I was reading your article on CCIE and this made me recall how my workmates in TAC cleared the lab.

This is the story of Cisco India TAC popularly known with the slang "India TAC Ghode Pe" means the team is always running at the speed of a horse. Initially this TAC was outsourced to Convergys from where it was moved to Aricent Holdings in Gurgaon, NCR India.

There were about 200 employees working in different TAC team (Security / Architecture / VPN / Switching). Guys gave an attempt, only to disclose the questions later to each other. Now, they know about 20-30% of questions. Later then purchased Chinese Dumps by sharing the cost and people started clearing CCIE on 1st attempt only.

This was well known to Aricent managers as well as the Cisco Director, but everyone stayed Mum cause it was a win-win situation. Eventually, they got big payout increase but failed to clear even a basic interview where the candidate was asked about the packet flow from router to firewall over WAN.

Shockingly, over 150 guys cleared the CCIE in less than the time of a year. Everyone was certified and a few double CCIEs too.

The same is happening these days in Bangalore Cisco TAC.

My 2 cents of info based on reality...

Regards,