this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore teams technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers welcome to the art of network engineering where packets and highly caffeinated people join forces in a never-ending plight of all that is right and just to prove that no the network is not down i'm tim burtino and i'm joined by two of the real hosts of this show along with a very special guest for tonight's episode we have mr no blinky blinky in the virtual flesh himself aj murray dan howdy packet richards and someone who i can't imagine ever gets any sleep because he always seems to be up helping other people tim mcconaughey so uh aj since uh you uh agreed to let me go through that ridiculous intro we'll uh kick it off with you how are things going buddy oh man you nailed it that was a great intro thank you very much i appreciate that uh i am on location recording from my fabulous hotel room at the residence inn in indianapolis uh so good times are being had here i'm almost done my shift i will be out of here on wednesday i'm super excited to get home it's been a long two weeks and is that it of this project or is there another leg of it somewhere oh there's another leg that starts like next tuesday so yeah oh wonderful yeah yeah never ending but you you get back for a little bit though right kind of visible yeah i i'm not scheduled to travel for the next uh two locations so two locations start up next week uh simultaneously happening uh and it's just supposed to be a remote support for me but you know we'll see what actually happens there yeah okay is it so is it like two on two off type thing um that's a long complicated story that i probably can't get into you while we're on recorded media i'm happy i understand so what is there to do where you are right now what kind of fun stuff are you doing like we're drinking fun i guess outside of work uh outside of work i couldn't tell you because i've been working 17 hour days since i got here um there have been like a couple of nights where we actually got out early today was one of them so we went to an arcade bar which was really fun it's called 16-bit there was like tons of arcade games they were all free to play there were some pinball machines we had some beers it was a good time very cool wow that's awesome yeah i miss those i'm a little jealous actually and it's my first experience riding around on the bird scooters i you know we don't have those where i live we got those in nashville man yeah yeah so i love those scooters what's the top speed on those shit a couple of times on those things i i will have to show you guys a picture so um this this particular trip has been like the entire month of may so the first two weeks another couple of guys were out here and then about halfway through i came out and another guy came out and uh during the first two weeks one of the guys here completely ate shit on a bird scooter like i'm not kidding you dude he was like he was riding around and it like apparently the app started to notify him that he was going into an area that he shouldn't or something so he pulled out his phone to check it and he like hit a curb and went you know ass over tea kettle and completely messed up like one side of his face like he broke his orbitals oh wow jesus wait so while he's on the scooter he's pulling the phone and he didn't stop nope nope okay sorry and he looked like the terminator because one of his eyes was like oh my god oh gosh oh yeah yeah hey that's that's one that's one way to get sent home like he didn't he didn't go home he just kept working like he literally showed up to work the next day to like install switches and everyone was like you should see the other guy right yeah after he broke his face and he showed up the next day he showed up the next day wow that's dedication right there man that's dedication yep he he's just lucky because the guy that was with him is like you know he used to be a firefighter trained emt so like when he went down he was in good hands so let's kick it over to you dan did you push any uh big fun fancy aci buttons this week uh just a couple i guess you know just a couple yeah they're all fun and fancy no actually what we did uh we we have successfully stretched the fabric and we we are using uh commvault has a pr or a i guess you can call it a product called livesync and what it does from my understanding a high level understanding of it what it does is when you take snapshots of virtual machines and back those up it will create a virtual machine at like the other location right and so as as you do a backup like on a tuesday night right you do a backup well then when it completes down at your second location it will create a new vm based off of that it'll keep it turned off right but but it'll create a new vm and then every time it does a backup it'll update that vm so basically you have a a cold standby waiting and so what we did is we we turned off the production server right this was all test but we turned off the the main server to to simulate maybe that server crash blue screen you know something happened on it windows updates got it in the middle of the day you know how that is that kind of thing um and then we turned on the one at our off-site location and it only lost like four pings between it so with a continuous ping going so yeah impressive that is impressive i i was pretty happy there was a lot of work that went into doing that so it uh it's pretty nice if you don't mind me asking what is the physical distance between your data centers that you're stretching the fabric i don't know miles wise but it's probably like an hour and a half away from each other okay okay so you're not cross country or anything like that no no they didn't they didn't want to go that far but still it's uh it sucks when you have to go to the off-site location because it's a trip there and a trip back yeah it's just far enough away yeah all right tim what's new in your world thanks for joining us thanks um so let's see what is new in my world i am uh i'm actually transitioning roles at cisco next week actually congratulations i hope thanks no it's a good move at least i hope so i am i'm leaving cpac i'm going to customer experience i'm actually going to be a customer delivery architect so i'll be working with customers on sd-wan designs and implementation and stuff so congrats that's what's new with me thanks i appreciate that very cool congrats yeah that's awesome man good job thank you all right aj what's up with you yeah i think uh i think i was just going to say i think you should take over before i lose you any subscribers no things are things are well uh home's good works good i'm i'm glad to be back here with you guys things are good any fun projects at work going on yeah it's all fun right there's uh there's actually some really good things going actually been able to kind of take a breath we've gotten some some big things knocked out um internet bgp wise um kind of bringing in another uh another entity that we've been integrating um into our system for quite a while so like i'm not a big a lot of big milestones yeah yeah okay i've heard some kind of nightmares but is it if you've got good people and good communication and and can set realistic timelines it it goes well so you mean like good soft skills i do mean that oh okay exactly i was just curious that's an interesting topic yeah we should we should do an episode on that sometime yeah i mean are you guys free like you just want to knock that out or oh man yeah i guess i got a couple minutes okay let's do that but first let's kick it over to mr no blinky blinky for the wins uh hey i i need to get a travel goat so i can play the sound i don't know yeah all right so uh i've got like two weeks worth of wins here so please bear with me uh alex passed the ccna congratulations alex nice excellent uh service type framed has passed the microsoft az 900 so that's the uh what the azure fundamentals exam i'm pretty sure okay oh okay very nice yeah cool very cool congratulations uh i i'm guessing uh got a promotion to a network security engineering physician so congratulations mark a lot wow uh in the past couple weeks the a1 podcast we have surpassed 70 000 downloads all right very cool thank you very much everybody out there listening downloading couldn't do it without you uh command steve 22 has accepted an offer for another network security engineer position so congratulations command steve andre our tech sergeant in the air force passed his gcia certification of congratulations that was that one was really cool for me because we all kind of got to see that the whole preparation to it everything he was doing all his notes he was building and the help he was getting from other people so that was really cool to kind of see that from start to finish so awesome andre very cool good job uh i don't want to brag but i'm on the list here this week fellas last weekend i replaced two 6509s with 29606's i had zero issues and that included a 23 000 lines worth of acl oh my gosh i want to talk about that for a second because when you brought that up you kind of made it sound like that it was some somewhat brought to you last minute that it was going to have to be done and it was just kind of like a here we got to get this done you need to do it by tomorrow was that true or not if you have a little more lead time okay so with the project that we're doing we're replacing a ton of switches so it's like i don't know 3 400 switches it's at a main site facility here and then there's a bunch of like satellite surrounding offices so we're doing all the access layer stuff at the main site the main campus we're replacing the data center stuff with nexus and we're replacing the cores while the core is already replaced i arrived on thursday before last and one engineer had kind of started the bonework uh the framework of the core upgrade but he was too busy supporting our installation team subcontractor of ours that had some junior installers we'll say uh and so unfortunately he didn't get enough of a chance to dedicate his time to fully preparing the core configuration so i spent most of friday doing a port map preparing and you know finishing it was he unfortunately did not get all that started so i wrote the config did the port map of all the old ports to the new ports uh did the software upgrade on the 9606's configured stack wise put everything on there except for that 23 000 line beast of acls i did that the following morning just before deployment to make sure that i captured the latest and greatest updates from it and then uh we went ahead and did the course swap um there was a ton of port channels going out to all of their switch closets so before i left on saturday i made sure at least one leg and each port channel was working we had to replace a lot of fiber because they have a lot of 10 gig and the 10 gig on the 6500 was using some much older sfp obviously it was usually like you know sc to lcs or it was sc to st at the patch panel so we had to change it from uh to st to lc and so um we had to roll a lot of fibers to make it all work yeah uh and so before we left on saturday we made sure at least one leg of all the port channels was working and then we came back on sunday and kind of finished up finesse config and made sure everything was working so um it was a not-so-insignificant replacement um and monday morning we had no issues no complaints and you know pretty pretty happy with that that's incredible you're a wizard you're a wizard i love those 9606s man those those are my favorites oh i was going to say those 96 hundreds are great switches yeah they really stumbled with the 6800s but the they really redeemed themselves with the cat 9ks i i yeah i love those switches yeah so yeah i mean we've been doing uh 9600s 9500s and the 9300s and and like the the top end 9300 with the 5 gig poe oh yeah i love those switches yeah so that the challenge with the 23 000 line hcl is they had to wait until an upgrade came out i think it's like some flavor of 17.4 so you can manually adjust the tcam so when you're not using like tcam for like qos or something you can allocate it to do the acl processing otherwise it just cripples the box so is that an sdm template do they not have i haven't followed it was that an sdm template do they don't have that available on the on the 9k or yeah it's like there are sdm templates but there wasn't one that suited you know the allocation for acl processing so yeah yeah 23 000 lines yeah that's a hell of a lot of uh tcam to program yeah yeah how did you what did you use to make sure that all those were there like when you put them into the new one did you just like count lines or did you i was going to ask what the migration process was yeah there's a bunch of revalidation commands that we run you know we want to see the i uh the routing table you know routing uh relationships and so forth so you know i do a show run i copy it for i copy the acl out of the show run into its own text document upload that via usb to the 9606 you know copy acl dot text to running uh and then i do a show run and then i compare in my uh in visual studio code i compare the two and it was like long for line exact i was like okay a lot of trust there right yeah yep it worked it worked that's that's that's how you gotta do it with those really big acls yeah that's crazy i love that copy copy text file to run oh man oh it's great it's merging you merge it with running config yeah yeah one time i had to do a cpoc with like 4 000 vlan interfaces i used the python script to create them and then of course obviously i didn't copy and paste that in right i did the same thing copied to a text file and then copy to the run config it's great i love it where did where did you learn that trick at because i i've never heard of doing that before now i've never copied thousands and thousands of acl lines either so neither have i um you know what i actually saw david uh he wrote a blog article for us and he actually talked about doing that how you do the merge like a lot of people you know you didn't know that you could do that you just copy a text file yeah you don't have to copy it off the usb you can copy it to flash if you want to or you can just do it directly from the usb uh but you just copy text text file i i think text file for the encoding works best if you do any other type of file sometimes the encoding can screw up which gets imported in so that's just a straight up okay yep um if there was a dock or something i've done it for years and i don't remember where i learned it either it's been that long i think there's a dock somewhere it it's not or some tribal knowledge stuff i picked up along the way maybe but yeah yeah no that's great so can you see it ftp it doesn't matter you know just get the file onto the box and then you copy file to running what was the gear that you were doing a c-pack of that that had 4 000 or thousands of svis it was a 9 500 actually okay it was a it was a 9 500. and it was a scale test on how many ospf routes we could inject it was no no no ospf this was a bgp test um we did both but this particular one was for bgp yeah so it was just a scale test you do a lot of scale testing in cpac and so that means you have to create huge amounts of everything and and so like i said i wrote a python script to spit out 4 000 spi's uh in that respect but yeah no it's a great trick you guys know about the config the config archive revert stuff too right where you can kind of get the commit config thing you guys know that one as another one everybody nobody seems to know yeah i think that was actually a uh so when i got the ccna for the second time in 2018 i think that was actually on the uh topics on the exam topic was that so yeah i do remember that can you briefly briefly just go over that real quick what does that do yeah so so you turn on config archive so just i think it's just archive or or something on the uh cli and what it does is it lets you save your basically your your candidate config if you will it set well the base thing it does is let you save like archive the config but it also turns on the feature i was talking about is it turns on the ability to do a revert timer so you can do like config timer you can do like config terminal revert you know 10 or five or how many minutes you want it to wait and if you have archive on if you say you know fat finger an ip address or ship down interface you lose the box it automatically rolls back to config and without having to reboot so you don't have to do reloading five or any of that yeah that's a good one i'll find the link to you i'll find the link for you guys for those the way the way i've done that is do the uh cause there's like a way that you can do like a restart or reboot within a certain amount of time yeah reloading type yeah and so i've done i've done that in the past just in case uh if it if i jax a lot of people have i like that but this way you don't have to reboot the box it just rolls back the config to the last good config if you don't fit if you don't commit basically because you lost the box it'll roll back to its last the last before you went in the config mode it rolls back to that config i guess okay sounds good that's cool i knew about archive but i didn't know about that part of our crime that's really cool oh yeah let me i'll find the link for you guys i'll i'll send it to you and you can like put it on with the show notes or whatever for everybody's interested yeah it's a great it's a great little thing to save you a lot of time waiting for a reload like two in the morning yeah so well speaking of show yeah i digress a little because we have more wins to go through okay all right yeah let's let's all right so i'm sorry no no no no this is great this is pretty we'll definitely add that stuff to this show next um so gerv uh jerv as they go by in the discord pass the security plus uh jonathan congratulations jonathan graduated with his bs and electrical engineering that's bachelor of science not the other days andy not not our andy uh another andy passed his probation network at least we presume it's probation at work our buddy robin canelo completed his itil version four our very own dan audi packet finished an aci multi-site deployment in the last couple of weeks congratulations dan uh and last but not least cisco boy 906 reported that they passed their ccna just today congratulations cisco boy there we go that is awesome lots of wing yeah didn't he get like a did he say he got like a 908 or something like that on it yeah yeah or something yeah yeah all right wins all around nice awesome still gonna name the goat we got the poll going i gotta go back and check for some good answers oh yeah that's true yeah yeah we'll finish all right so tonight tim what are we talking about tonight we are talking about soft skills which i i cringe a little bit when i say that i don't know about you guys but i i'm not a fan of that term at all i i'm not 100 sure why i think part of it is just the way it it sounds makes it uh not sound as important as the what i'll call hard technical skills that that you can have and i what i think the issue there is is that us as as network engineers as i.t professionals we we just get it pushed into us that we got to be the smartest people in the room we got to know everything from a technical perspective but i think sometimes it's easy to neglect the the quote soft skills and i think the reason why i don't like that is because because you hear soft you think maybe it's not as important which i think it's just the opposite i think you have to be able to effectively communicate just be an all-around nice person and handle yourself well in adverse situations so what i kind of wanted to talk about first is what your guys's uh opinion of soft skills are and it was no accident that we brought in tim uh because he wrote a really good article a while back uh giving advice for network engineers and a lot of that is is around what i'll call these soft skills so tim do you want to kick it off and give your kind of definition of what soft skills are yeah sure i think the reason a lot of us cringe uh when we say the word soft skills is that there's a lot of baggage i think that we've all you know associated with the with the word right it's very it's a very hr-ish kind of term or like uh you know what i mean and you know tell me if you think i'm wrong right but i feel like the the term soft skills carries a lot of baggage with it that's not like pleasant um i guess maybe more and and more clinically i guess uh the new the new uh term du jour darling is uh what emotional intelligence you guys hear that hearing that one a lot yeah versus iq you guys are hearing that one right so that's like the terms is your oh okay um they've been they've been kicking that one around within cisco for a while uh but like emotional i don't know if it's emotional quotient or whatever but it's like eq versus iq uh type of thing but yeah i mean it's all comes it all boils down to the same thing which is your ability to communicate uh to collaborate to kind of deal with other people in a way that is professional and also gets the job done whatever that job that needs to be uh done right so i think that's the basics of soft skills is basically everything that's not everything that has to do with other people or at least with communicating or just dealing with other people in the workplace i guess really outside the workplace too but i guess that's where i'd take a first stab at the at the definition so how do you how do you teach or how do you learn soft skills and is that even possible how do you teach soft skills so this is interesting right this is an interesting question and and i'm curious to see what you guys think as well um but what i find is and and we covered this a little bit in my uh when i when i was here doing the talk about the technical interviews um but the soft skills thing is sorry something just randomly popped up my screen i wasn't expecting um but the soft skills thing is kind of uh it's kind of important right so how do you teach someone soft skills when we're talking about like technical interviews we're saying we're we're doing interviews of a technical nature to kind of decide okay can this person do the job technically but a lot of times it seems like we're more interested in is the culture fit right and you know correct me if i'm wrong for those of you guys who've sat on interviews culture fit is like something that's really hard to teach someone versus say something technical like we can teach you how ospf works right but it's kind of hard to teach you how to have basic communication skills so so when you when you say how do you teach someone that i don't i mean i i'm not 100 sure like you know we have these hr uh things in it within cisco these uh what do they call it cisco mindset is what they call it and they're like little workshops over the weeks where you work with you know some uh and it's like a class right like a workshop class it's not it's not one-on-one but they intend they try to teach you things like meditation or like how to you know collaboration workplace communication and uh so i'm not saying it's impossible to teach someone soft skills but it definitely is is difficult because if you think about it you're kind of like fighting against like if somebody doesn't have soft skills right you say somebody's very awkward or or is hard at communicating like how do you teach them because teaching them is communicating so it's it's a little bit of being awkward man before the horse right um yeah so what do you guys think yeah no so for me i i feel like in my experience so far the best way that i've learned how to improve my soft skills are just by jumping in and doing things like getting experience basically like you know sometimes i try to be funny and i answer an email the wrong way and it's like you know what looking back on that that probably wasn't a good idea so the next time that i'm like hey i want to be i want to be snarky or something like that i'm like you know what remember how i felt that last time i probably shouldn't put that in there go ahead and backspace that out and you know don't do that that kind of thing or like jumping on the podcast here like i you know we were joking off offline before we jumped on here that you know i'm not real quick on my feet about you know coming up with some kind of idea or how to respond to something just right away well being on this podcast has helped me with that right like i still don't think i'm the greatest editor i'm nowhere near good but uh forcing myself to be in this situation has helped me you know develop that a little bit more i guess yeah thinking on your feet being able to answer questions quickly somewhat accurately or to the best of your ability or whatever yeah right i will say dan i i have noticed an improvement or at least a change right since since we first started this podcast now and not not just you but particularly you you know when i listen to the conversations from the early days versus today there's there's a remarkable difference for all of us and i think that's a combination of doing this a bunch of times getting to know each other better and so on and so forth it's improving and working those soft skills to be able to pull off what we're doing so yeah well appreciate it i'm gonna i'm gonna second that because as what i've really enjoyed as the as the show has gone on is that episode by episode we hear a little bit more and a little bit more from dan dan's talk you're communicating dan you're practicing your software yeah when i first started on here i was very like super quiet and like my heart was always pumping because i was like what if i say something dumb you know or and and just exactly what you guys are saying like as i've done it more i feel more comfortable when we hit that record button so uh i think the same thing kind of translates over into into your soft skills right like you just got to get out there and start working on stuff and and i mean well i think step one is to realize like hey if you're an awkward person like you kind of have to realize that right like yeah yeah so i will say that there was a number of times in the beginning where like you would record and you'd be kind of quiet and then as soon as we stopped recording you're like oh hey by the way yeah this is an amazing story you're like damn do that on the podcast yeah i apologize i was learning much better one thing i did want to ask you dan was do you think it's less difficult or more difficult from a communication and respect standpoint working in a smaller environment a smaller team i think i don't know because i guess i don't really know how to compare it to a larger team right uh but but i feel like i feel like we're more i would assume personable maybe because you know we sit right next to each other all day long kind of thing and then if you're communicating to someone else who's like maybe on the development team or something like that i mean i could you know within 20 steps i could probably get to their desk kind of thing so so i feel i feel like yeah you're not going to say something uh like you would on the internet right like yeah there's gonna be some weight to that whatever you say i agree it's that uh it's that small town concept i think in that you you are around these people in a close proximity every day you want to maintain a healthy relationship right yeah and i'm in the same boat i've been in in smaller teams my entire career so far so i think i'd like to hear from from tim and aj a little bit more as you guys have worked in larger teams larger environments um what's that like yeah i so i i mean but for me soft skills is second to none like i work in a very customer focused position right now and if i can't you know communicate to the customer either what the issue is what the goal of the project is or you know uh work with them and pull out the information i need in order to be successful in the project like i you know then i'm just not going to be successful i've held other positions as an itunes manager so communicating the technical goals of the project and linking those to the business needs or you know doing the reverse right like if the business needs something then how do we translate that to the technical uh answer to the solution or whatever and so the soft skills are really you've got to have them if you don't have them you're just you know i'm not saying you're not going to be successful you're just not going to be as successful if you don't have those technical skills um and now as a team lead there's there's a lot more of that going on right like so i have an engineer who great engineer just not very confident in their abilities and you know he feels bad because if he's doing a project he feels like it's going to take like twice as long three times as long for him to accomplish it versus having me or another senior engineer do it it's just like well if if we're if we're doing it all the time then you're never gonna become you know a senior engineer if you don't get that experience you just got to be confident what you know if you have questions ask you know don't just go with it if you're not sure because nobody wants to see anybody fail uh and we'll never let anybody we'll never let like a teammate fall kind of thing but just having the right soft skills to be confident in your knowledge ask questions when appropriate and um you know execute after that that that's helpful because uh i you know in the past thinking about different where if i was to change jobs or something like that like i i felt basically like that i was like what if i in the slowdown coming into a new team or you know whatever the case may be so that's nice to hear that what about you tim i've worked uh i've worked in it in a small enterprise and by small enterprise i don't mean that the enterprise itself was small i guess to be more accurate to say that um it was a very small team so there were three engineers and a network manager and and the manager was um was a network engineer that was promoted to manager and we were you know covering a global network but it was of course very small right that was a very extremely small team and uh we sat you know right next to the sysadmins and there were like three or four of them so it was very everything was very tight and tightly knit uh but i think company culture and like location culture or whatever like just the culture of the area you're in or the culture of the company that you're in uh play is a large part of that whole thing as well like like the the the softs not just the quote-unquote soft skills but just like how teams interact how people interact generally i guess um and i think you see it more on small teams like the like you know because it's a smaller team everything's much more impactful versus somewhere like cisco where you know i i talk to people all the time internally uh that i might never speak to again or i might see you know every tuesday even people on my team before covid um happened i you know had people on my team that i never saw in in you know real life so it was a different in that respect you know it was the way you communicate also feeds a lot you know into the culture of of it the company culture and the way you communicate so there you you communicate more with you know say uh chat or webex teams in our case right but and so the way you communicate is also a part of how your soft skills show up right so if you sit right next to somebody and you guys are both engineers and you know you talk that's a different form of communication than say me and a teammate who is across the country and we're chatting on a webex team or doing a webex or something like that right like so i think that figures into it so i guess that's what i would say as far as the difference i would say it relies more on how you interact with your team and part of that is geographical in some way and some of those culture company culture and location culture okay yeah i do i do think that uh communicating often is important and i think it can easily come off as you know maybe you think you're talking too much which you know you can obviously say too much sometimes but i think that if you're communicating your team especially in a dispersed environment just giving updates on what you're doing and especially if things can impact the team i think is important an example is is we recently had a maintenance window and and we just by chance you know we we like to let the operation center know when we're doing things just in case you know bad things happen and they start getting a lot of phone calls so we just i don't even think it was a phone call i think we just sent a uh an instant message to to someone that was working on the operations center the night we were doing our maintenance uh just saying hey we've got this change going on we're getting started we ended up getting an email from like the manager director over the operations center the next day saying that whoever was working that night absolutely loved that they loved being talked to i think it's that whole mentality of do something with people instead of to them i think they they you know respond to that a lot better so i i just think you know communicating effectively and communicating often i think is is a really important soft skill to have yeah yeah that's nice letting all the teams that might have to suffer from any mishaps right let them know so as much as i don't want to talk about this i want to shift gears a little bit to from communication and respect and all that good stuff to uh handling yourself in in an adverse situation so you're sitting there at your desk you're working along and all of a sudden you can't access anything in the data center anymore and all of a sudden you know pre-covered you kind of look around and people start poking their heads up over the cubes because they can't get to anything either and they're looking at you because you're the network guy and then all of a sudden your boss comes over and says hey we got to get on this conference bridge um yeah do you guys have any any tips around that so you get on that conference bridge everybody's kind of virtually looking over your shoulder how do you handle those kind of situations so so for me personally when that did happen to me uh i skipped the conference bridge and i ran to the data center with my uh with my cable you know my console cable and i fixed what i broke but you were a hero for fixing it so quickly yeah right they did thank me later and i was like well i screwed it up so they don't need to know that you fixed it yeah so for me uh i used to do the emergency services work uh and primarily as a radio operator and one of the best pieces of advice that i ever got from another radio operator was to remain calm because the second that you know you get elevated that you get excited even if it's just in your voice that kind of rubs off and other people can get excited or you know alert or whatever the case may be so you know get getting stressed out or worried or elevating yourself in some way during an emergency situation even if it's just like a network down kind of situation that will cloud your judgment create some poor choices and it just doesn't help the situation so you know just breathing and you know thinking about your training thinking about what you know you know go through your verification commands you know look for what you want to see if you don't see something that you would normally see you know kind of pick that stuff out um just remain calm is kind of the biggest takeaway there yeah i'll add to that um that i think if you are asked to be on a call uh i think you need to find a balance because you're you're on that call so you feel like you need to be communicating but you're also trying to you're the technical person so you're trying to fix the issue so right i think you really need to find that balance in that us as technical people will get in our own heads and we'll say i gotta be heads down i gotta figure out what's going on nobody bother me but there are management styles and culture where they want to get when those kind of things happen they want to get all the smart people on the call they want to get them talking to each other so what i think is is really important and what middle and upper level management like to see is they want you to be troubleshooting and then communicating as you troubleshoot giving updates often because the last thing uh management wants to to hear when they get on a conference bridge for a network down issue is silence they want to know what's going on because they've got the business coming after them trying to figure out what's going on and i think that really diffuses the situation to even if it's just you communicating what you're doing if you're just kind of talking out loud as long as you're coherent not every other word's a curse word um i think if you just kind of walk through what you're doing and especially if you've got teammates on the phone that you're bouncing things off of or teammates and adjacent teams sysadmins what have you just just communicate because you don't know if something that you may say might be a trigger word to somebody else that says oh i need to go check this you know so it's just it's all back to communication yeah so so how would you how would you handle that then would you jump on that bridge or how do you how do you have that fine line like how do you handle that situation um i in in my experience that decision is handled for you okay or you're told whether or not you're going to be on that call but i mean even if even if you aren't um even if you're given that option collaboration is a beautiful thing can be a beautiful thing if if people are really working together not pointing fingers i think that's a snippet from uh tim's advice article yeah um and and just working together and talking and still being able to troubleshoot i i think it's it's important and effective yeah so one thing too uh since like the whole covet thing we've been using you know like microsoft teams a lot right and so when things have been happening like a an outage or some kind of problem comes up right uh one thing that i've noticed in increase at my location is uh people jumping in on like a big group conversation on those team chats right and that's actually i think that's helpful right because then you don't have the audio of people talking and yada yada oh and also a good little tip is to go ahead and mute that so while you're digging into something you don't constantly hear bloop bloop you know all the little notifications coming up but uh but when you when you find something then you can go straight to your chat type it in there like hey i found this right here i'm looking i'm i'm still digging right and i i i feel like that's a pretty good one but yeah collaboration definitely yeah i definitely feel like uh so i mean i i devoted several of my 10 rules to what to base more or less what to do when shit hits the fan um you know and and the one you mentioned right when there's a fire be the firefighter don't be the police but uh because i worked at a place that was extremely punitive the leadership was very punitive with critical incidents like you know what i mean like you may or may not have ever you know we know dan's only worked one place so we don't swim but for everybody else um you know if you've ever worked at a place where when there is a critical incident you know the leadership is more interested in figuring out who is responsible than how you know not to let it happen again if you know what i'm talking about yep so that tends to engender a culture where the problem where we're not working together to fix the problem working together to clear our names so that's why i said like be the firefighter not the police or or not the the suspect right trying to clear yourself and what you said about collaboration is exactly true whether you do it in a chat whether you do it on a bridge uh and by the way when when you get on the bridge and and you know everybody's yelling at you for updates every five seconds you're just trying to you're like i literally have no update i'm sitting here watching the cli fly by uh what i'll do in that situation is say like i'll say exactly what i'm working on like i'm right now logging into this router i'm looking for this output i'll advise i expect this to take three minutes i'll advise i'll be back and you know i'll advise as soon as i have that result or within three minutes like that's the as long as you set expectations yeah on those kind of calls about when you will communicate you can actually still go heads down but you have to be communicating the expectation of when you will be communicating if you will that that's a good tip i don't really think about that but yeah i like that yeah yeah i've noticed that too in and when you get uh management involved on those calls i think it's it's much easier to communicate expectations in chunks of time than um even more so than explaining exactly what the issue is and exactly what you're right uh especially what it is yeah exactly but they they it's easy i think for them to be able to communicate to the business hey this is high level what we're working on and we'll have an update in x amount of minutes um i think is huge and it's much more important than just being silent yeah being proactive is a lot better than being reactive i mean you'll if you're new to a team it's probably harder but you know once you've been in a company or on a team for a while you'll get a feel for like okay you know this person is going to be asking for an update on this and so just even if it seems nonsensical to you to just kind of shout that stuff out on the bridge and then you know like like tim said setting the expectation well i have to go dig into this i need to be heads down for five minutes i'll come back as soon as i have the answer or within the next five minutes or so you know and give yourself the space like if people understand like hey he's gonna step away to go dig into the issue let's let him do that and then he'll come back with you know some result yeah yeah and like it or not you as the technical person uh troubleshooting the issue especially if you're on one of those big conference bridges your demeanor is gonna set the tone for how that that troubleshoot is gonna go yeah and if you're if you're remaining calm yeah if you're remaining calm and you're giving updates once that gets resolved you're gonna look much more like the hero than the goat in my opinion oh sorry hang on not in the word this is like it's like pee-wee's playhouse whenever we say the magic words yeah and i i think also uh look at it from a perspective of of a manager or you know whoever's over this project or or you know whatever the system might be uh if you are coming back and you're saying hey i'm to i got you something i'll have you something in like five minutes right uh and you deliver on that then i i see that benefiting you in the sense of hey management knows what what to expect of you so like if you're if you're delivering you you know your updates and hey we i we see the problem now we should have it fixed in like 15 minutes or something like that you know and then you deliver that i i think that just makes you look better all around right there like uh it everybody understands where the where the the cadence is right and you're building trust as well is it just me or does the clock always tick faster like while you're trying to oh yeah for sure it definitely does like i just noticed that like whenever i want to give an estimate i do some quick math in my head because i i will tell the person that it's going to take me double the time that i think it's going to because it always takes me at least one and a half times longer than i think it's going to yep so i give myself a little bit of a buffer there to meet my own deadlines always give yourself a buffer yeah that's what i do it's crazy like when you're under the gun with something like you you'll you'll be working away you're like oh it's already been an hour yeah so when i do our maintenance windows if i know that there's going to be like five minutes of downtime i always put like an hour on there just so that i get that i got a buffer on there just in case you know absolutely true the you know something that you know the thing of that is dan is that you know if you're communicating that to the business or to the help desk the operations center you know they're not in your head they don't have your skill set they don't know that it should take only five minutes so if you tell them an hour and it ends up you know you think it's five minutes and ends up taking a half an hour there's no harm done right as long as you still come out ahead communicated the expectation and met it yeah i mean they're not gonna know so yeah i always give myself plenty of cushion because i've learned over the years uh if something's gonna happen it's gonna happen like just go ahead it'll be very quick yeah yeah so yeah that's true no absolutely it's all about expectation right we talk about soft skills and really what we're talking about uh at a very basic level at a professional level between you know as part of that communication is communicating our expectations to ourselves you know to each other to the business just what can we expect from other people at our workplace and and i feel that's a big part of of soft skills in general right so there's two more things that i want to cover the first one is it's kind of the the first set of big words on your article tim and it's credibility is the most important thing you possess can you can you dive into that yeah absolutely so here's the thing um obviously the words speak for themselves on that right but what i mean is that so a lot of people are like you're like okay we'll name the one thing that you know is most important is it ambition you know is it knowing everything is it your ability to connect with other people like those things you can you can learn something you can get more connections you can get more recognition you get more fame all those things are a byproduct basically but your credibility meaning you know the trust that people extend to you and your ability to deliver on that trust and and i don't mean like you know this outage thing we're talking about i mean in general uh that's a thing that it's kind of a one-use item right like like if you lie like let's say let's say you know dan you said before you caused an outage and you you ran to the data center to fix it well you know if you had instead elected to you know log out of the log out and and you know go home or something and like pretended that wasn't you um you know obviously at some point somebody's gonna figure out that that happened or somebody or you're you know somebody's gonna know that that happened and your credibility's shot right like you can't even if even if you don't get fired even if you keep working there right nobody's going to trust you because you lied about it right like your credibility at its basic core anywhere you go anything you do within this industry or any industry right your credibility is like the one it's almost like i don't mean crass but it's almost like your virginity right like it's it's like it's a one day it's a one-use item right uh you know and once you've lost it it's gone and this industry is too small to waste your credibility on on anything really i can't think of a single thing that i would wait every time i've ever caused an outage and i have it of course right i've caused many i'm sure like everybody else um the one thing that i made sure always happened was that i owned it no matter how and if you get fired if it's so bad that you get fired you know what you got fired right but if you try to hide it what's that you may have deserved it if you got fired yeah yeah yeah i mean like if you get fired if you whatever whatever it is right like you still got to own it because you're going to get found out it's like your parents used to say right like if you lie you're only gonna make it worse well i mean we know this is true right because i know i i've known people in the past that you know they've they've broken crap and they've lied about it and everybody knew they were lying about it and like so you can never they just blew it right like they had no if you break something you have the opportunity to grow from that and to move on and whatever if you lie about it and you and everybody knows you lied about it you're there's no coming back from that so that's that's what i mean when i talk about credibility being your like one and only most important asset and see that right there is the whole reason why i stayed and didn't go home though all of these systems have logs you usually can't say you did one thing if you actually did something else and point in case i i was on call one weekend and somebody else was doing updates to some servers and they shut down a server rather than restart the server and then they called me and they're like i don't know what happened i did some updates and restarted it and now we'll come back and so i'm like okay i'll go in and check it out server's off power back on boots are fine check the logs they shut it down dude you're killing me yep yeah yeah that should be another soft skill don't mess with the on-call guys yeah or at least you know be ready to send them some some form of uh buy them a beer or something there you go and make them go into the office if i make somebody go to the office and it's my mistake and i would and i for some reason can't go in the office and solve my own problem then yeah i definitely make sure to take care of that person in some way that the next time i can right yeah send him a coffee or a gift card or something like that for some coffee yeah whatever buy a beer like him or her be or whoever that is right happens less now at cisco knock on wood right but uh because that doesn't really happen but yeah definitely when i was an enterprise engineer so the last thing i wanted to touch on is kind of around uh the concept of mentorship so if you're lucky enough to be a part of a team whether it be large or small one of the benefits is that you you can lean on people and you know when you join a team when you're brand new it can be scary you may not be the most uh seasoned engineer maybe you are but it's a new environment so i kind of want to direct this at aj because aj you've been in management positions leadership positions and highly technical positions at what point do you decide you're going to kind of mentor somebody or help somebody out or are you supposed to wait for management to tell you hey you need to go in there and help this person what's your mindset so i i think everyone's answer to this question might be a little bit different but for me personally i just like to help people and so i don't have to be your manager to help you you don't have to be a peer a direct peer for me to help you if i see that you know if i have knowledge that i feel like you should know then i'm going to take the time to share that with you because that's that's only going to help both of us right so um i i have worked as a manager and and mentor people uh there was a point where i have ever met toward our buddy taylor i gave him some some tips on some soft skills kind of stuff in the past when he was working for me as an intern uh now he gives me tips uh because he's way smarter than i am and on most things uh i i have you know like i was talking about earlier i have a junior engineer that works with me and i spend time mentoring him uh every once in a while just because i i want to see people be successful i want to see people grow kind of things so you know it mentoring does not come with any sort of territory uh so you know like i said if you see somebody that could use the knowledge then then give them that knowledge you know it's only gonna help you both grow yeah i'll kick that to you dan because i think over the last couple years you you guys have actually had some some newer people come in how have you handled that so i think definitely what aj said you know just wanting to help other people but i also look at it as a from i guess more business mindset i don't know but you know you want you want people on your team that aren't going to run into a bunch of issues right you want you want your team to grow you want your team to be um successful right you know you don't want someone going in there and then jacking up your core switches and then guess what now i got to go in too because i've got to fix whatever they broke um you you want some of that as well right like because a well-rounded team is always going to do better they're they're going to have the more successful they're going to they're the ones that are gonna have the 23 000 acl lines you know and and nothing happened on monday morning that kind of thing so that's a good point so i think i think there's some of that in there too right because i think you know i think some people might you know kind of going back to what tim said about uh pointing fingers and stuff like that like it let's say on my team if one of my guys uh if they if they screwed something up and it broke it and i was just like you know what they broke it guess what they don't have to fix it that's not a very that's not a team effort right you know and and so i want to make sure that they don't walk into something that i especially if i saw it coming right uh like oh that's gonna screw it up right there you know i'm gonna stop and be like hey look i don't think that's the way to do this right because of this and this and this you know whatever facts i might have kind of thing so i don't know i'm kind of rambling now but i i think it makes a better team right if you are mentoring somebody on your team i feel like that only ups your team as a whole well and i like one thing that you brought up there and it was something that i don't necessarily think about when i'm working with the team and and trying to help them out i'm thinking it solely from the aspect of just trying to help somebody and help us as a team but you brought up the aspect of think about it business-minded right right what's it there for they're there to support the business so taking that to that next level i really like that and that if i help them they're going to be able to better serve the business the business is better off altogether i re i really like that that was cool so i did say that was the last thing but i do want to put tim on the spot one more time put me on the spot yeah tim on the spot and we are uh we're we're kind of molding our this episode and our interview episode together so with the amount of interviews that you've done um both technical and probably non-technical if you have two applicants that come in for interviews and one is is incredibly technical incredibly smart but a little rough around the edges and you've got another person that comes in that that isn't as senior they could still do the job they can still learn they have the the will to learn but they're nice they can communicate well they're respectful which one do you lean toward i mean obviously there's a lot of factors there right i couldn't easily say oh well i take this over this right it depends on how rough around the edges when i'm thinking about interviews or you know like what would i want to work on a team with this person i think one thing i go to there's a few things i look for uh one is the ability to communicate uh two is the obviously the drive to learn is is extremely important right um if they come in with every skill known in the book i mean that's cool right like i mean obviously it's great for everybody if they can just sit down and immediately start uh you know doing work obviously so so that that's helpful too but if it was you know say you have this dichotomy where you have one person who is technically good but awkward or difficult to communicate or something like that and then you have someone who is not as technically savvy but is a great communicator and you know is easier eager to learn and can be taught and um will just in generally work better with in a team setting i i think i would take the person who would work better in the team every time because i can teach someone how to be technical it's much harder to teach someone how to be social and how to have good communication skills because of you know kind of what we touched on a little bit earlier right where it's it's hard to teach someone who can't communicate how to communicate right and and i'm personally not probably a great teacher of that sort of thing i i don't know i i've never been good at that i don't know i'm not like i don't i've never i've never seen myself as any kind of a mentor anyway because i like i struggle with imposter syndrome so it's really hard for me to decide to be anyone's mentor but at the same time it's like again if i have to teach somebody one thing or the other i think it would be a lot easier to teach them the technical stuff than it would be to teach them say how to communicate and how to be a member of a team and i think that yeah that's actually a really good point to go back to your original uh statement uh tim is you you're talking about you don't like the term uh soft skills right because it makes it seem like less and then you have an answer like that right there where hey if this person's more of a teammate more of a good communicator and stuff we can teach them the technical stuff so therefore the soft skills is what trumps his his interview there you know or trump's the other candidate right uh so yeah that's that's pretty neat yeah one one take that i like about what you said tim was you've got to think about it uh from the standpoint of is this somebody that i can work with on a daily basis and is this somebody who's going to be able to play well with others to be able to contribute to the business so yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah i mean i know from personal experience when we were doing our interviews through uh through network engineers i pretty much passed on a person because i thought they were grumpy in the interview and i was like and that's exactly what i went back to i was like you know do i think they could do the job technically i absolutely i thought they could do the job technically but just the way that their demeanor was and and i don't know it just i i was like do i want that on my team though and do i want to work with this every day and i i didn't and so i i passed on him am i going to be able to say howdy to this guy every day yeah exactly is he going to say howdy back to me you know i mean we uh at my old job as an enterprise engineer we got over we we interviewed someone exactly in that situation where the guy was surly he was just generally you know like you'd ask him like so some softball not even a technical question like what do you do for fun or something and his answer was like stuff like like like in an interview like we were trying to like interview this dude he was terrible he had a he had a ccie but he was like really really surly and grumpy and just non-social in any way and we told and you know they're like hey what's your feedback and we're like no um and then we got overridden by someone who was like oh but we can get a ccie in here for cheap and i'm thinking like well there's a reason you're getting them for cheap but point is the guy he was not a team player in any way he was regularly butted heads with everybody myself included i mean like really bad um like i'm trying to think i want to give a very specific example without like running out the clock here but you know just as an example this is a guy where we took the technical over the the personality and uh we were talking about acs or something and it was my first exposure to acs and i was saying hey i think you know we need to there's a button at the bottom of all of your rules and if you check the box it says basically allow default allow if if nothing else matches right and we were having troubleshooting vpn problems or whatever and she was over my shoulder watching me troubleshoot and i was like oh i didn't know like this this box was here any or i didn't know how to do this and he's like you can make it do whatever you want you can make it say tim is a dumb ass if you want i had just met this guy oh wow like within the that was the first week he was working like that was the first week he was working and i'd i'd probably said like 20 words to the guy in the meantime between that and him saying this to me and i just i pushed away that from the keyboard and i got up and i left and i just i i had to i had to walk away for a minute right right that's what i'm talking about right that's i'm like the perfect poster child what i'm talking about so anyway yeah which is another which is another soft skill right knowing when you need to take a break and need to decompress for a second without saying things that you may really want to say right in that moment yeah how to handle yeah situations and whatnot yeah yeah so so i got a quick question for from the table then is soft skills something that can be taught again wait which ten for for everybody you know whoever's got it oh for everybody so do you are you asking if soft skills can be taught yeah right like can you take that surly engineer and and then you know provide them the feedback for training whatever to make them into you know somebody that that has the best of both worlds right yeah i mean i i certainly think that you know maybe a manager could have stepped in on something like that if if a manager even saw that interaction and be like look you know how do you think that makes him feel you know how how do you make that how do you think uh that makes tim feel and and maybe someone can learn from that right i i don't think just because you know you're an a-hole like in that scenario doesn't mean you can't come back from that uh sure i definitely think it's a dent in your record right you know but maybe maybe maybe he doesn't want to yeah yeah i i was just going to say that i think it depends on the per the person and just like technical skills uh i think soft skills are the same you you have to have the will to learn that i think somebody can just be sharp as attack technically but they have no desire to uh to be personable now they can learn that and they can know how to be personable but if they don't want to they don't want to right yeah so so what do you do just get rid of them like get them off the team that kind of thing i think it's like any skill right like if you kept crashing the network every tuesday right you you would obviously take steps to to rectify that you know at professionally as part of the the process right um if somebody just is not getting along with the team and and everybody and just is not making the effort i think i would treat that failure as any other failure that i you know you'd expect management to deal with right right exactly well does anybody else have any uh anything to kind of tie this off any last thoughts around soft skills wha what's our new name rubber skills rubber skills semi tough skills i i don't know i i just i don't like the word i don't like the phrase yeah i like socials i've always liked calling them social skills yeah absolutely but i think there are some other soft skills that might not you know go with social exactly like i think what is it that's fair isn't like creative thinking isn't that kind of considered a soft skill i don't know what that is dan creative thinking i don't know a creative thinking thinking outside of the box have you ever heard that expression what's what's thinking yeah i don't know i don't do it too often so no no that's actually it's a fair that's a fair point dan i think you're right i'm sure there are other self all the other skills that are not social so maybe social is not the it's the one they think of but i'm sure yeah they're probably i think soft skills i think those are kind of like the major ones right and so definitely social skills in that sense is a because everything we pretty much talked about tonight is a social skill right so that's fair maybe we should have a soft skill 2.0 episode where we talk about things that aren't as social i think we will yeah i think we will yeah because i think there's more to dive into here for sure a lot of meat on this phone i'll say hello a lot of meat on this phone oh yeah yeah yeah for sure well dan uh aj do we have any uh any podcast updates anything new that you want to share coming down well we announced we have uh a sponsor dan is uh sporting their polo this evening open gear uh after i return from travel we will be connecting with them and uh recording their episode so super excited to uh get their message out to you they're looking very much to help out the community in many ways so we're going to do some giveaways you can expect to see that coming uh so yeah lots of lots of fun stuff coming for sure excellent any any last thoughts there tim uh no not really i'm usually pretty no i don't have anything to add i think we i think we i think what aj said earlier is correct we got a lot of meat left on this bone there's definitely some circle back for some of the other soft skills or whatever you would call them i guess awesome well tim thank you for joining us tonight uh aj you want to take us out see you hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net eng that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you