Another Post From a TAC Engineer

Hello, I have been in TAC with PANW for over a decade.

The motivation for this post was based on the previous post yesterday in this community speaking about life as a TAC specialist. First, that poster is 100% correct.

Second, I will also explain the ugly truth of TAC.

TAC has taken a 180-degree shift since Nikesh took over. TAC hes gone from the premium support experience to a level of service that is arguably fraud at this point (major network outage/security events). What used to be a startup atmosphere has turned into a complete and total toxic wasteland. The engineers that used to handle first contact cases were some of the best networking minds in the industry. Now, the first contact person was working at Door Dash a couple months prior, and speaks broken English. We are led by Cisco sycophants that only care about getting use out of their knee-pads.

My complain isn't with these first level "engineers", they are trying to make a living, The blame is with leadership that thinks that they can pass off this level of support while charging millions for support. We call these first-level support engineers, and they can't list a single firewall process, or even understand networking protocols. The change was slow at first, sprinkle in some contractors and hope they stay long with PAN (they didn't). This has now shifted to simply pairing a cheap contractor with an Al (we are the Al teader in Cybersecurity), and hope to convince our customers that are spending millions a year that they won't notice.

Once basic cases can't be solved, they sit in a queue, sometimes for months. The wait is for an actual engineer to take ownership, realize there is insufficient data was collected, and then have to start at square 1.

Leadership is planning to force all customers to use an AI chatbot before opening a case, and is expecting AI to start solving complex escalated cases. This is INSANE.

This is the current level of support in 2025.

We have a CEO that will do anything but hire talented American engineers. The micromanaging is only getting worse, the KPis only getting more and more unreachable. The attrition is unreal at this point. Leadership will drive this company into the ground before admitting they were duped on Al.