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I don’t like Cisco, but it’s a little much to blame them for your employer hiring and not firing support staff that are actively hostile to the people they are

I don’t like Cisco, but it’s a little much to blame them for your employer hiring and not firing support staff that are actively hostile to the people they are supposed to be supporting.

Spooky23 2y ago
Few vendors attract the fervor that network dudes carry for Cisco. It’s a weird and unique phenomenon.
- UltraSane 2y ago
  As a CCNP I think I can offer some insight into this phenomenon. I feel that it arises due to a few reasons: 1) CLI familiarity. Networking Professionals invest thousands of hours in learning router, switch, and firewall CLIs and want a return on this investment and this can only happen if their employer uses the equipment they are familiar with. If someone only knows the Juniper CLI then they will most likely have equal fervor for Juniper hardware. Having to use a CLI you are not familiar with adds stress to an already very stressful job. 2) Operational streamlining. Generally if every device on a Network is Cisco they will work together more reliably than if not. This isn't as true as it used to be but is still true. If your company network is Cisco only then Cisco cannot blame other manufacturers for an issue. Personally I'm fine with having non-Cisco hardware. The Cisco Firewpower "next gen" firewalls are utter garbage compared to palo alto. My company has dozens of Cisco 2960 access switches and Cisco in their infinite wisdom has replaced this very cost effective product with the extremely NOT cost effective 9200 and 9300 series switches. If you only need gigabit ports and VLANs then the 9200 and 9300 switches are an incredible waste of money.
acdha 2y ago
I don’t blame them for the common attitude problems in enterprise IT but it’s a symbiotic relationship. They avoid having to produce solid products with good UX by restricting access to report problems, and they help the gatekeepers stay in charge by telling the C-suite that networking is an unfathomably hard problem you can only solve by hiring people with lots of Cisco certifications. As a simple example, the AnyConnect Mac client has a bug in the socket filter related to IP changes, which means that sometimes when the system wakes it’ll block connections for roughly 5 minutes until it times out and retries (or you kill the process). I would bet that this would be fixed in minutes if it affected Windows because most Cisco people use that and only begrudgingly support Mac or Linux desktops.

I don’t like Cisco, but it’s a little much to blame them for your employer hiring and not firing support staff that are actively hostile to the people they are supposed to be supporting.

Spooky23 2y ago

Few vendors attract the fervor that network dudes carry for Cisco. It’s a weird and unique phenomenon.

UltraSane 2y ago
As a CCNP I think I can offer some insight into this phenomenon. I feel that it arises due to a few reasons: 1) CLI familiarity. Networking Professionals invest thousands of hours in learning router, switch, and firewall CLIs and want a return on this investment and this can only happen if their employer uses the equipment they are familiar with. If someone only knows the Juniper CLI then they will most likely have equal fervor for Juniper hardware. Having to use a CLI you are not familiar with adds stress to an already very stressful job. 2) Operational streamlining. Generally if every device on a Network is Cisco they will work together more reliably than if not. This isn't as true as it used to be but is still true. If your company network is Cisco only then Cisco cannot blame other manufacturers for an issue. Personally I'm fine with having non-Cisco hardware. The Cisco Firewpower "next gen" firewalls are utter garbage compared to palo alto. My company has dozens of Cisco 2960 access switches and Cisco in their infinite wisdom has replaced this very cost effective product with the extremely NOT cost effective 9200 and 9300 series switches. If you only need gigabit ports and VLANs then the 9200 and 9300 switches are an incredible waste of money.

acdha 2y ago

I don’t blame them for the common attitude problems in enterprise IT but it’s a symbiotic relationship. They avoid having to produce solid products with good UX by restricting access to report problems, and they help the gatekeepers stay in charge by telling the C-suite that networking is an unfathomably hard problem you can only solve by hiring people with lots of Cisco certifications. As a simple example, the AnyConnect Mac client has a bug in the socket filter related to IP changes, which means that sometimes when the system wakes it’ll block connections for roughly 5 minutes until it times out and retries (or you kill the process). I would bet that this would be fixed in minutes if it affected Windows because most Cisco people use that and only begrudgingly support Mac or Linux desktops.