Monthly Archives: August 2021

Sharing Failure as a Learning Model

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Earlier this week there was a great tweet from my friends over at Juniper Networks about mistakes we’ve made in networking:

It got some interactions with the community, which is always nice, but it got me to thinking about how we solve problems and learn from our mistakes. I feel that we’ve reached a point where we’re learning from the things we’ve screwed up but we’re not passing it along like we used to.

Write It Down For the Future

Part of the reason why I started my blog was to capture ideas that had been floating in my head for a while. Troubleshooting steps or perhaps even ideas that I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget down the line. All of it was important to capture for the sake of posterity. After all, if you didn’t write it down did it even happen?

Along the way I found that the posts that got significant traction on my site were the ones that involved mistakes. Something I’d done that caused an issue or something I needed to look up through a lot of sources that I distilled down into an easy reference. These kinds of posts are the ones that fly right up to the top of the Google search results. They are how people know you. It could be a terminology post like defining trunks. Or perhaps it’s a question about why your SPF modules are working in a switch.

Once I realized that people loved finding posts that solved problems I made sure to write more of them down. If I found a weird error message I made sure to figure out what it was and then put it up for everyone to find. When I documented weird behaviors of BPDUGuard and BPDUFilter that didn’t match the documentation I wrote it all down, including how I’d made a mistake in the way that I interpreted things. It was just part of the experience for me. Documenting my failures and my learning process could help someone in the future. My hope was that someone in the future would find my post and learn from it like I had.

Chit Chat Channels

It used to be that when you Googled error messages you got lots of results from forum sites or Reddit or other blogs detailing what went wrong and how you fixed it. I assume that is because, just like me, people were doing their research and figuring out what went wrong and then documenting the process. Today I feel like a lot of that type of conversation is missing. I know it can’t have gone away permanently because all networking engineerings make mistakes and solve problems and someone has to know where that went, right?

The answer came to me when I read a Reddit post about networking message boards. The suggestions in the comments weren’t about places to go to learn more. Instead, they linked to Slack channels or Discord servers where people talk about networking. That answer made me realize why the discourse around problem solving and learning from mistakes seems to have vanished.

Slack and Discord are great tools for communication. They’re also very private. I’m not talking about gatekeeping or restrictions on joining. I’m talking about the fact that the conversations that happen there don’t get posted anywhere else. You can join, ask about a problem, get advice, try it, see it fail, try something else, and succeed all without ever documenting a thing. Once you solve the problem you don’t have a paper trail of all the things you tried that didn’t work. You just have the best solution that you did and that’s that.

You know what you can’t do with Slack and Discord? Search them through Google. The logs are private. The free tiers remove messages after a fashion. All that knowledge disappears into thin air. Unlike the Wisdom of the Ancients the issues we solve in Slack are gone as soon as you hit your message limit. No one learns from the mistakes because it looks like no one has made them before.

Going the Extra Mile

I’m not advocating for removing Slack and Discord from our daily conversations. Instead, I’m proposing that when we do solve a hard problem or we make a mistake that others might learn from we say something about it somewhere that people can find it. It could be a blog post or a Reddit thread or some kind of indexable site somewhere.

Even the process of taking what you’ve done and consolidating it down into something that makes sense can be helpful. I saw X, tried Y and Z, and ended up doing B because it worked the best of all. Just the process of how you got to B through the other things that didn’t work will go a long way to help others. Yes, it can be a bit humbling and embarrassing to publish something that admits you that you made a mistake. But It’s also part of the way that we learn as humans. If others can see where we went and understand why that path doesn’t lead to a solution then we’ve effectively taught others too.

Tom’s Take

It may be a bit self-serving for me to say that more people need to be blogging about solutions and problems and such, but I feel that we don’t really learn from it unless we internalize it. That means figuring it out and writing it down. Whether it’s a discussion on a podcast or a back-and-forth conversation in Discord we need to find ways to getting the words out into the world so that others can build on what we’ve accomplished. Google can’t search archives that aren’t on the web. If we want to leave a legacy for the DenverCoder10s of the future that means we do the work now of sharing our failures as well as our successes and letting the next generation learn from us.

The Mystery of Known Issues

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I’ve spent the better part of the last month fighting a transient issue with my home ISP. I thought I had it figure out after a hardware failure at the connection point but it crept back up after I got back from my Philmont trip. I spent a lot of energy upgrading my home equipment firmware and charting the seemingly random timing of the issue. I also called the technical support line and carefully explained what I was seeing and what had been done to work on the problem already.

The responses usually ranged from confused reactions to attempts to reset my cable modem, which never worked. It took several phone calls and lots of repeated explanations before I finally got a different answer from a technician. It turns out there was a known issue with the modem hardware! It’s something they’ve been working on for a few weeks and they’re not entirely sure what the ultimate fix is going to be. So for now I’m going to have to endure the daily resets. But at least I know I’m not going crazy!

Issues for Days

Known issues are a way of life in technology. If you’ve worked with any system for any length of time you’ve seen the list of things that aren’t working or have weird interactions with other things. Given the increasing amount of interactions that we have with systems that are becoming more and more dependent on things it’s a wonder those known issue lists are miles long by now.

Whether it’s a bug or an advisory or a listing of an incompatibility on a site, the nature of all known issues is the same. They are things that don’t work that we can’t fix yet. They could be on a list of issues to resolve or something that may never be able to be fixed. The key is that we know all about them so we can plan around them. Maybe it’s something like a bug in a floating point unit that causes long division calculations to be inaccurate to a certain number of decimal places. If you know what the issue is you know how to either plan around it or use something different. Maybe you don’t calculate to that level of precision. Maybe you do that on a different system with another chip. Whatever the case, you need to know about the issue before you can work around it.

Not all known issues are publicly known. They could involve sensitive information about a system. Perhaps the issue itself is a potential security risk. Most advisories about remote exploits are known issues internally at companies before they are patched. While they aren’t immediately disclosed they are eventually found out when the patch is released or when someone discovers the same issue outside of the company researchers. Putting these kinds of things under an embargo of sorts isn’t always bad if it protects from a wider potential to exploit them. However, the truth must eventually come out or things can’t get resolved.

Knowing the Unknown

What happens when the reasons for not disclosing known problems are less than noble? What if the reasoning behind hiding an issue has more to do with covering up bad decision making or saving face or even keeping investors or customers from fleeing? Welcome to the dark side of disclosure.

When I worked from Gateway 2000 back in the early part of the millennium, we had a particularly nasty known issue in the system. The ultimate root cause was that the capacitors on a series of motherboards were made with poor quality controls or bad components and would swell and eventually explode, causing the system to come to a halt. The symptoms manifested themselves in all manner of strange ways, like race conditions or random software errors. We would sometimes spend hours troubleshooting an unrelated issue only to find out the motherboard was affected with “bad caps”.

The issue was well documented in the tech support database for the affected boards. Once we could determine that it was a capacitor issue it was very easy to get the parts replaced. Getting to that point was the trick, though. Because at the top of the article describing the problem was a big, bold statement:

Do Not Tell The Customer This Is A Known Issue!!!

What? I can’t tell them that their system has an issue that we need to correct before everything pops and shuts it down for good? I can’t even tell them what to look for specifically when we open the case? Have you ever tried to tell a 75-year-old grandmother to look for something “strange” in a computer case? You get all kinds of fun answers!

We ended up getting creative in finding ways to look for those issues and getting them replaced where we could. When I moved on to my next job working for a VAR, I found out some of those same machines had been sold to a customer. I opened the case and found bad capacitors right away. I told my manager and explained the issue and we started getting them replaced under warranty as soon as the first sign of problems happened. After the warranty expired we kept ordering good boards from suppliers until we were able to retire all of those bad machines. If I hadn’t have known about the bad cap issue from my help desk time I never would have known what to look for.

Known issues like these are exactly the kind of thing you need to tell your customers about. It’s something that impacts their computer. It needs to be fixed. Maybe the company didn’t want to have to replace thousands of boards at once. Maybe they didn’t want to have to admit they cut corners when they were buying the parts and now the money they saved is going to haunt them in increased support costs. Whatever the reason it’s not the fault of the customer that the issue is present. They should have the option to get things fixed properly. Hiding what has happened is only going to create stress for the relations between consumer and provider.

Which brings me back to my issue from above. Maybe it wasn’t “known” when I called the first time. But by the third or fourth time I called about the same thing they should have been able to tell me it’s a known problem with this specific behavior and that a fix is coming soon. The solution wasn’t to keep using the first-tier support fixes of resets or transfers to another department. I would have appreciated knowing it was an issue so I didn’t have to spend as much time upgrading and isolating and documenting the hell out of everything just to exclude other issues. After all, my troubleshooting skills haven’t disappeared completely!

Vendors and providers, if you have a known issue you should admit it. Be up front. Honestly will get you far in this world. Tell everyone there’s a problem and you’re working on a fix that you don’t have just yet. It may not make the customer happy at first but they’ll understand a lot more than hiding it for days or weeks while you scramble to fix it without telling anyone. If that customer has more than a basic level of knowledge about systems they’ll probably be able to figure it out anyway and then you’re going to be the one with egg on your face when they tell you all about the problem you don’t want to admit you have.

Tom’s Take

I’ve been on both sides of this fence before in a number of situations. Do we admit we have a known problem and try to get it fixed? Or do we get creative and try to hide it so we don’t have to own up to the uncomfortable questions that get asked about bad development or cutting corners? The answer should always be to own up to things. Make everyone aware of what’s going on and make it right. I’d rather deal with an honest company working hard to make things better than a dishonest vendor that miraculously manages to fix things out of nowhere. An ounce of honestly prevents a pound of bad reputation.

Slow and Steady and Complete

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StepTiles

I was saddened to learn last week that one of my former coworkers passed away unexpectedly. Duane Mersman started at the same time I did at United Systems and we both spent most of our time in the engineering area working on projects. We worked together on so many things that I honestly couldn’t keep count of them if I tried. He’s going to be missed by so many people.

A Hare’s Breadth

Duane was, in many ways, my polar opposite at work. I was the hard-charging young buck that wanted to learn everything there was to know about stuff in about a week and just get my hands dirty trying to break it and learn from my mistakes. If you needed someone to install a phone system next week with zero formal training or learn how iSCSI was supposed to operate based on notes sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin I was your nerd. That meant we could often get things running quickly. It also meant I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why things weren’t working. I left quite a few forehead-shaped dents in data center walls.

Duane was not any of those things. He was deliberate and methodical. He spent so much time researching technology that he knew it backwards and forwards and inside out. He documented everything he did while he was working on it instead of going back after the fact to scribble down some awkward prose from his notes. He triple checked all his settings before he ever implemented them. Duane wouldn’t do anything until he was absolutely sure it was going to work. And even then he checked it again just to be sure.

I used to joke that we were two sides of the same coin. You sent me in to clean things up. Then you sent Duane in to clean up after me. I got in and out quickly but I wasn’t always the most deliberate. Duane would get in behind me and spend time making sure whatever I did was the right way. I honestly felt more comfortable knowing he would ensure whatever I did wasn’t going to break next week.

Turtle Soup

Management knew how to use us both effectively. When the customer was screaming and needed it done right now I was the guy. When you wanted things documented in triplicate Duane was the right man for the job. I can remember him working on a network discovery diagram for a medical client that was so detailed that we ended up framing it as a work of art for the customer. It was something that he was so proud of given the months that he toiled away on it.

In your organization you need to recognize the way that people work and use them effectively. If you have an engineer that just can’t be rushed no matter what you need to find projects for them to work on that can take time to work out correctly. You can’t rush people if they don’t work well that way. Duane had many gears but all of them needed to fit his need to complete every part of every aspect of the project. Likewise, hard chargers like me need to be able to get in and get things done with a minimum of distraction.

Think of it somewhat like an episode of The Witcher. You need a person to get the monsters taken care of but you also need someone to chronicle what happened. Duane was my bard. He documented what we did and made sure that future generations would remember it. He even made sure that I would remember the things that we did later when someone asked a question about it or I stated blaming the idiot that programmed it (spoiler alert: I was that idiot).

Lastly, Duane taught me the value of being a patient teacher. When he was studying to take his CCNP exams he spent a significant amount of time on the SWITCH exam learning the various states of spanning trees. I breezed through it because it mostly made sense to me. When he went through it he lobbed up every example and investigated all the aspects of the settings. He would ask me questions about why something behaved the way it did or how a setting could mess things up. As he asked me what I thought I tried to explain how I saw it. My explanations created more questions. But those questions helped me investigate why things worked the way they did. His need to know all about the protocol made me understand it at a more fundamental level than just passing an exam. He slowed me down and made sure I didn’t miss anything.

Tom’s Take

Duane was as much a mentor in my career as anyone. We learned from each other and we made sure to check each other’s work. He taught me that slow and steady is just as important as getting things done at warp speed. His need to triple check everything led me to do the same in the CCIE lab and is probably the reason why I eventually passed. His documentation and diagrams taught me to pay attention to the details. In the end he helped me become who I am today. Treasure the people you work with that take the time to do things right. It may take them a little longer than you’d like but in the end you’ll be happier knowing that they are there to make sure.

Follow My Leader

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I spent the past two weeks enjoying the scenic views at the Philmont Scout Ranch with my son and some of his fellow Scouts BSA troop mates. It was very much the kind of vacation that involved a lot of hiking, mountain climbing, and even some inclement weather. We all completely enjoyed ourselves and I learned a lot about hanging bear bags and taking care of blisters. I also learned a lot about leadership by watching the boys in the crew interact with each other.

Storm Warnings

Leadership styles are nothing new to the people that read my blog. I’ve talked about them at length in the past. One thing I noticed when I was on the trek was how different leadership styles can clash and create friction among teenagers. As adults we tend to gloss over delivery and just accept that people are the way they are. When you’re fourteen or fifteen you haven’t quite taken that lesson to heart yet. That means more pushing against styles that don’t work for you.

We have all worked for or with someone that has a very authoritarian style in the past. The kind of people that say, “Do this right now” frequently. It’s a style that works well for things like military units or other places where decisions need to be quick and final. The crew leader exhibited that kind of leadership style to our crew. I sat back and watched how the other boys in the unit handled it.

If you’ve never gotten to watch the Stages of Team Development form in real time you’re missing out on a treat. I won’t go into too much depth here but the important stage happens after we get past the formation and into the Storming phase. This is where motivation and skill sets are low and the interaction between the members is primarily antagonistic. Arguments and defensiveness are more prevalent during storming. It happens every time and frequently occurs again and again as team members interact. It’s important to recognize the barriers that Storming creates and move past them to a place where the team puts the mission before their egos.

Easier said that done when you’re with a group of teenagers. I swear our group never really got past the storming phase for long. The end of the trek saw some friction still among the members. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why that was. After all, we grown ups can put things aside to focus on the mission, right? We can check our egos at the door and hope that we can just get past this next part to make things easier overall.

Style Points

That’s when our lead Crew Advisor pointed out a key piece of the puzzle I’d missed, even after all my time dealing with team development. He said to the crew on the last day, “There are a lot of leaders in this group. That’s why there was so much friction between you all.” It was like a lightbulb going off in my mind. The friction wasn’t the result of leadership styles inasmuch as it was the clash between styles that kids aren’t so good at hiding.

I’m not an authoritarian. I don’t demand people do things. I ask people to do things. Maybe when I want isn’t a request but it is almost always phrased that way. “Please walk the dog” or “Can you get me the hammer from the garage?” are common ways for me to direct my family or my unit. I was raised not to be a demanding person. However, in my house growing up those statements were never questions. I’ve continued that method of leadership as my own family has grown. Dad asks you to do something but it’s not optional.

Where my leadership style clashes is with people who tell you to do something right now. “Get this done” or “You go do this thing over here” wrankle me. Moreover, I get frustrated when I don’t understand the why behind it. I’m happy to help if you just help me understand why it needs to be done. Bear bags need to be hung right away to keep animals from devouring the human food. The dining fly needs to be put up to put things underneath in case of inclement weather. There’s an order to things that makes sense. You need to explain why instead of just giving orders.

As I watched the teenagers in the crew interact with each other I couldn’t understand the defensive nature of the interactions. Some of the crew mates flat out refused to do things because they didn’t get it. They took their time getting necessary tasks done because they felt like they were doing all the work. Until the end of the trip I didn’t understand that the reason for their lack of motivation wasn’t inspired by laziness, but instead by a clash in style.

My son is like me in that he asks people to do things. So when he was ordered to do something he felt the need to push back or express displeasure with the leadership style. It looked defiant because he was trying to communicate that politeness and explanation go a long way toward helping people feel more motivated to pitch in. 

For example, asking someone to help hang the bear bags because there is a storm coming in and they are the most efficient at it is a better explanation than telling them to just do it. Explaining that you want someone to train another person in a job because you excel at it helps the person understand this is more about education than making them do the job over and over again. I’ve mentioned it before when it comes to leaders leaning on the people that get the job done all the time without expressing why. It’s important to help people understand that they have special unique skills that are critical to helping out.

Promoting From Within

Leaders chafe at the styles that don’t match their own. One of the ways to help this process is through delegation. Instead of punishing those that talk back to you make them responsible for leading the group. Let them show off their leadership style to see how it is received. You’re essentially giving that person the power to express themselves to see if their way is better. Depending on your leadership style this may be difficult to do. Authoritarians don’t like letting go of their power. People with no patience are more likely to just do the job themselves instead of letting others learn. However, you need to do it.

Leaders will excel in the right environment. Give someone responsibility and let them accomplish things. Instead of simply giving out tasks let the leaders figure out how to accomplish the goals. I ran a small experiment where I told our crew leader to just take care of his one responsibility and then leave the crew to their own devices. By this point in the trek they knew what needed to be done. If they couldn’t find the motivation to get it done then it was on them and not the leader. Weather forced my hand before I could get the experiment done but when a leader is having issues with those under then chafing at their leadership style they need to empower their group to lead their way to see how effective it can be instead of just falling back on “I’m in charge so you do what I say”.

Tom’s Take

My leadership experience and training has been all about creating artificial situations where people are required to step up to lead. Seeing it happen organically was a new experience for me. Leaders emerge naturally but they don’t all grow at the same rate or in the same way. The insight gained at the end of the trip helped me understand the source of friction over the twelve days were were in the backcountry. I think I’d do things a little differently next time given the opportunity to allow those that needed a different style to come forward and provide their own way of doing things. I’ll be interested to see how those leaders develop as well as how I approach these situations in the future.