this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering podcast my name is andy laptop you can find me at permitipandyandy.com all my fun stuff and tonight i am joined by lexi rocket girl cooper how you doing lex rocket girl i don't hate that nickname i'm doing well andy how are you doing i'm good i want to point out that i'm i'm wearing a medal i was going to ask you about that my four-year-old daughter gave me a medal this morning and said it's because i'm a great daddy and i haven't taken it off i may never take it off and you know i've reached i've achieved all my goals my daughter likes me so like what else is there right i'm so proud of you andy thank you but i hear it all changes when they're teenagers so we'll we'll see if we'll see how long this metal endures i mean like maybe some teenagers are good so for for our fans for our listeners um what's going on with the rocket ships what can you tell us give us some proprietary secret info every time i talk to you every time what's the network on the rocket somebody asked me straight up on twitter today like hey uh i i know you might not be able to talk about this but like what's the redundancy level on the rocket or something and i was like i can't tell you is there anything new you can tell us are you working on anything so vaguely like safe to tell us i'll tell you this i'll tell you this um i've been work so it's a lot of layer one work for me because you just have to consider layer one a lot when you're building something going up into space um for environmental reasons obviously and so everything has to be kind of like hardened both logically i guess and physically so i'm focusing a lot on layer one because i'm really weak on that and um part of that is i'm learning how to use things like like this week has been me focusing on oscilloscopes because i did not know how to use one just learned it shout out to andrew zonenberg he's a zonenburg on twitter he walked me through an entire like i don't know two hours of working with an oscilloscope i was just probing around trying to figure out like is this guy you know what link pulses am i seeing because i'm really interested in ethernet right now and so i've been going through this whole phase where i'm learning about auto negotiation and i was able this week with andrew's help to hook up the oscilloscope to a device that is using auto negotiation i i saw the fast link pulses on there and it was just um really really really cool because they they you can you can definitely tell it's the specific like they're a certain number of microseconds away from each other and it's like that is the fast link pulses this gigabit auto negotiation is very very cool well i remember for my ccna days somebody's saying anything auto and networking you auto not do it so i don't know if that's stolen yeah that's awesome yeah no bad well i mean it depends on your situation i won't say in every situation you should but these days i think what we most of the time you want to use auto i spent hours trying to turn off auto negoti aldoneg and i found that later you can't on like 100 gig sfp whatever like it's it's not happening not not on consumer devices andy well i haven't worked on a consumer device in a decade but i'm glad that you're focusing on layer one we all should focus on layer one uh what do they say seventy percent of network problems happen at layer one so good stuff i mean it depends on what you're doing not everybody has to deep dive into layer one i'm just doing it because the crappy engineers don't but yes i agree with everything you're saying only because i came from a physical place i could talk to you all night i'm fascinated with you what's going on andy our guest is just staring at us i'm fine i don't want to i don't want to keep this man waiting any longer than he has to i'm not sure is supposed to say anything we've had feedback that like hey you have your guests just staring there while you guys are bantering but then we also have people like we love the banner so you can't keep people happy the voice you just heard from the ether is our guest tonight his name is jeffrey mclachlan how you doing jeffrey i'm doing well you can call me jeff that's fine jeff awesome jeff you can call me andy all right we're on good teams already so uh do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself who you are where do you work what do you do and you know maybe we'll travel back in time and figure out how you got there yeah sure i mean first of all i don't think i've ever used an oscilloscope uh in my entire time as a network engineer so that's pretty cool actually that's so the banter i learned something you know i've never done that i have used an oscilloscope just not on a network or in my capacity as a network engineer what have you used it on i'm curious a little projects at home i'm kind of into retro computing and like getting old apple twos to work again and sometimes you need an oscilloscope for that kind of stuff but um anyways i didn't want to ask lexi jeff because you were just standing there staring at us very patiently what so can you tell me quickly what an oscilloscope does i have no idea i know it's the wavy lines that i used to see in like doctor who episodes but what would you use an oscilloscope for keep in mind i just learned what they are and how to use i'm sorry yeah who are you you know you did and then i made the mistake of bringing up the oscilloscope right in there we can we can pivot away and edit it out basically it's plotting voltage over time and yeah it makes wavy lines so you know you can see uh you know if if you were to hook a microphone up you could see you know the pattern of your voice if you hook it into a digital circuit you'll see pulses so that's it voltage over time okay i mean i used to use a volt ohm meter in the field which is just voltage at that time but it's voltage over time got it cool just a graph yeah so is that where we were who are you man who was this guy well first of all i thank you for having me on you know i think um i love what you guys are doing because you're evangelizing our industry and that's something we need and we could get into more about why i think we need we need that and we need more of it um but i love you know i've been watching your your videos for a while now and so it's it's great to be on here and to be with you and uh like i was saying i sent aj a an email out of the blue and i figured he probably would go yeah who are you but he actually responded and here i am so uh who am i so right now i well my name's jeff as you said jeff mclaughlin i work at cisco i know you work at juniper that's okay we can still get along hello friend we're all in networking it's the art of network engineering right that's what it's about you know network engineering is bigger than any one company um but i work so i'm a senior director of technical marketing at cisco um and that probably requires a certain amount of explanation for a lot of the a lot of the listeners but before i go there i'm a career network engineer so i've worked a number of different places for for a long time now probably longer than i want to think about as far as the current job uh the way i like to think about it is you know and you're familiar with this because you're in product management andy lexi may not be quite as familiar with it if you haven't worked in one of the big tech companies but you think about like how many like cisco we have different business units so we have a business unit that makes cloud stuff like webex you know and where i work is core networking particularly enterprise networking and that's routing switching wireless and the software layers that manage all of that you've got a big team of engineers who build the products and they're hardware engineers and software engineers and they actually build the stuff and then you have attached to that in the business unit a smaller group which is product management and marketing and what they do is they partner with engineering and advise engineering on what what they should build right what products and features they should build that's like the inbound function right inbound of the company and how do we know what to build you know through our expertise through working with customers sales people research using our products in the lab all of that factors into how we advise engineering on what they should be doing and what they should be prioritizing and then there's an outbound function which is once they build stuff actually educating our sales people our technical sales people our customers on how the stuff works how do you deploy it how do you design whatever you know technology whatever kind of network how does all that work so we have an education function as well and and i don't know if this is how it works at juniper i think it is but um within cisco within product management you have product managers who are usually more business focused and i know andy's pretty pretty technical so at cisco at least they're usually fairly focused on the business side of things they're technical but they work on things like pricing and licensing and feature prioritization and then the tmes are the more technical side of um product management for example at cisco we don't product managers don't have labs i know you have a lab andy i remember thank you thank you for saying i'm technical that tickles my that that makes me happy because i struggle a lot of times with my level of technical proficiency when i speak to people like you and others in the industry and it it never feels good enough right i was doing a little bit of research on you and i see double cci and like oh great you know another genius network guy that's gonna make me feel like an imposter but um but yeah i have a lab i haven't been a product management that long but i am learning a ton about the business side which is fascinating but i love the technical you know and and i i don't want to give that up and i noticed just in the few months i was away with my head and the business stuff i went to do something in a lab and forgot everything like it's just funny how fast it you know the muscle memory so but yeah i think it's similar to cisco like you're saying it's the product side's much more business oriented um the tme folks are super technical i thought i wanted to be a tme and that's what i was interviewing for before i found this product job and then i met tmes and i was like oh like these people go deep and they know a lot and like they're super smart yeah yeah that's been my experience right you know i know a couple of things i mean first of all i've been in management for a while so my i do have a lab still but my hands-on technical capabilities you know are diminishing as well uh i try to stay technical but it's hard you know and that's you know i know we have a lot of time that's a good subject for a conversation too but i i think it's really important that we have more people like you and product management who have a technical background because the problem that we have as an industry and again this is a long i'm opening a can of worms here and you may want to go more in my history or whatever but the problem we have plenty of time here we we have all the time in the world you know let's yeah i'll go on my rant then you know the pro the problem we have as an industry is a lot of the people who are in charge um are more business focused than technical right so they they so in other words the business people are usually in charge and it's not just within tech companies i mean if you look at cios for example cios are usually business people more than their technologists and they're in charge and they see the technical people as sort of a service to them whereas i think the opposite is actually how it should work the technical people should be in charge and the business people you need them right you need people who know finance and all that stuff but they are really providing service to the technical people right and i write about this a bit on my blog like there's this problem in the corporate world in general it's not just the tech industry right it's probably in any any segment of the corporate world where you have people who just they know how to manage and they think that's enough and they don't understand the technology you know they're not like like us who have built you know in my case decades of hands-on experience building networks right and they come in and they've got their mba or whatever and they think they can you know decide the direction of the strategy for products or even whole companies whereas i think you know you should you should understand the business right from from a hands-on perspective before you start making those judgments mba is fine great i'm not bashing mbas i'm just saying without context it's worthless and so you know it's great to have technical people like you in product management roles thank you and yeah and i and i have to give credit to the guy who brought me in uh michael bouchong who you know i can't wait to have on here someday because he's just such a neat he does a lot of different podcasts and and stuff and i just love uh he's mirroring what you're saying right like he's been in the industry a long time and what the team that he's built he brings in a mix of your traditional product managers that you know right out of school you know google facebook you know whatever like but it's very business they've never managed to network right yeah but if you're in a company like yours or mine that makes networking products it makes a hell of a lot more sense to your point to bring in people that are technical that have experience hands-on and like bring them into all these discussions and get their feedback like hey you've been in network operations does this make sense to you you know because it's actually that uncommon to not have technical people in these kinds of roles because i was assuming that was the common thing that happened right there's a couple of interesting things that's a good this is a good question so if you look at product management rules you'll often see you'll see a few different kinds of people you will see people who have worked as network engineers and they've done a lot of jobs in the industry and they came in to become product manager you'll see people who got right out of grad school with an mba and got hired in to a tech company they don't have the history or the background and they could be put in charge of a product line in some cases or a part of a product line or a product or whatever you know and suddenly they're prioritizing the features that are getting developed and all that interestingly enough you'll see this i'm sure andy could back me up here some people get these jobs who are technical but they came from engineering so they're really like programmers or asic engineers or something like that so they're technical very technical but they've never actually managed their operated network which is different right from programming why is such a wide swath of different backgrounds well it varies depending on the hiring manager you know the business unit so for if you work in engineering it's very commonly seen as a as a a career path right to advance you want to go to um to the product management side the business side rather than stay in engineering where it was one engineer said to me in engineering i feel like a chicken on a chicken farm it's just like you know you're just another chicken right so you become product manager and you've got business experience and then you can be maybe become a vp or something like that okay so it's a certain stepping stone in a particular ladder exactly career path okay yeah interesting yeah interesting so are these um and we're gonna get back to you in your background jeff i'm sorry but this is so interesting you brought us down here jeff here we are yeah but it's a great conversation that's my fault are our companies hiring like it's just interesting to me that you can have so many um different unique backgrounds it almost sounds like the company or companies hiring for these roles don't really like there's is it like a sort of open-ended like job rack or what does it look like when they're hiring both someone who's extremely technical and someone who just like has an mba for the same role yeah i mean that's a fair question there are a variety of product management roles too i mean you know you'll see that i think the typical candidate probably grew up in the business unit probably came from engineering um and then you know we'll have you know like at cisco we've had a rotation program for new grad hire so like they had a program specifically to hire people who just got their mba and they come in and they rotate through different groups within the company um which which is great you know but i worked with one of those guys and he went out and he got a ccna and he used to work booths with me at cisco live on like netcoff yang program but like he was hardcore you know he had his mba but he got into the technology and that's what we need you know those kind of people that's great some people i'm not passing judgment on anybody i may have worked with or just you'll see some people who um they're just kind of interested in business they don't have a passion for networking you know they just they're just interested in business and so you know this is a good it's a big business it's a good place to cut your teeth and you know get experience and so they end up and companies are in business right like yes you could you could go to business school and get out and work at a vendor and know how to bring products to market with you know networking products without ever having worked on the networks like valid questions lex i've been pretty uh surprised too um you know and it's it's nice to see you i mean i i i hope your experience and mine like is this sure i mean so i i don't know how typical i haven't been where i'm at long i don't want to say anything to get myself in trouble you know um what i've seen it's a very varied skill set there's people with networking so even my team um i have a very bright very experienced systems guy who's like real into like server and linux and programming the other guy on my team is a super cloud guy you know i'm like the netops guy our boss is this ai guy so a lot but if you look at what vendors are doing cisco juniper there is this um kind of coming together of different technologies you're starting to hear about you know ai and predictive stuff and ml and and automation it's all programming so i think we seem to be in a period in this industry where a lot of different technology you know it's not just route switch right i became a dinosaur quickly like what do you mean you don't know programming like you know a couple years ago so it's but yeah it's it's um i i'm i'm fascinated by by all of it and i i really want to get i think i'd like to get back to your background because um you said something that so does the tme educate customers are you in on strategy are you doing presentations in nfd like what what's the if you had you know what's your elevator pitch on tme like what's the job what do i do what does the tme do well like i said it's i mean a combination of of guiding engineering as well as presenting i mean to answer your question officially the field the the sales people are our real consumers right like we need to get the sales people to sell the product that our business unit makes so we need to educate experts right you're the technical experts for the sales team basically right and so it is simplified exactly and think about you know especially if you've come up with a new product or a new feature and field doesn't know it that well they're going to come to us not just to learn it just so they can sell it but they may have to go design a big you know deployment for a customer and you know our you know customer experience people may not be that familiar with it etcetera so tmes get pulled on a lot to get in to customer engagements like whether to help you might get pulled in like perfect concept kind of thing and proof of the concept even into the design even sometimes the deployments which is not really what i want my because i you know i'm senior director i have a team of 40 tmes under me now a little bit more than that i think you know i i i don't necessarily want them to be deployment engineers sometimes you have to because you want to drive the sales of your product and nobody knows how to deploy it because it's new right um but you're the experts it's a blessing and a curse i'm the smartest guy in the room crap i gotta go deploy exactly and we get the stuff in our lab we get the early engineering code i mean we're kicking the tires on these products very early giving feedback to engineering working with the product managers when they say i think we need this feature then we will help them to fill out the technical details for engineering so they know you know what it is that they should be building we work very closely with engineering very closely at sales so you're in the middle of a lot of different um different groups within the company of all the jobs i've done a lot of jobs i can talk about them you know because we have a lot of time but to me the tme job is probably the most it's the the most interesting role that i've done in this industry you know i'm glad you said that maybe so so traditionally and i don't want to say it's almost a tired format by now but for the two years we've been doing this who are you what do you do let's go back in time and tell us every damn job you've ever had and every you know sandwich you ate along the way right but yeah we've never had a tme on i'm happy to go back in your his you know whatever you want to get into in your history you know like rock on like it's it's i think it's nice to have context on sure where you came because for me when i started this i thought you had to be a computer science major and you know you get that job at nit and that wasn't how i got and all you know the hundred however many people we've spoken to there's been so many different paths so that's why i like the whole history thing but you're also the first you're the first tme we've ever had on so if we do go back in time i'll leave it to you what you want to talk about right i know that's a pretty bad host thing to say but what i really want to hear about is the tme role because we've never had one on why do you think it's so interesting and why it's so great because i didn't know what a tme was six months ago and now i'm surrounded by them and i'm really you know fascinated by the job maybe we can do both things and hear how you got how you became a tme and then more about that yeah i can i can go that route yeah i mean i i i can go i mean i can go paleolithic if you want to go how did you get an attack right like i was a cable guy right that was my first job in tech like were you a computer science major did you stumble upon it like that's kind of an interesting thing because my path is actually very different from most tmes and most uh most network engineers i think um so okay the paleolithic part uh yeah so for many people this is shocking but i grew up before the internet and before even you know computers were common in people's houses and you know we got our first one right and it's like an apple ii with 48k i'm sure you've heard this story before um but the thing is interesting there was no internet to speak up back i mean it was there in some rudimentary form but most people didn't have access to it and um and so what we did was we had bbs's bulletin board systems and you got your your computer you got a modem and you plugged in a phone line to that computer and suddenly you could dial these other computers that were sitting out there and connect to them and look at what was on that thing and it was like this whole new world it was like being an explorer like like from your desk you know from your chair right and i was like this is really cool like like it the computer itself back then was a novel enough concept but like getting into other people's systems and these are all text-based really slow loading kind of kind of systems but you could go in there post messages exchange messages download files you could even email people although your email was specific to whatever bulletin board you dialed into because they were all independent and not connected right what was your introduction was it through school was it just a hobbyist at home you were curious like how did you get into i think i read in magazines about modems back then i'm like i really want one i was like begging my dad can we get a modem can we get him and you know finally he relented and then you go to the computer store you buy the modem and they gave they sold us a subscription to compuserve at the time which was like the precursor to the internet right and you get in there it's the same thing message boards emails files and it's it just expands your horizons and then i'm like i want to operate one of these myself so i set one up on my own computer and you know i had about 300 users i've actually done a couple posts on my blog subnet0.info for those who are interested where i actually i recreated it i used an emulator and fired up my old software and rebuilt my bbs so their screenshots and everything so it but it was like it was cool it was such it was so interesting to just like i said to explore and to see all these different and people would customize their their systems and you just see what people are doing and is pbs like a community is that like a bulletin board kind of thing bulletin board yeah that was why they gave it that name i mean originally it's just a way to exchange messages and then they started doing files and like ascii text based games and things like that primitive very primitive but that was groundbreaking right like when you know what what existed before none of it and now all of a sudden there's this whole world out there like whoa i'm talking to other people out somewhere else like what's happening you know yeah it was amazing and um and that was the start i mean that was networking for me back then and um but you know i i went as high school i went away to college and um i i go to college i i went to a liberal arts college it was not a good place to be a computer science major but i'm like for various reasons i i i messed up and applying to school it was a good school but just not for for tech people but i'm like okay i'm going to take one class in computer science because i actually wrote the code for my bulletin board so i programmed it i didn't write all the code i mean it came kind of pre-packaged and i rewrote the whole thing they gave you the source code so i get to college i take my my computer science course uh and we were using pascal back then that was the language that we programmed in it was on data structures and algorithms and stuff i took the class and i hated it you know there's no way i'm i was before that i was like maybe i'll transfer to different school and do computer science i typically i hated it and so i majored in political science which is very unusual when you talk to other people who work at cisco and the business unit most people majored in some computer science type field yeah interesting all right my manager was a poli side major and he's a very interesting cat i think it makes for very interesting conversations he pulls us down on these rabbit holes of crazy like human stuff and i swear it's because of his background and his education well a liberal arts major i think is a good thing because it's not just like we have to communicate we have to in my job especially have to write and speak do public speaking so being able to do those things i mean we'll get people who are great computer people but you know they pretty much belong and want to be in a dark room somewhere and not you know out in front of customers or whatever so i think it's a good background i don't think it should exclude people from our our industry at all right yeah you're saying that as an english major english literature i have not formally studied any technical yeah that's a good thing like don't think of that as a deficit you actually have i i don't but there are a shocking number of people who do yeah i i was i had a bachelor of communications and and i thought it was useless i mean it wasn't a very liberal artsy very now i i've been paid to communicate over the years and i'm told that being technical and able to communicate is a very valuable skill set but at the time going through that school i never thought it was something that was going to be valuable later i thought damn i wish i was smart enough for computer science you know at the time but it makes you very very well-rounded you know which helps when you're talking to people i think i mean just just the critical thinking skills alone at least at least from you know what i studied i think that applies to literally everything and it definitely can apply to technical anything right which majors build networks on rocket chips obviously she's proven it yes exactly she can use an oscilloscope when she's in english it just takes a couple hours and desperation and you can get there just like a little help from your friends right yeah what's interesting is like there's no real major in networking i mean some schools have have had that and there is cisco networking academy but usually you do a computer science degree you're studying programming i do have a master's in telecommunications management which is not quite networking but kind of but that's rare and actually that school doesn't even have that degree anymore um so you know at that point if you major in computer science you're not really studying networking except in rare cases where they may have a specialty in that at a particular school so you might as well major in english and then get certifications which is what really matters and then get experience right you know what frustrates me when i'm speaking to people about networking and yes they're programmers right like they're telling me how the network should be and they've never managed the network and you know but but you know but here we are right now we're automating and it's programmatic and you know devops and all this stuff but i have a really and again this isn't really happening at my job but throughout my career i've just felt you know when somebody's telling me about networking and they've never managed to network i just something happens inside of me where i just want to jump across the table and tell them like you have no context you don't know what you're talking about like go write some code what are you talking about i don't know that's ignorant to say but you know well you know i talk about this i'm doing cisco live next week and i talk about this i do a session called the ccie in an sdn world because you know and i start out by quoting you know all these people saying cci is not relevant you know you need to learn to code you need to learn python and i know you don't like that andy because i've seen the episodes but you know my point is okay learn the code that's fine um you don't need to be but but if you're planning to automate networks you better damn well know how they work because if you just learn python and you try to automate a network you don't you don't know what ospf is you don't know what bgp is how are you going to configure them with a python script so it's just a tool it's just another way it's a tool that you can use as a network engineer so yeah i i i mean is computer science a good background or major to become a network engineer i mean sure it's good it's it's not sufficient it teaches you logic and how computers work and all that which is a good background right but it's not sufficient and it's not necessary either it's okay it's good but you think they should teach more networking in computer science or do you think that it makes sense that computer science is programming i've never i've never passed computer science classes so i don't have the the context to have an opinion that makes any sense i think it's fine now i mean you could i suppose come up with a college program in it but you know you know how we all do it is we we we train ourselves and we train on the job and a lot of people train in certification programs and you know that's how we learn our trade it never ends so you're in a liberal arts college how do you how do you get from uh studying shakespeare to political science networks and i was i was political theory which is like plato and aristotle and all this so i get out and now i've got i i've got my degree in in political philosophy and i'm like okay now what do i do like what they there's i couldn't find jobs for political philosophers to save my life and i didn't want to get a phd and you know back then there was no linkedin there's no there wasn't even dice there was i think monster may have existed in 1995 when i got out but i end up getting a job at a company a small company that designs and builds museum exhibits now that's an unusual path right i've never been anyone else so cool poli sci major you won't meet someone who worked at a company that designs and builds museums so so you think about you go to a museum they have i don't know an exhibit on alligators or something like somebody actually has to design that and they have to figure out you know there's going to be a stuffed alligator here or you know animated out whatever it is you know a mural of their habitat all these different things somebody has to design that and somebody has to build it most companies do one or the other i actually ordered a company that did both so you hire us we've got the designers the architects the researchers they'll design your exhibit and then downstairs are all the people who actually will fabricate it for you now i know you're still thinking like how does that get to network engineering yeah what did you what did you do there what was your role they hired me to do odd jobs so i my first day i showed up i was dressed in nice office clothes and they put me in a paper suit and had me wash paint buckets for the muralists the next day i was in a hot room basically making copies in fact i did that for like a week just make copies um so it was and then eventually i became a gopher i don't know if you know to go for his gopher's gopher stuff so like the the design the the fabricators would need you know some nails or a screw gun or whatever um stuffed alligator i don't know and they would send me out to go pick this thing up in a truck so i drive until you stop wearing your nice clothes pretty quickly good question um but you know the thing was so so the the person it was 30 people actually well 60 people in the company like 35 30 maybe actual computers there because most of them were in the shop they didn't have a computer and the vp of operations she comes to me and says you're good with computers right i'm like yeah i'm pretty good and the problem she had the manager of the design studio was doing all the computer stuff so he was like the sys admin for the company and she wanted him to actually be doing design and she said so can you take over and manage the computers which is basically installing software upgrading them swapping out systems we had a lot of turnover there so there's a lot of backing people stuff up and getting a computer ready for the new person coming in and it was a network of mostly macs this was in the 90s which is like the beige box era of max it was before steve jobs came back and they became cool again um and so i became the cis admin while at the same time having to wash paint buckets make copies and go for things right it was like a mix of the two which was one of the reasons i quit after about a year but i got my hands dirty and that was also the first network i managed because their 35 max were networked do you want to know how yes very much was it coax it was not coax it was my favorite network networking technology of all times which was phone net okay if you worked on macs from that area you would know what phone it is so the mac back then i mean not a lot of computers actually had built-in networking the mac did something they got right it had its own protocol suite apple talk interesting equivalent to tcp but it was apple talk it did all the same things as tcp and in fact it did really good auto configuration i mean you plug in your mac you didn't need a dhcp server it would just broadcast pick a random address and go can i use this and if no other station said i'm using it it would use that address right so it was designed you could just turn it up with very little experience um and phonenet so so they made it there's a serial port on the back of each mac and you could daisy chain them with this thick serial cable and this company called faralon came up with a dongle that plugged in there called a phone net connector and what it did was it created an rj11 phone jack for your network and it used one single twisted pair of wires so what did you have back then you didn't have any wireless so most desks had a phone and it was either one or in case of that company two pairs in a category three cables what we had before cat5 and so you know two pairs are being used for the phone and then the third pair you'd use for your network and the way it tied together you could do different topologies and mix and match them so one the most basic topology is a passive star well actually the most basic topology was just daisy chain you could daisy chain the phonet just run a little phone cord between all the different computers but then passive star you run them all in a star format to a central location and then physically tie the wires together and that was enough to get it to work that's awesome i mean physically tie wires you can either strip the wires and just sit there and but if you had too many of them you know what you'd do is you'd run a jumper on a punch down block just from one to the other to the other which is what we did but the funny thing was there was a limitation of four branches on a passive star and we actually had 30 and things started to fall apart and i'm like why and i looked up the specs and i'm like oh we've got 30 and we're just only a four but they also had a a hub called a star controller that you could put in the middle of this thing and so you can mix them so you could have a star controller and one instead of going straight to a station you could have one wire that went to a passive star with four forks and then off of one of those passive stars you could have a daisy chain so it's really flexible it was amazing very advanced but it was slow that was a problem so how did you learn about all this you were just trying things out and reading specs and just doing what worked at the time pretty much i mean google wasn't around uh i don't even think alta vista was around you know so the information on the internet was limited a lot of it was trial and error you know i just so the funny thing was here's another funny story i i may spend too much time in the 1990s but why not so i was really fascinated by the phone system too and how it all worked and so i started i found the punch down blocks and i'm trying to figure out like there were 66 blocks which have like bare metal right and i'm trying to figure out like how does this work well i couldn't google it because there's no google and so i figured out it seems like the wires kind of slide into the connector and then they're they're cut somehow so i got a couple of pliers and just like started sliding wires in it worked right i moved phones around i'd slide and there'd be all these sparks flying i'm like yeah it seems to work so and one day i did it and all the phones in the building went out this was before cell phones right so business was over and i'm like oh man but you know then i then the phone phone people came out and replaced the um the system we had and she actually showed me what a punch down tool was and i'm like i was gonna say you needed your punch down man i'm gonna go buy one of those for the next time but you know it was trial and error and experimentation like that some of it you could find in you know in magazines and books there are books that i bought you know there were several books on networking even back then um some of it was vendor specs some of it was just yeah trial and error i love learning that way yeah you know you're just you're in there and you're figuring it out and you're breaking stuff and you know i guess this as long as the stakes aren't too high and you're not like you know burning down a data center like in the middle of the day or something i mean i'm sure that people weren't happy when you fried their phone system but i love to learn by doing yeah stories like that make me wish that i were a sentient being back in you know when the internet was so no offense intended i'm sorry i don't know how to say that without sounding kind of like a jerk but like no no i was sentient all the time back then it was the 90s we weren't all that sentient yeah i can't i can't call myself senti in the 90s i wish i was a sentient being in the 90s that's the sweetest way someone's called me old jeff but well but but you know to your point there's a way um even now like tying it back to technical marketing for example i mean we get the latest code from engineering in the lab and we got to figure it out and make it work and it usually doesn't the first time around and yeah we can't google it we can't you know you've got to work with engineering you've got to call the right people you've got to do trial and error um so that's a great thing and one of the things i love about about this year the lab get your hands dirty yeah figure it out so that's a great that's a great first job right i mean you didn't know when you were cleaning out buckets and stuff you'd be running their their computer network someday but that's that's a really cool way to come up i think in the in tech right it was a lot of luck too i mean it just so happened that they had that that vacancy otherwise maybe i'd still be washing buckets i don't know there's there's so much luck i hate to call it luck right yeah you have all those cliches of like what favors they're prepared or whatever but there's there's no way i could have planned out my career as well as it's gone there really seems to be something else going on call it luck or whatever you have to be there right you have to be putting yourself out there but so you stayed there about a year i guess that but that was your first foray you learned some phone systems you learned some networking that was the first foray yeah and then i i actually had a friend who worked at a consulting company i'm from san francisco by the way it was all taking place in the san francisco bay area so i had a friend who worked at a consulting company that mostly dealt with advertising agencies and they were mac shops i was a mac guy at that point and um you know in the 90s that was in the dot-com boom and so the dot-coms basically the vcs were funneling money into dot coms dot coms for funneling money and advertising so the advertising industry in san francisco just went crazy yeah and then they were hiring it guys to help them build out their you know move to new buildings and become you know bigger ad agencies and all that until it all fell over in like 2 000. so you were an employee at an ad agency i worked as a contractor for this consulting company working at multiple ad agencies and doing the same kind of stuff i mean installing software you know doing basic networking back then basic um but doing networking and you know i'd been out at dinner with my my friend and and another guy who worked there and i was still working at the the bucket washing place and then they were talking about isdn and like oh yeah we're getting an isdn line installed here and we're getting a t1 at this point and i'm thinking this is so cool because i didn't even have internet connectivity at that place i worked we didn't have anything actually we put a modem on a computer eventually and that was our internet you know um so i'm listening to these guys i'm like man i want to work there like i want to work on isdn i want to work on t i don't even know what they are but they sound cool like i didn't know the phone company could deliver something other than a phone line and uh and so i went to work there and it was a bit more of the same but i was just working with more companies i wasn't doing the bucket washing thing or answering phones anymore i was doing you know pure i.t guy but i was paid pretty pretty badly i have to say i mean it wasn't worth that much i only had a year of experience so it i wasn't paid unfairly but it was i was paid badly and to live in san francisco even then on that salary i only lasted there for a couple of years so how do you find the money to like it was you know san francisco's not a cheap place to live is it no it's not now for sure i mean it wasn't back then you know i'm sitting there i'm talking to my friend and i really want to be a network guy like that was the thing that i loved you know it fascinated me like installing microsoft word on someone's computer you know fixing their email not so interesting even server admin stuff i liked it better but that wasn't where my passion was but when they gave me the keys to the wiring closet and i'd go in there and it was dark and all the lights are blinking i know aj's not here no blinky blinky but i was like yes blinky blinky i loved it and like this stuff is cool you know all these wires where do they go i want to learn this i want to do this and i was talking to my friend and he said you know most people who do that kind of stuff have some kind of credential i'm thinking okay i need to get a credential what do i do and i didn't know really anything about certifications at the time but i started looking around all the universities in the area and one a local university golden gate university in downtown san francisco had a program like i said on telecommunications management and i'm like that's kind of like networking so i met with the chair of the department and she said re revamping the program is really oriented around phone people so people who worked at pacific bell which was the old phone company in the bay area before it got acquired multiple times but we're reoriented reorienting the programs in 1998 around data networking or at least there'll be a specialty in data networking i'm like cool that's what i want to do so i quit that job i went into this master's program and um i i kept i actually peeled off and stole one of the clients from my my old company just so i had a paycheck and i would work with them part-time and i did my master's in telecom management um and which was okay but to be honest it the professors were were a mix some were just terrible uh we had one guy who taught a class on networking protocols and he'd come in with a for dummies book and he's like okay i just read tcpip for dummies last night and this is what dhcp is and it seems like poor guy we're paying you for this yeah right because of the 90s like late 90s you couldn't hire network people i mean they were having a hard time i think filling their adjunct slots and he had a good resume but then we actually talked to the guys like okay uh i had a few i had one class on networking security that was awesome like life-changingly good um but you know i get out and i've got this masters and i'm like cool i've got a master of science degree i'm going to be such a hot commodity i'm going to get i'm getting hired into the best network job ever and so i go on we had dice.com at that point so i go on dice i update my i post my resume with my masters you know i've done research yes i've done research and nothing like i'm getting nothing nobody's calling me huh and i'm like man what did i do and finally i get a call from this company and i go to an interview and basically it's the same thing i was doing before at the consulting company just installing software fixing people's pcs you know and they offered me double what my salary was at the previous place so i'm sitting there like wow double you know maybe i should take this job you know like double my i mean i've doubled it but it's not what i i don't want to i i did the degree to get away from this right and so i'm sitting there thinking what what can i do and i remembered something someone had told me a while back which was get a cisco certification they're gold they're gold that was those are his words so i pull out a global knowledge catalog that i got in the mail and they had like the next week in san mateo just south of san francisco they had a boot camp for the ccna it was one test back then i i don't know how it is now but uh it used to be i know it was more than one test at one point so i go it's four days of a class and then on the fifth day you go and take the exam there like actually the same place where you took the class which seemed a little weird but anyways sounds intense so i went in and four days i never touched a cisco router you know i'd only done basic networking uh great class the instructor was awesome tony marshall if you're out there tony i never found him again tony you were you were awesome and i devoured the material like i was so into it every night i'd come home and i'd study and i come in early early to lab you know lab it all up because my lab partner was just was not following stuff so he was slowing me down so i'd come in early to set it all up did you say this was netacad what was it netiquette or was this pre-netacad pre-net i don't think they had it then it was not a cat it was a four-day boot camp from global knowledge right gotcha fifth day i took the test passed with it was on a 1000 then and i passed with 9.47 out of thousand oh my god yeah first time first time please tell me the test was easy i spent two years of my life trying to pass that damn exactly wait what year was this what year was this that you took it 2 000. okay it had ips back then it had frame relay i think did you find it to be difficult was it a difficult exam was it multiple choice did they have sims were there scenarios all multiple choice remember multiple choice i thought the class was adequate preparation it was an intense class though i mean i studied very hard in that class not everybody passed it but i i was so into it to me it was like if you have a passion for it and i just like i'm gonna pass this and i did and so i got my ccna i i remember she pulled it out of the printer and like ripped the paper i'm like turn it but i still have it and um so i go i go back on dice and i update my resume and i put cisco certified network associate here my phone starts ringing off the hook my phone's been ringing ever since i got that sir jeff it's still ringing there's still i know i still get get calls even now where the early invites where it's it's like we need you to be like an entry-level you know network and i'm like have you read my the first time in my life people called me for jobs was after i got my ccna and it just hasn't stopped 10 years later it's crazy so wow that's so you where did you land your phone starts blowing up well i have to say i was like first of all like why did i just spend two years in my master's program you know yeah um i didn't know at the time you know recruiters did keyword searches and all i if i probably put the masters and just put cisco anywhere on there i probably would have the same effect but yeah um i got a call from a recruiter for a company called the san francisco newspaper agency a a quick lesson history lesson here so back when people actually read the newspaper before you know the internet was so prominent a lot of a lot of cities had where there were two newspaper towns right there's a morning in the evening newspaper and a lot of those newspapers would go out of business and the judges would say well that's an antitrust violation it's going to be a monopoly so they forced the newspapers the two competing newspapers into a joint operating agreement where they would have separate content but they would share the same printing distribution like the business side of things would be done by a third-party company that they jointly owned so it's kind of like if you had coke and pepsi where they developed their own formulas but you had the same bottling plants the same trucks the same advert all that was handled by the same but you know you just had separate formulas that was it um and so what happened was when i when i was hired by i was hired by that third party company that did the printing and distribution but it was right after the hearst corporation which owned the san francisco examiner had bought the san francisco chronicle and so now they owned all three and they were just folding the whole thing into the chronicle and you know judges by that point had moved beyond the antitrust thing so basically i worked for about five years for the san francisco chronicle the newspaper running their network running the network i was i was a pure network guy i was when i interviewed my boss said our responsibility stops at the jack we are network guys that's it and i'm like that's what i want cool yeah give me a d mark not my problem bro yeah our responsibility ends here above it yeah those are for wireless obviously hey everyone it's lexi aka trackit pacer or as my co-workers now know me that little gremlin that keeps crawling in and out of the server racks i have a question for you have you ever heard of the usnua so let me throw three topics at you number one network engineering number two no annoying sales pitches and number three beer does it get any better have you ever wished you could have someone to chat with in person about network design that isn't trying to sell something to you if your answer is yes then let me tell you you need to check out the usnua the us networking user association is a group of fellow network engineers that like to openly chat about all things networking and the added bonus there's no selling these user group meetings are completely devoid of oem agendas that means no pushy salespeople cornering you after the meeting trying to squeeze you for that next purchase order while you're just there to get mildly buzzed and talk about vxlan or something find out all the goodness of the usnua that's the u.s networking user association by going to usnua.com we hope to see you at the next meetup in your area so that was huge huh you got your ccna that changed everything you got this awesome network job you probably learned a ton you were there about five years you said yeah a little under five years i think yeah it was a great learning experience yeah i feel like that first five years of experience is important i had a guy used to work with joe and he always said you know the reason every job posting out there says like five plus years experience is because there's poor people in the first five years of career you know you're not sure what you're doing you're breaking stuff you're like i think this is it full send and you know companies just don't they they want somebody who's going through all that pain already so like yeah once you're five years in you were probably pretty pretty proficient at that point right yeah i don't know what you're doing it's interesting i was the lead network engineer pretty much right off the bat for a major metropolitan newspaper back when newspapers were widely read like i said and so pretty quickly i had to come up to speed because if i didn't do my job right there was not going to be a newspaper delivered to people's doors the next morning and so it was a high stress environment it wasn't that complex of a network i mean it's complex in that you had ipx and apple talk and you had a mainframe so you had sna so there's some weird things like that but but they're high stakes right that paper doesn't get out if the network goes down that's yeah that's a big deal have you had like uh giving you like outage stories any nightmares of like we were up all night fixing and added so paper could get out my favorite one was the way they sent the pages to the printing plant so we had our downtown san francisco office but we had three printing plants around the bay area we actually had a microwave dish on top of our clock tower on our building and they use microwave to send it to a repeater up in on a mountain and that repeater bounced the signal down to the three different printing plants and that showed up for us network guys as a t1 so the the the it was just handed off to t1 we plugged it looked like a regular t1 to us but one day all the t1s go down and we switched over to the backups obviously we had backups right and we're like what's going on and the guy who ran the microwave was like yo it's not the microwave it's your routers your routers aren't working we're arguing about it finally we all went and climbed to the top of the clock tower and we looked and we saw that the moscone center the san francisco convention center they're building a second an expansion to it basically and they had built the cooling tower right into the path of the microwave line of sight right oh that's funny and it took out the microwave and so you know we were on our backup lines but man you know being on your backups like you need more than one level of backup for for a newspaper right to be sure the pages get to the plants yeah so we ended up uh we ended up doing uh you know running on backup t1s for a while but we had to get welders to come out to cut the the frame of the microwave dish and like lift it up and reorient it and bounce it off another buyer i think it took a couple of years to get all the permits and stuff so my god you're up there standing on the tower holding it above the damn other thing just to get the pages over wow i said if anybody brought a mic brought a popcorn bag into that cooling tower they could have made popcorn probably with our microwave oh my god fun times it was an enjoyable job for sure for sure so i really want to get i really want to get back to tme and and figure out how awesome it is so how do we jump with cisco always on your radar i know that you've been at cisco for a while was that like a dream job for you was that on your you know was that a happy accident or did you get there on purpose i'll make the rest of the journey shorter uh okay because i can diverge into a lot of stories but yeah i mean so i ended up working for cisco after i got my ccie well i worked at the chronicle oh we can't skip the ccie the double ccia show yeah yeah um well you can read my blog i wrote a whole series of articles called 10 years of cci i went through the whole the whole the whole experience but uh what's your fault to get it i wrote that 10 years after i got it yeah give us the blog what is it again oh subnet zero all one word dot info subnet zero dot info all right we'll put that in the notes for sure um yeah i was working at the chronicle and i wanted to get out at a certain point and i knew the cci like i wanted to be a cci all you know i thought they were like geniuses and they were so smart and like that's what i wanted you just want to be the best sometimes and i want to be the best so i went and um bought a bunch of material i built a lab in my apartment because you know i didn't work at cisco i didn't work at a big nice so i i was buying you know router this is before gns3 and that kind of stuff so i was i was buying routers off ebay um 2500 series routers you know taking decommissioned ones from work and i built a lab and um i took the test in 2004 and i passed on my first attempt oh my god i'm so happy for you jeff are you one of those guys who's never failed a cisco exam and he's like i'm so happy and just maybe a little bit jealous you know some of it's luck because there are a couple subjects that i was quite bad at that just didn't show up on that particular exam i saw that day and if i took the other exam that they might have been giving yeah i might have failed was that the two-day exam when you took it i'm a one-day guy it was one day good yeah okay yeah i i i remember hearing before it was like a physical lab you go in and work on and then you'd leave and then they break it on you and then you'd have to go back in and yeah were you under that direction they changed that that was i mean that was what it was known for and when they changed it to a one-day lab a lot of us are like is this even worth doing anymore because everybody when they talked about it they're like it's two days they're gonna break it it's so hard and then you hear oh we're going to one day and we're getting rid of the troubleshooting it was like should i do it and the answer was there was no there's no other game in town so yeah we did it and making it one day made sense because it used to take like six months to schedule your lab so they could schedule them a lot more you know frequently now um yeah makes sense wow so that was your r was that route and switch then route switch yeah okay because i noticed you have another one the security right so i got i got hired by cisco after that basically i was posting there's a mailing list back then that the people who want to study for the ccia subscribe to and i got contacted by a manager at cisco and ended up getting hired in attack high touch technical support which is like cisco's biggest customers and for a couple of years i worked on routing protocols service provider routing protocols in tech and i know you've talked about the tac experience with many people here and i second pretty much everything thank god for attack i've i've worked with the hd folks working at a service provider and oh my god they've saved my bacon so many times i'm amazed at the people in tech i got i i had the pleasure meeting a few of them in a meetup we had recently in asheville and just like wow i i could talk to those people forever i mean just what they know right like what you knew what was in your head all the cases like i the stress of it i'm just amazed at that job there needs to be like a cisco tech podcast like just the stories of tags well i do i do have on my blog plug for my blog again sorry lexi but i do have uh i think 20 tactiles on my blog they're wow they're entertaining wait did you call them tactiles tactiles yeah tactiles there's the podcast right there i should just turn it into a podcast absolutely listen you know every tax person i think we talked to is like i should start a podcast about tech stories someone's got to do it it was it was a really challenging place to work and like i said your previous guests have covered it pretty well even having worked for five years as a network engineer at that point like getting thrown into large-scale service provider outages i mean my my i know you want to get to tme a couple stories quick ones one you know like my they told me it'd be three months before i would take a case um because i needed that much time to ramp up so about a week into my job they're like there's nobody on the queue there's a p1 coming in we need you to take it so i pick up the phone and it was a multicast outage which is like the worst thing right and i'm just freaking out i'm like oh my what am i gonna do and i just okay just talk to them get it done start building a diagram of the network on your piece of paper figure it out multicast too huh yeah and luckily my mentor i i paged him and he came back in like 15 minutes and took over but it it was and then there there was another time similar when i got into service provider i had never heard of a gsr gigabit switch router which was the big service provider platform cisco made at the time and they moved just moving into service writer from enterprise and again a p1 comes in on gsr i didn't even know if it ran ios and it was a major one i put the phone on hold and i start running around the third floor building k going does anyone know gsr does anyone know and my my friend abe who i didn't know at the time was like getting his coffee he's like why yes i was a product manager on gsr once upon a time like help me i took a p1 i took a p1 i don't know what to do and he goes way to grab the bull by the horns and then we like charged it and took the case but yeah that was tag that's awesome crazy place crazy place what a great experience trial by fire and i've heard from every tech person i've spoken to i know the culture might change over the years but everybody there is like super helpful like you just yelling like for help and people come and running i've heard that a lot and that's that's always great to hear you you need that kind of environment you'll drive i don't know how you could function without that right like i've been in places where people run and hide like when i was in a knock and an isp the board lights up 300 things break and people disappear like oh my mom's calling me and like running out of the room you know like yo this is what i need you you know you find out what people are made of when it gets bad right yeah like when when verizon calls you with the bgp case it's probably not that they misconfigured a route map right like it's probably going to be a bug and you haven't you have a lot behind you right you have engineering you know you have this massive you're just the tip of the spear and there's all this all these resources so it's not like you're that you have to be that smart i mean you got to be smart you got to know your stuff but at the end of the day you've got to use the resources and then we'll talk about bugs actually let's not that's a whole separate podcast we're going to do we got to get to tme like i know andy i know that's good uh i did work at a partner for a while after i did two years in tech and i was burned out so i went to work with a partner and that didn't go so well but when i was at that partner i got my cci security three attempts just to make you feel good andy um and that was back in the days of pix and vpn 3000 series concentrators and all that um i don't know there's not much to say about the partner part the partner world can be a great place to work um but not that partner was kind of you say partners like avar like somebody who was reselling so yeah right yeah a gold partner basically cisco gold partner gotcha um but i got my security cci there and so then i was looking for a way out of there and i ended up at juniper networks which you've heard of andy i'm sure you have two lexi some of us yeah a little bit but he really knows juniper and yeah i ended up getting a job as the network architect for corporate i.t at juniper so i was so juniper's you know you think about it juniper has an i.t department just like any company that they have a network that runs their company and i was the network architect for that for about six years so you're running the corporate network huh yeah wow so did you during that time learn a lot from the people around you with products and i don't know i assume corporate i.t there uses their own products right so you would think uh and they do now well back in the in those days there were actually they used for example a lot of hp switches because it was still a new platform they didn't make switches and you know so they bought a bunch of hp and it's not like even when you start making switches you can just all of a sudden you know change out all of your hp so one of the things we did when i was there was to kick off a juniper on juniper project to get us like running our own stuff and by the time i left and i'm sure now you know they use their own stuff which which they should you know even i work at cisco they should use their own stuff yeah i probably don't know the history as well as i should but i think they made their you know they cut their teeth on the service provider right so they probably didn't have you know enterprise class you know corporate switches they were looking to run a service provider network it's it's diversified since then right but yeah back then they might have not had the i guess they didn't have the gear right that's why they're running hb yeah i was 09 i was there 09 to 15 i think and um you know yeah they made the ex for a while they just weren't we weren't deploying internally but um you know it to your question lexi i think you're asking um you know i learned a lot from people there because i was a cisco guy i'd never touched juniper you know and it was a weird right believe me the story was it was a very difficult time because the guy who hired me left before i started and i ended up reporting to an application guy who knew nothing about networking and didn't really like it even though he worked at juniper and i came in i the guy who hired me and was going to mentor me was gone and i didn't know anything about juniper so oh man here i am how am i going to be the authority the network architect telling these guys who've worked there for like 10 years each this is what you're going to do how you're going to build your network so it's a disaster for a couple years in fact i quit at one point and they talked me into staying it's like tack all over again you're writing on a napkin the damn network and you know crawling through the lldp trying to figure out what's connected to what dear god it probably wasn't documented well i'm guessing one of our patreons in the chat asked if people at juniper treated the network team differently than at other you know other places when something wasn't working okay yeah there's nothing worse than being a network guy at a network company where everybody thinks they know better right so it actually when i got there was not well liked and partly i mean they built for example the network was designed with a single point of failure i mean we had one building which was the core of all of juniper's network and it would go down all the time so there's hostility and i think we built credibility back with with the business over the years i was there but it started out kind of bad and yes you have we had some good partnerships with the business units and and there was a marketing aspect by the way there's kind of a tme aspect to being the network architect at a networking company because customers want to talk to you how do you build your network how do you use your own products how should we do it oh that's what got me interested in technical marketing right so even as the corp it guy the corp network guy you were kind of getting exposed to customers doing presentations you know doing abc's executive briefing center where we talk to customers yeah i would have never thought of a good job yeah i would have never thought of um an architect role as just like the enterprise it person is customer facing then but is that what you're saying it turned out to be yeah i mean you know there was a lot of internal facing work but you know again like the the customers we were selling juniper enterprise networks when i was there it was very different because from now because they've acquired missed and they have a very different story than they had back then but um you know we were selling juniper enterprise networks and so our customers say okay let's talk to your it guys we want to know how they do it um how do you design your network so we re-architected for example our wham was all ipsec vpn over the internet back then really slow we put in an mpls our own private mpls network we ran it over vpls which is basically just layer two so the vpls basically was think of it like a big switch and then we just ran our own mpls on top of that um so you know then we'd go tell customers hey this is how we did it you know we use vrfs to segment off different parts of the company and you know we run our own mpls and um yeah so they want to know that stuff so i'm looking at your linkedin this is your pivot to tme it looks like yes you left juniper for a tme spot how i mean i know how i found out about the tmr tme role how did you go from network architect to juniper to tme guy at cisco you know i'd wanted to do it for a while and like i said i was doing some technical marketing kind of work at um at juniper i actually my blog initially now it's a lot more opinion pieces and stories and stuff because i don't do as much hands-on but a couple of the most popular articles on my blog were like explaining juniper's inet.3 routing table and and some you know internal stuff or like how rib groups work in junos and i love doing that stuff i loved writing up technical you know content in a really clear way where people would write me and say i never understood this before until i read your article that bat to me is a thrill and i had seen tina i've been to cisco live in the past when i worked at the gold partner and i'd seen tmes present breakouts and i always wanted to do that i thought that looks like a cool job i was terrified of public speaking but that was another issue i had to get over um but i liked the teaching part of it and so yeah it just happened to be one day on linkedin a recruiter pinged me and said you know i've got this job it's a principal technical marketing engineer at cisco and you know she's like i don't think your experience really aligns but i just thought i'd shot in a dark you know and i'm like no let me tell you how it aligns and you know i interviewed for with my boss who's who carl soldier spiritual leader of technical marketing engineers at cisco he's an awesome guy and we hit it off he had a similar philosophy about explain how to explain things to people and he's one of the most gifted presenters i've ever seen and we just hit it off and and uh you know i got hired in and it was certainly you know there were there were rough times at cisco now because i've been at juniper six years i hadn't touched i was actually first hired not to work on nexus and i had they'd come about after i left the cisco world and went to juniper so now i'm working on nexus which i hadn't even touched and again i'm a principal i've got a big title i'm director level which i was at juniper and i'm expected to be authority on something i know nothing about it's like the story how'd you tackle that one story of my life you know you you've i think i don't know if you have andy alexia i know you've been a tech field day delegate right in fact you heard one of my people krishnan um on tech field yeah uh but you might i was i was i think about three weeks into the job and they said we want you to present a tech field day on puppet all right running puppet containers on nexus switches and i'm like oh my god i didn't know anything about puppet and i didn't know anything about nexus and i've got like a couple weeks to get ready for what tech field day is probably the most stressful presentation that we do i can't imagine yeah and i'm like okay so i had to call engineering like how does this work send me everything you have get it so quick quick pause here so did they know that you didn't know puppet and you didn't know nexus yeah they did but um yeah you know i was a principal and they just kind of expect nobody else kind of nobody else wanted to do that presentation so they're like well put it on the new guy what what i've seen maybe i'm maybe i'm you know what what i'm trying to say is what i've seen is like so a guy like you right like you're smart you've learned a lot of different technology stacks you've got ccies like yeah once you've seen that someone can learn things you know they probably knew like oh well this guy he can learn technical stuff make him go learn puppet and nexus right and and that's that's happened to me a couple times in my career i get thrown into a role i don't really seem qualified on paper to do it but i guess between the like you know the person you are right you're you're likable person you can present you're well spoken you're smart and you can probably learn this other stuff because you learned all this other but man what what a position to be in like nfd coming up and i got to learn two new technologies in three weeks dear god that does not sound fun it actually means you'll see the video and it went pretty well actually yeah all your peers are watching the live stream you know my boss is in the room i'm just sitting there like man i hope i don't break down i hope i don't cry yeah it's it's but you know like same thing attack i mean you just get thrown into stuff in yeah particularly in in the big tech companies like cisco um but even you know every job i've had i mean like you're saying earlier lexi you know you're you're suddenly working with an oscilloscope one day you don't know even how to use one but you know you figure it out and you find the people who know and they help you yep you rope them into it as long as leadership builds right and i think good leadership builds teams right that yeah lex we started right full circle like why would there be all these varied and sundry skill sets in this technical arena but yeah if you have enough of that people will cross pollinate maybe yeah right a healthier kind of smaller yeah healthy knowledge base amongst everybody knowing the same one thing it might not be as uh wow so you you pulled that off you fell in love with the tme role and yeah have you done a bunch of like nfds is that your favorite thing to do like everybody seems to love the nfd experience done it's not my favorite necessarily i've done maybe three of them tomorrow careers earmuffs no no i don't they do a great job of running it it's stressful it's stressful because if you fail on that one you fail big you know yeah like it's going to go on youtube for posterity and you know even cisco live is less stressful to me it's more it's more fun um but but no they don't go sideways right like demos aren't a hundred percent yeah you know i just wanted somebody's demo for both of my tech field days i think i did two and i did live demos um so the great thing now as a leader of a big team is i can just go you're gonna do tech field day christian and you know good luck but you know we all people and when it go it's a great service i think to the to the industry um it's it's it's really a good thing but but it's stressful you know it's stressful so now you are senior director of technical marketing i'm senior you went from tme to senior director yeah of all the tmes is that how it works no no no there are a lot of other directors and people i've got 40. so so my charter is cisco's enterprise software defined product so that's dna center it's identity services engine software defined access our campus fabric um it's all that stuff how do you climb i know we're going long here but how do you climb the corporate ladder like were you a manager before director like is it are you just awesome and people just promote you or is it a is it an intentional thing like you know what i want to be director and these are the 10 things i got to do to get there i came into cisco and i told my wife i have no intention of of ever being a manager of people i don't want to do it i love being a technical person that's what i want and one day my boss came to me and said i want you to manage a team of three people and i'm like okay because at that point i'm being a leader i'm in a principal role but i'm i can't tell anybody what to do and i have ideas so i said okay so a few months later he comes back to me he says i've got your team there's 12 people on it and i took over that team and we did software defined access we did programmability which was what i had made a name and even though i again i knew nothing about programmability before i came to cisco and um and then it just kept growing why did you say okay to a management role you didn't want because your boss asked you to partly but also like i said i mean i was just feeling a juniper and at cisco i was doing these roles where i was a leader an authority but i had no power right like i had i had to influence without authority right and i thought if i have a team i'll have more ability to to mold things the way i want right whereas when you're an individual contributor you don't have that um and you know he told me oh you'll still get to do all the individual contributor stuff like present at cisco live and all that but um it ended up you know the more the more you get into it the more of a manager you become and the less of a technical person but i still try to stay technical you know right so you feel like that authority has helped you kind of has that given you some how do you say this have you been able to achieve things you know with that power that you couldn't have otherwise some things you know you learn it's still hard it's still hard you know i mean i can tell the people who work for me to do something and they'll they'll do it because they report into me ultimately but i can't necessarily make engineering do something i can't make product managers do something so i'm still influencing people without authority and a big company like cisco it's hard it's really hard to get stuff done you have to negotiate with a lot of different parties they have other priorities so you know it's i i don't have no regrets i love you know the reason the other reason i got into it andy too was i loved to mentor people and i loved the job i enjoyed being a tme i like going out and talking to people and presenting and doing all that and i wanted to help people be better tmes you know right and i'm asking for a selfish reason you know i want to rule the world someday but i don't know i i don't know if i have the patience for managing people because people can generally be i mean i guess it depends on the people you're surrounded by but historically i've been surrounded by people that i wouldn't want to be responsible for not so much now where i am but and then you've got the hr aspect of managing which i've i've met a lot of engineers now who love managing people and helping you know mentor in that way but then they get to the hr part of it and they're just like ugh you know they don't want to do it yeah that's a good point i've had to lay people off i've had to fire people i've had to deal with employee relations cases um where people are fighting with each other i mean i don't like any of that i don't i don't like to lay someone off and thankfully we're not doing layoffs at cisco like we used to and hopefully we won't for a long time but for a while they were like pretty regular um and that's not for everybody and you i don't care how technical you think you are you become less and less technical the more you get into people management and if that's your passion being technical you know then maybe it's not the right thing so what are the what are the qualities of a great tme you're you know you have 40 people under you you're you're hiring for a tme when i was looking for something different because i was working all the maintenance windows and all the nights and all the weekends and all the things and i was just burned out um i reached out to a guy in the community wes kennedy and he was a tme and you know he was like everybody in this community like i'm cr i can't believe the network networking community especially on twitter um i reached out to him he got on the phone with me we talked for 45 minutes like just he was so selfless but at the end of the conversation he's like you'd be great you have what you need don't worry about it because previous to talking to him i had like six interviews in a week at this other vendor and they said you know i wasn't technical enough i didn't have enough product knowledge of so i was i was on that that's why i'm asking is a network engineer who maybe likes to present or is good with people or maybe has a passion for teaching is is that the secret sauce maybe or is it something better or different than that no i think that's that is the secret sauce and it's that balance of finding the technical with the ability with the t with the m as we say you know the t the technical and the marketing i mean you need both and if you're not very technical but you're you know good at marketing and talking and you know that's not gonna work if you're if you're very technical but again you're the one who wants to be in a dark room and not in front of people i mean we have to stand up one of my guys at cisco live next week is going to stand up in front of a room of 900 people it's more than i've done 500 i've never done 900 i mean you know you have to be ready not everybody wants to do that right but if you if you have that capability and by the way you know if you're bad at it the people at cisco live will let you know it when you get your scores back so you know you if you're if you don't make an effort to be good at that kind of stuff then the communications part of it then you're going to fail at the job so it's a combination of both it's hard to find it's really hard to find i always tell people focus on the technical get your search you know get experience but but work on making sure you can communicate well you know start a blog do something that that helps get you writing speaking whatever you can do to um to develop that side of things and you'll be a good tme how do you know if you're technical enough like are you looking at certs are you i mean you're obviously doing technical interviews i guess and peppering them with you know i mean i've done enough technical interviews to know they're awful um and you never know what they're gonna ask you well if we if we had another show i could go on about my thoughts on technical interviewing because i don't think we do it well and i used to do the thing where we grilled people and when i was in tech and and i think there are better ways to do it than making people we should have an episode on that technical interviews oh that would be a really fascinating one absolutely i i fell on my face on both of my technical interviews on my two big networking jobs but in hindsight and from the feedback i got from them they wanted to see a couple of different things like how i could if can i work a problem what's my thought process of going through a problem and how i was under pressure this one place put me in a thing i could have never done but i didn't run out of the room i kept asking questions and you know and i wasn't an a-hole as they put it we want a guy who was you know we want a guy who's going to fit into the culture who isn't a jerk and somebody we can yeah and then somebody like we can teach you the rest you know you have a couple certs you have a little bit of experience we can teach you the rest but there's tech it's it's always been challenging for me i know this isn't about me but like tme sounds really cool i just don't know if i'm technical enough i love labbing i love the tech but there's so much i don't know and when i talk to tmes i'm like wow that the depth of their knowledge i've never had i can make a network work but i'm not talking about asics and tk you know whatever crazy minutia they get into for them usually focused too on one technology you know and that's the thing that do they often have depth but not not as much breadth um you know i mean the really good ones have a lot of breadth and they've done multiple things in their careers but you know if i put you on sd-wan you know then you're gonna know a lot about sd-wan you may not know a thing about data center um and that's typical of anyone you know you talk to tac people who are who are often really deep you know but but i think one of your guests talked about that like she was working on ucs and she knew ucs but not much about other technologies so i mean the the hiring it depends you know like we hired a guy to work on ice recently on any services engine security product and you know we wanted someone who knew ice like ice takes a long time to learn so we hired someone who knew ice who had worked with it who had a lot of experience sometimes that's what we're looking for sometimes like you said i just want to know have you demonstrated a technical ability have you learned you know and succeeded in technical positions and then i know i can teach you the rest you know we'll throw you in the lab you know in a couple weeks time you know a couple couple customer calls that's what we do right we're always just thrown in the deep end i've been back in the lab for weeks it's wonderful and awful all at the same time we have a kind of funny question from a patreon um given that you get access to technology early in the life of the product i guess this would be you know your engineer days but uh is there any tech you wish you could sabotage so it wouldn't get out as you were trying to make it work in the lab oh that that one uh the answer to that is yes but my job i mean no some of it's frustrating and look you know when you when you get the early code i mean you practically want to sabotage all of it because i mean you just you waste so much time things don't work and that's normal right i mean nothing works the first time that's why we're testing it in the lab um but uh yeah i mean you know look i i don't make all the decisions and there are things in the products in my portfolio that maybe i would have done differently but you know it's a it's a team effort i i don't want to end before we circle back to something you said in the beginning okay which was you know you liked what we're doing here which thank you really appreciate but you know we need more industry evangelizing and i guess i just wanted to dig in a little bit you know into that like why why why do you think that because i get you know every time i turn around there's some podcast or youtube channel or influencer you know right talking about or evangelizing things what why do you think we need more evangelizing in the industry yeah i i'll and maybe i'll step in a little controversy here but i think there's a message that's been going out lately which is that you know like we were talking about earlier you shouldn't learn to be a network engineer learn python it's all about software now learn software learn apis learn those things like all this stuff learn to code learn the code you know we're trying to get more women to code which is great but it's all code right coding right well you know why because network engineers all these all sdn and apis and all that it's going to take your cr your career is not going to exist in a few years right and i talk about that in my session at cisco live but you know it's it's not actually true i don't care what kind of automation systems you use i don't care how good you are programming like i said earlier you need to know what it is that you're managing you need to know how this stuff works you need to get out your oscilloscope and see that see the the bits on the wire yeah i gotta say um that that makes sense to me i i agree with you wholeheartedly jeff i'm actually really happy to hear someone like senior in the industry say that because you know i've had experiences in the past with software developers that you know have hired it you know former companies where we hired them to automate the network but they had no networking experience and so it was just a big disaster essentially like it seems almost easier to teach a network engineer to code what they need to versus teaching a software developer to become a network engineer almost you know lex are you looking at my notes are you hacked into my system and looking at my notes no but andy i know we have very similar thoughts on this yeah every every automation tool i've used is a software dev tool right with like even the terms like the non-networking terms it's it's all i don't know why network people aren't creating automation platforms and that's part of what i'm trying to do where i'm at but not create one but try to make you know all the terminology the philosophy how things are done like it's just so why does the networking person have to learn programmatic coding csd pipeline devops and not the other way around i mean i think i know the answer to that but it always just seems i think it's why i've been crying for three years lex about why automation is so hard for me because i'm right there with you man i i don't i don't enjoy it like i want the networking i don't want the coding yeah so so so i know i know you need to wrap up but can i give you an analogy real quick please yeah this is a hot topic here we're good tmes talk for a living so shut me up when you're here so i give the analogy in my session i've used it many many times about airplanes if you look at an airplane cockpit from like the 70s right it's all levers and you know dials and switches right and you look at it now it's a beautiful glass cockpit right screens very few manual controls um and the pilots who fly the plane they still need to know about aerodynamics weather systems navigation all of that right but they're just interacting with the machine in a more efficient way right the way they're they're putting information in and getting it back is is more efficient and at the end of the day we need to automate we we do need to automate you know as we manage larger and larger networks um you know as more and more devices show up on the networks wireless you know iot all this stuff does explode the number the amount of stuff we have on the networks and therefore the number of devices we're managing we need the tools we need the automation we need the assurance we need to learn how to script we need to do some of that stuff but we don't need to be coders we don't need to be experts you know like if you look at the code i used to do programmability for years that was my thing i never thought it would be i came into cisco it became my thing i was doing python scripting and you look at the code i wrote and it was pretty bad but it worked because i'm a network engineer i don't need to optimize it i don't need to be beautiful i need it to work so that's the point i mean at the end of the day we're still network engineers they're going to be some different tools that we use to do our jobs but we still have to do our job and it's the same job as it was before and we need to know it just like that pilot needs to know all that stuff so learn the core especially if you're new to the industry learn the fundamentals learn the core and when people are hiring software engineers to do a network engineer's job they're going to call you someday and say yeah maybe maybe come over we messed up can you come back yeah that's a great note to end on i love that is there anything we should have asked you that we didn't oh no i think we covered the gamut you know like i said i i can go on for a while but this was fun thank you for having me we'll have you back for more more opinionated talks on specific things because you've got you've got some great opinions yeah any time it's been fun thanks so much for coming on jeff we'll we'll go ahead lex i was just going to say jeff where can we find you in general we've talked about your blog um you're welcome to shout that out again well subnet zero dot info i i actually start a sub stack to subnet 0.substack.com i have i think six subscribers so it's going well yeah i'm hoping to get to seven or eight and um i haven't published anything in a while because we're getting ready for cisco live i've just been tied up but other than that i don't have twitter i'm kind of you know not a social media guy but uh yeah you can put comments on my blog i will respond to them eventually awesome okay awesome thank you so much jeff this has been fantastic um if anybody out there is looking for a study group we have about 2 700 people at this point in our discord study group artofnetins.com iaatj stands for it's all about the journey uh you can check out our swag uh over to march store art of netense.com forward slash store we're always on twitter at art of net eng and uh if you'd like to support us through our patreon program uh you could actually come in here and watch us record these things in person and ask our guests and us questions that's at patreon.com art of netenge jeff thanks so much lex always great to see you and we will catch you next time on the art of network engineering hey y'all this is lexi if you vibe with what you heard us talking about today we'd love for you to subscribe to our podcast in your favorite podcatcher also go ahead and hit that bell icon to make sure you're notified of all our future episodes right when they come out if you want to hear what we're talking about when we're not on the podcast you can totally follow us on twitter and instagram at art of neteng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find a bunch more info about us and the podcast at art of network engineering dot com thanks for listening you