I never understood why anyone picks Oracle at this point. There are so many alternative options that are vastly cheaper, much easier to maintain, and aren't owned by a company that has a habit of suing their customers.

I had a job interview for a Senior Linux Engineer, the interview was via MS Teams, I mentioned that MS Teams does not have Linux support (at the time) and requested to have the interview over any other service. They replied asking me to use Windows for the interview, as that was the OS my work laptop would use. I politely replied that I was no longer interested.

I used to work for Cisco ... or so I'm told. What happened was that my original small-ish company (25 US employees and 100 offshore employees) was acquired by a larger company (about 1000 employees mostly in Scandinavia) that made network equipment and was a minor competitor of Cisco. My original company provided programmer consultants (like me) to various companies and was acquired by the Scandinavian company because they had written a client-customizable Skype clone app that clients were actually unable to customize to their satisfaction.

I had a fun couple of years customizing this app using a language and framework I had no experience with, while battling with the Scandinavian programmers who hated me and everything I stood for and not only refused to help me but actively sabotaged everything I was doing. Fortunately, these custom versions were for various ISPs and cable companies who offered them as free come-ons to their customers and they were never actually used by anybody. Also I worked remote from home the entire time, which my cats appreciated.

Then the new company was allegedly acquired by Cisco. I got a new work laptop in the mail, but never visited any kind of Cisco office in person and was never assigned any tasks whatsoever. After six months my manager called me and said that I and everyone else from the original small company was being laid off. I laughed and said of course we were. He was shocked that I was so accepting of it and surprised that I seemed to have known it was coming; apparently my co-workers didn't think doing fucking nothing for six months was a bad sign. I did actually get a severance package for the first and only time in my career. However, it was almost to the penny equal to the value of the unemployment I could have collected, but the severance meant I wasn't eligible for unemployment. Oh well, saved me the hassle of pretending to look for another job.

It was pretty clear that Cisco bought my second company just to dispose of a minor competitor.

Later I learned that my mother thought I had been working for Sysco (the food services conglomerate) the entire time. I had to go back and check my emails to see if that had actually been the case.

The punchline is that the guy hiding is hallucinating the recruiters. Companies aren't actually hiring anyone for these jobs, they're just posting them online to make it seem like they are.

I've had to work on adding support for Cisco hardware on some Teams competitor before and it's crazy the level of shit that goes on there.

Even worse is how things like that reach me. Customer reports just "screen sharing is not working" and the support team takes the ticket for a dancing session, asking me for input from time to time until one month later someone casually lets it slip that they are running the client remotely on a device that has no screen (they wanted to share the screen from the device they are accessing from, not the one where our client is running). They didn't think it was relevant. Teams can do it so we need to do it too. Then "fixing the bug" suddenly becomes a top priority, but getting any kind of access to Cisco hardware to be able to test anything is out of the question and I have to keep doing patching things on the dark. God why am I still working here?

If I never have to review another spreadsheet of Cisco SKUs at the end of the year ill be happy.

I WISH! Am on the job hunt and no recruiters hahaha But kinda also for the better. I have noticed that when i apply myself i get sometimes invited to interviews but never with recruiters or they sold my skills bigger than they are

As someone interested in going to be a network admin and considering a CCNA, why should I avoid Cisco hardware