this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys 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 podcast and we are renaming it today to the aj and aaron show because you are lucky enough to be stuck with us on an elevator for the next 60 minutes so buckle up um so introductions out the window i'm aaron aaron engineered you can find me everywhere uh books are sold uh with me i have aj at no blinky blinky also everywhere books are sold and even where they're not sold um the dark web is really what i'm referring to there did yeah aj for sure did i see you bought but next you bought start with english did i see you buy or receive a new cisco press book in the past yes you did okay what was it yeah yes you did it is the definite associate the devnet associates uh ocg oh boy okay so full disclosure i took that and i failed it miserably and then i just gave up that was my foray and to devnet associate but it stopped right there huh yeah it kind of stopped where it started really um i did try and i thought i had a lot of the stuff and i went through the blueprint obviously this is pre-ocg because i'm assuming you just got it because it just came out right that's right yeah i just got released at the i think at the end of september early october i pre-ordered it in anticipation of its release uh and it just arrived the other day so dude like growing up this is like the scholastic book fair remember that like everybody yeah every dude okay remember how stoked you would be to go get books like i mean no no one like at any other point it's like teachers like hey we're going to the library today everybody's like oh god i got the library and look stuff up that's boring but anytime that scholastic book fair came around dude it was like all like the school turned into like a carnival i felt like for like a week right yeah yeah and uh it was really funny because i was always like showing up there with my 20 that my parents gave me and everyone's like oh dude you're like a millionaire you're rich i was just gonna say that dude 20 bucks a ton of freaking money holy moly i don't even think i'd seen twenty dollars like i've never seen a 20 bill i don't think until i was probably like 13 right right i mean yeah i i used to pay for my lunch i was like one of the only kids that would like pay for my lunch it was like a dollar 25 for a hot lunch ticket at school in middle school every time i'd walk into the lunch lady's office oh dr murray you're here for your lunch ticket dr murray she promoted you she's like all right the smartest kid in school here he comes she only knew yeah she only knew yeah remember how stoked you'd be when the book fair came around it was like because like this is like pre amazon pre ebay pre freaking barnes and nobles for the most part too right like i mean this is like how long ago this was i don't know if they still do it or not i would assume they did but they they do actually they do i my kids uh my kids go get books even my youngest kid he's in kindergarten and they do the whole scholastic book fair thing now like the i think they ship a bunch of books in and they have like the librarian take care of the sales and stuff like that it's just like a sampling of it but you can go online to the scholastic bookstore and they have a code that gets associated with you know the school the daycare center whatever the case may be and now we wouldn't buy the books the sale gets associated to the school oh so they i just i just thought about that that's probably true right they do give back to the school so that was like the incentive for the school to have it but i bet amazon and all these are just chewing into their business model oh yeah yeah for sure them and everybody else i guess but yeah i i fear for the people who run the scholastic stuff it's a dying breed of folk because i can get everything digitally do you ever get the digital copy of the ocg so here's the thing i i do the acm annual membership and i love it wait what's that i don't i honestly don't know so uh it's like i'm sorry i gotta look it up because i can never remember okay so so it's an acronym we'll start there it's acm.org okay uh association for computing machinery and and what you do is is you go and pay for their annual professional membership it's a hundred bucks and if you're a student and can prove you're a student you get a discount i think it's like 40 bucks a year it's less than 100 bucks a year and what you end up getting with that is the o'reilly digital subscription that normally is like 500 bucks a year on its own they have made some changes in the last year so when i first signed up last year you got everything you got practice exams you got digital learning content videos and stuff like that you've got all the books and that includes cisco press um it includes packet publishing books most of those are in there anything o'reilly does of course too there's lots of great books uh and there's just like a whole lot more that's not even like i.t related too right but uh o'reilly's like one of the bigger publishing points for it-related books right definitely the cisco press stuff um so i have that but sometimes i just like to hold the book yeah so uh i bought the i bought the encore book i used that to study i i bought the associate book here but some of the like the tack on stuff that i'll read i'll just do that on my tablet through the o'reilly digital sub yeah this is like one of the other i guess we'll call it like networking uh never-ending questions which is like oh should i get well not just which book right because like especially like ccna level there was always like todd lambly and then the ocg and then you know i mean there's just a bunch out there i mean even chris bryant has his own book um but it was like okay do i get the digital copy which is obviously way more convenient because you can even pull that thing up on your phone so like you're waiting in the doctor's office and you're just like checking out just like kind of zip through a couple pages or you know you wait and pick somebody up from the airport you know just whatever mundane task is convenience is the point i guess but like there's no ocg that exists that like you couldn't tie to somebody's feet and have them sink to the bottom of the ocean right like like that's that's true you know what i mean they're not they're not for like first of all like if you live in a studio apartment you probably shouldn't be buying ocgs like because they're just gonna fill up your entire place absolutely they're not the ones who used to shim your table to make it easy no no no they're the ones you use like if the table completely breaks in half and you need a table replacement you can just eat on top of the ocg that's right that's right you want a standing desk you just lay down an ocg okay right so that i think the competing wisdom between the two uh preferably i would have both because i like the convenience but i'm with you i for some reason there's something about having like a tangible like let me flip through the pages and i even do that with other books too like i don't i don't do a whole lot of nonfiction or a whole lot of fiction i just basically non-fiction stuff but i i always have to get the book like i i almost feel like i'm cheating when i buy the kindle or that just get like a pdf because yeah like i don't feel as invested almost you know right right for like instructions if i'm doing research like i have a folder and like my onedrive for work that i just dump pdfs into and i can easily pull up on my ipad and search them or hi you know sometimes with some of those apps you can still highlight and stuff like that if you want to remember like a key point you can bookmark it or whatever now that brings up an interesting question too like what is your strategy when you read that book because we've heard a couple people on the show now and they've they've all had competing strategies i felt like uh i'm gonna always go back to like there's no wrong answer like you know what i mean as long as you're consuming the content and you're retaining it like that there's no wrong answer uh you know you know probably better than anyone how i feel about this subject but but i just want to ask like your two cents of like so like you get the ocg what are you doing like in the ocg are you because we talked to uh dear uh our good friend ccie by 30 she said that she went just directly to the do i know this already questions which i thought was genius and i can support that too but i just want to know what you do in there um like physically do you do anything to the book are you do you highlight like give us your strat so i used to highlight oh no what happened i i used to be a highlighter and and through conversations with you and other people i realized i don't ever go back and read the book have you ever opened have you ever opened up like uh just anywhere that you would see someone studying right like we always just see pictures of people studying i don't know what that is like twitter let's say somebody's like hey just as an example like for you like hey studying the devnet associate today and it's like a picture of their book and the highlighter's next to it and it's like oh yeah yeah but the whole the whole page except for two words is highlighted i'm like dude what have we determined here all of this is important well yeah that's how it made it into the book obviously right like gosh dang i don't know they're so you don't you don't highlight the whole thing or do you even pull the highlighter out now or i don't anymore no i have these i have these like little sticky tabs uh and and i'm going to hold them up and show you and unfortunately anyone is going to see them they're just like little post-it pads and i i use that to mark certain pages that you know and maybe it's relevant to what i'm doing at work and i want to come back and maybe reread it again or use that as a reference or something but uh i don't i don't highlight stuff anymore yeah it's i actually use the tabs as well but i use them for a different approach yeah so i put them at each do i know this already the ditkas so i can just go straight to the ditkas and then i obviously marked with a different marker like the part where you can go find the answers because yeah you know that's that doesn't do you any good if you didn't know if you got them all wrong but um yeah so so at any time like i'll go in there and i i've read the reason why i praised dara so much when she did that and i thought it was so cool is because i read that even if you attempt to take a test before you read the material which is exactly what a dikka is right like how genius is this if you take the deca before you even read the chapter you're more likely to return uh retain the information that you're about to read so have you ever used or looked at the digital content that comes with the ocgs you mean like uh like the the cd well i mean it's not a cd anymore but but yeah it used to be basically yeah you used to be a cd there's still a cd jacket in the back of the book and you pull that open and there's there's a little card yeah yeah and you get a digital code and you can go online and um it's a it's for i think it's two digital practice experiences yeah pearson testprep.com okay yeah and yeah and then there's a code in there for um i think you can save like 80 to get the digital version of the book plus two more practice exams so you get four practice exams from pearson yes and you get all the do you already know these the dikkas in digital format so before i read a chapter now i will go to pearsontestprep.com pull up the exam uh and then i will do the dickus and then i will do because you can bust it out by chapter which is nice so that's perfect so when you're doing the boson you can only do it by like the blueprints like major section that you're trying to tackle yeah with the pearson test prep you can actually do test questions based on the chapter that you're about to read see that's good i like to be able to filter like that like you just said because actually that's funny you mentioned that that's like that has always been my one beef with boson i mean it it by and large it's a perfect product right like i mean like when you when you talk about de facto stuff that you should spend your money on it's a boson test exam and what's cool about that is it that like exam prep software could stay with you your entire certification career because they just keep putting different exams right um great content they explain every single question right like so if you put it in study mode and you get the answer wrong or right you can hit the explain and it'll tell you and it'll give you a freaking link half the time to a cisco white paper which is also a genius yeah and what i really like is that they they take the time to not only explain why the right answer is the right answer but they also explain why are these other answers wrong and perfect what are the other answers right like if it's like a bunch of alphabet soup up there what is that thing you know that that three-letter acronym or whatever they're showing you and so yeah so i've been giving some advice to a co-worker of mine he takes his ccna tomorrow i'm really excited to see how he does all right cool but i i told him while you're going through the boson don't just you know learn the right answer learn all the answers because what what you know i saw in my experience using the boson for encore was you could get a question on the boson and it would be flipped on the actual on the core exam so a similar question but flipped in the opposite direction so if i just took the time to only study what was the correct answers and not bother with learning what was the wrong answers i would have gotten wrong but because i studied everything all the different possible choices i understood you know all the technologies that were coming my way and also yeah because because i think what what it would do is maybe i could just dissect like a fake question for a second so like if they were asking you something about like let's say ospf uh hello and dead timers right like like they would also in the answers sometimes they will either use like similar things from a different protocol that you know but but if you didn't already right that would trip you up so like you know you could just if you knew that off the top of your head you're like no that's actually applies eigrp but but it was just like two numbers you're like uh i guess that could be it you know i don't know it's not it's not like i'm saying that they intentionally try to get tricky but they just know how the brain works right and how how you're likely to associate certain things so that's why people think that they're always being tricked but it's really just that's where your brain is going and they're just manipulating that right right right i mean you're spending all this time learning about all these different timers and you know hello this and and then timer that it's just like well was that for ospf or was that for eigrp yeah you know until you you do it enough then then you you know you really start to spend like which one belongs to which protocol right so yeah that's cool that that um those online practices because i'll say this testing yourself is going to be the one single greatest thing that you can do when it comes to exam preparation because testing yourself is basically forcing your brain to connect the dots when you re-read something and it's it's just highlighted like if you went back and re-read let's just say that you only highlighted ten percent of the book which is which is palatable to go re-read right because that's why you highlighted it so it was like this is very important stuff to your earlier point most of that's going to be in the test anyway not just the stuff you highlighted but if you just highlight you know 10 of the book and you go re-read it or instead you took maybe the do i think i know this already tests you're gonna do better for yourself if you take the test as opposed to just going back and rereading the highlighting because if you think about it how easy on a scale of one to ten how easy is it to go re-read something you'd think it'd be easier but it's it's a lot more time consuming it's time consuming but but but like as far as brain power goes it it's about a negative seven right like yeah it's very passive you're just you're just putting it in one in into your eyes and it's going straight back out right like right and it's because like it's easy so so to your point where it's it is time consuming you then are left feeling like man i sure studied my butt off today why because you read 150 pages it took you two and a half hours and you you still have some of that information because that was like 25 minutes ago so you wake up the next day and you take you know a practice quiz based off of what you just did maybe you'll retain some of it but there's there's a retention curve they call it right that just like slowly goes off after like five days so the likelihood of you retaining any of that is very slim after five days so what you should be doing ladies and gentlemen now that you've really just come here to find out how you should get a step-by-step on how to study for certification exams as if i am the certificate authority on how to study for certification exams after i started this whole thing you have a lot of search though i do but i also started this off by saying i failed a devnet associate very very bad and um failed to talk about it ever again and or look at it again but yeah you sh you need the way you create the memory and the way you create those get those neurotransmitters to connect like that is to is to make it as difficult as possible and i know i've told you this before but i mean it's very similar to taking yourself to the gym you know when you go to the gym um you know this i'm just gonna say this is like a generality you know no one is going in there and lifting one pound weights although we could like let's just take you and i for instance we both walk into the gym when we start just blasting out these one pound weight reps right and you and i are both in there for like two hours and then we leave and we're high fiving the hell out of each other because that's just what we do you know we're not we're not sweating at all though and you know we go home and we're like texting we're like dude we worked out so freaking hard today we lifted all day for like two and a half hours like and then you know wash rinse repeat right and now it's the day of the muscle competition and you and i are like look there's no way anybody's beating us because we have been doing this for three hours a day for a solid month right like that's pretty that's pretty good and we can't lift a single pound more than when we started right because although we were occupying our time which is not the definition of busy we were occupying our time we were not doing anything constructive but we thought we did and we were basically tricking ourselves because it was that much easier into thinking that we did something in fact we just stared at each other in the mirror and lifted one pound weights so the real way to get ahead is to take your butt to the gym lift almost as much as you could possibly do for as many times as you possibly can and call it a day that's how you build and that that's that's the approach i took to to do an encore this time around was uh you know honestly i had never used a boson until i got to encore dude it's so good it is it is really good it's it's a very close facsimile to the actual exam the questions are very challenging harder i would say yeah in some cases i definitely felt that way for sure um because there were some questions i got on on the encore it was just like really you know and i had to read it like a couple times like right was it an actual softball or were you tricking yourself yeah i know you're like it's too good to be true i can't answer this quickly right right um but i you know there came a point where i just stopped reading i stopped watching videos like i you know what what i what i like to do is um give us give us the aj recipe to success here so i i feel very lucky because my work wants me to have certifications yeah and and so if there's down time if there's not a lot of projects going on if i don't have a lot of deliverables there's no you know billable work for me to be doing they encourage me to study uh and in fact that's that's what like this entire past q3 for me was so i i took july and i got my ccnp i did encore i did design and right after i passed encore or uh uh my ccmp i go to you know my boss at work and it's like hey hey i passed i passed my design exam i got ccnp's like awesome i'm really happy for you now i need you to go get these five juniper certifications exactly exactly so so you know because of this kind of wall we had throughout the summer i was able to spend 25 30 hours a week studying for these certifications and and so i would hit the juniper the junos genius and i'd watch some videos and then i'd go read a little bit uh you know do some research find some white papers on you know jennifer's website they have pretty good documentation they do they do geniuses yeah absolutely um and then i would spend some time like like labbing it a little bit so uh and then and then i'd hit the junos genius practice exams and i would just kind of keep doing that you know over and over again for a couple days and and with the associate level exams i was taking one associate level exam every week for three weeks i did the the juno students uh i did the jan cda in a week i did the jnci junos in a week and i did jnci devops a week nice the the special ex specialist exams were a little bit harder what like which ones oh j and cis oh yeah yeah okay yeah which they should be i mean they're like a level right so yeah right exactly yeah um but but that that was it like you know watch some videos do some reading do some labbing quiz yeah and the closer i got to the you know when i when i scheduled my exam i i stopped doing all that other stuff and i just focused on the quiz uh and you know when when i got stuff wrong i would look at like okay why did i get it wrong what's the right answer uh is there some sort of connection i can make here uh i'm trying to think of the word of it it's like um you do like some sort of weird funny word association to get it to connect and you'll get it no i know what you're talking about yep i don't know what it's called but yeah so you know i would just i would look for something like is there something in the way that it's worded the definition uh why why am i making you know this connection to the wrong answer i want to make the connection to the right answer right and so you know even if i have to make up some weird funny thing um it helps me remember it so even like uh because i've done that before too so oh uh new mock device mnemonics yeah yeah so i've done that before too uh like almost like turn it into a song kinda yeah yeah i've done that yeah just little trips because those are the things that it's funny because like those are i i always feel like oh these are the i'm doing that to things that like i don't like like i loathe and so that's my way of remembering it but in a strange twist of fate those are the things i end up remembering the longest because i created like a mnemonic forum or like a little song or something right that's so fucked exactly that's so funny i so one thing i wanted to talk about right there was interesting was was you said uh uh that your work you're lucky with the work and stuff like that like they kind of like help you out but that's cool because not a lot of companies do that um you know they encourage it but of course it's like always in your free time and especially if you're transitioning like into this field clearly you're not going to have a job that supports you getting it certifications if you're not in the it certification world already i hope that kind of goes without saying but no that's cool um because not a lot of people get that so that's it's a double do they pay for your books too or yeah see that's this is gold in here man you know when we talk about we talk about um total compensation i have i have a thing on our intranet like on my work main home page right on our internet it's there's a section a whole gigantic section it's called total compensation what do you what do you think is in there what kind of stuff do you think is in total compensation oh probably like at your 401 k and your health insurance it's like everything the company pays out to have you on staff bingo and you know i work for a very very large company that has a lot of larger than the company i work for much larger and and my company owns other companies like universal studios right like it so i get like two free tickets to universal studios right there's a perk you get for working at at this like every year i get two free tickets or four free tickets so i can take the family so it's super cool right no i mean it's a cool perk right but again it's in my total compensation section where i'm going with this is sometimes you get offered a job and you're like okay well it's 50k but i make 50k now why would i take said job because money is a very like surface thing to get you hired they can give you all types of stuff so some of the other stuff you might find in a total compensation package stock options uh free stuff like i just pointed out like tickets i mean that you know face value that's like close to 500 bucks and i'm not saying that like i would have spent that 500 bucks anyway going to universal studios but it's 500 bucks i don't have to spend elsewhere because i could do that in lieu of that right so put put that into consideration you know if you're an employee of a cable company you know you get free cable that's 200 bucks a month right that like that has a that has a very quickly um very very quickly so it's things like that that you need to be like kind of cognizant of when you're thinking about like is this the right move for me the other thing is like wouldn't even be listed in total compensation is stuff like what you just said where it's like hey if there's like a little bit of a downturn or whatever you know you're not getting laid off we just want you to study like would you have known that you know like these are things that you can ask like hey what are the expectations around certifications because i've applied places before and they've said like pre like let's say before i had like my ccna and they'd be like hey this is great but we would want you to get your ccna within a month because that's part of our compensation is like we expect you to get a certification every year and no matter what it is and that's part of how you get like a raise so you can directly affect yourself in two ways like think of how cool of a situation that is right so you're being very selfish by going out and getting yourself a certification selfish is a good word in this scenario so you're going out and you're getting yourself assert and you're making yourself better you know you're updating your linkedin you're putting it on your resume you now have that right let's just say it was a ccna that makes me more dangerous on the job market to my current employer and they're also giving me a raise for it but the reason why they're giving you a raise based off that is because they now know that your market value is much higher based off of that and so they're rewarding you and you know basically giving you like a loyalty like hey just stay here man we we want you to keep getting better because our company does better when you do better because you know it's just the sum of its parts so as long as everybody's what what's the the term you you're using the the tide that your favorites oh uh high tides make all boats rise yeah so the high tide makes all boats rise right so everybody here gets smarter it's not like they were paying for the certification they were still expecting you to do that right do it on your own self study all that stuff they weren't sending you to boot camps but they're still rewarding you for it and they're telling you that they're telling you hey this is how you can make more money here go make yourself smarter oh my gosh have you ever seen that cartoon i it's like a like a business e leadership kind of cartoon where it's like the cfo talking to the ceo like what if we pay for all their training and they leave and it's like well what if we don't train them and they stay like yeah right yeah the million dollar question damned if you do damned if you don't right yeah yeah no but i think the other part of it does something to make you want to stay which is like they care about me right like i as a as a human with you know some dwindling morals um not too many not too many like let's be careful here i'm not oh man i am not mother teresa if that's what you were thinking and if you were shame on you oh i was i was talking about me personally okay yeah so we're both basically just uh pretty close to going to jail at any given second here but yeah we you know that would make me want to stay uh just a little bit more you know like that knowing that that was out there like oh man these guys paid for this and i'm about to use it as a weapon to leave here i guess you know if you give it that much thought you might think twice about it and that's okay think twice about it because because that's that's intangible like that's that's not showing up even on the total compensation button right that that stuff is exists only in like our collective minds at this point so but you need to tally it when you're thinking about like is this the best place for me to be you know also things like you know oh my work doesn't care if i'm going you know in the middle of the day to go get my oil changed or something right like i don't have to tell everybody where i'm gonna be every second of the day right because there's times after and i'm not talking about myself but i am kind of right but there's times where i work on saturdays because something needs to be done or you know it's 9 00 p.m and i'm answering something like i don't ever think about that kind of stuff just like i don't ever think about like oh i'm gonna go run and get lunch and it's gonna take me 35 minutes you know because there's times where i don't even eat lunch i just sit here and i you know like i don't leave this computer desk for eight hours so like that to me is worth you know thousands of dollars right if i had to monetize yeah you know what i mean so so that's that's new for me so um the place that i used to work at the the manager was very like you know you're here when you're here and you're working and if you're not here like you know it's it's he didn't go so far as to say i need to know why yeah he didn't say that you know verbally maybe he did non-verbally um and so so when i get to this place and you know i go to my boss i'm like look i i can't start work right at like eight o'clock because you know i gotta bring my kids to school and then they're just like dude like why are you telling me yes yeah why yeah they get like offended they're like dude yeah tmi pretty much you're like sorry i gotta change my kids diaper tmi so it's taken me a while but i i have adapted to this uh it's i i call it like the whole work from home thing but it's it's not necessarily work from home or or anything you do with comet it's it's trusting the employee that they're gonna take care of their job and you know and that's what i do like i get my work done if i say i'm studying i'm studying you know i obviously i'm passing certification exams when i put in my life where my mouth is i have ever heard of stories where engineers not on my team will put down lots of hours of studying but then they never even attempt to take a certification exam so that just doesn't really look good in their favor no um yeah that either makes it look like you're cheating or you're really stupid right right so i guess either way you're you're stupid so the the thing with with my position is is unbillable so there are there are parts of my time where it gets billed to the customer and so while i'm a salaried employee i have to account for all of my time to charge back um to charge back right and even if it's not charged back then i still have to account for my time right like even all that study time i had to put that i've studied for 25 30 hours that week wow but if i was you know working on a project then i would i would put it in that bucket like i was you know build time on this product yeah that's an interesting way to do it um but i think that's because and it's only interesting to me because my company's so big so like you know we're not that minut about it you know right like as far as like even how we charge customers i mean um i you know i think i think a lot of it has to do with analytics you know that yeah the company does does look a lot like how are people spending their time you know like if if aj wasn't able to pass certification exams in series it was it because he was like 150 available did he not get the time to study because they they want us to have at least you know throughout the course of the year at least a third of our time should be spent studying like they that's how bad they want us to commit to studying and pursuing certifications they want to make sure that they want to make sure that we're getting paid to study because customers appreciate that if you're if you're a partner to an oem it is almost guaranteed you know like i don't write the rules and i don't read all the rule books on partnerships but i am aware that for a business to maintain a partnership with cisco they need to have so many people on staff that hold cisco certifications and i know the same is true now for juniper because i was asked to go get these certifications so we could improve our partnership with juniper and move to the next level as far as you know partnerships or whatever go so that's why it's so important for the company that i work for to have certified employees and the customers appreciate it too you know you get somebody coming into your network to do some work for you uh and they see that you know oh they're ccnp enterprise or they're wireless this or whatever that like they know that the person they're getting has the knowledge to do the work right and your company sees that as a selling point too right like that there's always a what's in it for me right like you know it's it's nice to think that everybody's got these warm and fuzzies but no there's a reason of course and it's nine times out of ten or maybe ten times out of ten it's related to money but that is what it is as you're by the way as you were sitting there in your cmna cisco meraki shirt talking about vendor relationships and how you don't know how it works that was good stuff there i'm like i wonder if he realizes he's wearing a cisco meraki shirt yeah that's funny so yeah that that that's a good that's a good place to be but it probably you know it may or may not show up on our job description it may for you you know may not have but like i'm just saying like because i've been preaching a lot lately in um you know throughout the community on twitter and sometimes i get like on these like tangents where i just can't stop and this one's lasted a few days but in regards to like the interview process these are things that can come up if you ask questions right so so for goodness sakes please stop going to interviews to be interviewed because that ain't what it's about it's just as much for for you to interview the company that you want to work for as it is them to interview you right like 100 i i learned that a long time ago like i care about the places that i work in that what's the culture like who's my boss like what are these people like and you can ask them like what's your favorite part about working at this company you can tell pretty quickly when people are are hiding like oh it's great here you're gonna love it you know like when they're kind of talking through their teeth or when they're being sincere and very genuine about the response too so it's it's just as much about you getting to know the business that you want to work at more than it is than getting to know you you know i had an interesting situation it pertains to that like you asking about the culture i love that question first of all like what's the culture like because if someone has a hard time describing it even that should be a red flag um you know not every place has to be like silicon valley where you know you got ping pong tables and beer taps in the kitchen you know it doesn't have to be like that uh it can still be a cool company right not everybody has to be a startup so we stop chasing that now should we take a moment and define culture for maybe some of the younger listeners of our podcast please do well you know culture is is i don't know the atmosphere of the place that you work um that's good well i i don't know i think i feel like there's a lot of things that go into culture and yeah what i think people think of the like what pops into their head probably is like is the quote-unquote stuffiness of of the environment right like yeah like like when you go there like is everybody wearing you know a suit with a tie and the blazer right because it or or another piece of culture could be like hey like is there a history of like racism or like misogyny you know or things like that like hey these th this company traditionally uh does not like to hire women or maybe traditionally this company doesn't like to hire from within you know there's all these things that that contribute to the culture some of those that i've just mentioned are awful some of them are just you know like i don't hire from within like i think that's awful too um yeah and then some companies only hire from with you know what i mean so like that those those are all contributing facts factors to culture right it's not just like one thing but also some of the stuff that i mentioned startup wise like ping pong tables and you know do they have catered lunches and like is there like uh like does everybody hang out with everybody like after work like that those are all culture things you know beer fridays jeans fridays yeah yeah yeah exactly so like all that stuff diversity and inclusion and um you know hiring veterans and you know how do they how do they give back to the community these are all culture questions right so that philanthropy yeah philanthropy like you got money how are you reinvesting right and and so all these things you know not by themselves equal culture but but all contributed to it so one of the most interesting things that i've ever had happen to me in regards to that was kind of like you said where you just ask about the culture like say hey what's the culture like here but you know how often do you think like a hiring manager is going to be like well it's okay you know you know they're going to be like yeah that's great i don't know so what's happened to me before was even before i could ask that question the hiring manager had me during the interview process just go hang out with a guy that had been hired in my exact position like two months before that he's like just go talk to him and and ask him what it's like because he's he's just like two months ahead of you i thought that was great because like yeah you know sometimes when you're at a place for a long time and they make you go they always do this they make you go ride you know ride with somebody they make you go hang out with somebody or like shadow someone and it's always some it's always some person that's been there forever and they're bitter about every little thing and that's all they want to vent about but it's good to get a fresh perspective from somebody it's like hey man just so you know i you know i've been here for two months i still don't have a laptop you know those are all good things to know right like that that old guy's not gonna give me that wisdom you know he like predates laptops and you know what as silly as it is like this used to drive me crazy and i and i know it happens in a lot of places like when uh the company hires on somebody new and they come to you like at four o'clock the day before like oh we got a new person starting tomorrow can you have a laptop ready it's like what like stock laptops like and and how how bad does that look for the person coming on board right the worst there is at least a two week notice given so the person at minimum has known two weeks that we're going to be starting here and so they show up two weeks later to this place that they've already been to one's interview know some people on the inside knew they were coming to work here but there's no laptop their workspace isn't ready it's like you're not welcoming me in that we're not starting this relationship often culture so so totally yeah culture culture yeah yeah i mean how difficult is it like because you mentioned the empty like workspace or whatever and then the laptop how difficult is it though like when you open the job wreck to just at that point hit the purchase button on a laptop like you're planning on hiring somebody you don't know when it's going to be is it like you're worried that the model of laptop is going to change in that period of time like right in one of my my last jobs um where i was the it manager i went back and forth with hr on like you know this process right this exact process this conversation and you know finally it was just like look when when a job wreck gets posted that's when we should order the laptop or whatever because it's not dependent upon the person that gets hired right like are they smart enough to use a laptop well it's you know for us it was we were a large uh engineering firm manufacturing firm so you know if we were ordering a computer for one of our engineers our cad engineers they would get a very different you know workstation uh but if we were getting like just a regular power user that you know worked in the office purchasing finance something like that and there was like a standard kind of build right that makes sense so it you know the machine is tied to the position not the person i guess there could be some unique circumstances where uh if the person had a unique need you know needed a custom whatever you know that there might be a reason why you would want to wait and order the technology for a specific person so what i think what you just described though like with the hey the stuff's not ready the laptop the workspace there was a while there like on linkedin where i was seeing from companies like they would this was part of them like trying to barf their culture on us even though we don't work there do you know what i'm talking about they would take pictures they would take pictures of where the new guy was about to sit and all his stuff would be sitting his or her stuff would be sitting there right like their new inbox yeah the the acme mug the acme lap the brand new macbook pro right um the acme north face zip up you know all this stuff just hanging out there and it's all expensive stuff you know and so so when you walk in your first day and you got your little box full of trinkets and you sit down and you're like wow look at this i got a brand new macbook in a box i got a freaking coffee mug i could man it'll hold coffee hot for five hours oh guess what the coffee's also free here you know we got the top colombian we got a we got a columbian guy out back growing coffee beans for us silicon valley that's what they do but yeah that was it's it's silly little tchotchkes but it's stuff like that that makes somebody feel welcome it works they plan for my arrival there's a place for me to sit i have a computer to walk into you know like that's that's the kind of stuff uh the culture things that make a person feel welcome right like they don't even know me but they care yeah you know it's funny because like those are basic amenities at any hotel it's like oh the space is clean you know oh the stuff the stuff is where it should be the stuff i need is where it should be right but like you show up to your first day of work and they're like i guess you could sit over there and it's like you gotta clean donut crumbs off from the last dude that's sitting there it's like kind of crap is this i've had that oh yeah dude yes uh so the the job i had just before this one um just before uh i came to work here i worked at another company very small msp and uh i was definitely oversold on the culture and how like how how did they do that though so i would go so far as to say that the hiring manager maybe did not have his finger on the pulse of his team as much as he thought he did so maybe so what you're saying then is he wasn't lying he genuinely thought it was different than what it was yeah okay i mean we can't really fault him for well we can't fault him for that part of it but the underlying issue we can definitely fault him for um and so you know it was unfortunate because like i was super pumped i was very excited to get out of the place that i was at uh because it was a poor culture and so culture was extra important to me for my next move and uh you know i get there and i get handed a laptop that wasn't even like reimaged it was like a five-year-old laptop that had a hundred different other user profiles on there uh it was like clearly just boomerang to the it department like oh this guy left on friday well let's give it to aj on monday uh kind of thing and then the entire two months i was there i i sat at a coffee table like in the department i didn't even have like my own space and it was like every day i like you know well not not every day because my boss didn't work in the office he worked at a you know he was like somewhere else in new england and occasionally he would come into the office and every time i saw himself we're working on that space for aj don't worry yeah constantly under construction yeah yeah it's like and you know in the end that's definitely not what killed it for me that's not the reason why i stayed there for two years there was plenty of other things but it got to me early on that that said look like this is not a good fit for me this position is not not what i thought it was the place isn't what i thought it was and and so you know that's why i decided to move on dude you want to hear a weird story i did because this happened to me the culture thing right and it wasn't even the culture necessarily because everything else was checking every single box so i went and i interviewed at this place and it was uh for a very large amount of money more than what i was making to the tune of it was a at least a twenty thousand dollar difference okay sizeable sizeable right sizeable enough to look over some stuff right okay so at the time that's a long time ago so at the time there was nothing wrong with my job right why i was looking to leave i i can i can't even answer that because i don't even think i was i was just kind of like testing the waters right and it was a good thing because i you know used that unbeknownst to me at the time to figure out how much i was worth in the marketplace hence the 20k so so i didn't know that but whatever so anyway knowing that right they were going to give me another 20k than what i was making today let's say it was crazy because when i went there again everybody was cool everybody was cool to me like it was a nice facility clean uh the culture seemed great everybody was like very like cheerful like almost like like not fake cheerful but i'm like dang like these people can't fake this happiness it was like that weird you know what i mean yeah like it was like oh maybe they put something in the water or something but like and we work at the same place because it sounds like we're starting off on the same foot here no no no no it doesn't i don't know and the story never really gets good spoiler alert but so ultimately i never ended up working there i didn't leave the job that i had at the time but what i ended up doing was weird so like i was walking through the building and like i i think it was like halfway through the day because like once you get to the final stages of some of these interviews you know how it ends up just being like you just like are there for a very long time right and so you're basically hanging out in this strange building giving everybody in your and your sister a resume that you've printed off like 50 of these by the way if you guys ever go to an interview have like 50 of these things with you right don't just take one take like 50 of them you better better safe than sorry okay because there's been times where i've like all of a sudden it turned into a marathon interview where i ended up talking to like 12 different people and you i was able to give my resume to all 12 of the people so best case scenario you get you get to give out your resume so just have them with you but anyway i'm like walking through the place and i think i was headed to the bathroom they're like oh yes you know it's down the hallway whatever and i just had this weird feeling that i to this day i can't describe it it was just the strangest feeling like i don't i don't belong here and maybe now when i look back at it and i've now identified some new sort of emotions i think maybe that it was impostor syndrome and like i i felt as if i didn't deserve to be there but it felt different it felt more like like something was just off you know what i mean like you ever just like walk in somewhere and you're like something's off here and it wasn't people it wasn't like the way things looked visually or smelled even i don't i can't i can't pinpoint like a sense to what was off but it's just like that gut feeling and i had that gut feeling it was like okay this is weird so i i do what any normal person would do um i called my dad and the reason why i called my dad just a little history on me i moved a ton when i was a kid i was not in the military but i moved a ton and if my dad was just always getting better jobs so he's like the pro when it comes to like just getting a new job and when i look back at it he was really a pro because like the internet didn't exist so i don't know i don't know how he was pulling all this off like i don't know how he was finding jobs i don't know how he's applying for them i don't know any of this so so i call the master himself the dude that's had a thousand jobs my dad and i'm like hey dude just want to pick your brain for like two seconds i got an issue here everything's great they're offering me more money it it's a cool place to work um like benefits like you wouldn't believe like day one benefits right like full health you know you normally gotta wait like 90 days for that kind of stuff yeah here in the us and i just couldn't pinpoint it so i had this conversation the only thing he said to me was uh it sounds to me like you've already made your decision interesting yeah and i'm like okay so next day i call and say hey look i can't explain it i had a talk with my dad things didn't feel right um is that what you told the company yeah oh i was honest with him i i mean like i think that's great yeah it's it's it's just you know to me if i'm gonna back out of positions it would just be like i i plainly declined i wouldn't necessarily like oh hey you know yeah no i did i did man you got me like rethinking myself i don't know you know how like when you're laying in bed at night and you start thinking about all this stuff you screwed up in your life well guess what this is going to come from center tonight he's sitting there going okay what else have i done i'm just going to stop telling aj stories no i don't know i definitely teach her i definitely told him but i mean i i tend to do things that are i wouldn't say like out of the box but like i tend to do things that like i don't really think about first i just sort of go this is this is how it should be and i just do it you are very transparent yeah yeah yeah so i just told him like hey dude i called my dad because something was off you know but i will say this so of course i declined the job and it's obviously things worked out um perfectly fine which you know they always will so yeah keep that in mind but if oddly enough i would actually go work there now i i don't want to leave where i'm at but but what i mean is like if that situation happened again and if it was this time in my life i would go work there for sure absolutely right right but it's a timing thing totally that's what it had to have been right like maybe most of it had to do with like my maturity like how i felt how mature i actually was you know yeah and all those things kind of roll into it but yeah so maybe that's a piece of culture too that although we can't like pinpoint it exactly like yeah that's a that's part of it it's like if you have a weird feeling like kind of goes with everything right like if you're in a relationship and you have a weird feeling about it just go with it nobody knows you better than you so trust that guy boy that's a gem right there holy moly so to that point no one should like you as much as you like yourself too i hate it when people are like boy you're like you sure are like you love you some you you know i feel like everybody should be like that because like i can't expect anyone else to be like man that aaron is a really cool guy if i didn't think that about myself you know but if i don't think that about myself and nobody ever says it like if i if i think i suck and everybody else thinks i suck then so be it but if i think i'm cool and everybody thinks i'm suck then maybe i'm wrong but in the off chance in the off chance someone actually thinks i'm cool then i wouldn't expect them to think that if i didn't think that about myself you know right right well erin and i think you're cool oh man come on you didn't have to say that ah man that gave me like warm and fuzzies give me the opposite feeling of which i was describing earlier little butterflies there for you so i if you guys are listening and you follow us on twitter you know art of netenge or if you follow myself aaron engineered or aj no blinkyblinky send us a a culture story or you know send us like this is a good one too send us the coolest job perk you have i love hearing stuff like that like oh yeah like i think people unique stuff yeah unique stuff right like like the universal studios tickets i think people always kind of get taken aback when they hear that about me because uh you know we own tv channels and you know nbc and all this their stuff and it's like oh yeah also universal studios like harry potter so yeah shoot us that kind of stuff i'd love to hear that kind of stuff and maybe we'll shout you out or something if you got some you got a wild story maybe if your whole story is wild we'll even get you on here and ask you a bazillion questions about said wild story oh no the world is our oyster so we really really really really appreciate you taking the time to listen to us just us for today the aaron and aj show formerly known as the art of network engineering um like a sub podcast within the art of network engineering right exactly like we're the like if we were a football team like maybe you and i are like special teams or something you know we got our own little niche there but we're also like we're also like sometimes on defense you know crossover players yeah so um obviously we we typically have more people on here but you guys get more than anybody um like andy and dan sometimes you know things get busy and you know we have prior engagements people have lives and that's okay um and we really secretly knew that everyone really just wanted to listen to us too anyway now you're now you're going to give andy a complex when he hears his eyes i know that's partially why i'm doing it actually so we uh we appreciate you guys taking the chance or the opportunity to listen to us if this is your first time thanks we appreciate it uh tune in hit that subscribe button everywhere we're working on a lot of cool stuff behind the scenes uh i don't even want to tease you any further other than aj rubbing his hands in diabolical excitement because we're we're really just trying to change you know maybe somebody's not whole life but their certification journey so we're really trying to help out i mean not somebody some bodies because we know that a lot of people may or may not have the means in which to help themselves and we also know that sometimes things are harder if you have to make that investment yourself so we're we're going to try to help any way we can um so with that being said thanks for listening check out the footnotes for you know me and aj and the rest of the gang's information and check us out at the art of network at nard of art of netenge pretty much everywhere until the next episode see ya 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 artofnetworkengineering.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