with things um and and that's just how it works you know we're both learning the person who needs help and the person who's doing the help is uh helping is learning and um so after doing the case review and figuring things out sometimes you might bring it back to case review we also do a lot of ad hoc helping like where people came into my cube but um there's the the bu which is the business unit where tac will escalate cases to not frequently but it does happen and then the business unit will bring in their own level of expertise that they help push things along and then if it seems to be a new defect then eventually it would reach the point where a developer gets pulled in and then solving it and vetting it out and making sure that it actually is a new defect and then figuring out the fix so those are those are big things it's it's difficult we all need to help each other there's people that are willing to help there's also schedule meetings specifically for helping people so um we set that side we carve out time to help each other and then also it once we've addressed the cases where people needed help we opened the floor for people to talk about new defects or to talk about something that they learned recently anything cool or maybe they ran into a really weird issue that they were able to figure it out and they just want to convey that to the team now so that the team knows about it if there's any sort of big issues like maybe a field notice that was uh recently released or about to be released we'll share that type of information with each other as well um so let's go back now a little bit and talk a little bit about my career progression while i was in tech so i came in and i knew a little bit again right so then i start taking cases i get put on my butt really bad get that case out of the way though right and then now i move on to uh taking the cases that we typically start new people on and within the cecm world at least in rtp we'll have people taking certificate cases and you'll end up taking certificate cases because pretty much everybody on the team knows how to deal with them and anybody can help you at any point in time there also is a fair amount of documentation so you should be able to find whatever answers uh you need to find on your own but it also assists people in figuring their way around the tools and like the ticketing system and figuring out those types of non-technical things and then what i ended up doing was after getting familiar with the certificate cases i started trying to take like all recording cases call reporting so that way i would have a backlog of a bunch of recording cases and then i would go in the lab and do a lab reproduction set it up configure it get a better understanding of it pull traces pull packet captures really get to understand it and then that would that one time that i would go in the lab and do that would apply to the whole backlog of recording cases that i had which is a lot easier than trying to take cases that deal with contact center cases that deal with voicemail cases that deal with call like phone registration now you have all different types of cases that one lab repro doesn't get applied across to all of them so so that brings me to my next topic um time management the people that uh i i see do the best in tech are the folks that are really good at time management they're really good at saying these are the things that i need to prioritize these are the things that i need to knock out and then just doing it and you know they crush it another thing that helps people do really well in tech is uh writing documentation which i've done a ton of content creation i actually became a somewhat you know technical writer within tech something you know another another thing about working in tech is that the management team is awesome the people that you work with are awesome i mean you end up working with some of the smartest people in the industry some people that are on industry that they help develop industry standards people that work with the ieee boards um you know so you get some awesome people that work around you and the managers that i've ever run into some of them are ccies but all of them were once engineers and so that helps a lot with having a good leadership team because they understand uh what it's like you know they've they've been through the ranks and then now they're they're uh managers another thing that i would like to talk about is the the lab i mean there is it's massive it's like a data center and there's more than one the one that i use the most takes up half of the floor that i worked on right and uh that's another thing is is intact it was policy that you work from the office you had to go into the office be at your desk and that's because of how much we really need to collaborate with each other in order to survive intact now covet has kind of thrown a wrench into that but we're all doing great you know webex did did an awesome job allowing us all to remain in touch and keep collaborating and doing well let's talk about another point the stress that comes with the job some people have a hard time dealing with it but again more often than not those are people that are putting their own stresses like they're trying to compare themselves to the distinguished engineers you know they're trying to compare themselves to the people that have five ccies uh within tech and those are also a lot of times the people that don't have good time management so uh when you don't manage your time appropriately what ends up happening is uh you start ending up and instead of being able to manage the workload everything starts boiling up and the next thing you know uh you know you're just you're engulfed in flames everything around you is on fire and so that's again why time management is so important so how do we handle these these stresses how do we maintain a good team environment we end up doing things called fun fund where we go out to movies together there's tac movie night where everyone in all of tack is invited to go out and see a movie and we end up getting the whole movie theater and then um you know all watching a movie together getting popcorn and all that good stuff we also go out to uh events for uh maybe rope rope they'll be like a rope course in the trees um axe throwing archery i've seen that and then also just uh going out and having some drinks together maybe going out and getting dinner together these are all things that we do for team building but there's also a lot of recognition tons of recognition so when you walk through the hallways there are these tvs that hang from the walls that also come from drop downs in the ceiling and uh they'll have all sorts of things if you if you got a certification they'll put you up there if a customer gave you really good feedback on a survey that will get highlighted on there other big events will get put on there as well if you you know been at cisco for five years or something like that they'll put it up there now there's also some other things that are that are company-wide not just taqwa like there's a connected recognition which will will allow peers to recognize each other so if i see somebody on my team or somebody on another team uh doing something really well i can recognize them and it can be monetary or it could just be like a message or it can be both you know a message that gets displayed on the corporate feed which uh these types of things do matter and that's really good but there's also other incentives like we get vouchers to take exams i've never since being at cisco i've never had to pay for an exam we get money to go to courses they they are really big in talent talent retention and talent development so i've gone to courses with instructors that are several thousand dollars and it's all paid for by the company under the the training and education budget but then there's also i have like an o'reilly account i have um pluralsight i have um an udemy udemy account um there's there's cbt nuggets accounts that are there you know so they're really big on making sure that people are training and getting uh the information that they need to better themselves another one of the stressors that comes with being attacked is that you're a valued resource people from the sales teams want to talk to you people in professional services want your time the customers want your time partners want your time managers want your time tech engineers from other tac teams want your time uh they need it even right because they're there's customer issues and they need to be solved plus it's essentially day two operations right so uh there's never like a oh yeah we're getting to this and we can do it we got a couple months to plan it's always no do it right now get it done it needs to be fixed last week you know so um those are some of the pressures that that come with being intact but overall i would say especially because of the the leadership team that i've had while in tech the people the quality of the people that i work with the knowledge sharing the team outings the recognition that occurs all of these things together um being able to go and do cisco live all of that type of stuff makes it well worth it the pod the pros well outweigh the cons and um even though i'm transitioning out of cisco tech i'm staying at cisco and my time at cisco attack will will always be something i hold near and dear and the relationships that i've built in my time attack are ones that are very strong relationships that i that will be maintained over time if you have any questions uh feel free to comment down below and hopefully i'll be able to get to them and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Patrick Kinane

Views: 5,449

Keywords: cisco, tac, dayinthelife, day in the life, working, work, cisco tac, rtp, collaboration, patrick kinane, Cisco Intersight, HyperFlex, HyperFlex Management, Cisco UCS, DC Compute TAC, Cisco Technical Assistance Support, hyperconvergence, cisco hyperflex, cisco TAC, TAC, technical services, technical support, services, CX, technical assistance center, support, innovation, AI, culture, data, krakow, poland, engineers, behind the scenes, interviews, cisco services

Id: ijaTwmilZvo

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020