Thirty seconds into my career as a Cisco apprentice, I walked into a meeting room, looked my new manager directly in the face, and asked, “Hi! Which one of you is Saravana?”
He grinned and said, “Boss, that’s me! 😂”
The whole team laughed. Not cruelly. But loudly, and all at once, and at me.
Here’s how it happened. I’d done what I think every nervous new joiner does the night before day one: I looked everyone up. I studied my manager’s Webex profile photo like it was an exam. Clean-shaven, no glasses — that’s him. Got it.
Those nerves didn’t stay at home, though. They came to campus with me. I got to the Bengaluru office early — far earlier than I needed to — and spent that spare time asking myself, “Am I dressed right? Is everyone here going to be smarter than me? What if I’m asked something and I don’t know the answer?” Everyone walking past me looked like they’d been doing this for years and knew exactly where they were going. I did not.
So, when I walked into that room and found my entire team already seated, I scanned the faces for the one from the photo — and he wasn’t there.
Except he was. He was sitting right in front of me, wearing glasses that weren’t in his profile picture.
I have replayed that moment more times than I’d like to admit.
I sat down and genuinely felt awful. Not embarrassed, but sad. I remember thinking, “This is it. This is what corporate life is going to be. I got one shot at a first impression and fumbled it in the first thirty seconds. Now, I get to spend the next two years being the guy who couldn’t recognise his own manager.”
I’d built up this idea that the professional world was a place where I had to arrive perfect, and I failed the entry test.
But, I was completely wrong, and it took about a week for me to understand why.
That laugh wasn’t a judgement. It was just the sound a comfortable team makes. They were welcoming me in. Nobody let the moment turn awkward; the joke stayed in the room for about a minute and then we moved on to actual work, and by the end of the day it had quietly become my joke rather than something that happened to me.
Over the following days, I noticed this was simply how they worked: people joked, people got things wrong out loud, people asked questions without judgement. Nobody was performing. My “mistake” hadn’t broken some unwritten rule — I had just walked into a room where that rule didn’t exist in the first place.
And Saravana, the manager I failed to recognise, turned out to be the reason I grew faster in my first year than I thought was possible.
He didn’t hand me documentation and a six-week ramp-up plan. He put me on real systems, with real consequences — not the tutorial version, not a sandbox. He let me near things I hadn’t earned yet, which is the kind of trust that feels uncomfortable at first, but stretches you in ways you didn’t know you were capable of. The message was never, “Here’s how you do it,” but “Try it, show me, and we’ll figure it out together.”
It’s a Cisco thing. Nobody here waits for you to be ready before they let you try.
It’s a Cisco thing. Nobody here waits for you to be ready before they let you try.
That’s how the two of us ended up being the first in our team to build an AI agent inside Webex, using a tool called n8n to automate the heavy lifting. It started as a, “What if we just tried this?” conversation. Then it took us four to five months of building, breaking, and rebuilding to automate a whole set of our database administrator (DBA) tools — work that people had been doing by hand every week that machines should have been doing all along. Not a weekend hack. A genuinely long stretch of figuring it out together, which is exactly why it stuck.
I’ve since realised that isn’t a Saravana thing. It’s a Cisco thing. Nobody here waits for you to be ready before they let you try.
I want to be honest about the part that surprised me most. The technical skills are not what changed me. What changed me is that I stopped rehearsing.
I don’t script my sentences before meetings anymore. I say, “I don’t understand this yet,” without a run-up. When something breaks, I raise my hand instead of quietly hoping someone else will. And when a new joiner goes silent in a call, I notice immediately, because I know exactly what that silence is. I’ve sat in it. So, I say their name, ask them what they think, and I wait.
Today I’m a technical systems engineer at Cisco in Bengaluru, working on AI-driven automation for our DBA tools, and still occasionally the guy who says the wrong thing in a room full of people. The difference is that I don’t spend a week feeling sad about it anymore.
So, here’s what I’d tell you, if you’re thinking about joining Cisco, or if you feel like you don’t have it all figured out yet: You don’t have to arrive as the finished version of yourself.
I thought belonging was something earned after months of proving I deserved the offer. It turns out, it started on day one, in a room full of people laughing because I couldn’t even pick my manager out of a crowd.
I just had to stop performing long enough to accept I already belonged — I just need to be me.
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