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 i am aj murray at no blinky blinky and tonight i am joined by lexi at track it pacer lexi how are you hey jay i'm good i'm very tired i've been awake since four in the morning big day big day it was a big day at work we uh we launched a rocket and um there were a bunch of people on it and i don't know who most of them are but uh one of them was a was an employee of ours and so it was really nice oh wow yeah he architected the the rocket itself and so it was really nice to see him go up but it was a very early launch and i'm very tired so forgive me in advance for anything dumb that i say 4am is very very early yeah i'm gonna crash tonight how are you aj so i i'm excited because uh as we record this episode in one week's time we will all be together in asheville uh very exciting uh the first time ever all of us will be in the same room under one roof since we started this thing and i'm also really excited because i'm holding a trackit pacer sticker so we got a whole bunch of stickers ordered for the show next weekend so if you're attending you will have stickers for every co-host on the show including stickers for the art of network engineering i even made a sticker for dan dear old dan got his own face on a sticker you're just listening so you can have a limited edition howdy packet sticker a picture of dancing he's still like a light blue background he's giving that like that like stern dad look that oh yeah yeah that's dan in a nutshell i love it i can't make a logo but i can make a sticker with a picture is there any text on that sticker or is it literally just you can probably barely see it but it does have his twitter handle like up in the corner on the edge nice so in case you needed to follow dan and you need to follow dan because i think he has like 100 followers on twitter so awesome well uh we'll cut to some wins and when we come back we'll introduce our guest and now it's time for some wins this week winning in our discord channel is bill murray he accepted a new position as a senior manager for it operations congratulations bill pepfrong got a huge salary bump congratulations mind shadow accepted a new job as a network engineer at a large corporation the complete noob accepted a new role as a network engineer as well lots of new jobs this week congratulations everybody eli grp passed the aws cloud practitioner congratulations new patreons this week there are no new patreons joining us this week but if you're interested in joining the patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge check out our different tiers and join the program that suits you best and you'll see all the cool stuff we have going on thank you so much for your support of what we do here at the art of network engineering podcast now back to the show all right and this week i am very excited to welcome to the show uh she networks uh otherwise known as serena serena thank you so much for joining us this week yeah thanks for having me so um you are pretty big on tick tock and twitter and other and other social media outlets um so i i want to start with that like you know your your network engineer what what was the motivation and and why did you decide to start a tech talk and and do all the videos and stuff that you do yeah so um that's a good question i i'm not really like a content creator i guess i am now but before tick tock i really wasn't um and i had a pretty small social media following it was just kind of like average i didn't really use twitter at all i didn't use tick tock aside from watching videos but i had downloaded tick tock during quarantine you know when everything kind of picked up and everyone was bored in the house and i started to eventually the tiktok algorithm kind of puts content in front of your face that it thinks you will like and i've i stumbled upon tech talk which is the um technical creators on tech talk and at the time it was very small there was only really a few people doing it and when i had found them i was like wow this is crazy because i didn't i didn't really realize that people on take talk would be interested in anything technical right but i was very wrong there is a huge community now and a ton of content creators sure for tick tock and you know i just started posting videos based on trends so tick tock always has really popular trends and i would try and figure out a way to either make them technical related or networking related and then from there i started to do more in-depth technical videos and see what i could really accomplish in 60 seconds right what can i teach someone or talk about or convey in 60 seconds that for the majority of the time it's networking related but i do do some like general networking or general technology stuff as well you have a background in networking is that right correct you are a network engineer like currently um so i'm currently unemployed your last position maybe yeah so um i've actually worked at cisco for the last few years so i graduated college and um my first job out of college was working in tech it's nice very cool yeah and that was wild because i so the team that i was working on was server virtualization so i was taking cases based off of ucs or intersight um i think like 1000v sometimes although i would try and avoid those cases um so you know when i started at cisco i had never even heard of ucs and then three months later i was taking cases on it so it was wild because my background had at that point been on in more ccna level courses some ccmp but all of it was enterprise catalyst type stuff so i was like i really don't know much about servers or vmware and i had taken a linux class before but i you know i didn't have any production experience in any of those things and then all of a sudden i'm taking these cases where um you know the customer might have been working on ucs for years and i'm honestly just graduating college and i'm just like crap how did you were you just like thrown to the wolves or how did you end up learning so quickly to deal with those cases hack is brutal very brutal and like um you know part of it is being thrown to the wolves because now i think that's why i work really well under pressure is because of that experience and yeah so you do some training right but you're not going to get any better training than hands-on experience so typically you're going to maybe shadow a little bit um but you're going to also take some lower priority cases learn how to use a lot of the tools a big part of tack is log analysis like i spent almost a majority of my time going through logs um for you know like root cause analysis is a big thing like why did the server restart or why did this part fail or you know just different things like that just a lot of log analysis finding bugs so yeah i mean it took a while right you start off a little bit slower but then at some point you know you get when you're a full-fledged tac engineer they put you on a queue and every team kind of does it a little bit different but my team was like you if a case gets sent to you that's your case and it doesn't matter if you've taken a case like that before you're gonna have to figure it out and that's what i've done you know i would get cases where it'd be like a hospital system down i had a case once where it was a 911 system down for like a major city in a state and that was on me and i was like 22 and i'm like okay and you know i figured it out though you do have so many resources when you're working in tech and you know the first thing that i would do if i didn't know what i was looking at would be to like look up cases that had similar issues um and then just kind of go from there so do you have documentation like if you can talk about this i don't know if you can share it about tac but like do you all have some kind of ticketing system documentation where you can look at what past engineers have troubleshot and how they went by through it step by step what they learned things like that yeah so here's how it typically goes right so i was i don't i guess it would be like layer 3 four level three four engineer so we have what's called a gdp team and those are usually and this is come from coming from a ucs perspective or server virtualization some teams operate a little bit differently depending on the technology but so the gdp teams are usually taking cases on hardware for the most part or like quick easy solves things like that the team that i was on was handling the much more complex cases so i was kind of almost the final engineer that you would get um unless we'd have to escalate it to the bu but i would still be your engineer at that point i'd just be involving the bu um but yeah so if if i didn't know basically i would look for other cases using search terms like internally to find if there was a similar case and if there wasn't then i would start looking up that error and going from there sometimes you'd have to go through tech engineers old cases and depending on how great they were at documentation i mean you could find a case where it's like oh they solved the issue but they didn't document how they did it so you know and most of the time i would say people are pretty good about it um but you know you do run into those those issues occasionally and then if you if i didn't know i'd maybe ask someone on my team or just kind of like talk to the person that next cube over and be like hey like have you seen this before and then i would ask maybe my technical lead if they didn't know we could basically like pulse out to all the engineers within our technology basically write up a really good summary of what's happening log messages errors everything you've tried and then all the engineers that are in your technology around the world are able to reply and answer to that basically i love that this little group thing yeah so it's it's encourage or like it's not discouraged i guess to like ask for help from other engineers when you need it or like pull resources on a case that's really complicated or difficult yeah tech would not function without those resources basically i mean you would never solve cases if you couldn't ask other people for help because it's impossible to know everything that's gonna go wrong right and sometimes you're gonna run into a weird bug and i'm not a developer so i can go through logs and be like hey i got this weird error message but then the day i didn't write the code so i don't really know where that bug came from or how to fix it right and sometimes i can be like oh this is a documented bug and they fix it in this version right then that's that happens all the time i mean i think the most common thing that i would see would be like um interoperability problems where people would update but not update drivers so uh you know you'd have those issues where it's like well your systems are all messed up because you're operating on these drivers on this like firmware version and it's not communicating properly or there's a bug in this firmware version so you need to go to the next one i mean you run into those problems all the time but again it's tax so i'm not running into not problems no one's opening a case being like hey i'm having a great time love it it's just issues every day i would get like four or five cases wouldn't that be so nice you know if everyone was like hey just wanted to say thank you tech engineers that's all my ticket is i just wanted to open it i love this router so much i just wanted to let you guys know that this thing is like working flawlessly yeah we don't get those conversations so you everyone intact kind of starts bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and then towards like the end of your first year you're grumpy because you're just like this is it can get rough like burnout is super common for tech engineers because i mean there was a two or three month period where i had a sev one every single day and when you're on a sub one you're still taking cases in the background so cases are still coming in your queue and so i would be honest and then taking like two or three cases that were like maybe a p3 right and from there i'd be like okay so i'm like sending my initial emails out to these other cases to meet the slas which typically sometimes wasn't too difficult to multitask because like you know there's so much waiting when you're trying to troubleshoot it's like oh we'll try this thing we'll see we'll give it a minute or it takes you know whatever so there's a lot of waiting so sometimes it's not too difficult but yeah i mean it would get crazy and so you'd have a backlog of cases you're trying to get to but i'm on a step every single day and so by the end of that i was just like i was done like i was like i don't want to do this anymore i can't imagine that i remember being at a um a job in my past i won't name but sometimes we like we kept tac engineers on for like you know through their entire shift it would not end and then we'd take the next one on the next shift and it wouldn't end with the sev whatever right so i can't even imagine like i know there's a lot of like hurry up and wait in those but i i can't imagine being that tac engineer and having to like concentrate on other things even for a little bit when you're in the middle of an emergency even if you are waiting like you still have to keep it straight in your head i don't know that's that's wild the other thing that happens so what would happen you'd get a sev one right so you get a seven one the customer is already on the phone so whoever's in the front lines like sends you the call they do the handoff and then sometimes once you pick up that case the account team will add you to a chat like an internal chat where it's like all the account team like sales engineers whoever because they're talking about it too trying to get it fixed and like seeing what they can do and a lot of times the account manager will be like just replace the part just replace the part i'm like i'm gonna send a part out and it's not gonna fix your issue because it's not a part problem so it's like all the time and they always just want you to like replace a part like send an our rma and like like this isn't a dim failure like this is much further past that sounds familiar so you you knew if you got added to a chat like it was going to be a rough call so yeah yeah so you have like account teams aged toms other cases happening um if it is a critical infrastructure like a hospital 9-1-1 anything like that um that gets escalated to i think it's like directors or something and and the longer that you're on that call the longer that your severity case doesn't resolve your it gets escalated so it's like automatic it's like okay so now the director gets emailed and now like the vp gets emailed because you haven't resolved your case yet and it hasn't gone down in severity and so and then you have to like your emailing updates being like no we're working on it it's fine like whatever so it's a ton of multitasking it's a lot of stress but i would do it again for sure like i think it was a great part of my career so it was a good place to learn ultimately for you it sounds like you grew a lot oh yeah i would definitely not be where i am now without my experience in tact like i it was very valuable as far as learning goes um and i would i would do it again i would recommend other people would do it again but i would not recommend that you stay there for longer than two years personally for me the problem with tack is well there's a couple problems one it's pay in my opinion i think a lot of tack engineers are underpaid which is unfortunate because we would joke like this is probably bad but i don't work there anymore so whatever so like we would joke that like oh we're getting paid this much and you're like oh you know the person that we we're helping out on the other side of the line is making triple what me we make right and so we would joke about that like it's probably not great but it was true like it was true that the being everyone knew being on the other end is where more money was going to be um but also when you're in tact and one technology for a very long time you end up getting very siloed so all i would know would be the technologies that i worked on and of course you know ucs goes into um a lot of times sand so i knew a lot about a lot of storage systems and sand switches like brocade we would go into like nexus um and then so i would learn a little bit about nexus and how all that went together or aci but if you're trying to get a good round rounded experience as a network engineer that's not going to be attack you're going to learn ucs like the back of your palm you're gonna be able to solve all these problems and then some companies like bigger companies where it's like yeah we want just a ucs engineer that's great yeah but not everywhere is like that the majority of places aren't like that so you're not going to have a really rounded knowledge base or experience with the other technologies that you need as a network engineer like firewalls and load balancers and different things like that it makes sense that makes a lot of sense so you said this was your sorry you said this was your first um this was your first position out of college yeah so straight out okay so yeah i had an offer from cisco a year before i graduated college um and so it was part of their like new college grad hiring program and so i went to i moved from so i went to university of akron because they had a ccna academy or cisco academy there and then from there i drove to raleigh north carolina where i stayed for three months and was on that campus doing their like new grad program and the idea is you're gonna go there you're gonna get a ccna learn how to be a tech engineer yada yada i got my ccna in two weeks because my undergrad was all cisco stuff right so i didn't i didn't really need to do that much studying for it um i just basically did some practice tests and then went and took like the icnd1 and then icing d2 um but you know there's other people that get hired that like have a background in electrical engineering not everybody that got hired came from a cisco academy so that was kind of my advantage so i ended up helping other people with their ccnas and then playing like a lot of foosball basically when that was in rtp um and then from there i went to the richardson office where the ccie lab is and yeah that was my first job out of college wow so did you obtain any other certifications other than the ccna yeah so i ended up doing the ccna routing and switching then i went and got the data center one because like kind of right before it expires like i already know all the ucs stuff i know it's kind of the nexus stuff a lot of the sand stuff so or storage you know like i was like i might as well just go take the certification so i studied a little bit for that one ended up getting that one um i got like my aws certification um i have my devnet uh network plus and then for take talk i did uh getting the security plus in 24 hours that was great 24 hours so i wanted to see well it was like good tick tock content and i didn't have to pay for the certification so i was like hey like based off of what i know right now can i get the security plus in 24 hours because i my boss was paying for this the certification and i didn't want to like fail it and then i'd be like so how did you study and then you'd be like i didn't so i basically was like all right i'll give myself 24 hours so i don't completely just like yolo this 300 voucher that i have um and you know so i mainly focus on the cryptography section because that i was doing like some practice tests and that's what i was scoring consistently the lowest on so i basically spent the entire 24 hours focusing on that section i went and took it and i passed it so like yay that's awesome that's great yeah did you study just like out of a book you just said you took practice tests you think i had like udemy business so i could like get all the courses that i wanted so i think i used jason dion's practice test and that was i'm trying to think if there was anything else that i use i think i i use a practice test and then looked at the topics that i was failing on from the practice test and then just went and looked up those topics basically smart we had a couple of questions come in uh pertaining to your your tack time uh or your time attack um one of them was did you ever get a customer that lied that uh was trying to turn a p3 into a p1 just to get uh faster assistance and yeah all the time yeah yeah all the time i have had to do that i've been i have been you didn't it really depends on the tac engineer that you get how they're gonna handle that for me i was always so busy that i was not putting up with any bs so i basically would be like um i mean i would start them off right and maybe get them going in the right direction but then you have to kind of explain like hey um you know because there's not an active outage going on i'm gonna lower this to a p3 if i had the time i would try and help them especially if it was like a quick fix while they're still on the call but i would lower the ticket down to a p3 so that because the longer it's at a p1 like i said the ticket keeps escalating and so it'll send out emails to my manager then the director and blah blah blah whatever um and so you'd have to be explaining but the other thing is when i'm on on cue i can't be on a call unless it's a an outage so if i get another case that comes in that is a outage i have to take that and prioritize that over the p3 that i'm on if that one really isn't truly an outage because your co-workers are going to look at you and be like why are you trying to get out of taking outage cases because you know everyone gets those are can be stressful and if you so for the richardson office if i get a p1 and i haven't resolved it i have to stay on that call till 7 pm before i could pass it off to the next theater so people would try and avoid them because nobody wanted to be staying at the office till 7 00 pm yeah is that like two hours one hour later than normal or how so it's usually like i would get in at 8 00 a.m so there would be days that i was there from eight to seven oh that's tough that's a long day yeah it is definitely a long day um and then another good one i'm i'm genuinely curious does tech have a rating system for customers so if you have a customer company that calls in and they're just like really shitty to you do you guys like have notes you take somewhere and let everybody else know like hey if you get tickets from this place watch out for these guys or whatever um not typical so there's really depend again this is all dependent on technology there's not that many tac engineers so if there is a company that you constantly see like there are some just like notorious people that from specific companies that we would know about right just just from taking cases from them previously because like on my team we may only have like six people on queue at once oh wow i mean it's not that many right so word does travel um and then depending on what kind of contract that you have you would have htts which is the higher tier tack basically you get a lot more benefits and those are more seasoned tac engineers they've been working intact for a while they have better customer service skills you get like you just get a little bit extra perks right for having htts but there's also much many fewer customers so from those customers then you really know because you're constantly working with the same people all the time so you definitely would know about certain customers or certain companies that might have maybe like a lot of outsourced help which sometimes was hard because they would just put in tickets for literally everything like that was their support basically is just if anything's wrong just put in a ticket for it and have tax solve it and so that could be frustrating because you're not working on the other end with somebody who is familiar with the systems at all and that could be frustrating and i i heard you say htts or http https what does that stand for um it's high touch technical support i think oh okay you know one we had a a guest on the show early on it was actually a friend of andy's who was htts for uh i believe it was google and at t uh but that's right okay i remember that now so yeah so it's basically a tac engineer that's dedicated to certain companies sometimes in some technologies they will be dedicated to specific customers only for server virtualization they didn't have any dedicated engineers but it was just a much smaller pool of companies like maybe you would really only be dealing with like 10 companies potentially uh so yeah but it is someone said white glove it is more of a white glove service where like you know if you have regular support with tac we won't sit on an upgrade or anything like that but https will so if you are uncomfortable with an upgrade or something they'll set on the call with you while you do it but regular support doesn't grant you that right interesting just the oh shit something broke while i was doing this now i can call yeah exactly right there's also things like they can't close your case like for regular attack i can three strike you so if you haven't responded so like if let's say i email you call you email you again then i can close your case if you haven't responded i don't think they can do they have much different rules in htts for how they can close your case without having a response okay i see you know that okay so um can we go back a little bit like what got you into networking what started you out on the cisco netacad stuff how did that work yeah um so that's also kind of an interesting story i so i guess like when i first started working in technology my first job was i was 16 working at best buy and i had originally applied to be a cashier but they said i would make like a dollar more if i worked in computers and i was like yeah i'll do that and you know i actually i didn't really grow up with like a ton of money like i had a single mom i we didn't really have computers or internet at my house so a lot of my experience with computers was basically just from school like working on school computers and things like that and so i learned a lot at best buy and we'd have like a lot of customers come in and a lot of people to assume that i was already in college uh but i wasn't at the time i was still in high school and so they would ask like oh where are you going to college and no one in my family had gone to college so i didn't really have plans to go to college i knew we didn't have the money for me to go to college um but then a lot of people were like what do you mean you're not like gonna go to college and so cause it's like everyone's like what like you have to go to college and i'm like i i i don't think i'm going to go to college and i really hadn't put that much thought into it right so i ended up applying for university of akron because basically they had an acceptance rate where anybody could get in because i did not have the grades i was a notoriously bad student and it wasn't because i'm not intelligent i just hated school like i hated being told what to do i hated getting up early i did not like teachers like i had a really pro i had problems with authority overall where i was just like i don't understand why you're telling me to do this and this doesn't make sense you know and so i always kind of just did not really excel in school and so i got into akron because i graduated high school with a 2.1 gpa i mean i really did not care about um and then so i went to akron and i liked it so much more because i got to basically pick my major pick what classes i was gonna take do it on my own time and i think just having that mobility having that power to just choose what i wanted to do i jived a lot better with and i had a much easier time with professors because they treat you like adults they didn't care i don't have to like raise my hand and go to the bathroom you know and so for me i just like that a lot better um and so i did really well in college the reason i ended up picking networking is because we had this guy that would always come in like you know you have regulars pretty much working in retail all the time you'll you'll meet regulars and he was just telling oh you should do networking you should do networking because you'll always have a job and he knew like a little bit about like my home life and i i mean i grew up in the rust belt so job security is like a really important thing that people think about a lot because that's really affected the area that i grew up in was a lot of the automotive companies moving out and a lot of people and families lost jobs and were living in poverty because there weren't high-paying jobs in that area anymore and it's gotten a lot better right but still people really think about job security and they're like if you go into networking you'll get paid well you'll always have a job you know the internet's not going anywhere and so i was like all right cool and at the time the only thing i knew about networking was like the stuff that was sold in the home networking aisle at best buy so i was like how hard can it be you know like whatever um it was hard i was very confused my first networking class because i'm like what are you talking about like i was overly confident going into it because i thought i knew a lot more than i did but i got through it i made i made it through at the other end that's awesome yeah cool so you basically okay so it was somebody at best buy who was a regular who was like you should get into networking that's really yeah just somebody yeah i i had no plan like i really didn't know what i wanted to do and i i didn't think i was really interested in software development which is a lot of people think like oh do computer science and then you know do software and coding blah blah and i was like i don't think i really care about that too much and so networking seemed a little bit more interesting to me and i was like well i don't have any other plan so i'll just go do this i might as well that's awesome so cisco tac after college and then what i i briefly quit cisco um because of creative differences problems with authority perhaps yeah i i basically like had applied internally for another position and my manager wasn't happy because two people on the tag team which we were already a little bit understaffed but the tag teams are chronically understaffed he was not happy about losing two people and there was like some riff-raff and then i ended up just like quitting because i was like you know what i i don't blame this on cisco as a whole like specifically i think i had more of a problem with this manager who always put himself over the people in my opinion so i just was like well if you don't support like me and my growth because i'm so i was so young you know so i was like this is so early in my career like this is a time where i need to be like growing and moving and expanding and so i was like all right so i started applying for another jobs and i quit in two weeks and so i left worked for this other company for a little bit and basically did data center design i helped with like a nexus to aci migration and some other things and i wasn't there very long because cisco reached back out to me and wanted me to work on the other team that i originally applied for and i was like all right cool and then i went back so nice okay it worked out so what was this other team uh so i did like customer success for a little bit and i was the technical lead for that on compute for the like centers america it's all like the one thing that drives me nuts i love cisco you know like i would definitely recommend other people work there but there's so much corporate jargon that i'm just like no all of this is so meaningless to me like it's i don't i don't care about any of these words like i don't feel like i shouldn't need a dictionary for these like made up corporate terms right but anyway that's like a whole other soapbox of mine um but yeah so i was on customer success basically helping customers when they would have issues with their new products either migrating into their systems or whatever i would come in address kind of what barriers they were having or what problems and then a lot of times it's just kind of more of an educational gap where it's like i we're completely new to aci i have no idea what it is you like go in and talk to them about aci make them a little bit more comfortable with their purchase and product so that they're happy about it right um but then i got bored of that really quickly because i was like it wasn't hands-on enough for me and it was a good job after like the burnout from tac to kind of transition to there's a much different pace but then i was like all right now i need to move on again i usually get the the bug like a year after i start a position where i'm like i need to be doing something more right than that because i'm like i learned everything like now what and they're like nothing this is all you do and i'm like i don't like that so yeah i hear you yeah like i need more give me more that's good though i mean you're interested in learning and you're hungry i think that's good obviously yeah so was the customer success the most recent position and then you said now you're you're currently unemployed yeah so i quit so i mean obviously we talked a little bit about my tick tock and since starting that i've had a number of offers and a lot of the offers are obviously like operations production network engineers sometimes those like network security because i do a lot of security focused videos um and i wasn't sure that's what i wanted to do again and i kind of got a lot more into security so i um took a job at black hills information security and i will be doing offensive security for them all right congratulations that sounds nice so that so i'm doing that and content which is great oh my god so you've accepted an offer and you're just waiting it out to your start date now yeah i wanted to take some time off yeah um and just not do anything for a minute and i was like hey you know when i accept the offer with them i was just like hey i just want to take a few weeks before starting he was like totally you know the owner his name is john strand he's awesome um but i was like i just need a few weeks and he's like cool and i was like cool so now i am hanging out riding my bike watching bridgerton right now so wait do they have a new season out let's talk about yeah season two's out i gotta do that too anyway no that's great recharging is so important i i feel like everybody when changing jobs needs at least like a couple of weeks um it would seem unusual not to do that right yeah i mean i understand financially and like i'm paying for cobra which is like not great but for me like luckily i'm in the position where i can take time off and not really worry about the money so much um which is great especially because like with tech talk i can do sponsorships and make decent money doing that and so the only reason i kind of need or would want a full-time 40-hour week job is one it helps make tick tock content because i get a lot of inspiration from my job and then incorporate that into videos but then to like health insurance in the us is like a scam a whole other soapbox but like just paying for that right when you're a contractor are so low it's so much more expensive and i have an autoimmune disease so i'm like i can't not have insurance oh sure so you know there's a lot of reasons but luckily with cobra and then like my tick tock um income that helps a lot so with security so you sort of i guess maybe we glossed over a little bit how you got into security you said you did the security plus was that sort of your first like introduction to that world so my undergrad was um a concentration on networking and information security so i did a lot of security work in college and then right now i am in grad school uh for data center systems engineering and there's a lot of security in that as well so yeah i did the security plus but i do like i said i do a lot of security content on tick tock and that's mainly just driven by interest and from there i was able to get offers based off of like my content and my previous background wow that's awesome so you're in grad school right now too so you're making content you're about to have like a what 40-hour week job and you're in grad school like that's that's wild yeah i took some time off grad school because um so i have ulcerative colitis and for the last year i've been really struggling with it um and i it did get really hard for me to kind of juggle everything and i was like took time off to just kind of focus on my health and luckily now i am feeling a little bit better and i'm kind of like you know i get stir crazy so easily where i'm just like i need to take things on i need to like keep myself busy and that's just i don't that's just how i've always been awesome though wow good for you so thanks you have a lot going on and so i'm wondering do you have any strategies that you use to to kind of balance and keep track of all the different things you have it's just chaos it is i mean i have like my outlet calendar and i do have to uh i have to be careful with taking on things so there's a lot i mean especially with my social media presence i get a ton of dms and so that can be kind of overwhelming and then also trying to keep up with cons it's not easy like and that so like you know i haven't been making as much content lately either um but you know that's going to change soon i'm ramping stuff back up but yeah i don't ever like i said it's chaos i'll put stuff on my calendar some some engagements i do have to kind of decline just because i will burn myself out if i accept everything that comes my way but for the most part it's been okay do you kind of plan out or pre like give like a calendar of content uh in advance or do you just kind of like something new topic is like hot right now okay let's go make a video on that yeah the latter i mean sometimes i'll write down like topics in case i kind of come sometimes you just can get exhausted constantly thinking about content and then also thinking about content that's going to fit into 60 seconds right so yeah piece that's like a whole other piece where it's like yeah i can get make a youtube video for as long as i want tick tock i need to get everything out in 60 seconds and so creating that can be a little bit more difficult but so yeah sometimes i'll write down stuff and like oh maybe i'll return to that later and i'll have like a little backlog of topics most of the content that i make is just like fired off i'll just make the video and send it out send it on its way and let the algorithm do whatever it's gonna do one of the things that i admire about you with your content whether it's like i've i'm more active on twitter so i see the twitter stuff more but i know like with tick tock too you'll occasionally make content specifically just to piss people off who are like usually sexist men or just like people who are being idiots in your comments a lot which i personally really appreciate because that's that's always fun right um and how i'm i'm curious like how often you have to be inspired to do that right and by that i mean like how often are you like just just want to strangle somebody in your dms or your comments it used to be a lot more frequent when i first started doing content so the thing is is like as a woman you know i mean in general when you make yourself a presence on the internet you're gonna get mean comments there's trolls it is what it is and i was like all right obviously i know i'm gonna get some comments pointed at me being a woman or me people think i'm a lot younger than i am so they think i'm like some either in college or like high school and so i would get so many comments about like not knowing anything about networking and all this stuff and at the time i was very private about where i was working right and so most of the time i wanted to be like you moron like i'm literally an engineer at cisco like i think because people would be like why don't you go get a ccna and then come talk about these topics and i'm like first of all i have two second of all i'm a literal technical lead at cisco but i didn't say that right because i just wanted to leave them out of it and not and and not only that like i don't feel like i should need to bring that up and use that as part of my credibility as to why i would be good at networking or whatever right so i used to get a lot more frustrated by it but now i just like like trolling people back and that's probably just because i'm like a troll myself and i like would rather just use it for content because it's funny right and it's like okay it's just funny you're gonna come here and i'm gonna make you look stupid and everybody's gonna laugh and then i'm gonna get followers you know what i mean and it sounds bad right but it's like don't don't fire shots if you're not ready to take some heat back absolutely um i i can say i relate to the impulse for sure that's partly yeah and i walk a tightrope because a lot of times i wish my account was anonymous so i could really say how i'm feeling and there is a point where it's like i'm gonna get myself blacklisted from this industry if i like really say what i want to say you've mentioned like people contacting your work right like yeah and like finding out who you are which is just absolutely ridiculous yeah so that has happened i had like i don't know i call him a stalker and i think it was multiple people who this happens kind of frequently but they'll like target somebody and try and dox them and my theory behind it and it's kind of somewhat supported is that they're like basically kids from like skid packer forums and they are trying to like basically show off their hacking skills or get involved with certain groups or whatever by like targeting higher profile people in in tech or whatever i don't really care that much but so they were trying to get me fired for my job and they would i mean i'm not talk like hundreds of emails about me they would put they would send every tick tock that i posted to my work and it would be stuff it would be funny because i'd be talking about a security topic that would literally be on a cisco certification and they're like she's teaching people how to hack and do illegal activities and i'm like these are literal concepts on certifications that's published by cisco super weak so why would they care that i'm talking about those concepts and teaching people do you know like had you shared where you worked did they find out where you worked they just found my linkedin which honestly wasn't super hard because it was up so if you would search serena cisco on google i was the first thing that came out because i have i have i don't know if it's still up it probably still is but a profile page of me on cisco's website okay so it really wasn't too difficult like it was kind of an open secret but the main reason i didn't associate was because i wanted to say whatever i wanted on my account without violating like company social media policies by associating myself with them so as long as i wasn't like actively being like i'm a cisco employee and f you it's fine right and so um i mean obviously there are some things that if you get very extreme that's not going to go over well and right i'm not that type of person though like like the real stuff i'm like no um but yeah so i mean they just kept doing that they were like threatening to go to my house but the like they were and this is how i knew they were like kids because they just were not that intelligent and like they found an old voda record in ohio which had an address that i hadn't lived in in 10 years like in 10 years and you could see like on zillow if you were to look up that address when that house was sold so they're like we're gonna come to your parents house and blah blah blah and i was like listen if you show up to my mom's house unannounced i don't even do that she's crazy i don't i have to warn my mom before i go to her house or else i'm not it's not gonna be a good time for me you know what i mean but so i was just like anyway my whole i was like my bio literally says that i live in dallas texas you are giving me an ohio address that's so funny so you're obviously not that intelligent so what was the goal and i'm sorry i keep focusing on this i just think it's interesting like was the goal to intimidate you in general or ju like that doesn't seem that part right there doesn't seem focused on like getting you fired so were they it sounds like they were just straight up harassing you to make you crazy or something you know so i think like the first things that they said to me was like send me a thousand bitcoin or i'll dock your address and like sent me the address and i was like post it i was like post the address and they did and i was like all right cool and so i kind of thought like that would be the end of it just because i was like i don't care like sorry for whoever bought the house if you really do go there um but i was like i i don't whatever um but then it was like them calling my work and like i don't know if it's because i was trolling them back that they kind of like got more personal with it where they were like all right then like screw you like i'll show you or whatever because i was just not giving in to like anything that they were trying to say or do or whatever and i was trolling them back because i was like this is hilarious this is funny to me like i don't care and then they would just say stuff that i knew was like they were like we have photos of you and i was like are they good ones like if you did have photos of me i think it would be very easy for you to prove that um and obviously they didn't and they don't and they were just trying to like block you know and i'm just i call people out on their bluffs like you're not gonna intimidate me or scare me i don't really care um i mean them calling my work was super annoying like that part irritated me because i was like here there's a lot of things like you want to harass me on twitter or social media you want to say your mean comments whatever but you trying to mess with my income and my health insurance and at the time like i said i was very sick at the time so i was like very reliant on the health insurance that i was getting through my employer and if that would have gotten taken away that would have been like very detrimental to me and so i was just kind of that's what irritated me at that point and so i got their social media account subpoenaed because i'm that person and i will be annoying and i will find you and that was taken care of so nice wow that's awesome no mercy no mercy none destroy the trolls the the thing with the trolls though is they're gonna be like wow like you're not very mature and i'm like i'm not like because they really expect you to be the bigger person and i won't be so like and i mean but that's it is what it is like i i'll troll you back like i'll figure it out i'll find a way like i'm very dedicated and i'm intelligent so yeah i mean it worked out that's over and you know i get mean comments here and there i think my original point was that when i started doing content i was surprised by the number of comments that i would get like it was like i knew i would get them and it was just like i had no idea would be so many because my videos would get hundreds of thousands of views and that's a lot of eyes and that's a lot of people all over the world right so people have opinions about women in different countries that are different than we do in america and there are also jerks here that have opinions about women and working and you know being called a diversity hire or like whatever and the thing is is like i knew that's not true so like why do i care if this user 6573 blah blah whatever who's too scared to even show their face like all right like i'm still getting my paycheck at the end of the day so like i guess who's really winning here i love that too yeah that's awesome that's awesome seriously yeah well i think it's safe to say that you put like tech and networking and some security things like in front of a lot of people who may not have actually been exposed to that right like um i feel like they're the more women who make like tech related content the better um even if it's just like a you know 30 second video of like i don't know what see i don't even i can't even think of anything like what a router is right like you know even if it's just like a simple thing and i i love that tic toc's platform like allows for digesting that really easily um and i love that you're doing that because it's just i don't know the more exposure for women and tech the better yeah i just my thing is like i don't want people to see there i don't know if you saw on twitter the ad and it was like a woman and a tank top and it was like cyber security work from home and like i was shocked by the comments because honestly it's an ad that i if i would have scrolled right past and not thought of twice right i honestly would have just been like whatever and gone about my day but somebody screenshotted this ad and it was just like a woman in a tank top working at her computer and it was just like a like work from home try cyber security blah blah and people are like oh like you they have to use like i don't know i'm sorry if you need a sense of the word boobs right for her like for you to get people interested and it's just like this it's just a woman who biologically has boobs like she's not she can't just leave them at home at it i'm looking at it again right now and she's literally it's just a stock photo of a woman in a tank top sitting like in her living room on her laptop and she's for me it's the most generic like i i don't and so like the comments were like yeah this is a really distasteful ad and i was like what yeah it's not it's not like revealing like it's not it's just like a normal looking lady in it yeah it's just like a stock photo that the pro the woman probably took that and didn't even know it would be using an ad right and so i just was like so surprised the thing is is like i want to get to the point in tech where like people just aren't surprised that a woman shows up to fix your issue or something like that or you answer the phone and you have a tack call because this would happen to me all the time like there was one time i got on a call and it was a p1 and this thing had been going on for hours and it was the aci team did a collab with ucs because they didn't they still couldn't really figure out where this problem was coming from and there was about 100 people on this call when i joined okay it was like all hands on deck and the entire this per entire company was on the call and so i joined the call and the customer's talking to the other engineer and so i was just like okay i'll just wait i don't want to interrupt because sometimes i can get on and hear what they're saying and gather some information and it's useful for me whatever and so he goes where is this engineer where is he when is he joining like just saying stuff like that which is i don't really care too much whatever so i i muted myself and i was like hi like i'm serena i'm your attack engineer and there was a lot of people in the call who aren't muted and you can just hear like everybody break out and laughter because this guy had said he him so many times and then i answered with my voice right and they were like and the guy was like i'm so sorry like i didn't know you're on the call and he felt really bad and the kind of interesting thing was he was kind of heated talking to the other engineer but that almost reset him and so he calmed down a lot at that point to talk to me and tell me what the issue was it was fine the thing is i'm gonna get to the point where like people aren't surprised that they see a woman and that they don't think about it like it doesn't need to be thought about it doesn't need to be a topic for me it's just like like you should be able to see an ad talking about cyber security that involves a woman and you're not like offended by it because she has a body you know so yeah oh that was fun to read man that whole thing was just sometimes i read stuff on twitter and i i don't know i'm still surprised which is surprising but yeah sometimes i read stuff and i'm just like can you explain why you think this ad is offensive or distasteful and they won't and that's the other thing too like i asked a lot of people like what like what do you think's distasteful about this ad but they wouldn't say it right but we know these yeah they wouldn't say it and so that's how i'm like um okay i see say the quiet part out loud already yeah very frustrating yeah i i yeah i don't know all i can do is agree with you at this point like i don't even have anything insightful to say because it gets really really old we know it does we don't have to just continue talking about this but like it's it gets really really old sometimes i'm going to see that shit on twitter and everywhere it'll be like a great day when this isn't a topic i mean unfortunately it has to be talked about right now but when you get to the point where nobody cares and as many people as so many people be like nobody does care i can tell you a lot of people care because they're in my comment section very loudly telling me that they care so yeah yeah and like you know i've never been in a i haven't yet been in a tech job that like there were anywhere close the number of women as there were men um it's just i don't know i've heard some like mythical stories about software engineering and sometimes that can be like more you know there can be more women sometimes in that field but i haven't seen it myself and i'm just waiting for the day because i think in an environment where there are there is like a much more equal just like distribution of women and men whoever like you know we we just have a better environment in general and people stop like caring about something so arbitrary and silly as like what your gender is when you're just trying to do a job right yeah the one thing that i liked about tack was no like as far as my co-workers went like nobody cared they're like can you take a case okay because there's so many cases and everyone's so busy it's like i don't like i truly if it's a five-year-old that can talk to a customer like take the case you know and so that was like a good part and i mean we just vibed really well on that team together of course you do get customers which you know in the professional world it's very different than online because people feel a lot more comfortable saying how they truly feel behind a screen under an anonymous username or whatever a lot of times it's not as anonymous that they think it is and i find them and because i'm like i want to know who this is like i want to put a face to a name right so i'll end up tracking them down and finding their linkedins and people like oh these are just like little kids it's not like every person that i've really found aside from maybe a handful are men who work in a lot of times it's been software developers to be honest it's not even people that work in networking most of the time it hasn't because they're trying to correct me or whatever and someone who works in networking will know what i'm saying is valid versus a software engineer who's like oh this doesn't i took one engineering network engineering course in college and now i know more than you about it and it's like okay i like wait what is your like twitter banner it's is that a comment from someone go try a layer for udp tcp and the osi stacks no that's a c like that's a csi uh a csi quote basically it's just like the cat closed captioning for a csi episode and i think on youtube you can look up just like bad csi technology takes there's like one where they're both like typing on the keyboard at the same time it's just i love them it sounds like a threat it sounds like someone's threatening you go try it therefore udp tcp and the other side stacks yeah i mean that's that's like one thing i like to do like i like to joke around i like to be satirical and like very sarcastic and sometimes like a lot of people miss that sarcasm and they think i'm an idiot which kind of becomes fun for me like the raid video i posted became very controversial that's right that's right i saw that so for people who haven't seen the video i posted a video and it was a tick tock trend where it would be like a girl gosh i'm trying to like remember somebody oh it was okay so one of them was like a guy and he was like when my girlfriend says she needs new foundation but her house is just fine and then the background music is a song where it just says you look so dumb right now and so it was just like a sarcastic joke right so mine that i posted was when they say you need a back backup but you have raid and so this is like an old joke like it's not like i didn't make this up myself you know as much as i think i'm hilarious like i that's not like my joke it's a very old joke um and everybody in the comments thought i was being like serious and it got posted in like facebook groups where people were like she's so dumb and just like all this other stuff and here's the kicker because i knew people would miss it i knew people would miss a joke so in the caption i literally wrote this is a joke like i put it in the caption and people still missed it and of course they got like reposted and all this stuff so like i would troll them in the comments when people thought i was serious because it's like oh like you say that till you have a fire in your data center and i was like my data center doesn't have any fires like just like just ridiculous and then i would like repost those comments on twitter because they were just like funny and yeah that was a whole thing that was very good so much entertainment just from that i mean the return on investment for you must have been so i know i was like so and that's honestly how i ended up gaining a lot of my twitter followers was like posting just ridiculous stuff that i comments and different things that i got on tick tock and reposting it on twitter because i'm like y'all see this so do you think a lot of those followers came from like people who got the joke as it were or people who didn't get the joke and wanted to like hate follow cuz i've definitely seen that happen no i think most the people in my experience twitter as far as like my technical stuff has like is way less toxic than tick tock by far and i think it's maybe because twitter has typically an older crowd a lot more people are professional on there because they're are using actual real accounts with their faces attached and maybe their company that they work in or they are a professional that's been working there for a long time um versus sometimes you get it a little bit different on take talk i don't know it's a different vibe um but twitter has typically been a lot more welcoming to me than tick tick-tock has been good to hear but it sounds like you're handling like the trolls and all the silliness very well yeah it's an ever-evolving process right i mean i used to get upset kind of and then i was like it's really not that surprising i mean it gets to a point where you get so many comments that you're just like okay whatever like i've heard the same thing like 20 million times you must get so much like come up with new jokes yeah like you you probably don't even have time to read most of the stuff that people say i'm guessing yeah sometimes when videos it the hundred thousand view mark is where things like really hit the fan because below that it's mainly people that are familiar with my content and are familiar with me but then after a hundred thousand it's a lot of people who might be seeing me for the very first time they have no idea who i am they don't know any of my previous content any of my background they have not been following me and so they might just be like who the heck is this like what is i don't understand why is this on my for you page that's great is that back up oh my god yeah like and that that was poof i won't be making that joke again just you should make it once a year you know and see how far you can get this joke for like 10 years in a row and you'll yeah i mean it gets really rough so some of my videos or different things have been reposted on 4chan oh and so when that happens it really goes downhill quickly but i don't know again like it doesn't bother me too much i know some women who have basically alerts from programs that will tell them when their name pops up on 4chan on certain boards and i was like i don't want to know honestly they can say whatever they want i just don't want to see it i can see that being super draining right like to know everything everyone is saying about you or at least in in some of the most toxic toxic places on the internet i can yeah i mean i don't i need to know the only thing that i need to know is like what is happening in my life and i know myself better than anybody else knows me so i'm not gonna let some greasy nerd on 4chan get me down you know it's like whatever people are going to say things and it's it's not going away either right like i'm going to continue to make content and that's going to continue to be a problem so it's just like might as well let it go now or stop making content there's there's no in between they're not gonna stop being me and i'm not gonna stop getting mean comments the only thing that i could do is stop making content and like i'm not gonna do that so it's a great healthy attitude i think i think we can all aspire to that so thank you for sharing yeah i'm in therapy so not the brag but um no that's awesome that's very healthy seriously yeah yeah that's great well um i would like to say thank you to the patreons for asking so many wonderful questions this evening if you're interested in joining our patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge serena what's your most popular video on tick tock um that's a good question i had a video on basically talks about hacker one and bug bounties that did really well because i was like hey you find bugs you could get like twenty thousand dollars so everyone's like how do i do that um so probably that one might be but i also did some videos with hack five on like wi-fi pineapple that did really well so i'm not quite sure which one's the best very cool or has the most views or whatever yeah yeah um would you have any advice to women considering a career in tech yeah do it kick ass and just you know like really figure out what you want to do uh there's so many avenues and paths and technologies and if you don't like something stop doing it and try something new you know don't get stuck in something that you don't like because you feel like you have to to do it or you're like a failure there's you can pick up and try a ton of different things and not like it and set it down and not feel bad you know i kind of had a complex when i was in college where i didn't want to fail because i was the only woman in the class and i didn't want that to be like a representation of all women just because i had a failure right and then i didn't want to be like oh look she couldn't do it so now all women can do that like don't put that kind of pressure on yourself because at the end of the day it doesn't matter i mean i talked to like two people i went to college with that were my courses so like none of it really matters um and you know i think another thing there's a lot of pressure on women to have credentials like certifications and degrees because you feel like this is a way to show that you are valid and that you do have the knowledge and it's like some type of like physical proof you can show somebody and that feeling's never gonna go away i mean i was an engineer at cisco and i had people telling me that i didn't know what i was talking about so you could get a ccie and you're still going to have those comments so don't stress yourself out by trying to get all these credentials because i've i did that and i still get all those comments so it doesn't really matter just do what you want to do and don't let all these other people put pressure on you that's probably like my biggest advice that's great advice um for any of our listeners that uh don't follow you uh where can people follow you and your your various social media accounts so i am on take talk as she networks i am on twitter as not she networks because she networks was taken so i'm not she know where he's there um and then i'm also on youtube as she networks as well i don't have any videos yet but i am going to be starting to post more frequently here soon and do some longer form content so if you want to be an early subscriber to my youtube channel it's very much appreciated and those are probably like my main my main platforms fantastic we'll put a link to all of those in the show notes so you can uh subscribe early or jump on and follow her in her various places serena thank you so much for joining us this evening is there any questions that we should have asked you that we didn't get a chance to before we close out no i think this has been great and the conversations have been awesome and thank you for the invitation to be on your podcast thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you next week on another episode of the art of network engineering podcast 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 artofnetworkengineering.com thanks for listening you