I’m at camp this week helping put on the second weekend of the Last Frontier Council Wood Badge course which is my idea of a vacation. I’m learning a lot, teaching a lot more, and having fun. But that does’t mean I’m not working too. Lots of fun conversations that make me recall the way people consume information, communicate what they know, and all too often overlook the important things they take for granted.
Why is IT one of the few disciplines that expects people to come in fully trained and do the job instead of learning while doing it? Is that because hiring managers don’t want to train people? Or is it because senior people are less likely to impart knowledge to protect their jobs? I don’t have a good answer but I know what the result looks like and it’s not something that’s positive, either for the people doing the job or how it’s perceived outside of IT.
There is a ton of value in doing something for real instead of just planning it and calling it good. DR plans need to be tested. Network changes need to be mocked up. No matter what kind of critical thing you’ll be doing you need to try it for real instead of just putting it on paper and hoping that it works. In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
Don’t forget to commit your knowledge to paper at some point in your career. You may know everything under the sun but when you’re not available you will be missed. You know more than you realize and you need to make sure that others benefit from what you’re capable of helping with. Those that hold the knowledge only have the power when they share it. Keeping it to yourself only hurts those that can benefit. Use your currency effectively.
Tom’s Take
These questions don’t have answers. They are designed to make you think about how you do things and what you can do to leave a legacy for the people that come behind you. Don’t be the story that everyone tells about that guy they hated. Be the inspiration for those that want to be like you in the future.
This week I found my tech life colliding with my normal life in an unintended and somewhat enlightening way. I went to a store to pick up something that was out of stock and while I was there making small talk the person behind the counter asked me what I did for a living. I mentioned technology and he said that he was going to college for a degree in MIS, which just happens to be the thing I have my degree in. We chatted about that for a few more minutes before he asked me something I get asked all the time.
“What is the one thing I need to make sure I pay attention to in my courses?”
It’s simple enough, right? You’ve done this before and you have the benefit of hindsight. What is the one thing that is most important to know and not screw up? The possible answers floating through my head were all about programming or analytical methods or even the dreaded infrastructure class I slept through and then made a career out of. But what I said was the most boring and most critical answer one could give.
“You need to know the basics backwards and forwards.”
Basics Training
Why do we teach the basics? Why do we even call them that? And why are people so keen on skipping over all of them so fast to get to the cool stuff? You have to understand the basics before you even move on and yet so many want to get the “easy” stuff out of the way because memorizing the OSI model or learning how an array works in programming is mind-numbing.
The basics exist because we all need to know how things work at their most atomic level. We memorize the OSI model in networking because it tells us how things should behave. Sure, TCP/IP blows it away. However, if you know how packets are supposed to work with that model it informs you how you need to approach troubleshooting and software design and even data center layouts.
I’ll admit that I really didn’t pay much attention when I took my Infrastructure class twenty years ago. I was hell-bent on being a consultant or a database admin and who needed to know how a CPU register worked? What was this stupid OSI model they wanted me to know? I’ll just memorize it for the test and be done with it. Needless to say that the intervening years have shown me the folly of not paying attention in that class. If I went back today I’d ace that OSI test with my eyes closed.
The basics seem useless because we can’t do much with them right now. They’re just like Lego bricks. We need uniform pieces with predictable characteristics to help us understand how things are supposed to work together. Without that knowledge of how things work you can’t build on it. If you don’t understand the different between RAM and a hard disk you won’t be able to build systems that rely on both. Better yet, when technology changes to incorporate solid state disks and persistent memory storage you need the basics to understand how they are different and where you need to apply that knowledge.
I once picked up a Cisco Press CCIE study guide for the written exam to brush up on my knowledge before retaking the written. The knowledge in the book seemed easy to me. It was all about spanning tree configurations and OSPF area types and what BGP keepalives were. I felt like it was a remedial text that didn’t give me any new knowledge. That’s when I realized that they knowledge in the book wasn’t supposed to be new. It was supposed to be a reminder of what I already learned in my CCNA and CCNP courses. If anything in the text was truly new, was it something I should have already known?
It’s also part of the reason the CCIE is such a fun exam in the lab. You should already know the basics of how things like RIP and OSPF work. So let’s test those basics in new ways. Any of the training lab you can take from companies like INE or Micronics are filled with tricky little scenarios that make you take the basics and apply them outside the box. That’s because the instructors don’t need to spend time teaching you how RIP forms neighbor relationships or adjacencies. They want to see if you remember how that happens so you can apply it to a question designed to stretch your knowledge. You can only do that when you know the basics.
Graduation Day
Basics aren’t just for learning at the beginning. You should also brush up on them when you’re at the top of your game. Why? Because it will answer questions you might not know you had or explain strange things that rely on the architecture we long-ago forgot about because it seemed basic.
A fun example was years ago in the online game City of Heroes. The players can earn in-game currency to buy and sell things. Eventually the game economy got to the point where players were at the maximum amount of currency for a player. What was that number? It was just over two billion. Pretty odd place to stop, right? What made them think that was a good stopping point? Random chance? Desire to keep the amount of currency in circulation low? Or was there a different reason?
That’s when I asked a simple question: How would you store the currency value in the game’s code? The answer for every programmer out there is an integer. And what’s the maximum value for an integer? For a 32-bit value it’s around four billion. But what if you use a signed integer for some reason? The maximum value is just over two billion in each direction. So the developers used a 32-bit signed integer and that’s why the currency value was capped where it was.
Over and over again in my career I find myself turning back to the basics to answer questions about things I need to understand or solve. We really want the solutions to be complex and hard to understand and solve because that shows our critical thinking skills being applied. However, if you start with the basics approach you’ll find that the solutions to problems or the root causes are often defined by something very basic that has far-reaching consequences. And if you forget how those basics work you’re going to spend a lot of time chasing your tail looking for a complex solution to a simple problem.
Tom’s Take
I don’t think my conversation partner was hoping for the answer I gave him. I’m sure he wanted me to say that this high level course was super important because it taught all the secrets you needed to know in order to succeed in life. Everyone wants to hear that the most important things are exciting and advanced. Finding out that the real key to everything is the basics you learn at the beginning of your journey is disappointing. However, for those that master the basics and remember them at every step of their journey, the end of the road is just as advanced and exciting as it was when you stepped on it in the first place. And you get there with a better understanding of how everything works.
Peyton Maynard-Koran was the keynote speaker at InteropITX this year. If you want to catch the video, check this out:
Readers of my blog my remember that Peyton and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a few things. Last year I even wrote up some thoughts about vendors and VARs that were a direct counterpoint to many of the things that have been said. It has even gone further with a post from Greg Ferro (@EtherealMind) about the intelligence level of the average enterprise IT customer. I want to take a few moments and explore one piece of this puzzle that keeps being brought up: You.
Protein Robots
You are a critical piece of the IT puzzle. Why? You’re a thinking person. You can intuit facts and extrapolate cause from nothing. You are NI – natural intelligence. There’s an entire industry of programmers chasing what you have. They are trying to build it into everything that blinks or runs code. The first time that any company has a real breakthrough in true artificial intelligence (AI) beyond complicated regression models will be a watershed day for us all.
However, you are also the problem. You have requirements. You need a salary. You need vacation time. You need benefits and work/life balance to keep your loved ones happy. You sometimes don’t pick up the phone at 3am when the data center blinks out of existence. It’s a challenge to get you what you need while still extracting the value that is needed from you.
Another awesome friend Andrew von Nagy (@RevolutionWiFi) coined the term “protein robots”. That’s basically what we are. Meatbags. Walking brains that solve problems that cause BGP to fall over when presented with the wrong routing info or cause wireless signals to dissipate into thing air. We’re a necessary part of the IT equation.
Sure, people are trying to replace us with automation and orchestration. It’s the most common complaint about SDN that I’ve heard to date: automation is going to steal my job. I’ve railed against that for years in my talks. Automation isn’t going to steal your job, but it will get you a better one. It will get you a place in the organization to direct and delegate and not debug and destroy. In the end, automation isn’t coming for your job as long as you’re trying to get a better one.
All Aboard The Train!
The unseen force that’s opposing upward mobility is training. In order to get a better job, you need to be properly trained to do it. Maybe it’s a lot of experience from running a network for years. Perhaps it’s a training class you get to go to or a presentation online you can watch. No matter what you need to have new skills to handle new job responsibilities. Even if you’re breaking new ground in something like AI development you’re still acquiring new skills along the way. Hopefully, if you’re in a new field, you’re writing them all down for people to follow in your footsteps one day.
However, training is in opposition to what your employer wants for you. It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Yet, we still hear the quote attributed to W. Edwards Deming – “What happens if we train our people and they leave? What happens if we don’t and they stay?” Remember, as we said above you are a protein robot that needs things like time off and benefits. All of those things are seen as an investment in you.
Training is another investment that companies like to tout. When I worked at a VAR, we considered ourselves some of the most highly trained people around. The owner told me when I started that he was “going to put half a million dollars into training me.” When I asked him about that number after five years he told me it felt like he put a kid through college. And that was before my CCIE. The more trained people you have, the easier your job becomes.
But an investment in training can also backfire. Professionals can take that training and put it to use elsewhere. They can go to a different job and take more money. They can refuse to do a job until they are properly trained. The investments that people make in training are often unrealized relative to the amount of money that it costs to make it happen.
It doesn’t help that training prices have skyrocketed. It used to be that I just needed to go down to the local bookstore and find a copy of a CCNA study guide to get certified. I knew I’d reached a new point in my career when I couldn’t buy my books at the bookstore. Instead, I had to seek out the knowledge that I needed elsewhere. And yes, sometimes that knowledge came in the form of bootcamps that cost thousands of dollars. Lucky for me that my employer at the time looked at that investment and said that it was something they would pick up. But I know plenty of folks that can’t get that kind of consideration. Especially when the training budget for the whole department won’t cover one VMware ICM class.
Employers don’t want employees to be too trained. Because you have legs. Because you can get fed up. Because you can leave. The nice thing about making investments in hardware and software is that it’s stuck at a location. A switch is an asset. A license for a feature can’t be transferred. Objects are tied to the company. And their investments can be realized and recovered. Through deprecation or listing as an asset with competitive advantage companies can recover the value they put into a physical thing.
Professionals, on the other hand, aren’t as easy to deal with. Sure, you can list a CCIE as an important part of your business. But what happens if they leave? What happens when they decide they need a raise? Or, worse yet, when they need to spend six months studying for a recertification? The time taken to learn things is often not factored into the equation when we discuss how much training costs. Some of my old coworkers outright refused to get certified if they had to study on their own time. They didn’t want their free non-work time taken up by reading over MCSE books or CCNA guides. Likewise, the company didn’t want to waste billable hours from someone not providing value. It was a huge catch-22.
Running In Place
Your value is in your skillset at the company you work for. They derive that value from you. So, they want you to stay where you are. They want you trained just enough to do your job. They don’t want you to have your own skillset that could be valuable before they get their value from you. And they definitely don’t want you to take your skillset to a competitor. How can you fix that?
Don’t rely on your company to pay for your training. There are a lot of great resources out there that you can use to learn without needed to drop big bucks for a bootcamp. Use bootcamps to solidify your learning after the fact. Honestly, if you’re in a bootcamp to learn something you’re in the wrong class. Read blogs. Buy books from Amazon. Get your skills the old fashioned way.
Be ready to invest time. Your company doesn’t want you using their billable time for learning. So that means you are going to make an investment instead. The best part is that even an hour of studying instead of binge watching another episode of House is time well-spent on getting another important skill. And if it happened on your own time, you’re not going to have to pay that back.
Be ready to be uncomfortable. It’s going to happen. You’re going to feel lost when you learn something new. You’re going to make mistakes while you’re practicing it. And, honestly, you’re going to feel uncomfortable going to your boss to ask for more money once you’re really good at what you’re doing. If you’re totally comfortable when learning something new, you’re doing it wrong.
Tom’s Take
Companies want protein robots. They want workers that give 125% at all times and can offer a wide variety of skills. They want compliant workers that never want to go anywhere else. Don’t be that robot. Push back. Learn what you can on your time. Be an asset but not an immobile one. You need to know more to escape the SDN Langoliers that are trying to eat your job. That means you need to be on the move to get where you need to be. And if you sit still you risk becoming a permanent asset. Just like the hardware you work on.
The Networking Nerd 