Category Archives: Education

Why Aren’t There More Technical MBAs?

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This weekend I was listening to the latest episode of the Art of Network Engineering podcast featuring Russ White. Russ is one of those guests that has a breadth of knowledge outside of technology that colors the way he looks at things in the realm of enterprise IT. Plus he’s a fun interview.

One of the questions he asked was around the idea of technical MBAs. For those that might not know, MBA stands for Masters of Business Administration, which is a post-graduate college business degree. An MBA is widely regarded as a way to put yourself on a track to be a manager for a company in some capacity. An MBA is punching a ticket to be a future CEO. Why does it seem like the number of MBAs coming out of prestigious business schools don’t have a technical background then?

Where the Action Is

I’m going to quote liberally from a book I’ve been reading called The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman. In it, Kaufman lays out the reasoning behind using his book to study the principles behind the information given in MBA classes instead of spending $200,000 to go to a business school for two years for the same material. The layout of the first few sections gives a great overview of the way that most people think about MBAs as well as how most MBAs view the business world.

The original reason to get an MBA was to apply scientific reasoning to management. The goal was to have managers for factories that looked at the numbers and made sound decisions based on facts and not hunches. In theory that was a great way to get started. However, the numbers started to change in favor of a newer, more exciting way to apply numbers. Instead of crunching them to make people more productive, MBAs started moving toward ways to apply that analysis to make the company rich.

In the past 50 years the number of business school graduates going into finance and consulting has exploded. Per Kaufman, something like 60% of the people getting MBAs have moved toward finance as their preferred area of management. When you think about it that makes all the sense in the world. Finance is where a company can get bigger and more profitable. Value creation can be heavily impacted by workers that are looking to invest profits and reduce costs across the board to increase return to investors. Likewise, investors more heavily reward managers that make them money. This feedback loop means the easiest way to pay off your MBA debt is to go into finance and make the company rich.

On the flip side of the discussion, do you think of value creation when you think of IT? I can remember way back in college when getting my BBA in MIS and being taught that I was going to be spending a lot of my time convincing management that IT departments were not just cost centers. Sales generates revenue. Marketing supports sales. Accounting makes sure we’re actually making money. IT? Well, we ask for stuff and then install it and then fix it when it breaks. We don’t actually do anything to make money.

I know a lot of my readers are probably shouting at their screens right now talking about how IT supports the business and enables the value creation that other parts of the organization do. You’d be absolutely right in your assertion. However, the stigma that IT has is that we take money and don’t give any back to the organization directly. Kind of like how plumbers and electricians are still seen as “dirty” or “low brow” kinds of jobs. Despite evidence the contrary IT is drag on the whole organization. IT doesn’t do the hard work of making money through emails or apps or ensuring databases are up and running to search through for customer leads.

Given that IT is a cost center and the real rock stars all go to finance to keep the shareholders and investors happy is it any wonder that MBAs want to work on spreadsheets instead of Excel? If you had a choice between limiting your career trajectory while also having a lot of business school debt to pay off would you do it knowing tech is a much more exciting role? The question pretty much answers itself.

Promote From Within

Let’s look at the second major reason that MBAs are always technical disciplines. Who is in charge of your IT department now? Is it an MBA? Is it a manager that came from accounting or sales? Or is it someone technical that got promoted a few times and now finds themselves in charge of all the IT teams? Does that manager have a formal background in management or a degree? Or do they learn the ropes as they go and feel a bit rough around the edges?

In many IT organizations that I’ve worked with and worked for the management in those areas tends to be promoted from the bottom up. Instead of a more formalized structure of managers trained to be managers and hired into the organization to manage, IT is more about enabling intelligent and qualified individuals to maintain the department. You see far more people with advanced technical certifications or years and decades of technical experience working to keep the lights on as opposed to the lessons of quantitative analytics from business school being applied to streamline operations.

Admit it. You’d rather work for someone who knew the tech as opposed to someone that had been trained to be a manager right? Is there anything worse than walking into a meeting with the head of the IT department knowing that they won’t understand the challenges of a new hardware installation or implementing a new protocol that could impact operations? The nerve of those people! If they would just get someone technical in that seat that you could talk to things would be different for sure. This place might even run right for once!

The fact is that most technical professionals prefer someone that understands them over someone that is good at managing others. They would rather spend time talking to a promoted tech resource that understands the differences between SSL and TLS instead of someone that was trained in how to go to management and ask for more budget this quarter. We’re more comfortable with people that understand the things we do. It’s the same in accounting and finance and sales. We want to be managed by people that know how to deal with our special areas of expertise.

Extend that to the business school. MBAs go into finance so most finance people are managed by MBAs. IT is managed by people that worked in IT, which is more focused on certification and practical knowledge rather than formal learning in universities. The divide grows each time a new class of business school graduates starts applying for roles in a company. Would you take an interview with a cost center department full of people that automatically don’t like you because they think you don’t know the difference between a switch as an access point? Or would you rather talk to people that “get” you in the finance department?

There have been attempts to bridge this gap. In the above episode AJ Murray mentioned a hybrid degree that offered training in IT and in business. I too looked at the possibility of obtaining an MBA and a MS in MIS from my graduate school. As mentioned by AJ that major was the least popular option at his school and it didn’t last too long at mine either. That’s because the amount of work that you have to do for both degrees is far above what you’d have to do in order to get just the MBA. And there isn’t a lot of crossover either. You could be in a quantitive analysis class for finance on Monday and writing Python code on Tuesday for a program that was due at the end of the semester. It just doesn’t make sense when most of the candidates would prefer one over the other.

Tom’s Take

Russ wondered why there aren’t more people with a technical background getting an MBA. My answer is that the ones with a technical background don’t want it and the ones that want it don’t want to deal with tech. Management doesn’t care if you can manage a team of high-performing nerds to streamline operations for the business. They do care if you can cut costs and use financial wizardry to make the company more profitable. Why do you think so many people who are CEOs are former CFOs and not former CTOs or CIOs? The MBA is a degree to teach people to manage and the roots of it go back much further than enterprise IT as a discipline. As much as we might hate to admit, MBAs are focused on the business, not the departments. And as long as the road to the CEO’s chair involves making money for the shareholders you won’t see many technical people in that chair any time soon.

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.

Knowledge is Powerful and Needs to Be Shared

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A tweet this morning from my friend Stephanie stood out in my timeline because she’s talking about something I’ve seen happen over and over again in my lifetime:

How many times have we seen this in our organizations? People want to hoard knowledge because they feel like it’s power. Maybe they’re worried that if anyone knew what they know it would mean they could get fired. Perhaps they enjoy holding the keys to the kingdom and not allowing anyone else to do something or know something they know. It could even be that they like the idea of mystery in the air and not allowing people to know the whole truth keeps things alive, as the founders of Coca-Cola and Colonel Sanders will happily tell you.

Over the years I’ve figured out that hoarding knowledge leads to ruin. I’ve been involved in so many scenarios were a lack of knowledge sharing ended up causing the kinds of problems that were easily avoidable if someone had just committed what they knew to memory. It wasn’t always malicious either. There is a lot of information that people collect incidentally and just flat out forget to write down until it’s too late.

The first time I truly realized how important good documentation was happened on a sad day in my career. My mentor, Wes Williams, tragically passed away during an otherwise uneventful workday during lunch. I wasn’t there but our office got the news shortly thereafter and we were stunned. No one in the office was even thinking about anything other than how tragic it was and how we were going to miss him. Eventually, one of the other engineers stood up and asked, “Does anyone know the password to Wes’s laptop?” We realized that Wes had a ton of knowledge about his clients and other operational things saved on his laptop, which was sitting unlocked on his desk. We rushed to keep it from going to sleep and to make sure that we changed the password to something we all knew. After that, the tedious process of copying all his data to a shared location began. Wes didn’t think to save it all somewhere else because he didn’t know he would need to until it was too late.

Information Is Currency

Since then I’ve tried very hard to share the knowledge that I have so that everyone benefits. The cynics in the organization may see information as a kind of currency to trade power. If you have to come to them to get the answers then they are important in the grand scheme of things. Kind of like a power broker of sorts.

My outlook is different. Having the knowledge written down somewhere means someone can learn what they need and do the job without needing to get me involved. Maybe they have other questions or need further explanation. That’s a great time to engage me. But I don’t need to be a gatekeeper for the basics or feel like I have to hoard it all to myself.

If you think that hoarding knowledge makes you impervious to firing or reassignment, you need to be careful with your hubris. No one is immune from reductions. External factors can limit your involvement with your career or organization before you know it. We use the idea of the “hit by a bus” test to explain how knowledge needs to be shared in the event of a sudden thing like the issue I mentioned above. But what if the situation develops slowly and you get caught up before realizing it’s too late to share what you know?

Power Corrupts

If you’re the person in the company that always calls the ISP to report outages because you know exactly how to navigate the automated trouble ticket system you have value. However, if you never write that down for your team members you’re going to limit your mobility out of your job. No matter how high you climb it will always be your responsibility. Worse yet, if you find yourself in a place where you can’t communicate what you know and someone else has to figure it out on their own your so-called “power” is useless now.

Information is a strange form of power because it loses all it’s inherent value as soon as it’s shared. If I know who the next supervisor is going to be before anyone else then I only have power as long as no one else knows. As soon as someone finds out I no longer control that information and therefore it’s useless. Instead of hoarding knowledge and information to wield as a cudgel to lord over others you should share it freely to ensure it’s not lost. How many advances in human history have been lost because no one wrote them down?

Knowing how something works isn’t a tool you should use to extract further value at the expense of capability. Even if the knowledge is something that shouldn’t be shared for reasons related to secrecy you still need to let people know there is a purpose and they either don’t need to know right now or it’s something that will be available to others. There are many times when I’ve been told that a decision-making process exists and I don’t need to understand it right now. I’m fine with that just so long as it’s written down somewhere. If it’s not then we may all find ourselves recreating a process that was a solved issue simply because someone took the secrets of how it worked with them when they moved on to a different role or out of the organization entirely.

Tom’s Take

There are times when I have to keep things secret. I know something and it’s not time to reveal it. But processes or knowledge about basic things should never fall into that category. It’s one thing to know that your supervisor is being promoted to section leader next week. It’s entirely different to hoard the knowledge of how the factory wireless network is configured because you are afraid if you don’t you’ll get fired. Commit every piece of knowledge you can to paper, physical or virtual, while you can. You never know when someone will need to know what you know. Knowledge is only valuable as currency when it’s shared. And that’s the kind of power that makes you valuable to us all.

Mythbusting the CCIE Continuing Education Program

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It’s been about a month since the CCIE Continuing Education program was announced ahead of Cisco Live. There was a fair amount of discussion about it both on this blog as well as other places, like Jeff Fry’s post. Overall, the response has been positive. However, there are a few questions and ideas about the program that are simply not true. And no, this is not The Death Of The CCIE Program (just Google it). So, let’s take a look at this edition of Mythbusters for the CCIE CE program.

Myth #1: The CE Program Is Just A Way For Cisco To Sell More Training

This was a good one. The list of CE classes that was release at the beginning of the program included Cisco Live classes as well as Cisco Authorized training classes. Those were the only thing on the list as of right now. When some people saw the list, they jumped to the conclusion that the reason why the CE program exists is because Cisco wants to push their training courses. Let’s look at that.

Let’s say you want to start a global program that requires people to keep track of their training credits to turn them in for some kind of reward, whether it be money or credit for something else. Do you:

  1. Open the program for submissions of any kind and then hire a team to sort through them all to verify that they are legitmate
  2. Use a small list of verified submissions that can be audited at any time internally and are known to be of good quality based on existing metrics

I can only imagine that you would pick #2 every time. Remember that the CCIE CE program is barely a month old. It was announced so people could start taking advantage of it at Cisco Live. The list of classes included on the list was small on purpose. They were Cisco affiliated classes on purpose. The CCIE team can audit these classes easily with internal metrics. They can drop in on them and ensure the content is high quality and appropriate for learners. They can revoke classes deemed too easy or add advanced classes at any time.

The list of training classes looks the way it does because Cisco thinks that these are classes that CCIEs would learn from. They weren’t picked at random to get class sizes higher or to make more profit for Cisco. These classes are something that people would benefit from. And if you’re going to be taking the class anyway or are looking to take a class on a subject, wouldn’t you rather take one that you can get extra credit for?

Myth #2: The CCIE CE Program Was Designed to Sell More Cisco Live Conference Passes

Another chuckle-worthy conclusion about the CCIE CE program. People assumed that because Cisco Live courses were included in the acceptable courses for CE credits, Cisco must obviously be trying to push people to register for more Cisco Live courses, right?

It is true that the CCIE CE program was announced right before Cisco Live 2017. I personally think that was so the CCIEs attending the conference could get credit toward any classes they had booked already. Yes, the courses count. And yes, the longer 4-hour and 8-hour Techtorial classes count for more credits than the 1-hour sessions. But, there is a limit to how many classes count for credit at Cisco Live in total. And there is a cap of 70 credits per cycle on Cisco Live credits in total.

Even if Cisco wanted to use the CCIE CE program to push Cisco Live attendance, this isn’t the best way to do it. The Cisco Live option was to reward those that went anyway for things like advanced training classes and the CCIE NetVet lunch with the CEO. If Cisco wanted to make the CCIE dependent on Cisco Live, they could easily go back to the model of a specific conference just for CCIE recert as they did in the past. They could also just require a specific number of 3000-level classes be taken to recertify, again as in the past, instead of awarding points for other things like Techtorials. Thanks to Terry Slattery for helping me out with these last two points.

Additionally, tying CCIE CE credits to Cisco Live is a horrible way to push conference attendance. Most of the “cool stuff” happening at Cisco Live right now is happening in the DevNet Zone. Many people that I talked to ahead of the conference this year are strongly considering getting Explorer or Social passes next year and spending the whole time in the DevNet Zone instead of the conference proper. If Cisco wanted to push Cisco Live conference pass purchases, they would lock the DevNet Zone behind a more expensive pass.

Myth #3: There Are No Third Party CCIE CE Credits Because Cisco Hates Competition

This myth is currently a half truth. Yes, there are no third party CCIE CE options as of July 2017. Let’s go back to myth #1 and take a look at things. Why would Cisco open the program to the whole world and deal with all the hassle of auditing every potential source of CE credits just after launching the program? Sure, there are a lot of great providers out there. But, for every Narbik bootcamp there’s a bunch of shady stuff going on that isn’t on the up-and-up. But investigating the difference requires time and manpower, which aren’t easy to come by.

Ask yourself a simple question: Do you think Cisco will never have third party options? I can almost guarantee you the answer is no. Based on conversations I had with CCIE program people at Cisco Live this year, I would speculate that the CCIE CE program will expand in the future to encompass more training options, including third parties. I would bet the first inclusions will be certified trainers offering official courses. The next step will be auditing of classes for inclusion, like bootcamps and other semi-official classes. Expansion will be slow, but the classes that make the grade will help enhance the program.

What won’t be included? Youtube videos. Training webinars that are just cleverly disguised promotional pitches. Anything that is given without any way to track down the author and verify their knowledge level. And, as much as it pains me, I can almost guarantee that blog posts won’t count either. Cisco wants to be able to verify that you learned something and that you put in the effort. The only way to do that is through class attendance auditing and verification. Not through Youtube views or blog post counters.

Tom’s Take

For a program that’s less than a month old, there were a lot of people rushing to pass judgement on the hard work put into it. To pronounce the death of something that has endured for more than 20 years is a bit presumptuous. Is the current version of the CCIE CE program perfect? Nope. However, it’s better than the lack of a CE program we had three months ago. It’s also a work-in-progress that will only get better over time. It’s a program that Cisco is going to put significant investment into across the entire certification portfolio.

Rather than tearing down the hard work of so many people for the sake of ego stroking, let’s look at what was delivered and help the CCIE program managers build a bigger, better offering that helps us all in the long run. Cisco wants their CCIEs to succeed and go far in the networking world. And that’s no myth.

How To Make Mistakes

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We all make mistakes. We type the wrong command. We use the wrong verb tense in an article. We leave out a critical step when explaining a process. It’s something that happens all the time. It’s avoidable through careful planning, but how do you handle things when the avoidable becomes unavoidable?

Making Amends, Not Mistakes

Once a mistake is out in the open and noticeable, it’s done. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen or that it’s not affecting things. That’s when you need to own up to what happened and fix it. Sometimes that’s not always easy. Even the best person is reticent to admit to being fallible. So the process for fixing a mistake isn’t always easy. But it is important.

  1. Realize You’ve Made A Mistake – As amazing as it sounds, this is sometimes the hardest part of the deal. It’s easy to see that you’ve typed in the wrong command to a router and that the output isn’t what you were expecting. But what about those errors you don’t immediately catch. How about hearing the incorrect name at a dinner party and calling someone by the wrong name for an entire night? Or incorrectly spelling or pronouncing a word for years because you never knew it was wrong. Often, the hardest part of the mistake is realizing you’ve made it. Hopefully, someone will point it out to you in a way that doesn’t immediately put you on the defensive.
  2. Apologizing Specifically For The Mistake – I’m rather tough on my kids when it comes to apologizing for their mistakes. Instead of a simple, “I’m sorry”, they have to apologize specifically for what they did wrong. For example, “I’m sorry for hitting my sister with the inflatable baseball bat after you told me not to swing it.” Why am I so tough? Because putting the action in the apology helps reinforce what happened and why is was wrong or was a mistake. The next time you make a mistake and have to apologize to a manager or a customer, try wording the apology with inclusion of what happened. “I’m sorry I typed in the wrong OSPF command and cause the routing table to disappear.” You’d be surprised how receptive people are to finding out what the mistake was.
  3. Create A Plan Of Remediation – Okay, you admitted what you did wrong. Now, how are you going to fix it? That’s the last part of realizing your mistake. You did something wrong and you admitted it. It’s time to figure out how to not do it again. In the case of incorrect commands, it’s as simple as typing the right command in this time. But in the case of other things, like systemic behaviors, it’s more important to realize that you may need to do something repeatedly to correct the behavior. If you’re constantly using “on-premise” incorrectly, it may take some practice before you’re using it as intended.

Each of these steps is important. You can’t fix the mistake until you realize you’ve made it, apologized for it, and planned on how to fix it.

Tom’s Take

Mistakes will happen. How you overcome them says a lot about your character. The worst thing in the world is a person that believes they are completely infallible. These kinds of people never think they’ve done anything wrong, so they don’t know that they still have much to learn. Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. And the best source of experience is mistakes. The key to learning from them is simple: recognize, apologize, and prioritize the fix. If you can manage all of those things, you have the chance to grow and learn.

Keystone Keynotes

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My distaste for keynotes is well known. With the possible exception of Justin Warren (@JPWarren) there may not be a person that dislikes them more than I do. I’ve outlined my reasons for it before, so I won’t go into much depth about it here. But I do want to highlight a few recent developments that are doing a great job of helping me find new things to dislike.

Drop The “Interviews”

When you walk into a keynote ballroom or arena and see two comfy chairs on stage, you know what’s coming. As someone told me recently, “This is when I know the next hour is going to suck.” The mock interview style of keynote speech is not good. It’s a thinly-veiled attempt to push an agenda. Perhaps it’s about innovation. Or transformation. Or some theme of the conference. Realistically, it’s mostly a chance for a keynote host (some form of VP) to provide forced banter with a celebrity that’s being paid to be there.

These “interviews” are rarely memorable. They seem self serving and very plastic. The only ones that even stand out to me in recent memory are the ones that went off the rails. The time when Elon Musk was “interviewed” on stage at Dell World and responded with clipped answers and no elaboration. Or the time Richard Branson was hitting on the host at Cisco Live. Or the Cisco Live when William Shatner started taking shots at Cisco on stage!

It’s time to drop the fake interviews. Let the speakers tell their stories. Kevin Spacey at Cisco Live 2016 was a breath of fresh air. He was compelling. Invigorating. Engaging. People around me said it was the best keynote they’d heard in year. It was easily the best one I’d see since John Cleese in Orlando in 2008. Give the people who spend their time telling stories a chance to shine. Don’t inject yourself into the process. Because actors and celebrity storytellers don’t play. They live their stories.

All By My Selfie

If the keynote involves talking about community or the power of the user base or some other contrite platitude, you can almost guarantee that the host VP is going to pause at some point, usually during the big celebrity interview, to take selfie with their guest and the whole audience in the background. It’s a nod to how hooked in and in the know with the community. Think back to Ellen Degeneres and her infamous Oscars selfie:

Except it’s not. It’s a big steaming pile of patronizing behavior. Hey everyone that paid $1,500 to hear our transformation strategy! Let me take a picture of myself on a stage with blurry, badly lit faces in the audience! Let me post it to Facegram and Instabook and Snapfilter Stories! Let me have my social team repost it and heart/like/favorite it as many times as it takes for me to look like I “get” social. And after the conference is over, my InstaFaceSnapgrambookfilter feed will go back to auto posting the content fed to it by a team of people trying to make me seem human but not be controversial or get us sued.

Don’t take a selfie with 4,000 people in a hall. Meet those users. The ones that paid you. The ones that run your hardware even though your competitor is knocking on the door every week trying to get them to dump you. The users and customers that are supporting your efforts to cut your nose off to spite your face as you transform yourself into a software company. Or a cloud provider. Or an app company. Don’t pretend that the little people matter in a selfie that needs Super Troopers-style ENHANCE to find my shining freckles in the dark. Be a human and take a selfie with one user that has stuck by you through thick and thin. Make their day. Don’t make yours.

Distrupting Disruption

“We’re like the Uber of….”

No. You aren’t. If you are a part of the market, you aren’t disrupting it. You may be shifting your ideas or repositioning your strategies, but that’s not disruption. You still support your old equipment and software. You’re not prepared to jettison your existing business models to move somewhere new. A networking company building networking software isn’t disruption. A server company buying a networking startup isn’t disruption. It’s strategy.

Uber is the Business School case study for disruption. Every keynote in the last two years has mentioned them. Expect their disruption of the transportation market is far from total or completely impressive. Sure, they are farming out taxi services. They’re also cutting rates to drive business to increase profits without helping drivers with new lower rates. They are bullying municipalities to get laws passed to protect them. They’re driving other companies out of business to reduce competition. Does that sound like the Disruptors of Taxis? Or does is sound like the very cab companies that are getting run out of business by the very tactics they themselves have used?

Don’t tell me how you’re disrupting digital or accelerating change. Tired cliches are tired. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me how you’re going to head off your competitors. Tell me how you’re addressing a shrinking market for hardware or a growing landscape of people doing it faster, cheaper, and better. This is one of the things that I enjoy about being an analyst. These briefings are generally a little more focused on the concrete and less on the cheerleading, which is a very pleasant surprise to me given my distaste for professional analyst firms.

If you’re tempted to say that you’re the Uber of your industry, do us all a favor and request one to drive you off the stage.

Tom’s Take

Does my dislike of keynotes show yet? Are some you sitting in your chairs cheering? Good. Because it’s all a show for you. It’s a hand-holding, happy hugging reinforcement of how awesome we are. Outside of a few dynamic speakers (who are usually made CTO or VP of Technology), we don’t get the good stuff any more.

If you’re sitting in your chair and getting offended that I’m picking on your event, you should know two things. First, I’m not singling anyone out. EVERY keynote I’ve seen in the last two years is guilty of these things. And if you think yours is, you’re probably right. Fix it. Transform and Disrupt your own keynote. Let story tellers talk. Cut down on the attempts to relate to people. Tell your story. Tell people why they should be excited again. Don’t use cliches. Or funny videos. Or cameraphones. Get back to the business of telling people why you’re in business. Ditch the Keystone Keynotes and I promise you’ll have happier audiences. Including me.

A Stack Full Of It

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During the recent Open Networking User Group (ONUG) Meeting, there was a lot of discussion around the idea of a Full Stack Engineer. The idea of full stack professionals has been around for a few years now. Seeing this label applied to networking and network professionals seems only natural. But it’s a step in the wrong direction.

Short Stack

Full stack means having knowledge of the many different pieces of a given area. Full stack programmers know all about development, project management, databases, and other aspects of their environment. Likewise, full stack engineers are expected to know about the network, the servers attached to it, and the applications running on top of those servers.

Full stack is a great way to illustrate how specialized things are becoming in the industry. For years we’ve talked about how hard networking can be and how we need to make certain aspects of it easier for beginners to understand. QoS, routing protocols, and even configuration management are critical items that need to be decoded for anyone in the networking team to have a chance of success. But networking isn’t the only area where that complexity resides.

Server teams have their own jargon. Their language doesn’t include routing or ASICs. They tend to talk about resource pools and patches and provisioning. They might talk about VLANs or latency, but only insofar as it applies to getting communications going to their servers. Likewise, the applications teams don’t talk about any of the above. They are concerned with databases and application behaviors. The only time the hardware below them becomes a concern is when something isn’t working properly. Then it becomes a race to figure out which team is responsible for the problem.

The concept of being a full stack anything is great in theory. You want someone that can understand how things work together and identify areas that need to be improved. The term “big picture” definitely comes to mind. Think of a general practitioner doctor. This person understands enough about basic medical knowledge to be able to fix a great many issues and help you understand how your body works. There are quiet a few general doctors that do well in the medical field. But we all know that they aren’t the only kinds of doctors around.

Silver Dollar Stacks

Generalists are great people. They’ve spent a great deal of time learning many things to know a little bit about everything. I like to say that these people have mud puddle knowledge about a topic. It covers are broad area, but only a few inches deep. It can form quickly and evaporates in the same amount of time. Contrast this with a lake or an ocean, which covers a much deeper area but takes years or decades to create.

Let’s go back to our doctor example. General practitioners are great for a large percentage of simple problems. But when they are faced with a very specific issue they often call out to a specialist doctor. Specialists have made their career out of learning all about a particular part of the body. Podiatrists, cardiologists, and brain surgeons are all specialists. They are the kinds of doctors you want to talk to when you have a problem with that part of your body. They will never see the high traffic of a general doctor, but they more than make up for it in their own area of expertise.

Networking has a lot of people that cover the basics. There are also a lot of people that cover the more specific things, like MPLS or routing. Those specialists are very good a what they do because they have spent the time to hone those skills. They may not be able to create VLANs or provision ports as fast as a generalist, but imagine the amount of time saved when turning up a new MPLS VPN or troubleshooting a routing loop? That money translates into real savings or reduced downtime.

Tom’s Take

The people that claim that networking needs to have full stack knowledge are the kinds of folks further up the stack that get irritated when they have to explain what they want. Server admins don’t like knowing the networking jargon to ask for VLANs. Application developers want you to know what they mean when they say everything is slow. Full stack is just code for “learn about my job so I don’t have to learn about yours”.

It’s important to know about how other roles in the stack work in order to understand how changes can impact the entire organization. But that knowledge needs to be shared across everyone up and down the stack. People need to have basic knowledge to understand what they are asking and how you can help.

The next time someone tells you that you need to be a full stack person, ask them to come do your job for a day while you learn about theirs. Or offer to do their job for one week to learn about their part of the stack. If they don’t recoil in horror at the thought of you doing it, chance are they really want you to have a greater understanding of things. More likely they just want you to know how hard they work and why you’re so difficult to understand. Stop telling us that we need full stack knowledge and start making the stacks easier to understand.

 

CCIE at 50k: Software Defined? Or Hardware Driven?

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50kSticker

Congratulations to Ryan Booth (@That1Guy_15) on becoming CCIE #50117. It’s a huge accomplishment for him and the networking community. Ryan has put in a lot of study time so this is just the payoff for hard work and a job well done. Ryan has done something many dream of and few can achieve. But where is the CCIE program today? And where will it be in the future?

Who Wants To Be A CCIE?

A lot of virtual ink has been committed to opinions in the past couple of years about how the CCIE is become increasingly irrelevant in a world of software defined DevOps focused non-traditional networking teams. It has been said that the CCIE doesn’t teach modern networking concepts like programming or building networks in a world with no CLI access. While this is all true, I don’t think it diminishes the value of getting a CCIE.

The CCIE has never been about building a modern network. It has never been focused on creating anything other than a medium-sized enterprise network in the case of the routing and switching exam. It is not a test of best practices or of greenfield deployment scenarios. Instead, it has been a test of interoperability with an exisiting architecture. It tests the ability of the candidate to add devices and protocols to a stable existing network.

Other flavors of the CCIE test over different protocols or technologies, but the idea is still the same. The only one that even comes close to requiring programming is the CCIE Collaboration, which tests over the ability to customize Cisco Contact Center scripts. Otherwise, each test focuses on technology implementation and not architecture or operation.

Current logic dictates that people don’t want to take the CCIE because it doesn’t teach programming or API interaction. Yet candidates are showing up in droves. It’s almost as if the networks we have today are going to need to be maintained and built out over the coming years. These are the kinds of tasks that are well suited to a support-focused certification like the CCIE. The ideal CCIE candidate isn’t using Vagrant and Chef in a lab somewhere. They’re muddling through OSPF to RIP distribution somewhere in the dark corners of a network that got welded on after an acquisition.

Is Everyone A CCIE?

One thing I have noticed about the CCIE is the fact the number climb seems to have leveled off. It’s not the rapid explosion of certifications that it has been in the past, nor is it the eventual cliff of increased difficulty. Things seem to be marching more toward steady growth. I don’t know how much of that can be attributed to factors like the Cisco official CCIE training program or the upgrade to version 5 almost two years ago.

Lots of CCIEs doesn’t necessarily mean that the test has lost meaning. Microsoft had several thousand MCSEs by the time the certification became a punchline to countless call center jokes. Novell had a virtual army of Certified NetWare Engineers (CNEs) before software changes locked many of them into CNE 5 or CNE 6. Having a lot of certified individuals doesn’t devalue the certificaiton. It’s what people do with it that creates the reputation. Ask and Novell Certififed Directory Engineer (CDE) about the reputation garnered by a test and they can give you a lesson in hard exams that breed bright engineers.

Does that mean that we should brace ourselves for even more CCIEs in the future? It likely won’t be as bad as has been imagined. The written exam for version 5 has pointed out to me that Cisco is going to start closing ranks around technologies in the near future. The written exam serves as a testing ground for potential new topics on the exam. MPLS was a written topic long before it became a potential lab exam topic. The current written exam is full of technologies that make me think Cisco is starting to put more emphasis on the Cisco and less on the Internetworking in CCIE.

Cisco wants to have a legion of certified individuals that think about Cisco technology benefits. That’s why we’re starting to see a shift toward things like DMVPN and GETVPN in testing. In place of industry standard protocols, we get the Cisco improved versions. This locks candidates into the Cisco method of thinking and ensures that their go-to solutions will include some form of proprietary technology.

If this shift in thinking is really the start of the new way of certification testing, I worry for the future of the CCIE. Not because there are 50,000 CCIEs, but because the new inductees into the CCIE group will be focused on creating islands of Cisco in the sea of interoperable data center networks. That’s good for Cisco’s bottom line, but bad for the reputation of the CCIE. Could you imagine what would happen if a CCIE walked in and told you they couldn’t fix your MPLS VPN configuration issues because “I only know how to work on DMVPN”?

Tom’s Take

Every time someone I know passes the CCIE it makes me happy that they’ve completed a rigorous exam testing process. It tells me this person knows how to follow the lab instructions to create an interoperable enterprise network based on constraints. It also tells me that this person knows how to study material and doesn’t give up. Those are the kinds of people I would want in my networking group.

CCIEs are the perfect people to learn more modern network techniques like programmability and SDN. Not because they learned how to do it on their test. But because they are the kinds of people that learn well and will apply everything they have to picking up a new concept. But it needs to be pointed out here that Cisco must foster that kind of interoperable learning experience with CCIEs. Focusing too heavily on proprietary solutions to help create an army of unknowing Cisco SEs in the field will only serve to hurt Cisco in the future when that group of certified individuals must learn to work in the world of networking post-SD.

 

Q And A Should Include The E

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The IT world is cyclical for sure. I’ve seen trends and topics repeating themselves over and over again in my relatively short time here. I find it interesting that we keep solving similar problems over and over again. I also find it fascinating that this particular issue leads to the reason why blogs are so important.

Any Questions?

Questions abound in IT. It’s the nature of the industry. However, it’s not just new questions that we create when technology leaps past us. We keep asking the same questions over and over again. This is the field of study that created the FAQ, remember?

In recent memory, I find the same questions being asked over and over again:

  • What is SDN?
  • How can SDN help me?
  • What makes this different from what we’ve done before?

You’ve probably asked those very same questions. Perhaps you found the answers you were looking for. Perhaps you’re still trying to figure it out. The problem is that those questions are still being asked. The industry should have evolved to the point where the simple questions have been answered with simple answers. Complex questions, or those questions that need more in-depth discussion, should be treated as such. Yes, the question of what SDN really is would take more than a cursory paragraph on a blog, but we should be able to at least answer it with enough specificity to make the user not feel like they been slighted.

Questions will never stop coming in IT. But how should we handle them?

Any Answers?

Questions may abound in IT, but the answers drive IT. People make a career out of being the person with the answers. It’s in all the marketing jargon. It’s why we create blogs. Even though most of my writing in the last year has been focused on industry trends or non-technical focused posts, the top three posts on my blog are still answers to simple questions:

  1. When Is A Trunk Not A Trunk?
  2. Switchport Voice VLAN – What Does It Do?
  3. Why Is My SFP Not Working?

These posts are far and away the most popular. I even saw this a few months ago and it made me smile:

This would make it seem like people are in need of answers. Any blogger can look at the incoming search terms for their blog and see all the things that brought readers to them. People want answers and they will keep looking until they find them. But why?

Explain It

I never understood why people kept searching for answers until I thought about satisfaction. I think Randall Munroe summed up the satisfaction (or lack thereof) angle here:

Who are you, DenverCoder9?!? (Thanks XKCD)
Who are you, DenverCoder9?!? (Thanks XKCD)

People can find answers easily. But they won’t stop looking until they are satisfied with the answer. It’s easy to find people saying things like “That’s not supported” or “RTFM” when you’re looking for an answer to a particularly difficult problem. And if you’ve ever called a tech support line, you know how unfulfilling the unsupported answer can feel.

That’s when explanation comes into play for me. First, an admission: I’m a chronic explainer. If you’ve ever met me and had a conversation with me for more than three minutes, you know I explain things. I talk about comic books and movies and technical topics in more depth than I should. That’s because I want things explained to me. Explaining how OSPF area calculations are done is as important as explaining how Captain America ended up wielding Mjolnir.

Think about the following answers:

This is unsupported.

or

This is unsupported on that platform because the CPU doesn’t have enough horsepower to process the packets in real time. We tried cutting down on the processing time but it just overwhelmed the unit no matter how much we tried. So rather than dealing with poor performance, we marked it as unsupported.

Both answers are technically correct. But the second is much more satisfying because the explanation is there instead of just the distilled answer.

The IT world needs more explanation. We need to know why things work the way they do instead of just getting a response of a few words. The explanation has the keys to understanding the answer to the question in its totality. It prevents us from asking the same questions over and over again. It leaves us fulfilled and ready to seek out the next question that needs to be asked.

How Do You Spell That?

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I spent a bit of my career on the phone doing support for a national computer vendor. In addition to the difficulties of walking people through opening the case and diagnosing motherboard issues, I found myself needing to overcome language barriers. While I only have a hint of an accent (or so I’ve been told), spelling out acronyms was a challenge. That’s where the phonetic alphabet comes into play

By now, almost everyone uses the NATO phonetic alphabet. It’s the most recognized in the world. The US joint Army/Navy version varies a bit but does have a lot of similarities. However, when I first started out using the NATO version quite a few callers didn’t know what Lima was or giggled when I said Tango.

I decided that some people have much more familiarity with first names. This was borne out when I kept using Mary for “M” instead of Mike. People immediately knew it. Same for Victor, Peter, and so on. So I cobbled together my own Name Phonetic Alphabet.

A – Adam
B – Barbara
C – Charlie
D – David
E – Edward
F – Frank
G – George
H – Harold
I – Irwin
J – John
K – Kevin
L – Larry
M – Mary
N – Nancy
O – Oliver
P – Peter
Q – Quincy (or queen)
R – Roger
S – Sam
T – Tom (my favorite)
U – Umbrella
V – Victor
W – William
X – X-Ray
Y – Yellow
Z – Zebra

Finding a name for Y and Z was pretty difficult, but everyone knows Yellow and Zebra. I was tempted to use Zander, but the more popular version of that name from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was spelled Xander. No sense confusing folks. As for X, if you don’t know X from the sound we need to have a chat.

Was it a duplication of effort? Certainly. But it works universally with everyone I’ve ever talked to, including children. It makes “Roger Adam Irwin David” easy to get across to people without trying to remember Romeo and India.

The key to communication with others is to find something that works for you.  If you can easily convey your information to someone else, the shortcuts you take don’t matter.  If first names work best, use them.  If drawing pictures works better, use those.  In the end, getting the point across is the goal.