Category Archives: Musing

Do You Need To Answer That Question?

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Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

We’ve all been in a situation where we’re listening to a presentation or in a class where someone is sharing knowledge. The presenter or expert finishes a point and stops to take a breath or move on to the next point when you hear a voice.

“What they meant to say was…”

You can already picture the person doing it. I don’t need to describe the kind of person that does this. We all know who it is and, if you’re like me, it drives you crazy. I know it because I’ve found myself being that person several times and it’s something I’m working hard to fix.

Info to Share

People that want to chime in feel like they have important things to share. Maybe they know something deeper about the subject. Perhaps they’ve worked on a technology and have additional information to add to the discussion. They mean well. They’re eager to add to the discussion. They mean well. Most of the time.

What about the other times? Maybe it’s someone that thinks they’re smarter than the presenter. I know I’ve had to deal with that plenty of times. It could be an executive that needs to clarify the message or add in the important talking points that marketing has decided on so that everything sounds right.

In the latter cases, the reason why someone needs to jump in and answer the question is less egalitarian. They’re not trying to raise the body of knowledge or educate the people in the room for a noble reason. They’re looking to be the center of attention. They want to take all the agency of the presenter and show how smart they are or make sure everyone knows how important they are.

I’ve been at the point where I’ve almost asked out loud, “If you’re paying this person to talk why do you feel the need to talk over them?” For a CEO of a company that should be the end of the discussion. For the smart person in the audience they’ll probably have a more pointed response. The result is hopefully the same. Why are you the one talking when everyone came to hear the person you interrupted?

Ask Your Own Questions

I’ve struggled with this myself many times. I’ve wanted to add to the conversation. I’ve felt like if I could just clarify this point things would be way more clear. While I may feel like my info is the most important to impart what I’m trading away by doing that is robbing the person presenting of all their agency.

It really hit me last year when I was a Wood Badge course director. I was intimately familiar with the curriculum and knew every lesson we were trying to impart to the participants. We had also chosen our staff members to present on specific lessons. Each of them had time to prep and understand the material and knew what they were supposed to accomplish. Someone without awareness might have thought they knew the material better than anyone.

I found myself wanting to add to the conversation after every presentation but I also knew it was my place to watch and make notes, not jump in. How would it look to the participants if I kept interrupting the presenter to add my points? They would have stopped listening to the real presenter and just waited for me to speak. That’s not the preferred outcome for someone to present material.

The other thing you have to ask yourself in that situation is “what does this do to the presenter”? How would you feel if someone kept interrupting you if you tried to make a point or teach a lesson? I’m all for deferring to people with more knowledge or experience but if someone is constantly interrupting me for pointless reasons or to restate something I’ve said I would be furious. I’d never want that person to be in the same room as me when I’m trying to present. Minimizing your presenters is a great way to ensure they never want to work for you again.

To me, the best way to support your presenter and the lesson they are teaching is to stay quiet. If you feel like you need to add something wait until the very end so they don’t feel like you’re stepping on them. Even if they say something incorrect and you feel the need to call it out, do it quietly with the presenter instead of making a scene. If the presenter corrects themselves it looks way better than having someone else do it. And above all, remember that everyone’s skills and viewpoints are valid and you aren’t an authority. You’re a voice in the conversation.

Tom’s Take

I really love sharing info and answering questions. I like teaching. But I have learned over the years that there is a time and place for things. And if I’m not the one that is designated to be teaching or talking I really need to keep things to myself. Stealing someone’s agency makes me look bad and makes the presenter look weak. I would rather help where I can and build up a future rock star presenter than steal their thunder and make them look silly. I still have moment where I need to work on it but I hope that I’m better than I have been in years past.

A Year of Consistency, Again

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2024 was a year of being busy. You probably noticed as a loyal reader because my output on this blog fell off quite a bit. I wanted to get back on track per my New Year’s Day post. How did I do? Sixteen posts for the whole year. Barely more than one a month.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy. I have been working hard to bring great Tech Field Day events to the community. I’ve become more active on BlueSky as the community shifts there due to the craziness happening on Twitter/X. I have been getting more and more briefings on technology, which I’ve been writing up on LinkedIn. And of course I’ve been active on the Gestalt IT Rundown and the Tech Field Day Podcast

I also ran almost every day in 2024. I mentioned on Facebook that “consistency beats quantity”, which was a phrase that encouraged me to try and run at least one mile a day in 2024. That ended up being 901 miles of running for the year, with November and December having a LOT or running. I plan on keeping that going in 2025, where I’m aiming for 1,000 miles. It will be a challenge but I’ve never been one to shy away from that.

Coming Up

Where does that leave writing here? I still try to get that done when I can. Usually when I have something interesting to say. In years past I’ve tried to post every week or even two weeks. I’ve written about tech and leadership and even writing itself. I’ve tried to cover the gamut of things that are important to me.

2025 is the fifteenth anniversary year of me starting to write. The industry has changed quite a bit. Networking is focused more on moving data to the cloud or getting inputs to AI algorithms. Wi-Fi is getting faster and opening new spectrums. Security is crazy and provides the kinds of headlines that could keep one busy with breach analysis every week for the rest of my career.

However, I don’t want to just hit the highlights. I want to bring you analysis and insightful things to make you wonder about where the tech is going. I want to highlight important things that you need to be aware of. In short, I want to bring thought behind the words. Ironically it has become extremely easy to write in 2025 with the advent of AI text generation. Every writing tool integrates some form of text creation, whether it’s generating paragraphs from prompts or just analyzing your writing to figure out how to better say something. That means that there are more words out there saying a lot less than they ever have before.

I want to make sure I’m bringing you the kind of content that you want to read instead of just posting because I need to create something. That’s how I felt for a very long time. This year caused me to post less but it made me think more about what I wanted to say. I don’t think I’m going to get back to posting weekly but I do promise to get more out there for you as long as you keep reading it.

Cutting to the Quick

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No doubt you’ve seen the news that Intel has parted ways with Pat Gelsinger. There is a lot of info to unpack on that particular story but we did a good job of covering it on the Rundown this week. What I really wanted to talk about was a quote that I brought up in the episode that I heard from my friend Michael Bushong a couple of months ago:

No one cuts their way back into relevance.

It’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I wanted to talk about why he’s absolutely right.

Outcomes Need Incomes

Do you remember the coupon clipping craze of ten years ago? I think it started from some show on TLC about people that were ultra crazy couponers. They would do the math and they could buy like 100 lbs of rice for $2. They would stock up on a year’s worth of toothpaste at a time because you could pay next to nothing for it. However, the trend died out after a year or so. In part, that was because the show wasn’t very exciting after the shock of buying two years of hand soap wore off. The other reason is because people realized that a lot of those deals required you to make some investments first. Sure, you could buy all the dental floss you wanted for $3. But you had to buy it at full price and send away for a rebate. Or you had to hope that someone at the register would triple your coupon first.

I bring this up because it illustrates an issue with company finances too. There are two ways to increase profit. You can sell more things or you can cut costs. Most companies do the former because it’s the fastest way to make money. You sell more goods and you take in more money. Sounds easy, right? Once you make those sales you have to take away your expenses, like labor and overhead before you arrive at net profit. While you do need to keep an eye on those costs some people take it to the extreme, much like the ultra couponers above.

I usually see this expressed when a CEO is let go and their immediate successor is the Chief Financial Officer, or CFO. On the org chart the CFO is almost always considered to be the second in command after the CEO. Why? Because they deal with the money. They figure out how to make the most money and reduce costs as much as possible to make the most net profit possible. On paper that sounds like a wonderful idea. If this person is in charge of the money why not put them in the charge of the business?

My issue comes when the newly-minted CEO is only concerned about costs. You see this with decisions like cutting workers or selling off pieces of the company to reduce overhead. It is often expressed by seeing a company “tightening the belt” so to speak in order to make more money. Again, a great theory on paper. Companies do need to control expenses and it can be a great way to reverse your fortunes if you’re struggling. But what happens when you run out of expenses to cut?

Ninety-Day Executives

The real reason why you can’t cut your way back into relevance is because cost cutting puts your company on the back foot from the start. If you’re only worried about how much something costs you’re not going to want to invest in anything that could bring long term gain. You’re only looking at the immediate horizon. Why spend money to make money?

Of course, we all know the companies must invest if they want long-term success. Intel is a great example. The current plan of investment into chip foundries is going to pay off in the future for sure. But that future is years away. Intel has to forgo immediate profits in favor of future success. That’s literally how investment works. If I want to make money in a savings account I have to put my money in there and not touch it until it makes money. That’s how opportunity costs works and it spares no one.

However, opportunity cost has a darker counterpart, namely the quarterly cycle. See, companies don’t operate on a five-year timeline. Or a fiscal year. They really operate on a three-month rolling timeline. Everything that happens needs to impact the current quarter. Every decision must make money by the end of the quarter. Why? Because every quarter a publicly traded company must release a report to investors detailing how much money they made. If the investors don’t like the report they lose confidence and the value of your company could drop if they choose to sell off stock in your company.

So CEOs, especially the cost-conscious ones, are driven more by the need to succeed and be profitable every quarter rather than run into the issues of not making enough money for the past three months. They would rather recognize immediate gains rather than invest for the future. And how do they accomplish that if there isn’t more profit to gain from selling things? By cutting costs even more. Hence the Bushong quote above. CEOs that have no vision will make things look great for investors for a quarter or maybe two until the easy costs are cut. Then it’s time to produce. However, you’ve stifled your workforce and your research teams because they weren’t making immediate profit. So your company is now in trouble because there isn’t a way to produce more income and costs are at a minimum.

And the investors? They only care about how much money you’re going to make the end of the quarter. They don’t care about last quarter or next quarter. Just now. They want their $2, as in the paperboy from Better Off Dead. Which leads to a feedback loop that can destroy a company. Pat Gelsinger was facing that feedback loop at Intel. Investors wanted their profits at the end of this quarter and Pat and the rest of the industry could see it was going to take longer than that to succeed. Who won? Well, the board didn’t retire.

Tom’s Take

I know it sounds a little harsh, but I’m tired of investors driving companies into untenable positions because they can’t imagine investing for the future of a quarter from now. As much as we make fun of day traders for not having vision some quarterly investors are no better. They just have a little more patience. If we started building companies that are in it for the long haul and make investment decision based on calendar years and not quarterly cycles I think we would have more robust companies overall and less reliance on cost cutting as an emergency profit making button. And we wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not we were cutting our way to a profit or cutting off our nose to spite our faceless investors.

Semper Gumby

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By now I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” If you work in IT or events or even in a trade you’ve seen things go upside down on many occasions. Did you ever ask yourself why this happens? Or even what you can do to fix it? What about avoiding it completely?

I have done a lot in IT over the years. I’ve also been working hard as an event planner and coordinator with Tech Field Day. The best lessons that I’ve learned about anticipating disaster have come from my time in Scouting. I’m often asked by companies “how did you know that would happen?” I almost always answer the same way: “I didn’t know THAT would go wrong, but I knew something would. I just kept my eye out for it.” It almost sounds too simple, right? But if you are familiar with event planning you know it’s almost a law, just like Mr. Murphy’s famous version.

How can you anticipate problems and still manage to make things happen? You can’t always fix everything. However, you can make sure that people don’t notice the issues. You just have to be willing to bend a little with the new situation. Rolling with the punches, as it were. There’s no better mascot than Gumby, the beloved childhood clay toy. Borrowing “semper” to be translated as “always” as in the Marine motto of “Semper Fidelis” (always faithful) and you arrive at the unofficial motto for most scouting events. It’s something we’ve always repeated during our Scouting events as a reminder to stay flexible. I even have a little Gumby with me to serve as a reminder courtesy of my friend Rebecca Koss after a particularly fun bout of necessary flexibility when delivering a course during COVID.

Always Flexible

Things go wrong more than we’d like to admit. We’re late for an appointment. We’re missing a page out of our workbook. A butterfly flapped its wings in the Sahara and now your hard drive is blank. Whatever the reason for the troubles you still have something you need to do. It’s way too easy to just admit defeat and hope that you can make a better attempt the next time. Or, you can bend a little and try to make the most of it.

“Semper Gumby” doesn’t mean you quit. It doesn’t mean you scream and yell and cry because things aren’t fair. It means you assess the situation, apply some flexible thinking, and you make it work. Nothing is perfect, but our response to that can be pretty close. You just have to accept that the more set-in-stone something might be the more likely it is that you can do a reasonable job of it when things go wrong and still do well.

Here’s an example. You’re teaching a day-long seminar course and you’re running behind. Specifically, you’re running behind because a fire alarm went off and you wasted half an hour on something that’s outside your control. Does it suck? Yes. Does it mean that things aren’t going to be perfect? Absolutely. But will it be the end of your class? No. Because you can be flexible and claw back some of that time to make it work.

You’re probably already formulating in your head how you could get that time back. Shortening sections by five minutes is a great way to reclaim time. You can also rearrange the schedule on the fly to focus on the important lessons so people get the critical information. Not everything lends itself well to this kind of remix. If lessons are dependent on other information you can’t rearrange them. But if you can move things or even change their content you can work some magic. Group discussions can become more focused lessons. Ten minutes of note taking can be four minutes of notes being shared on a projector and copied.

Go With The Flow

What if the hassle is because someone is terminally late? If you’ve ever worked with an important vice president in a company you know they’re constantly running behind. Sometimes that’s on them. Their calendars are always super packed and their appointments always run long. It’s because their people book their appointments short to keep them moving. But that extra five minutes they want to take to finish something up makes their last appointment an hour late. Sound like the doctor’s office to you?

How can you anticipate that? Well, honestly, you can’t. If you’re flexible you can make it work. VP running ten minutes behind? Fine. Have someone else start presenting in their place. Move on to the next part. Unless that VP is holding some kind of crucial information you can probably start the meeting without them. Especially if they’re just “framing the discussion” or some other thing that shows what they’re adding is less than necessary. Plus, if you start the meeting without them they’ll mention to their people that they need to get them in early next time to avoid interrupting next time.

Flexibility doesn’t mean you don’t have rock solid deadlines. Some things have to happen at a certain time or in a certain way that can’t easily be moved. The flexibility part comes when you learn how to adjust so that things flow smoothly around them. Imagine a boulder in a river. The river can’t move the boulder. So it flows around. Soon the river either wears away the boulder or accepts that it won’t move and continues on the path. The boulder is none the wiser and the river accomplishes its goals.

Tom’s Take

The next time you find yourself stressed out because something isn’t going to plan, don’t scream at the heavens. Just breathe and think of a little green cartoon character. As it was phrased in the 1984 Dune movie, “bend like a reed in the wind” and find a way to be flexible in your approach. You might not be able to affect the kind of change you want but being open to the idea means you can find a way to make something happen that will keep your meeting or lesson on track. If you do it with enough flourish people might even believe that was the plan all along. Just be flexible.

Experience Expansion

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Recently at Networking Field Day, one of the presenters for cPacket had a wonderful line that stuck with me:

There’s no compression algorithm for experience.

Like, floored. Because it hits at the heart of a couple of different things that are going on in the IT industry right now that showcase why it feels like everything is on the verge of falling apart and what we can do to help that.

Misteaks Hapin

Let’s just get this out of the way: you are going to screw up. Anyone doing any job ever for any amount of time has made a mistake. I know I’ve made my fair share of them over the years. When I finished chastising myself I looked back at what happened, figured out what went wrong, and made sure that it didn’t happen that exact same way again. That’s experience.

Experience is key to understanding why we do things the way we do them or why we don’t do something a certain way. You know how you get experience? By doing it. It’s rare that someone can read a book or a blog post about some topic and instantly know everything there is to know about it. Experience is the process of taking all that knowledge and applying it in a successful way. As the quote above states, you can’t rush that.

Can you accelerate some of the process? You absolutely can. You can tell your coworkers not to use a server or that they need to configure a function call in a certain way. However, a lot of figuring things out is learning what didn’t work and not doing it again. Trying to rush that process either leaves gaps in knowledge or creates situations where people are pushed way above their skillset into roles that demand more applied knowledge.

Fast Track

Here’s where I think the disconnect is coming from. People are trying to get into roles that have experience requirements that are beyond them. That means they’re trying to bluff their way into a place they shouldn’t be. It’s a two-part problem that is going to require some introspection on sides of the discussion.

For the workers: You are going to get experience. You’re going to get it doing the job. There’s no VR training for routing loops or cloud outages. There’s no way to compress the lessons you learn on a conference bridge at 3am trying to figure out why CrowdStrike is acting screwy. No one could have predicted the way that particular bug could have affected so many systems. No amount of reading up on null memory pointers or dirty initial environments is going to show you the results of that. You’re going to have to see it. You need to work on it. Then you need to commit the results to memory.

Yes, that means you’re going to have some long hours in the office or the lab trying to figure out race conditions or learn why a certain setting should never be enabled. The more you try to take shortcuts the more likely it is that you’re going to find those skipped lessons coming back to haunt you.

For the employers: Let’s stop lying to ourselves. You don’t need 10 years of experience in a 4-year old programming language and a masters degree in quantum mechanics to program VLANs. Everyone in the industry is laughing at your attempts to weed out the most unqualified candidates automatically by claiming you have to be a genius to get an entry-level job in today’s environment. It’s also disingenuous because you’re putting these lofty goals as requirements and then offering a laughable salary. What you’re really saying is “we pay poorly for overqualified people because we don’t want to train anyone for fear they’ll leave to get more money.”

If you want to pay for junior-level salaries then put junior-level qualifications on the job. Hire people that need experience and give it to them. They’re more likely to be happy getting to learn in a role and potentially stay to become senior as you reward them for gaining experience. Lastly, if your operation is so critical that it can never go down or be impacted for any reason by people learning a trade then you should be compensating the employees you do have 5x what they’re making for the stress you’re making them endure.

Tom’s Take

Shortcuts miss out on the journey. Maybe you get there faster but then you’re waiting around for the rest of reality to catch up to you. The culture that puts ridiculous requirements on entry-level roles is the one that encourages entry-level people to spend 100% of their time studying and cramming with zero experience in order to get a role that lets them gain it. Years ago I said that apprenticeships are key to filling these gaps and that message resonants more with me every day. If we can’t convince people to take their time and get experience and if we can’t keep companies from requiring so much of people that have so little, maybe it should be time to expand how we teach and train. Because experience is an uncompressable algorithm.

The Keynote Answers You Expect

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Keynote Starfield

Good morning! How are you?

I’d like to talk about keynotes, again. You know, one of my favorite subjects. I’ve been watching them intently for the past few years just hoping that we’re going to see something different. As a technical analyst and practitioner I love to see and hear the details behind the technology that drive the way our IT companies develop. Yet every year I feel more and more disappointed by the way that keynotes take everything and push it into the stratosphere to get an 80,000 foot view of the technology. It’s almost like the keynotes aren’t written for practitioners. Why? The answer lies in the statement at the top of this post.

Perfunctory Performances

When most people ask someone how their day is going they’re not actually looking for a real response. They most certainly aren’t asking for details on how exactly the person’s day is going. They’re usually looking for one of two things:

  1. It’s going great.
  2. It could be better.

Any more than that drags someone down into a conversation that they don’t want to have. Asking someone about their day is a polite way of acknowledging them and making a bit of small talk. The person asking the question almost always doesn’t care. Think back to a time when you asked that question and someone unloaded on you with all their issues like a car acting up or a baby that wouldn’t sleep through the night. Did you actually want to know that? Or were you really trying to avoid awkward silence during a transaction?

That same rule applies to a keynote address. CEOs and leaders have a ton of information they would like to share with the world. They want to talk about their advantages and their investments and how they plan on being the best company in the market next quarter. However, the audience is like the above example. They don’t care about the details in the answer. They really only want to hear two things:

  1. The company is doing great.
  2. We made some stuff that will make us better.

That’s it. That’s the only two things you need to say during a keynote to keep the audience happy. Boil every keynote you’ve ever watched down to the minimum and you’ll see that right there. Even when the company hasn’t been doing so well it’s always framed as a path to getting better. If the company doesn’t have something super exciting to show you they’ll either dress up something they’ve have for a while or talk about new partnerships that will deliver The Thing that everyone wants to hear about.

You may think to yourself that this is silly. You are the one that wants to hear about the technical implementation details and the integrations. You want to understand how this fancy new AI/ML/VR/AR/OMG/WTF implementation works. I’m right there with you, friend. But I have some bad news for you. We aren’t the audience for a keynote.

Audience Participation

Who is the audience for a keynote? It’s an easy question to answer for any company anywhere. Just look at who i sitting in the front section in the middle of the room. Keynotes are designed to appeal to exactly two groups of people, not counting company employees:

  1. Investors
  2. Analysts

That’s it. The peanut gallery behind that section couldn’t matter any less. Sure, they’ll clap when some new announcement gets made. Or they’ll enjoy the slick video that has been put together by the marketing team. Unless the company is trying to set some kind of tone with a huge audience those people behind the investors and analysts might as well not even exist. You want proof? Why is the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple’s HQ only a 1,000 seat room? Even with millions of Apple fans out there? Because they only care about analysts and investors. Just like every other company.

When you realize this fact you note why keynotes are structured the way they are. Investors only want to hear the company is doing well. Their investment is protected and they will make money. How? With these new things we’re going to show you. Likewise, analysts like hearing the company isn’t going to go out of business next quarter but it’s the tech that gets them excited. But analysts are usually specialized enough that they only care about two or three things in a big keynote. They’re more likely to want to pull someone aside and ask them more in-depth stuff after the big show as opposed to getting all the big details on stage when they’re having a hard time keeping up with the announcements anyway.

Tom’s Take

Because these two groups only want to hear those two specific kinds of answers that’s all the keynote is going to provide. It’s just like someone asking how your day is going. Once you know they don’t really care to hear any of the details you start answering with simple statements designed to mollify them and no more. Why bother making someone uncomfortable with the details when they don’t really want to know them anyway? Better to just stick to the script and keep them happy. Honestly, I’m at the point where I realize that keynotes aren’t made for me. I’d rather find the time to talk to someone in the hallway later to learn the real details as opposed to the choreographed performance for the audience in the front row. Maybe then they’ll tell me how their day is actually going.

On Open Source and Volunteering

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I saw a recent post on LinkedIn from Alex Henthorn-Iwane that gave me pause. He was talking about how nearly 2/3rds of Github projects are maintained by one or two people. He also quoted some statistics around how projects are maintained by volunteers and unpaid members as opposed to more institutional support from people getting paid to do the work. It made me reflect on my own volunteering journey and how the parallels between open source and other organizations aren’t so different after all.

A Hour A Week

Most of my readers know that one of my passion projects outside of Tech Field Day and this humble blog is the involvement of my children in Scouting. I spend a lot of my free time volunteering as a leader and organizer for various groups. I get to touch grass quite often. At least I do when I’m not stuck in meetings or approving paperwork.

One of the things that struck me in Alex’s post was how he talked about the lack of incoming talent to help with projects as older maintainers are aging out. We face a similar problem in scouting. Rather than our volunteers getting too old to do the work we face the issue of the kids aging out. When the kids leave the program through hitting age limits or through growing bored with the program their parents usually go with them. Since those parents are the source of our volunteers we quickly have gaps where our most promising leaders are gone after only a couple of years. Only the most dedicated volunteers stick around after their kids have moved on.

Recruiting people to be a part of the fun, whether a project or an organization, is hard. People have even less time now than they did a few years ago. It could be social media or binge watching TV or doing the work of an extra person or two but finding help is almost impossible. One of the ways that we’ve tried to bridge that gap is to make sure that people that want to help aren’t overwhelmed. We give them little jobs to do to help get them into the flow of things before asking them to do more. That would translate well to open source projects. Give people small tasks or little modules to work on instead of throwing them in other the deep end of the pool with no warning. That’s a quick way to alienate your volunteers. It also keeps them from burning themselves out quickly.

We ease them in by saying “it’s only an hour a week”. Realistically it’s more like two or three hours per week to start. However, if you try to burden people with too much all at once they will run away and never look back. Even if the developers are overwhelmed and need the help they need to understand that shifting the load to other volunteers isn’t a sudden thing. It takes time to slowly move over tasks and evaluate how people are doing before letting them shoulder more of the load.

My Way or the Highway

The other volunteer issue that I run into is the people who are entrenched in what they do. This applies greatly to the people that are the die-hard maintainers of a project. They have their way of doing things and that’s how it’s going to be. Just take a stroll through any Linux kernel mailing list thread and see how those tried-and-true things are encouraged, or in some cases enforced.

I’m all for having structure and a measured approach to how things are done. Where it causes problems for people is when that structure takes precedence over common sense. In my volunteer work I’ve seen a number of old timers who tell me that “this is the way it’s done” or “my way works” when it clearly doesn’t or can lead to other problems. Worse yet, when challenged those people tend to clam up and decide that anyone that disagrees with them should just leave or get with the program. It leads to hard feelings and zero desire to want to help out in the future. The well is poisoned not only for that person but for anyone that knows about the story of how they were rejected or marginalized.

People that are shouldering the load want help. Even if they’re so set in their ways that they can’t conceive of a different way to do it we still need to offer our help. What we need to realize on our side is that their way has worked for them for all this time. We don’t need to come crashing through the front door and trying to upset everything they’ve worked hard to accomplish. Instead, we need to ask questions that help us understand the process and make suggestions where appropriate instead of demands that must be met. My Way or the Highway doesn’t work in either direction. Compromise is the key to accomplishing our mutual goals.

Tom’s Take

Writing an open source library isn’t like taking a group camping in the woods. However, the process isn’t totally foreign. A group of dedicated people are doing something that is thankless but could end up changing lives. We’re always overworked and we want people to help. We just need them to understand why we do things the way we do them. And if that means pushing back it’s up to us to make sure we don’t scare anyone off that is genuinely interested in helping out. All volunteer work lives and dies based on who is helping us accomplish the end goal. Don’t get hung up on the details when evaluating those that choose to give of their time for you.

Human Generated Questions About AI Assistants

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I’ve taken a number of briefings in the last few months that all mention how companies are starting to get into AI by building an AI virtual assistant. In theory this is the easiest entry point into the technology. Your network already has a ton of information about usage patterns and trouble spots. Network operations and engineering teams have learned over the years to read that information and provide analysis and feedback.

If marketing is to be believed, no one in the modern world has time to learn how to read all that data. Instead, AI provides a natural language way to ask simple questions and have the system provide the data back to you with proper context. It will highlight areas of concern and help you grasp what’s going on. Only you don’t need to get a CCNA to get there. Or, more likely, it’s more useful for someone on the executive team to ask questions and get answers without the need to talk to the network team.

I have some questions that I always like to ask when companies start telling me about their new AI assistant that help me understand how it’s being built.

Question 1: Laying Out LLMs

My first question is always:

Which LLM are you using to power your system?

The reason is because there are only two real options. You’re either paying someone else to do it as a service, like OpenAI, or you’re pulling down your own large language model (LLM) and building your own system. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of a service-based offering is that you don’t need to program anything. You just feed the data to the LLM and it takes off. No tuning needed. It’s fast and universally available.

The downside of a service based model is the fact that it costs money. And if you’re using it commercially it’s going to cost more than a simple monthly fee. The more you use it, the more expensive it gets. If your vendor is pulling thousands of daily requests from the LLM is that factored into the fee they’re charging you? What happens when the OpenAI prices go up?

The advantages of building your own system are that you have complete control over the way the data is being processed. You tune the LLM and you own the way it’s being used. No need to pay more to someone else to do all the work for you. You can also decide how and when features are implemented. If you’re updating the LLM on your schedule you can include new features when they’re ready and not when OpenAI pushes them live and makes them available for everyone.

The disadvantages of building your own system involves maintenance. You have to update and patch it. You have to figure out what features to develop. You have to put in the work. And if the model you use goes out of support or is no longer being maintained you have to swap to something new and hope that all your functions are going to work with the new one.

Question 2: Data Sources

My second question:

Where does the LLM data come from?

May seem simple at first, right? You’re training your LLM on your data so it gives you answers based on your environment. You’d want that to be the case so it’s more likely to tell you things about your network. But that insight doesn’t come out of thin air. If you want to feed your data to the LLM to get answers you’re going to have to wait while it studies the network and comes up with conclusions.

I often ask companies if they’re populating the system with anonymized data from other companies to provide baselines. I’ve seen this before from companies like Nyansa, which was bought by VMware, and Raza Networks, while is part of HPE Aruba. Both of those companies, which came out long before the current AI craze, collected data from customers and used it to build baselines for everyone. If you wanted to see how you compared to other high education or medical verticals the system could tell you what those types of environments looked like, with the names obscured of course.

Pre-populating the LLM with information from other companies is great if your stakeholders want to know how they fare against other companies. But it also runs the risk of populating data that shouldn’t be in the system. That could create situations where you’re acting on bad information or chasing phantoms in the organization. Worse yet, your own data could be used in ways you didn’t intend to feed other organizations. Even with the names obscured someone might be able to engineer a way to obtain knowledge about your environment you don’t want everyone to have.

Question 3: Are You Seeing That?

My third question:

How do you handle hallucinations?

Hallucination is the term for when the AI comes up with an answer that is false. That’s right, the super intelligent system just made up an answer instead of saying “I don’t know”. Which is great if you’re trying to convince someone you’re smart or useful. But if the entire reason why I’m using your service is accurate answers about my problems I’d rather have you say you don’t have an answer or you need to do research instead of giving me bad data that I use to make bad decisions.

If a company tells me they don’t really see hallucinations then I immediately get concerned, especially if they’re leveraging OpenAI for their LLM. I’ve talked before about how ChatGPT has a really bad habit of making up answers so it always looks like it knows everything. That’s great if you’re trying to get the system to write a term paper for you. It’s really bad if you try to reroute traffic in your network around a non-existent problem. I know there are many systems out there that can help reduce hallucinations, such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), but I need that to be addressed up front instead of a simple “we don’t see hallucinations” because that makes me feel like something is being hidden or glossed over.

Tom’s Take

These aren’t the only questions you should be asking about AI and LLMs in your network but they’re not a bad start. They encompass the first big issues that people are likely to run into when evaluating an AI system. How do you do your analysis? What is happening with my data? What happens when the system doesn’t know what to do? Sure, there’s always going to be questions about cost and lock-in but I’d rather know the technology is sound before I ever try to deploy the system. You can always negotiate cost. You can’t negotiate with a flaw AI.

Back On Track in 2024

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It’s time to look back at my year that was and figure out where this little train jumped off the rails. I’ll be the first to admit that I ran out of steam chugging along toward the end of the year. My writing output was way down for reasons I still can’t quite figure out. Everything has felt like a much bigger task to accomplish throughout the year. To that end, let’s look at what I wanted to do and how it came out:

  • Keeping Track of Things: I did a little bit better with this one, aside from my post schedule. I tried to track things much more and understand deadlines and such. I didn’t always succeed like I wanted to but at least I made the effort.
  • Creating Evergreen Content: This one was probably a miss. I didn’t create nearly as much content this year as I have in years past. What little I did create sometimes felt unfocused and less impactful. Part of that has to do with the overall move away from written content to something more video and audio focused. However, even my other content like Tomversations was significantly reduced this year. I will say that the one episode that I did record that dealt with InfiniBand was actually really good and I think it’s going to have some life in the future.
  • Insuring Intentionality: I tried to be more intentional with things in 2023 and we see how this turned out. I think I need to make sure to put that more at the front of my mind in 2024 as we look at the way that writing and other content creation is being transformed. In fact, the number of times that I’ve had to fight my AI-based autocomplete to make it stop finishing sentences for me reminds me how intentional I need to be in order to get the right things out there that I want to say. And before you say “just turn it off” I want to see how trainable it is to actually do what I want. So maybe part of the intentionality is making it intentional that I’m going to beat this thing.

Looking back at where I was makes me realize that content creation is always going to be a battle and so it making sure I have time for it. That means prioritizing the schedule for 2024, which isn’t going to be easy. Tech Field Day is now a part of the Futurum Group, which means I’m going to need to figure out how my role is going to be different in the coming months. I’m still going to be a part of Field Day but I also know I’m going to need to figure out how to navigate new coworkers and new goals. I have also been named a course director for my council’s Wood Badge course in the fall. That means doing some of the hardest leadership I’ve ever had to do, which I’m sure I’ll be documenting along the way here. As to what I want to specifically work on in 2024, what needs the most help?

  • Reaching Out For Help: Not surprisingly, this is something I have always needed help with (pun intended). I’ve never been one to ask for help with things until it’s almost to the point of disaster. So I need to be better in 2024 about asking for the help I need or think I’m going to need before it gets to be a huge problem. But that also means asking for assistance with things early on to help me get on the right track. Help isn’t always just doing things. It’s about making sure that you have the right ideas before you start down the track. So I’m going to make sure I’m ready to get the guidance and assistance I need when it’s needed and not when it’s an attempt to save the day.
  • Prioritizing Scheduling Intelligently: Part of the struggle in 2023 was making sure I was prioritizing things appropriately. Yes, work things always take priority as they should. But It’s also about other things that are part of my calendar that I need to get a handle on. I’ve done a good job of letting some of them go over the last year so the next phase is taming the ones that are left. Making sure the important meetings have their place and time but also making sure that those meetings have prep time and other pieces in the calendar so they don’t push anything else out of the way. It’s not enough to just block time and hope for the best. It’s about knowing what needs to be done and making it happen the right way at the right time.
  • Staying Consistent with Content: After the rise of GPT assistants and the flood of video content in 2023 I realize that I like writing more and more. Not having something complete my thoughts for me. Not jumping in front of a video camera to do stuff cold. I like to write. As much as I love the weekly Rundown show that we do I love writing the scripts almost as much. My Zen is in the keyboard, not the camera. I’ll still be creating video content but my focus will be in creating more of the writing that I like so much. I’ve already been experimenting with LinkedIn as a platform and I think I’ll be doing some more there too. Maybe not as much as I hope to do here but we will see how that goes.

Tom’s Take

We all have challenges we have to overcome. That’s the nature of life. As the industry has changed and evolved over time the way we communicate our ideas and perspectives to everyone has had to change as well. If you’d have told me ten years ago that Twitter would be a ghost town and Youtube would be everyone’s preferred learning tool I might have laughed. If you’d have told me five years ago I couldn’t have foreseen how things would turn out. The way we make it work is by staying on track and taking the challenges as they come. Switching social media platforms or embracing new content styles is all part of the game. But working with your strengths and making people smile and helping them to be informed is part of what this whole game is all about. 2024 is going to be another year of challenges and opportunities to shine. I hope the make the most of it and stay on track to success.

Does Automation Require Reengineering?

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During Networking Field Day 33 this week we had a great presentation from Graphiant around their solution. While the presentation was great you should definitely check out the videos linked above, Ali Shaikh said something in one of the sessions that resonated with me quite a bit:

Automation of an existing system doesn’t change the system.

Seems simple, right? It belies a major issue we’re seeing with automation. Making the existing stuff run faster doesn’t actually fix our issues. It just makes them less visible.

Rapid Rattletraps

Most systems don’t work according to plan. They’re an accumulation of years of work that doesn’t always fit well together. For instance, the classic XKCD comic:

When it comes to automation, the idea is that we want to make things run faster and reduce the likelihood of error. What we don’t talk about is how each individual system has its own quirks and may not even be a good candidate for automation at any point. Automation is all about making things work without intervention. It’s also dependent on making sure the process you’re trying to automate is well-documented and repeatable in the first place.

How many times have you seen or heard of someone spending hours trying to script a process that takes about five minutes to do once or even twice a year? The return on time investment in automating something like that doesn’t really make sense, does it? Sure, it’s cool to automate everything but it’s not really useful, especially if the task has changes every time it’s run that requires you to change in the inputs. It’s like building a default query for data that needs to be rewritten every time the query is run.

You’re probably laughing right now but you also have at least one or two things that would fit this bill. Rather than asking if you should be automating this task you should instead be asking why we’re doing it in the first place. Why are we looking to accomplish this goal if it only needs to be done on occasion? Is it something critical like a configuration backup? Or maybe just a sanity check to see that unused switch ports have been disabled or tagged with some kind of security configuration. Are you trying to do the task for safety or security? Or are you doing it for busy work purposes?

Streamlining the System

In all of those cases we have to ask why the existing system exists. That’s because investing time and resources into automating a system can result in a big overrun in budget when you run into unintended side effects or issues that weren’t documented in the first place. Nothing defeats an automation project faster than hitting roadblocks out of nowhere.

If you shouldn’t invest time in automating something that is already there, what should you do instead? How about reengineering the whole process instead? If you occasionally run configuration backups to make sure you have good copies of the devices why not institute change controls or rolling automatic backups? Instead of solving an existing problem with a script why shouldn’t you change the way you do things that might have other hidden benefits? If you’re scripting changes to ports to verify security status why not have a system in place that creates configuration on those ports when they’re configured and require change controls to enable them?

It feels like extra work. It always seems easier to jump in from the bottom up with both feet and work on a problem until you solve it. Top down means you’re changing the way the system does things instead so the problems either disappear or change to something more manageable. The important question to ask is “where are my resources best spent?” If you see your time as a resource to invest in projects are you better served making something existing work slightly faster? Or would it be better for you to take the time to do something in a different, potentially better way?

If you believe your process is optimized as much as possible and just needs to run on its own that makes for an easy conversation. But if you’re thinking you need to change the way you do things this is a great time to make those changes and use your time investment to do things properly this time around. You may have to knock down a few walls to get there but it’s way better than building a house of cards that is just going to collapse faster.

Tom’s Take

I’m a fan of automation. Batch files and scripting and orchestration systems have a big place in the network to reduce error and multiply the capabilities of teams. Automation isn’t a magic solution. It requires investment of time and effort and a return for the stakeholders to see value. That means you may need to approach the problem from a different perspective to understand what really should be done instead of just doing the same old things a little faster. Future you will thank you for reengineering today.