Category Archives: Certification

Being the Best at Beginning

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The other day I was listening to an excellent episode of The Art of Network Engineering talking about technical marketing engineers (TME). The discussion was excellent and there was one line from Pete Lumbis in the episode that stuck with me. He said that one of the things that makes you good as a TME is being an “expert beginner”. That phrase resonates at lot with me.

Fresh Eyes on the Problem

I talked a bit about this last year when I talked about being a beginner and how exciting that it was to start over with something. As I compared that post to the AONE episode I realized that what Pete was talking about was a shift in mindset that gives you the energy and focus to pick things up quickly.

You may have heard the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt”. It’s a common phrase used to describe how we feel less impressed with things the more we learn about then. Our brains are wired to enjoy new things. We love new experiences, going to new places, or even meeting new people. The excitement and rush that we get from something unfamiliar causes our brain to devour things. It’s only once we become familiar with them that we feel the contempt set in.

It’s not always possible to avoid the contempt part of things. Think about something as dreary as your morning commute to work, whether it’s walking down the stairs or driving to the office. I used to joke that my car was practically on auto-pilot most mornings because I knew every bump in the road and every turn by heart. When I would go somewhere new I would have to focus more on road signs or directions.

Back to Basics

The beginner aspect of things is easier to deal with. That’s because we can trick ourselves into seeing something with fresh eyes. On a number of occasions I’ve mentioned my friend and mentor John Pross and his assertion that every upgrade or deployment that happened was like the first time doing it. He never took anything for granted. He always took things step-by-step. While this had the affect of him making sure everything was followed to the letter it also gave him the beginner aspect of looking for ways to improve or discovering new solutions to problems along the way.

Once the contempt or apathy sets in you’re going to get very good at just clicking through the steps to get to the end as fast as possible. If you don’t believe me think about how many times you’ve given directions that involve something like “Just click Next, Next, Next, Next and then you’re done”. Trust me, it sounds funnier when you say it out loud. But it speaks to the fact that we know the dialog boxes so well that we know they aren’t important. But what if they are?

If you want to understand what it feels like to be a beginner again and you’re having a hard time getting yourself in that mindset you should find a beginner and coach them through a task like a setup. Don’t just tell them what to do. Let them figure it out. Answer questions as they come up. Make them explain why they’re doing something. I bet you’ll learn a lot more as you have to help them understand why that configuration line is in there or why you always choose twice the amount of RAM in an instance. Once you see the process through the eyes of a beginner you have to learn it more completely in order to help them understand it.

In some roles, like a TME or a VAR engineer, the ability to be an expert beginner is critical to your job. You have to see a technology for the first time and pick up the basics quickly. I used to tell people that the excitement of being an engineer at a VAR was the variety of problems I’d be called on to solve. One day might be wireless clients. The next could be iSCSI storage arrays. Whatever the case may be I could count on finding myself in a new situation pretty regularly. It kept things exciting and made me realize I had to stay on my toes.

For those that work as product managers or on more specialized teams you need to make sure you’re taking time to approach things as a beginner. The “same old, same old” may not actually be the same any more. That kind of contempt and familiarity leads to the phrase “the way we’ve always done it” and doesn’t force you to challenge the process to understand how to improve it. Sometimes you need to step back and remember that you have to see everything for the first time.

Tom’s Take

Beginners shouldn’t feel like they’re a nuisance. In fact they should be celebrated for the energy and focus they bring to a task or project. For roles like a TME it’s important to bring the same kind of energy to new things. You can learn a lot when you allow your brain to soak up knowledge like a fresh sponge. More importantly, the ability to be a beginner helps you refine your knowledge base more and will ensure that you can explain a concept or process to someone with absolute certainty.

The Power of Continuing Education on Certifications

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I’m about six months away from recertifying my CCIE and even though I could just go Emeritus now I’m working on completing some continuing education at the end of the year to push it out another three years. I am once again very thankful that Cisco has this as an option instead of taking a test over and over again as the only option to renew my certifications.

As I embark on another journey to keep myself current in the networking community, I realize that the flexibility that education credits offer is more important that just passing a test or learning a new skill. Employers should also be thrilled that knowledge workers have the ability to work on other skills and be recognized for them. Because there are two different paths that this can lead to.

To Be The Best

One of the things that most professionals recognize with continuing education is that you can leverage your skills to race through things. If you’re already an expert at something like BGP or spanning tree why not take courses to improve the depth of your knowledge? This is part of the reason why there are a number of double CCIEs that have Routing and Switching and Service Provider. The skill sets have a big overlap which makes the additional study to pass the other relatively painless.

Taking pride in practicing the same skill set over and over again is something we traditionally associate with athletes and other skill positions. It is a very valid way of showing everyone that you truly are an expert at your craft. Knowing every nuance of the protocol or understanding it to a degree not possessed by anyone else is a real accomplishment. The value you gain in troubleshooting situations is unmatched. It’s easy to become the authoritative source on something because you’ve literally studied every piece of material on it and you know it inside out.

The downside of this kind of approach is that you naturally gravitate toward being an expert on exactly one or two things. Like a cake baker you are great at making one specific kind of thing. You may have more than enough work to keep you occupied for years but if the market shifts you may find yourself in trouble. The deep learning method works with technology that doesn’t get superseded quickly. IP routing is here to stay but we also said the same thing about traditional telephony and FORTRAN. Those may still exist in some form today and the experts are still needed to make them work but they aren’t nearly as big as they used to be.

Covering the Rest

The opposite of a deep expert is one that has a wide breadth of knowledge. This is the area where I feel a continuous learning program really shines. That’s because access to knowledge outside of your specific discipline can be hard to come by without help. Having a list of approved courses for a CE portal steers you in a good direction to take advantage of these offerings.

I remember telling people that I knew I was starting to gain on my knowledge and certification journey when I stopped finding the books I needed at the local book store. That’s absolutely true for those that are trying to reach the pinnacle of their specific skill set. However, those basic books are great to jump into an area you may not be familiar with.

You may think that you can spend your time studying and practicing and getting expert skill levels in a few key areas but you also need to realize that things can shift. Networking professionals today also need to understand programming and cloud and many other aspects of enterprise IT. It’s not even a case that knowing how to use those things is just easier. Instead it’s a case of requiring knowledge in those areas to understand how they interact so you can build more complete systems. You might be able to work on technology with a specific skill set but you won’t be able to work on anything new if you don’t know how all the parts work together.

You may not like the idea of studying lots of different areas of knowledge and that’s totally fine. But if you don’t at least understand that some knowledge of other areas is needed you’re going to find yourself opting out of many opportunities to work on things that are going to be important later.

Tom’s Take

You can choose to be the deep expert or the designer with breadth. The important thing is that the choice is yours thanks to the foresight of companies that embrace a model of learning over regurgitation. If you want to pick up new skills and get credit for them you can. If you’d prefer to be the best at a given discipline then the world is your oyster. No matter what you have the ability to make a choice that isn’t studying for a test every couple of years that doesn’t expand your knowledge. To me, the real value of a CE program is how it makes us all better.

Intelligence and Wisdom

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I spent the last week at the Philmont Leadership Challenge in beautiful Cimarron, NM. I had the chance to learn a bit more about servant leadership and work on my outdoor skills a little. I also had some time to reflect on an interesting question posed to me by one of the members of my crew.

He asked me, “You seem wise. How did you get so wise?” This caught me flat-flooted for a moment because I’d never really considered myself to be a very wise person. Experienced perhaps but not wise like Yoda or Gandalf. So I answered him as I thought more about it.

Intelligence is knowing what to do. Wisdom is knowing what not to do.

The more I thought about that quote the more I realized the importance of the distinction.

Basic Botany

There’s another saying that people tweeted back at me when I shared the above quote. It’s used in the context of describing Intelligence and Wisdom for Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying:

Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting tomatoes in a fruit salad.

It’s silly and funny but it gets right to the point and is a different version of my other observation. Intelligence is all about the acquisition of knowledge. Think about your certification journey. You spend all your time learning the correct commands for displaying routing tables or how to debug a device and figure out what’s going on. You memorize arguments so you can pass the exam without the use of the question mark.

Intelligence is focused on making sure you have all the knowledge you can ever use. Whether it’s an arcane spell book or Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 you’re working with the kinds of information that you need to ingest in order to get things done. Think of it like a kind of race to amass a fortune in facts.

However, as pointed out above, intelligence is often lacking in the application of that knowledge. Assembling a storehouse full of facts doesn’t do much to help you when it comes to applying that knowledge to produce outcomes. You can be a very intelligent person and still not know what to do with it. You may have heard someone say that a person is “book smart” or is lacking is “common sense”. These are both ways to say that someone is intelligent by maybe not wise.

Applied Science

If intelligence is all about acquisition of knowledge then wisdom is focused on application. Just because you know what commands are used to debug a router doesn’t mean you need to use them all the time. There are apocryphal stories of freshly minted CCIEs walking in to the data center for an ISP and entering debug ip packet detail on the CLI only to watch the switch completely exhaust itself and crash in the middle of the day. The command was correct for what they wanted to accomplish. What was missing was the applied knowledge that a busy switch wouldn’t be able to handle the additional processing load of that much data being streamed to the console.

Wisdom isn’t gained from reading a book. It’s gained from applying knowledge to situations. No application of that knowledge is going to be perfect every time. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to do things that cause problems. You’re going to need to fix mistakes and learn as you go. Along the way you’re going to find a lot of things that don’t work for a given situation. That’s where wisdom is gained. You’re not failing. You’re learning what doesn’t work so you don’t apply it incorrectly.

A perfect example of this came just a couple of days ago. The power in my office was out which meant the Internet was down for everyone. A major crisis for sure! I knew I needed to figure out what was going on so I started the troubleshooting process. I knew how electricity worked and what needed to be checked. Along the way I kept working and trying to figure out where the problem was. The wisdom I gained along the way from working with series circuits and receptacles helped me narrow things down to one wall socket that had become worn out and needed to be replaced. More wisdom told me to make sure the power was turned off before I started working on the replacement.

I succeeded not because I knew what to do as much as knowing what not to do when applying the knowledge. I didn’t have to check plugs I knew weren’t working. I knew things could be on different circuits. I knew I didn’t have to mess with working sockets either. All the knowledge of resistance and current would only serve me correctly if I knew where to put it and how to work around the issues I saw in the application of that knowledge.

Not every piece of wisdom comes from unexpected outcomes. It’s often just as important to do something that works and see the result so you can remember it for the next time. The wisdom comes in knowing how to apply that knowledge and why it only works in certain situations. If you’ve every worked with someone that troubleshoots really complex problems with statements like “I tried this crazy thing once and it worked” you know exactly how this can be done.

Tom’s Take

Intelligence has always been my strong point. I read a lot and retain knowledge. I’m at home when I’m recalling trivia or absorbing new facts. However I’ve always worried that I wasn’t very wise. I make simple mistakes and often forget how to use the information I have on hand. However, when I shared the quote above I finally realized that all those mistakes were just me learning how to apply the knowledge I’d gained over time. Wisdom isn’t a passage in a book. It’s not a fact. It’s about knowing when to use it and when not to use it. It’s about learning in a different way that matters just as much as all the libraries in the world.

Certification Comfort Food

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I’m a big fan of comfort food. Maybe more than I should be. The idea of something simple and tasty just hits the right spot a lot of time, especially when I’m stressed or don’t have time to do something more involved. I know I really need to be better about cooking but you can’t beat a quick meal that uses something simple and gets the job done, right?

Now, before you ask yourself what I’m on about this week, I want you to think about that analogy in terms of certifications and learning. When we’re starting out in the industry or we’re learning a new skill we have to pick up basic ideas. The more advanced or radical the technology the more we need the kinds of explanations that make the concepts simple to understand. We need the equivalent of learning comfort food. Simple, digestible, and easy to prepare.

Climbing the Ladder

As our skills improve we have the choice to continue on and develop our capabilities to greater depths. Perhaps we want to learn everything there is to know about BGP and policies. We could even parlay that networking knowledge into new adjacencies that build on our skill sets. We also have the option of staying in the basic level and honing those skills. Instead of learning VXLAN we could spend a thousand hours practicing all the ways that you can configure a VLAN.

Which way is right? Is there a need to make a choice? People are going to feel more comfortable doing one thing over the other in almost every case. If you’re like me you want to get to the bottom of every mystery and explore every nuance of something. Once you figure it out you’re going to want to move on to the next hard problem to solve. You become a voracious reader and consumer of knowledge and before you know it you’ve run out of things to consume. It’s partially the reason why I’ve been such a prolific writer for the past twelve years. I’ve been creating the content that I wanted to consume so others can benefit.

The other side of the choice is being content with the skills you have. This is in no way a negative thing. Not everyone that cooks needs to be a four star chef that makes perfect risotto and Beef Wellington every time. There is a place for everyone that learns enough to accomplish their goals and decides that is enough for them. If the above option is the “pull” model where one is trying to pull in new knowledge as fast as possible then this is the “push” version where people must be pushed to learn additional things. Your company might move to cloud and that would facilitate a need to pick up cloud operations skills to complement the ones you have for the network or the virtualization cluster. You’re not actively seeking the knowledge until it’s needed.

Boiling the Mudpuddle

It’s all well and good when you can recognize which type of learner you are. It’s also important to know where your resources are aimed. If your top destinations for content are part of the “push” model and aim at a lower level when you’re someone that wants to grow and investigate new areas you’re going to hit a wall eventually and sour on them.

A personal story for me comes when I was racing through my certification journey in the early part of my career. Once I started with Cisco I was consuming books left and right. Every time I went into the book store I picked up a new tome to teach me more about routing or remote access networks or even firewalls. I would consume that content whenever I could and apply those lessons to my job or my certification process. Eventually I knew I was reaching a limit because there were fewer and fewer books in the bookstore that taught me things I wanted to know. It made me realize there is a target market for these resources.

Things like certification guides are aimed at a wide market. They want to teach skills to the widest possible audience. Not everyone needs to know the ins and outs of EVPN but most everyone in networking needs to know how a switch forwards frames. If you want to sell the most books which would you write about? You’d write the one that covers the most people. It’s a reality of the market. Content for the entry level and the broadest group sells the best. In today’s world the book has been replaced by the blog and the YouTube channel.

As mentioned, I started my blogging career because of the above bookstore issue. Once I started learning things that weren’t in every book I wanted to share those ideas. That got me to Tech Field Day and eventually to different things. It also made me realize that while my content may never have hundreds of thousands of readers for every post it would serve people that needed to find those lessons or understand those topics in a depth that was beyond a paragraph or two in a 400-page encyclopedia of terminology.

To me, the certification comfort food is that entry-level content. It’s always going to be there. It’s simple to write about, especially when you have good analogies to frame new concepts for people. It’s tasty when you’re starving. And you can make a very good living doing it. But if you’re the kind of person that wants to try new tastes and break away from the comfort and ease you’re going to need to figure out your own path. You need to experiment and make mistakes and struggle to conceptualize what you’re talking about. You need to expand your horizons and do new things and then tell the world how you did it. Like a recipe blog or TikTok channel for cooking you’re going to need to put your crazy ideas out there and see how it goes.

Tom’s Take

There are a lot of great creators out there that have made a very good place for themselves teaching newcomers the basics of how things work. I applaud them and wish them nothing but success. I also know that’s not for me. I started writing about my CCIE studies and the challenges I was solving the real world. Now I write about the state of the market or the changing of tech or how to build and lead teams. It’s very representative of my journey as well as the journeys of those in the community that I talk to. My very nature won’t let me stay in a little bubble and create the same things in new ways. I’m going to push the envelope and explore new things. It means I might not land in everyone’s top list but it also means I won’t be bored. Why be mac-n-cheese when I really need to be risotto?

Choosing the Least Incorrect Answer

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My son was complaining to me the other day that he missed on question on a multiple choice quiz in his class and he got a low B grade instead of getting a perfect score. When I asked him why he was frustrated he told me, “Because it was easy and I missed it. But I think the question was wrong.” As usual, I pressed him further to explain his reasoning and found out that the question was indeed ambiguous but the answer choices were pretty obviously wrong all over. He asked me why someone would write a test like that. Which is how he got a big lesson on writing test questions.

Spin the Wheel

When you write a multiple choice test question for any reputable exam you are supposed to pick “wrong” answers, known as distractors, that ensure that the candidate doesn’t have a better than 25% chance of guessing the correct answer. You’ve probably seen this before because you took some kind of simple quiz that had answers that were completely wrong to the point of being easy to pick out. Those quizzes are usually designed to be passed with the minimum amount of effort.

This also extends to a question that includes answer choices that are paired. If you write a question that says “pick the three best answers” with six options that are binary pairs you’re basically saying to the candidate “Pick between these two three times and you’re probably going to get it right”. I’ve seen a number of these kinds of questions over the years and it feels like a shortcut to getting one on the house.

The most devious questions come from the math side of the house. Some of my friends have been known to write questions for their math tests and purposely work the problem wrong at a critical point to get a distractor that looks very plausible. You make the same mistake and you’re going to see the correct answer in the choices and get it wrong. The extra effort here matters because if you see too many students getting the same wrong distractor as the answer you know that there may be confusion about the process at that critical point. Also, the effort to make math question distractors look plausible is impressive and way too time consuming.

Why Is It Wrong?

Compelling distractors are a requirement for any sufficiently advanced testing platform. The professionals that write the tests understand that guessing your way through a multiple choice exam is a bad precedent and the whole format needs to be fair. The secret to getting the leg up on these exams is more than just knowing the right answer. It’s about knowing why things are wrong.

Take an easy example: OSPF LSAs. A question may ask you about a particular router in a diagram and ask you which LSAs that it sees. If the answer choices are fairly configured you’re going to be faced with some plausible looking answers. Say the question is about a not-so-stubby-area (NSSA). If you know the specifics of what makes this area unique you can start eliminating choices from the question. What if it’s asking about which LSAs are not allowed? Well, if you forgot the answer to that you can start by reading the answer choices and applying logic.

You can usually improve your chances of getting a question right by figuring out why the answers given are wrong for the question. In the above example, if LSA Type 1 is listed as an answer choice ask yourself “Why is this the wrong answer?” For the question about disallowed LSA types you can eliminate this choice because LSA Type 1 is always present inside an area. For a question about visibility of that LSA outside of an area you’d be asking a different question. But if you know that Type 1 LSAs are local and always visible you can cross off that as a potential answer. That means you boosted your chances of guessing the answer to 33%!

The question itself is easy if you know that NSSAs use Type 7 LSAs to convey information because Type 5 LSAs aren’t allowed. But if you understand why the other answers are wrong for the question asked you can also check your work. Why would you want to do that? Because the wording of the question can trip you up. How many times have you skimmed the question looking for keywords and missing things like “not” or “except”? If you work the question backwards looking for why answers are wrong and you keep coming up with them being right you may have read the question incorrectly in the first place. Likewise, if every answer is wrong somehow you may have a bad question on your hands.

What happens if the question is poorly worded and all the answer choices are wrong? Well, that’s when you get to pick the least incorrect answer and leave feedback. It’s not about picking the perfect answer in these situations. You have to know that a lot of hands touch test questions and there are times when things are rewritten and the intent can be changed somehow. If you know that you are dealing with a question that is ambiguous or flat-out wrong you should leave feedback in the question comments so it can be corrected. But you still have to answer the question. So, use the above method to find the piece that is the least incorrect and go with that choice. It may not be “right” according to the test question writer, but if enough people pick that answer you’re going to see someone taking a hard look at the question.

Tom’s Take

We are going to take a lot of tests in our lives. Multiple choice tests are easier but require lots of work, both on the part of the writer and the taker. It’s not enough to just memorize what the correct answers are going to be. If you study hard and understand why the distractors are incorrect you’ll have a more complete understanding of the material and you’ll be able to check your work as you go along. Given that most certification exams don’t allow you to go back and change answers once you’ve moved past the question the ability to check yourself in real time gives you an advantage that can mean the difference between passing and retaking the exam. And that same approach can help you when everything on the page looks wrong.

A Decade of CCIE Certification

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I was notified this week that I’m eligible for the 10-year CCIE plaque. Which means that it’s been a decade since I walked out of Cisco’s Building C in San Jose with a new number and a different outlook on my networking career. The cliche is that “so many things have changed” since that day and it’s absolutely accurate because the only constant in life is change.

Labbing On the Road

I think the first thing that makes me think about the passage of time since my certification is the fact that the lab where I took the exam no longer exists. Building C was sold to the company that owns and operates the San Francisco 49ers stadium just down Tasman drive from the old letter buildings. Those real estate locations were much more valuable to the NFL than to Cisco. I can’t even really go and visit my old stomping grounds any more because the buildings were gutted, renovated, and offered to other operations that aren’t from Cisco.

Now, you don’t even go to San Jose or RTP for the lab. Three years ago the labs in the US moved to Richardson, TX. The central aspect of the location is pretty appealing when you think about it. A part of me wishes I would have had the opportunity to take the lab there since I wouldn’t have to jump on a plane and burn three days of my work schedule. The costs of my lab attempts would have been a lot less if I only had to drive down for one night in a hotel and got to come back and sleep in my bed that same night. I realize that it’s equally inconvenient for people to need to fly to the middle of the country when they used to be closer to the lab when it was on either coast. However, real estate in RTP and San Jose is beyond crazy when it comes to price. Moving the lab to somewhere more reasonable means Cisco is getting value out of their buildings elsewhere.

The mobile lab is another aspect of the changes in the CCIE certification program that are a welcome change. By putting the lab on the road and giving people in countries far away from a lab location the opportunity to get certified the program can continue to be relevant. This is due in large part to the changes in the lab that allow a large part of it to be virtualized or operated remotely from a rack located somewhere else. I remember starting my lab studies and thinking to myself that the rack that I was working on was just across the room. Not that there was much that I could do about it. The idea that there could be something going on that was just out of my reach was an itch I had to get over. Today, you would never even start to believe that you had a hardware issue in your lab because of the streamlining of the process. That can only happen when you optimize your offerings to the point where you can just virtualize the whole thing.

The Next Ten Years

Right now, I still have a year to go on my certification before I have to make the decision to keep it current or go to Emeritus retirement. My role on the CCIE Advisory council doesn’t matter either way. I’m likely going to just go Emeritus when the opportunity presents itself because I don’t use those lab skills every day. I’m not configuring BGP filter lists and port channels like I used to. The technical skills that I honed in Building C serve me more now to understand technology at an architecture level. I can see how people are using tools to solve problems and offer commentary when they are making poor decisions or when a better protocol exists.

The CCIE itself is still a very valuable certification to hold and study for. IT certification on the whole has been trending away from being the gold standard for hiring. Cloud and DevOps focus more on skills instead of papers hanging on a wall. However, operations teams still need ways to differentiate their people. If nothing else the CCIE is a great forcing function for you to figure out how deeply into networking you really want to get. It’s not enough to be curious about BGP or Frame Relay and traffic shaping QoS. You have to understand it at a level that would bore most others to tears. If you’re not prepared to know the minutia of a protocol the way that some people memorize batting averages or random movie trivia than you might not be up for this particular challenge.

The CCIE also isn’t going away any time soon. I remarked to someone the other day that the CCIE is a technology bellweather. I can remember the clamor to introduce the “new” SDN changes into the program so many years ago. I also chuckle when I think about the CCIE OpenFlow that more than a couple of people proposed. The certification program exists to refine and highlight the technology solutions that people are using today. It’s not a sneak peak at things that might be important later on in life. Think about how long it took for them to remove ISDN, ATM, and even frame relay from the test. And even frame relay was debated heavily because more than a few claimed they still used it in production.

The CCIE is a testament to the way that people study for and build networks at a high level. It’s not a cool badge to keep on your list like a hunting trophy. It’s a testament to the commitment that it takes to attain something like that. The JNCIE and the VCDX are much the same. They represent an investment of time and energy into something that proves your capabilities. More than any other certification, the CCIE challenges people. It creates study habits and builds communities. It makes people ask themselves hard questions about desire and commitment and helps the best rise to the occasion. It’s more than just a certification.

Tom’s Take

I wouldn’t change a thing about my CCIE journey. I learned as much from the failures as I did from the success. The opportunities afforded to me because of that number have been immeasurable. But through it all I realized that the process of getting my lab has helped shape me into who I am today. A decade past late night study sessions and soul-crushing failures I know that it was all worth it because it helped me take technology more seriously and form the habits and process that have served me well from then on. I’m happy to get the new plaque that marks me as a veteran of the lab plus ten years. My status as a CCIE might pass into Emeritus but the lessons I learned along the way will always be there.

Basics First and Basics Last

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This week I found my tech life colliding with my normal life in an unintended and somewhat enlightening way. I went to a store to pick up something that was out of stock and while I was there making small talk the person behind the counter asked me what I did for a living. I mentioned technology and he said that he was going to college for a degree in MIS, which just happens to be the thing I have my degree in. We chatted about that for a few more minutes before he asked me something I get asked all the time.

“What is the one thing I need to make sure I pay attention to in my courses?”

It’s simple enough, right? You’ve done this before and you have the benefit of hindsight. What is the one thing that is most important to know and not screw up? The possible answers floating through my head were all about programming or analytical methods or even the dreaded infrastructure class I slept through and then made a career out of. But what I said was the most boring and most critical answer one could give.

“You need to know the basics backwards and forwards.”

Basics Training

Why do we teach the basics? Why do we even call them that? And why are people so keen on skipping over all of them so fast to get to the cool stuff? You have to understand the basics before you even move on and yet so many want to get the “easy” stuff out of the way because memorizing the OSI model or learning how an array works in programming is mind-numbing.

The basics exist because we all need to know how things work at their most atomic level. We memorize the OSI model in networking because it tells us how things should behave. Sure, TCP/IP blows it away. However, if you know how packets are supposed to work with that model it informs you how you need to approach troubleshooting and software design and even data center layouts.

I’ll admit that I really didn’t pay much attention when I took my Infrastructure class twenty years ago. I was hell-bent on being a consultant or a database admin and who needed to know how a CPU register worked? What was this stupid OSI model they wanted me to know? I’ll just memorize it for the test and be done with it. Needless to say that the intervening years have shown me the folly of not paying attention in that class. If I went back today I’d ace that OSI test with my eyes closed.

The basics seem useless because we can’t do much with them right now. They’re just like Lego bricks. We need uniform pieces with predictable characteristics to help us understand how things are supposed to work together. Without that knowledge of how things work you can’t build on it. If you don’t understand the different between RAM and a hard disk you won’t be able to build systems that rely on both. Better yet, when technology changes to incorporate solid state disks and persistent memory storage you need the basics to understand how they are different and where you need to apply that knowledge.

I once picked up a Cisco Press CCIE study guide for the written exam to brush up on my knowledge before retaking the written. The knowledge in the book seemed easy to me. It was all about spanning tree configurations and OSPF area types and what BGP keepalives were. I felt like it was a remedial text that didn’t give me any new knowledge. That’s when I realized that they knowledge in the book wasn’t supposed to be new. It was supposed to be a reminder of what I already learned in my CCNA and CCNP courses. If anything in the text was truly new, was it something I should have already known?

It’s also part of the reason the CCIE is such a fun exam in the lab. You should already know the basics of how things like RIP and OSPF work. So let’s test those basics in new ways. Any of the training lab you can take from companies like INE or Micronics are filled with tricky little scenarios that make you take the basics and apply them outside the box. That’s because the instructors don’t need to spend time teaching you how RIP forms neighbor relationships or adjacencies. They want to see if you remember how that happens so you can apply it to a question designed to stretch your knowledge. You can only do that when you know the basics.

Graduation Day

Basics aren’t just for learning at the beginning. You should also brush up on them when you’re at the top of your game. Why? Because it will answer questions you might not know you had or explain strange things that rely on the architecture we long-ago forgot about because it seemed basic.

A fun example was years ago in the online game City of Heroes. The players can earn in-game currency to buy and sell things. Eventually the game economy got to the point where players were at the maximum amount of currency for a player. What was that number? It was just over two billion. Pretty odd place to stop, right? What made them think that was a good stopping point? Random chance? Desire to keep the amount of currency in circulation low? Or was there a different reason?

That’s when I asked a simple question: How would you store the currency value in the game’s code? The answer for every programmer out there is an integer. And what’s the maximum value for an integer? For a 32-bit value it’s around four billion. But what if you use a signed integer for some reason? The maximum value is just over two billion in each direction. So the developers used a 32-bit signed integer and that’s why the currency value was capped where it was.

Over and over again in my career I find myself turning back to the basics to answer questions about things I need to understand or solve. We really want the solutions to be complex and hard to understand and solve because that shows our critical thinking skills being applied. However, if you start with the basics approach you’ll find that the solutions to problems or the root causes are often defined by something very basic that has far-reaching consequences. And if you forget how those basics work you’re going to spend a lot of time chasing your tail looking for a complex solution to a simple problem.

Tom’s Take

I don’t think my conversation partner was hoping for the answer I gave him. I’m sure he wanted me to say that this high level course was super important because it taught all the secrets you needed to know in order to succeed in life. Everyone wants to hear that the most important things are exciting and advanced. Finding out that the real key to everything is the basics you learn at the beginning of your journey is disappointing. However, for those that master the basics and remember them at every step of their journey, the end of the road is just as advanced and exciting as it was when you stepped on it in the first place. And you get there with a better understanding of how everything works.

How Long Should You Practice

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A reporter once asked boxing legend Muhammad Ali how many sit-ups he did each day. I’m sure the reporter wasn’t expecting Ali’s answer. Ali replied with:

I don’t know. I don’t start counting them until it hurts. Those are the only ones that count. That’s what makes you a champion.”

Ali knew that counting things is just a numbers game. Five hundred poor sit-ups don’t count as much a fifty done the right way. With any practice that you do the only things that count are the things that teach your something or that push you to be better.

Don’t Practice Until It’s Right

People used to ask me how long I would spend at night studying for the CCIE lab. I told them I usually spent between five and seven hours depending on what I was studying. Sometimes those people would say things like “I’m not talking about setup time. I’m talking about actual lab work.” I always countered by making them explain why the setup isn’t part of the “real” work. That’s usually when they went quiet.

It’s far too easy to fall into the trap of overlooking things that you think are unimportant. A task you’ve done a hundred times is no big deal until you do it wrong the next time. Like Ali above, the things you do that require no effort don’t count. If you’re practicing a skill for a certification or a lab you need to put the same effort into it every time to ensure you’re doing it correctly. Lack of attention means you are doing it without gaining something from it.

I spend a lot of my time teaching things to people all over the place. I teach IT and networking skills to professionals. I teach outdoor skills to scouts of all ages. I teach merit badges and other things to a variety of youth. And I teach my kids life skills they will need. Every one of these lessons comes with instruction in the little details that matter. Every lesson also includes guidance that it needs to be practiced properly until it’s right. And then some.

Until You Can’t Get It Wrong

I tell my students and kids all the time, “Don’t practice until you get it right. Practice until you can’t get it wrong.” The level of involvement that it takes to get past the part where something finally works up to the level where it works every time is as wide as the gap at the lower end of the spectrum.

Too often people are content to work on something until they get it once. Whether it’s tying a knot or programming a router interface or even cooking a grilled cheese sandwich. Once you’ve done it right once you’re done with learning, right? Most of you are already shaking your head because you know that’s not right.

Once you get it right the first time you’ve already made a list of all the wrong ways to do something and you avoid them in the future. However, that list doesn’t include the entirety of all the wrong ways to do a thing. Amateurs make somewhat predictable mistakes because they’re working from the same basic knowledge. It’s when someone says they know what they’re doing that the real crazy stuff starts coming out of the woodwork.

Once you’ve practiced a skill you need to keep going. You need to work a variety of different angles to make sure you’ve covered all the ways you could get it wrong. If you’re tying a knot you need to practice with different kinds of ropes or in different positions. If there are two ways to tie something, practice them both. You don’t want to be an expert at a clove hitch over the end of a pole only to find out you have to tie it around the middle with no way to use the loop method you have memorized.

In IT, we lab things up to make sure we understand them. For these labs, try out the things in wrong ways. Click buttons before you’re supposed to. Put the wrong numbers in the field. See how the system will try to correct your errors. Maybe it doesn’t even bother? It’s easy to figure out you typed something in wrong when you hear a bell and see a message. It’s harder to troubleshoot when you don’t see anything right away and it all falls over later.

The extra practice above and beyond the first success is just like Muhammad Ali’s sit-ups. The hard ones count. The tasks that stretch your mind are the ones that build your skillset. You can’t give up when the answer isn’t right at your fingertips. Going that extra mile is the key to making yourself a better professional in whatever you do.

Tom’s Take

As we wind down 2020 we’re all looking to be better at things. Hobbies, skills, or professional talents are all calling to us to work on in whatever down time we have available to us. Make that practice count. Work hard to get it right every time. If you want to learn to make hollandaise sauce or write a novel or do a forward flip you have to keep practicing even after your success. Get to the point where you have no other choice but to get it right every single time. That’s the perfect amount of practice you need. Anything less counts as much as Muhammad Ali’s sit-ups before they start hurting.

Iron Chef: Certification Edition

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My friend Joshua Williams (@802DotMe) texted me today with a great quote that I wanted to share with you that made me think about certifications:

You’ve probably already thought through this extensively, and maybe even written about it, but after sitting through another 8 hour practical exam yesterday I’m more convinced than ever that expert level exams from technical companies are more analogous to a gimmicky Food Network TV show than real world application of technical acumen. They don’t care so much about my skill level as they do about what kind of meal I can prepare in 30 minutes using Tialapia, grapes, and Dr. Pepper syrup with my salt shaker taken away halfway through.

I laughed because it’s true. And then I thought about it more and realized he’s way more than right. We know for a fact that companies love to increase the level of challenge in their exams from novice to expert. It’s a way to weed out the people that aren’t committed to learning about something. However, as the questions and tasks get harder it becomes much more difficult to get a good sense of how candidates are going to perform.

Boiling Water Isn’t Hard?

When you look at something like the CCNA, they’re trying to make sure you know how networks actually work. The simulations and lab exercises are pretty basic. Can you configure RIP correctly? Do you know the command to enable a switch port? There isn’t a need to get crazy with it. Using Joshua’s analogy from above, it’s not unlike a show like Worst Cooks in America, where the basics are the challenge that needs to be overcome. Not everyone is a superstar chef. Sometimes getting the building blocks right is more than half the battle.

As you move up the ladder, the learning gets harder. You dive deep into protocols and see how technologies build on each other. You need to configure BGP, but you also need to have some kind of other IGP running to distribute the routes. You need to remember that this spice goes in while the dish is cooking and this other goes on at the end so the flavor isn’t destroyed. I would liken this to a “fun” challenge cooking show, where the expert Food Network Chef faces off against someone that isn’t in the food business at a high professional level. Maybe they run a diner or are a short-order cook in a hotel restaurant. They aren’t looking to create their own signature dish. They know enough to cook what tastes good. But ask them to make hollandaise sauce or make pufferfish sashimi and they’re out.

Which brings us to the highest level of learning. The expert certification tracks. These are the crowing achievements of a career. They are the level that you have to be at to prove you know the technology inside and out. How do you test that, exactly? Microsoft had a great way of doing it back in the day with some of the mastery programs. You went to Redmond and you spent a couple of months learning the technology with the people that wrote it. It was very similar to a doctor’s internship in a hospital. You did the work with people that knew what you needed to know. They corrected you and helped you grown your knowledge. Even though you were an expert you understood what needed to be done and how to get there. At the end you took an exam to cover what you had learned and you earned your mastery.

Other certification programs don’t do that. Instead, they try to trip you up with tricky scenarios and make you make mistakes if you’re not paying attention. This is the Iron Chef round. You know your stuff, eh? Face off against this hard challenge. And by the way, here’s your curveball: You have to use this crazy extra ingredient. A show like Chopped does this a lot too. You need to make a meal using chicken, soy sauce, and candy corn. Are they testing your ability to prepare food? Or trying to figure out how creative you can be with a set of constraints that don’t make sense?

Ala Config!

The theory behind this kind of challenge is sound on paper. You never know what you’re going to walk into and what you’ll be forced to fix. I’ve had some real interesting problems that I’ve needed to solve over my career. But in every crazy case I never had to deal with the kinds of constrained setups that you get in lab-based exams. Configure this protocol, but don’t use these options. Make this connection work this way using one of these options but know that picking the wrong one will wreck your configuration in about two hours. Make trout-flavored ice cream. You name it and it’s a huge challenge for no good reason.

In theory, this is a great way to challenge your experts. In practice, it’s silly because you’re putting up barriers they will never see. Worse yet, you force them to start looking for the crazy constraints that don’t exist. One of my favorites is the overarching constraint in the CCIE lab that you are not allowed to use a static route to anything unless explicitly allowed in the question. Why? Because static routes don’t scale? Because they create administrative overhead? Or is it because a single static route fixes the problem and doesn’t require you to spend an hour tagging routes when redistribution happens? Static routes cut the Gordian Knot in the lab. So they can’t be allowed. Because that would make things too easy.

Tom’s Take

We need to move away from trivia and Iron Chef-style certifications. Instead of making our people dependent on silly tricks or restricting them from specific tools in their kit, we need to ensure their knowledge is at the right level. You would never ask a chef to cook an entire meal and not be able to use a saucepan. Why would you take away things like static routes or access lists from a network engineer’s arsenal? Instead of crafting the perfect tricky scenario to trap your candidates, spend the time instead teaching them what they need to know. Because once someone learns that trout is a horrible ice cream flavor we all win.

Thanks to Josh Williams for this great post idea!

The Certification Ladder

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Are you climbing the certification ladder? If you’re in IT the odds are good that you are. Some people are just starting out and see certifications as a way to get the knowledge they need to do their job. Others see certs as a way to get out of a job they don’t like. Still others have plenty of certifications but want to get the ones at the top of their field. This last group are the ones that I want to spend some time talking about.

Pushing The Limit

Expert-level certifications aren’t easy on purpose. They’re supposed to represent the gap between being good at something and going above and beyond. For some that involves some kind of practical test of skills like the CCIE. For others it involves a board interview process like the VCDX. Or it could even involve a combination of things like the CWNE does with board review and documentation submissions.

Expert certifications aren’t designed to be powered through in a short amount of time. That’s because it’s difficult to become an expert at something without putting in the practice time. For some tests, that means meeting some minimum requirements. You can only attempt your VCDX when you have already passed the VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD test, for example. Or you may have a minimum requirement of time in the industry, such as the CISSP requirement of four years in the security industry.

But, more importantly, the requirement is that you truly are an expert. How many times have you bumped into someone that has a certification that you think to yourself, “How on earth did they pass that?” It should be fairly uncommon to run into a CCIE that you feel that way about. The test is rigorous and requires everyone to pass a very similar version of the practical exam. Sure, you still run into people that say the old 2-day exam was harder. But by and large, most CCIEs have had to endure the same kind of certification requirements.

Now, what people do after they get there is an entirely different matter altogether. There are a lot of people that get to the pinnacle of their certification journey and sit there on top of their mountain. They take time to survey the lands that they now watch over and they relax. They don’t see any need in going any further. They’ve done what they came to do. And for many that’s the way to go. Congratulations on your ride.

Still others use this opportunity negatively. They expect people to kiss the brass certificate and pay deference to them because of it. This can affect almost anyone. I remember years ago back to a time when I had just gotten my CCIE lab out of the way. I was working on a proposal for a customer. We had just gotten an email from the customer asking why we didn’t include a particular switch in the design. I told our team that we didn’t need it because the requirements of the design didn’t need something that cost three times over what we recommended. The customer’s response was, “Well, this other partner guy is a CCIE and he says we need that switch.” I replied back with, “Well, I’m a CCIE too, so let’s cut that crap and talk about the hardware.”

I’m not sure how many times that person had used the “I’m a CCIE” justification for their recommendations, but it shows me that some people believe a piece of paper speaks louder than their track record. Those people are usually the ones that fall back into the pattern of “listen to me because I passed tests” not “listen to me because I did the studying”. It’s important to ascribe value to passing a test, but remember that the test is a way to prove you have knowledge. It reminds me of this scene from Tommy Boy:

Throwing up a certification as justification for a recommendation is no different that just tossing a worthless guarantee on a box. Prove you know what you’re talking about instead of just saying you do.

Exceeding Your Reach

The last type of person that climbs the certification ladder is like the one in this tweet from my friend Hank Yeomans:

He looks at the ascent to the top of his certification ladder as a chance to do more. To build more. It’s not the end of the journey. It’s not bad to stop and look around at the new view from the top of your ladder when you’ve climbed it. But if you look at the journey as the start of something that you need to finish, you’re going to start immediately looking around to find the next thing that you need to do. Perhaps it’s learning a new technology related to the one that you just finished. Or maybe it’s that you want to figure out how to get even better at what you do.

People that never rest in their attempts to be better at the ones that ultimately change the way things are done. They don’t just accept that this is the way that things need to be. Instead, they use the top of their ladder to stretch out and see what they can reach. They realize that everything we do in life it just building on something else we’ve already done. We use Crawl, Walk, Run as a metaphor for building through a project or a process all the time. That’s because we know that you have to make steps all the time to progress. But what if someone just said, “You know what, I’ve mastered walking. I don’t need to run. All you people who only crawl listen to me because I’m better than you!” It would show how short-sighted they are when it comes to continuing the journey.

Tom’s Take

Many times, I’ve talked about the fact that I relaxed after I passed my CCIE and enjoyed not studying into the wee hours of the night. But after a while I started getting uncomfortable around 8-9pm. Because there was a little voice in the back of my head that kept telling me “You should be studying for something.” Instinctively, that voice knew that I needed to continue my journey. I would never be content resting on my laurels and I could never bring myself to use my certification as a crutch to make myself look important to others. Instead, I needed to push myself to build on what I’ve already done and make myself better. As Hank said, it’s just a foothill on a greater journey. Once you’ve learned how to use your ladder to increase your reach, even the sky isn’t the limit any longer.