NOC engineer work

Dear all,

I, recently, received an offer for a position of Network Support Trainee for Cisco-TAC. The position gets converted to Associate Network Engineer (N1/L1) rank depending on the performance and certification of the trainee. I was explained the nature of work on a very elementary level.
My folks are confusing that with a call-center job

Anyway,

Have you ever worked/been working at a NOC (Cisco TAC) ?
If yes, how was/is your experience ?
In your opinion, how is it different from a call center job (or a help desk) ?
What all did you learn ? How did you use the NOC experience to grow your career ?
How did it affect your personal life/goals (I've heard this kind of work can be very stressful) ?

Appreciate your feedback, critique, opinion and thoughts

Regards

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Comments

Kai123

I work in a NOC but not a Cisco TAC.

The NOC I work in supports a lot of different services, and the NOC Engineers are expecting to troubleshoot up to the source of the problem before sending it to T2 for them to make changes on the network.

Its very customer-centric. How the job was explained to me was dealing with customers, being a buffer for the NOC Engineers while also helping the NOC Engineers with basic troubleshooting for DSL and Fibre, EFM/LLU, Metro Wireless, network monitoring, PTP links, etc.

Every request to make my job easier has been granted by the Manager, and now I am troubleshooting everything and limited only to my knowledge, mostly with SIP, MPLS circuits and loads of other things, but it is still customer-facing, customer focused and comes with all the cons of a call-center (having a customer from hell phoning in every 20 minutes because their whole business is based around their residential DSL connection is down).

networker050184

It's a good start for sure. If it's working directly for Cisco even better.

I worked in a TAC environment for another vendor and learned a lot while there. It's is stressful in the sense that you are working on customer issues and they expect an expert when they call for vendor support. This is different than a NOC position though. It is somewhat similar to a call center on the lower levels answering phones etc.

NOC-Ninja

This depend on what kind of NOC you will be geting into. There are different types of NOC. Some NOC only deals with monitoring whats in the screen and making calls to escalate the problems. These guys are more of a helpdesk.
Other NOC deals with phone calls, deploying switches, troubleshooting the network issue, and small projects.
There are some NOC that that deals with customers and work on engineering projects at the same time since they are a small department.