Good culture but Hard work and Bad management - Network Support Engineer (NSE) Meraki Employee Review

2.0
3 Jul 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Culture and coworkers are great, lots of nice people who are on your team. Wide variety of people working, people from all cultures - Great Cisco benefits are pretty generous (21 days off plus more)(1 week of paid volunteer time off) (good health insurance) (Emergency days off)(Visa sponsorship)(Employee stock purchase program) - Great office including free lunch and premium drinks, snacks everyday - Access to a lot of education resources such as pluralsight, CBT nuggets, LinkedIn learning, udemy and safari books. Paid Cisco certifications and others to further your knowledge - good opportunity to learn a lot about networking and system administration but once you learn it’s time to move on - Fun trips happen about every 2 quarters and give opportunity to grow relationships with your team

Cons

- Support is the bottom of the barrel. Especially the network support positions, retention rate is very bad because leadership fail to address issues such as head count and compensation year after year. Very bad leadership and management, causes resentment and feeling of low moral among existing and most experienced support engineers. All engineers I’ve talked with feel the same way - Compensation model makes it very hard to get a raise as work load is already very high especially due to bad management such as halting hiring at wrong times. Ensure you negotiate the highest salary if you do decide to join because getting a raise will be very very hard - once support was sent to work from home due to Covid, culture was lost and made the NSE position exposed for what it really was. Heavy workload, long hold times resulting in angry customers and more stressful job - very limited room to maneuver to other positions within meraki, you need to work even harder to get out of the bottom of the barrel that is network support. You can move to higher touch teams to handle bigger networks and clients but without pay increase and more responsibility which management makes it seem like a promotion but it’s not really - management expects you to take escalations and extra cases to even give you a chance at justifying a raise but there are no guarantees so you’re better off moving on to other opportunities - management have town halls and meetings to listen to employees but advice and feedback is not taken into consideration instead they just make a Q&A so you can just refer to that instead of pushing management into what they should change - managers are nice and try to care but there is very little they can do as they don’t have much power - despite record sales; management would rather hire new support engineers than pay existing loyal ones what they deserve and this causes high turn over rate - because licensing and products cost so much customers expect a lot from support causing bad experience this is could be due to overselling and marketing - Bad product management, product team release new products without proper validation and testing and cause a lot of problems and headaches for both clients and support causing support engineers to take the full blunt of distaste - As a network support engineer expect to handle at least 8-15 calls per day on top of answering emails too, this is very stressful and tiring which in turn prevents NSEs from providing quality service - non Support roles seem to be better than support. Support treated badly. - As an NSE you are tracked and assessed based on how many calls you take and how quickly you close cases so you’re basically micromanaged every minute of the day which makes it very exhausting and hard to provide the best service. - sometimes you have to report a bug and take time to lab and recreate but this counts towards your overall availability which is stupid because you want to solve problems properly but at the same time you can’t afford to because it is affecting your overall performance stats. Meetings affect this overall stat as well so you can see how everything is structured about how long you’re in the queue ready to take calls

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Meraki Response
4y
Yes! We agree our benefits are exceptional. Having access to learning and development plans, vacation time, and paid time off to volunteer helps us all balance our personal and professional lives. We pride ourselves on creating a workplace where a wealth of perspectives, backgrounds, and cultures can work together to advance our technology. Regarding the cons you describe, we hear you. We will take your feedback to our senior leadership. Our goal is to foster an environment where every employee can do their best work—we’re disappointed that you aren’t experiencing that. Network support is one of the pillars of our success, which means we are focused on your success. If you feel unfairly supported, please discuss with your manager, or contact your People and Communities partner. We want every Merakian to feel confident and safe discussing their situation, so we’re grateful for your feedback. It will help us keep nurturing a company where each of us is successful.

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Pros

Structured nice team professional team

Cons

None it was all good

4.0
11 Dec 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

If you are early in career or transitioning, the NSE role is great way to get your feet wet with networking. You have opportunities to learn more in other IT domains as well but not as intensely. When you are off, you are off. No being on call. There are tons of resources and opportunity for you to train and learn. The benefits are some of the best. If you work near a Meraki office, take the opportunity to go, it is worth it. The San Franciso office is the best. There is plenty of documentation public and internal facing. There is a process for handling cases that have no documentation which is very nice. You are not alone on this job ever.

Cons

Being an NSE day to day can become tedious. Most customers are fine, but you will eventually run into one that is difficult to work with. Everything is based on your stats like talk time and customer satisfaction which can be problematic at times. I left because there were no opportunities to move on to a different role. Cisco proper is pulling in the reigns tightly on Meraki, so the culture is changing not for the better. Being in the call queue all day can be tedious especially when it gets backed up and you do not get your scheduled down time. In the US you will have to work weekends occasionally unless you get someone to cover which is becoming harder and harder due to change in overtime policies.

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