Speaker 1: 0:00

This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast. In this podcast, we explore tools, technologies and talented people. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers. Welcome to the Art of Network Engineering. I am AJ Murray and I am joined by Andy Laptev. Andy, how are you doing?

Speaker 2: 0:30

Hey, aj, good, I'm fantastic.

Speaker 1: 0:33

Or should I say Andy the Metallica, guy Laptev.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Yeah, I got new nicknames.

Speaker 1: 0:38

Yay, new moniker. I like it.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Thank you. The kids head off to school. I'm down the shore. We were at the beach today. It was lovely. How are you? How's Vermont? How are the leaves?

Speaker 1: 0:46

They're turning beautiful colors here. I'm rather enjoying it. I'm taking tomorrow off from work and I'm going to go shoot some bangers of the foliage up here. I'm very excited.

Speaker 2: 0:57

Do they know you're taking off work to go take pictures?

Speaker 1: 1:01

Nope, I'm just going to pretend. No, I'm just kidding. Yes, they do. I talk to my boss.

Speaker 2: 1:05

I have some really important thing going on, boss, something big's happening.

Speaker 1: 1:09

I'm just going to put myself in a meeting and I'm going to leave.

Speaker 2: 1:14

That's really cool. I've seen some of your pictures. I mean it's just beautiful up where you're at. Do you have to go far from home, or is that close by? There's really pretty pictures, I see.

Speaker 1: 1:23

It's relative, right Like. So I think tomorrow morning we're going to head to Peach and Vermont. There's like a really classic scene I took it last year and posted it online of like a church and a barn and a cornfield and some mountains and sunrise. That's about an hour plus away from here, but we want to get there before the sun comes up so we can get out into the field, set up our tripods, all that good stuff. So I got to leave at like four o'clock tomorrow morning, so it's going to be a tripods.

Speaker 2: 1:49

You cheaters, you know you know that's the right way to do it. Yeah, awesome man. I can't wait to see him.

Speaker 1: 1:55

Yeah, yeah, I'll try to post them as soon as possible, but that no. Tonight we're talking about IT career paths beyond network engineer, beyond. So you know, let's set the stage a little bit Like we're normally talking to, you know, entry-level people trying to break in. That's been a lot of our thing over the past couple of years. But you did it, you made it. You're a network engineer, you've been a network engineer for a few years, but now what do we do? So tonight we're talking about career paths beyond network engineering and there's just I think there's a lot out there. I think there's a lot more out there than people realize. For network engineers, I think networking is really the foundation for a lot of different possibilities.

Speaker 2: 2:46

Yeah, totally. And you know, there's not to say that you can't just stay in network engineering for decades and have a fulfilling career too. But it's funny how many people we've met that have started as network engineers and then, you know, pivoted to other roles. We have very transferable skill sets, I think, especially if you can communicate. If you're a networking person with technical acumen who can communicate, that really opens up a lot of doors in a lot of places. I mean even the people on the show, right, what do we have? One network engineer left working in prod.

Speaker 1: 3:19

Yes, sadly no two Kevin and Dan. Oh yeah, no, that's true, yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:24

So where should we start here?

Speaker 1: 3:26

So I mean, let's pick off the obvious right. Like you know, if you're a network engineer today, the next, I think obvious step would be a senior network engineer or kind of an architect, and that's about it, End of show. No, I'm just kidding. So yeah, I mean, if you want to stay where you're at and there's room for growth, you could become a senior network engineer. I mean, you could also step to another company and become a senior network engineer. So what's the kind of delineation between a network engineer versus a senior network engineer?

Speaker 2: 4:00

Doesn't it kind of depend on where you are?

Speaker 1: 4:03

Yeah, I think so. I think if you have really good troubleshooting skills and a solid ability to troubleshoot, if you have knowledge of the network and if you're involved in a little bit of the design and more of the deployment kind of side of things, those tend to be more senior level skills, right, like if you're involved in core switch upgrades and major projects, kind of like that, those tend to be the more senior skill reserved things.

Speaker 2: 4:35

And it's funny, where I worked I was a WAN, primarily running the WAN for a few data centers, and I got promoted to senior but never touched the core Again, because it depends on where you are. I knew everything there was to know about the WAN and I could troubleshoot it and we tore stuff down and rebuilt it then end-of-life replacements and all that stuff. But you tell me you've got to do a course, switch, upgrade. I'm like yo, that's Bob.

Speaker 1: 5:03

I guess that's a very valid point. When I think of senior network engineer, it's usually like jack of all trades, master of nothing. They're doing the LAN, they're doing the WAN, they're doing the core, they're doing the edge, they're doing everything. But where you were, there wasn't just one or two network engineers, there was a lot.

Speaker 2: 5:21

Yeah, the size and scale right.

Speaker 1: 5:23

Yeah, you specifically were focused on the win, so I I guess, like that's a good way to put it like if, if you're a master of your domain, it's it's probably time for you to be a senior yeah, and it's probably just skill set and experience, though like to not to try to say big is is different than little shops.

Speaker 2: 5:38

But if I think you're the expert in your domain and you know what you're doing, if people come to you, if if you're training the new people, if you're running the big projects right, that's a good indication. You'll be senior and it comes with some more money, which is nice I would have liked. I had really good relationships with the architects at that place and I saw myself going that route. I was studying under them and always picking their brains and I was planning on becoming an architect someday at that place. And then a vendor arrived.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Isn't it funny, how that happens.

Speaker 2: 6:11

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 6:12

Network architect, I think takes it to the next level. Right, if you're an architect, you're more forward thinking than you are tactical. Right, you're thinking about what are some future things that you could bring in to help facilitate whatever the business is doing. You're doing a lot more of the designing and planning of the implementation and then you're handing off those things to the senior network engineers and the network engineers to execute on that stuff. The network engineers and the senior network engineers typically worry more about the day-to-day and taking care of and maintaining, whereas the architect is more about the planning and the long-term and, like I said, the forward-thinking stuff.

Speaker 2: 6:52

And, in addition to that, when the building is burning down and none of us can figure out why, we wake up the architect.

Speaker 1: 6:59

After all the possible troubleshooting is done and we can't troubleshoot anymore, we call in the architect.

Speaker 2: 7:05

Somebody call Carl, I'll get tack on the line. Get everybody on. We have no idea what's happening. It's bad.

Speaker 1: 7:15

And now again, if you're a network engineer and you're aspiring to be one of those senior positions, some things to consider and think about Certifications. If you want to be a senior, you're probably looking at some sort of CCNP, maybe additional skill sets to help round out whatever it is that you might have in-house. So if you're doing a lot of automation, you might choose to do some DevNet stuff. If you're working a lot with the cloud, then you might go with some sort of AWS or Azure or GCP, networking-related certification, something adjacent like that. If you're doing an architect, then you might be looking more at the design side, right? So maybe the CCDE, maybe the CCNP. Design certification is enough. Depends on where you work and who you're working for, kind of thing, but there's certainly lots of stuff out there. If you're more security focused, maybe you're looking at Palo Alto or you know, maybe the CCNP security or Fortinet or you know whatever, right, whatever you're using where you're at.

Speaker 2: 8:18

Yeah, there's all those adjacent technologies. Right, like you said, security, you can become a firewall expert Cloud right, cloud. Have you heard of cloud technologies? Right, like you said, security, you can become a firewall expert cloud right cloud. Have you heard of cloud? It's getting big automation a couple times, yeah yeah, but again taking those foundational networking skills, cyber security, right like you can pivot into so many adjacent roles which, um cyber, seems all the rage right. That's like the sexy role right now right isn't that what everybody wants to be in.

Speaker 1: 8:47

I want to be in cyber Network automation engineer, devops engineer those are huge right now. It's really interesting to see the growth of that. I don't know part of network engineering A few years ago. Everyone's talking about, oh, you've got to learn Python, you've got to do that. And it's like, well, I learned Python. But everyone's talking about, oh, you've got to learn Python, you've got to do that. And it's like, well, I learned Python, but I don't know how to apply it to network engineering. And so now here we are, 10 plus years later, after the whole push to get to Python and automating networks, and it's established.

Speaker 1: 9:16

So now it's not just network engineers with automation skills. There's dedicated network automation engineer positions out there that are available that you can certainly move into. I think another big one is site reliability engineer. I've heard that one tossed around quite a bit. That's usually more about kind of disaster recovery planning. How are we going to gracefully migrate services from one site to another? Are data centers active-active, active-passive? How's that failover going to kind of work? So that's certainly a position that you could grow into and seek to move from network engineer.

Speaker 2: 9:55

And I guess there's management too. Right, you could move up to a people manager.

Speaker 1: 9:59

Yeah, yep. So I guess, do you want to manage people or do you want to be technical?

Speaker 2: 10:06

yeah, I'll tell you that right.

Speaker 2: 10:08

So I guess that's a fork in the road, right like if you're going to go into management you might be less technical, and I will tell you that my boss, eric, at my fintech role, was the most technical manager I've ever had like he. He was like architect level skills, I think when he went into management and I had met him, I think when he was had been management for a while, but any conversation we had he was right in there in the, you know, in the grind and the meat of it, talking and problems and stuff. So, but if you don't use it, you lose it, usually right, like the longer you're in management. Um, so I I don't know how you don. I mean it even happened to me and we'll probably talk about another time on another episode but you stop studying, you get out of engineering, you pivot to something else. I'd say a year I was just I forgot everything. I'm like wait, what you know? I'm trying to have conversations with people about networking.

Speaker 1: 10:58

I'm like I forget all this stuff.

Speaker 2: 10:59

Well, yeah, you know. So I don't know how Eric stayed crisp in the technical side because he had seemed to be away from it for a while. So I've seen it. Done is the point of this rambling. But I think it's hard, if you're not in it on the daily to try to not forget it all.

Speaker 1: 11:18

Sure, I think that is maybe atypical. If you're a manager you tend not to have. I guess it depends on the size of the organization and everything else but if you're a manager you tend not to be in the day-to-day nitty gritty not on the console, not, you know, doing the network engineering. You're managing those people and I think that if you spend too much time still down at that level, then you might be doing your team a disservice if you're not doing the leadership thing, because I think a really big role as a manager is to provide air cover to your team. Everyone's busy doing projects and everybody wants something from your team and you have to have all of those people come to you so you can triage those requests, validate, prioritize and then assign accordingly. And if you're not doing that, then all of those requests are probably going directly to people that work for you and that just makes their job harder.

Speaker 2: 12:14

Wouldn't it be cool if there were roles out there that somebody called you one day and said hey, aj, how many maintenance windows did you work this year and how often were you on call? And when you were on call, how often did you get woken up out of bed, aj? And you have that kind of conversation and then they go huh, how would you, aj Murray, like to make significantly more than you're making in production with no maintenance windows and no on call? How would you like that, aj? So these are the kind of roles that get me excited these days. I don't want to call them vendor roles, right, but, um, when I my mind was blown I don't know if it was when we met um pete and those guys when we did the tme episode, but there was a point in our show's arc where we started, I started to learn about these vendor roles, kind of like what we're talking about beyond. You know, senior network and network architect and people manager and DevOps and cyber to like oh wait, our skill set could be valuable to vendors in networking and networking adjacent companies, like huh, like that blew my mind and I still think it's pretty rad. You know, right now I'm interviewing with a few of them and just the impact I explained. I Now I'm interviewing with a few of them and just the impact.

Speaker 2: 13:25

I had an interview earlier today and somebody asked me why I wanted to work there and it kind of just came to me. It was very clear. But when you're at a company, you can impact that company and what you're doing there and the customers. If you pop up and you work at a vendor, you can kind of impact the industry right, depending on what you're doing there, your impact is much bigger. It's not just one company, you can impact all the companies if you have a great solution, sure, right, sure. So I really like the ability to have a larger impact, I think in a grander sphere, at a vendor. What do you think the most common like? Do you think it's an SE? Like I know in our community folks who have gone to vendors? Do you think most people jump over to the SE role as a first?

Speaker 1: 14:07

stop. I think that's pretty common, right? You might be doing SE, tam, so Technical Account Manager, there's like customer success, professional services, those are all kind of adjacent roles, but you'll find those at OEMs and you'll find them at partners and stuff like that too. So I think it takes a special kind of skill set right. Very typically, it people tend to be introverted and not very social, not really good at having the conversations. They're very good at the technical part, but then maybe not good at the soft skills quote, unquote kind of thing. But if you have that man, that that puts you in a good spot.

Speaker 2: 14:52

And people keep telling me it's rare to find someone technical who has the soft skills quote, unquote, I hate to call them soft skills, but the ability to communicate, the ability to influence people. Do we want to go through and kind of define each of these roles like could there be people watching this show who are like what the heck's an sc? What are they talking about? I don't know how deep we want to go into any of this, I mean yeah, yeah, I mean absolutely I mean, it's pre-sales, right?

Speaker 2: 15:16

isn't that what they call it? So how does it work? A company needs something you're doing like a refresh, I guess, and they'll have you know their se. So it's a solutions engineer, right? You're on a pre-sales team. You're, you're matched up with, I guess, an account manager who is like the salesperson, right?

Speaker 1: 15:30

yeah, yeah, so se it could be solutions engineer, sales engineer, systems engineer it's been called a bunch of different things.

Speaker 2: 15:38

Solutions architect yeah, there's like three to five, yeah, titles depending on the company.

Speaker 1: 15:42

Yeah, but but you're right. You know, usually you have a trusted vendor or multiple trusted vendors. Maybe you buy your networking gear from one partner, you might buy your compute from a different partner, whatever, and you go to the account manager and you say I'm looking for X solution. Maybe it's firewalls, maybe it's a core switch, maybe it's a new stack of switches for access layer, it doesn't matter. You tell them what you're looking for and they'll bring in a sales engineer and the sales engineer will usually give you the 5,000 foot view of here's some possibilities. And then, if there's specific technologies or specific hardware lines that you're interested in, they might pull in somebody else's specialist to go a little bit deeper on specific solutions yeah and and the comp is pretty good from what I hear.

Speaker 2: 16:30

So, like alexis, she's always kind of I think she's the one who said like you know, I'm just your friendly neighborhood se, right, she's kind of like your trusted and se is your trusted advisor, someone you can go to with questions. And I think I don't want to say the wrong thing here, but the AM is the salesperson. I think that the SE's integrity is the most important thing for them. They can't lose the trust of the customer. So when you're talking to your SE, they're not lying to you to try to get you to buy the thing. They're actually like hey, I'm an engineer too and I've been working with this technology for six months. I can walk you through it. I can show you a lab. We and I've been working with this technology for six months. I can walk you through it. I can show you a lab. We can get our hands dirty in it.

Speaker 2: 17:06

So it's kind of engineer to engineer. You're a technical person that can communicate, you can do demos and I think you're like a trusted resource. When I was talking to Tim, I think one of his clients is his old company and he'll sit there one day a week and he's just there. If anybody needs anything, if there's any problems, if anybody has any questions, go talk to the SE in the conference room, which is fantastic you have a vendor rep sitting at your building once a week. I'm sure that's a huge resource.

Speaker 1: 17:34

I will add that to get that kind of resource, you probably need to be spending a lot of money. Not just anybody's going to have an SE available to them. That's upper tier of spend.

Speaker 2: 17:46

What you're spending right, absolutely. There's an account manager. They're the salespeople.

Speaker 1: 17:53

So there's an account manager and then there's a technical account manager. They sound very similar. There's a fine line. There is a difference between the two, but obviously technical account managers are typically more technical than salesy. So they're helping you make sure that you're utilizing your purchase to the absolute most, because the more that you use it, the more that you rely on it. Chances are you're going to renew your subscriptions, you're going to buy more licenses, you're going to buy the bolt-ons that help enhance the product or solution and get more out of it. So it's more about that adoption after the fact. And if you're buying across the portfolio, then they're going to make sure that you're having success across the portfolio. So if you're having trouble with, say, data center products or wireless products or whatever, they can help pull in specialists to help you have more successful deployments and figure out those issues.

Speaker 2: 18:51

And it just jumped in my head because we had a TME episode the technical marketing engineers. That's another role at a vendor we've had some friends on. They're like generally very technical people. They do a lot of. I think they help sales, like sales enablement stuff, so they're. I think they're like you know, helping write documentation and you know they're in the lab. So like where I've worked, you know there might be an escalation and something weird's happening, so like the TMEs are like in the lab grinding it out, trying to help. You know support everybody in an escalation or things like that. So they have marketing in their title. But the TMEs I've known are very, very technical. So that's another cool role at a vendor. Probably didn't explain it well because I don't understand the role that well and we spent an hour with two TMEs on the show, but I don't know if you have a better explanation of it.

Speaker 1: 19:41

No, I mean TME is usually like a technical evangelist, right? Like you're helping. You know, you're the people presenting on networking field days and you're out there producing white papers and blogs and other sorts of content to help make sure there's adoption of product and people, you know, piquing their interest, right Like? I've heard of this but I'm not really sure what I can do with it. Oh well, here's what you can do with it. Here's how that can help you. Another position that I'm in it's called technical enablement. I rather enjoy it, so I help create content that our sales engineers and other sales members use to learn our products, so that way they can turn around and demo them to our customers and prospects.

Speaker 2: 20:27

What does that content look like? Is it like videos or demos labs?

Speaker 1: 20:31

It's a lot of labs and a lot of like kind of scripted demos. And something else I've been getting into a lot lately is like click through, so it's something that the SEs can use to learn to do a demo themselves. Or it's literally something that they can leave behind with the customer Like hey, here, check this out. And it's just walking through how to set something up and why this is important in the workflow.

Speaker 2: 20:57

And what's the title again, what's your title?

Speaker 1: 21:00

Mine is Architect, but it's part of the Technical Enablement team. Technical Enablement right part of the technical enablement team.

Speaker 2: 21:05

Technical enablement right Like. When I hear enablement, I think sales right Like sales enablement. So you're providing materials to the sales teams to help them understand the value, props and the features and then how to explain them to okay.

Speaker 1: 21:17

Yeah, and then another part of my position is it's kind of infrastructure, because we're maintaining things that allow our demo environment to run. So we have virtual environments that generate traffic, that send data into the demo environment to make it look like something real is happening. And some of it is typical work traffic right, like stuff going to Salesforce and Office 365 and other places like that, and sometimes we have to create traffic that looks like something that a customer might have. So maybe it's OT, maybe it's security cameras, maybe it's medical devices. But we want to try to, as much as we can, replicate what a customer environment will look like, so that way that data looks like it should. So when a customer that's in a medical environment logs into it, it's like oh yeah, yeah, I use those systems. That's totally what I do. I see that they have that connection. So just today I had to set up like an OT demo server and a client so that way they could log into the client via our services and see all the OT dashboards and everything like that.

Speaker 2: 22:26

Remind everybody what OT is. It's IT, except it's different.

Speaker 1: 22:32

It's like outside technology, right? Yeah, it's like all of your security cameras, maintenance thermostats, furnaces, all that good stuff.

Speaker 2: 22:42

And there's so much overlap. You were talking about evangelism and creating content, and so there's also like product marketing roles, right?

Speaker 1: 22:53

Which you're familiar with.

Speaker 2: 22:54

Yeah, right, so it's again some overlap with the TME stuff you know data sheets, brochures, videos, blogs, podcasts, evangelism, so, depending on what company you're in, but you know, if so, I love to communicate, I love the technical, but I also love to be able to explain, maybe in a story, how things are working to engage people, to get them talking about it, to get them interested. And product marketing is is another way, you know, to do that a little. I don't want to say less technical than TMEs, but the TMEs I've met super technical, where they have a technical background, but I think communication is their main strength, whereas I think the TMEs are a little more technical.

Speaker 1: 23:39

I think if you can take that like any sort of technical topic and I don't want to say dumb it down, but if you can explain something highly technical to a non-technical audience, right, like you know, even if it is a technical audience, like they're not going to understand what a particular solution is. So if you can take that and explain it to them, get them hooked, reel them in.

Speaker 2: 24:01

Yeah, and it's a real problem to solve too, because you're speaking to multiple audiences. You might if you have a solution or a product, for you know the networking industry. You have to win the hearts and minds of the people that are going to like, install, maintain and troubleshoot this thing in production. So you're going to have a certain, you know, dialogue with them and communication, but then you also have to communicate with the people who are going to sign the purchase orders. You know the CTOs, or the leadership, which might be slightly different.

Speaker 2: 24:29

You know communications and word tracks are going to be there you know, they're going to be interested in cost savings, as opposed to the operators who don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night. So I think it's fun to talk about a solution to multiple audiences, because people have different pain points that you have to talk to. What else do we have here? Product management.

Speaker 1: 24:54

I've always been a fan of post sales.

Speaker 2: 24:57

It's what is it?

Speaker 1: 24:58

It's less glamorous than than sales engineer.

Speaker 2: 25:01

That's your deployment. You're deploying the solution, yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:05

Yeah, so so post sales has always been fun. So you have a sales engineer that usually does like the entry level, okay, and sometimes it's one in the same, sometimes it's different, it depends on the organization. But you'll have a sales engineer that knows a baseline, a little bit about everything, and then they'll pull in the people that know more about specific things. And then, when it comes time to buy a particular solution, you might have an architect that tries to understand what the current customer's environment looks like. And then, okay, how are we going to take the solution and get it into the customer's environment? Once that is designed, it's usually converted into a statement of work. Here's how we're going to do it, here's exactly the parts we need to accomplish this and here are the hours that we're going to need to build this out and deploy. And then that SOW, that statement of work, is a prescription that gets handed over to the post sales team, and the post sales team generally behind the scenes, will review this in tandem with the architects and kind of approve or not approve how this is going to work, kind of approve or not approve how this is going to work. And then we get to do the nitty gritty.

Speaker 1: 26:22

Usually the design that's done by the sales team is more of a high level, and we get to do the low level design. We get to go a little bit deeper and talk exactly what protocols we're going to use, how are we going to secure them, all those fun nitty gritty details. And then we get to do the execution of that. We do the configuration of devices. We stage them, upgrade them to various versions of code, whatever is decided we're going to deploy, and then we get to do the deployment. So, even though it's not on the customer side, we're still right there with the customer and we're doing the cutovers, we're on the calls with TAC, we're doing all that stuff. But it's nice in that you're not just working in one environment. You see a bunch of different environments, so you get a lot more experience.

Speaker 2: 27:05

That's nice and you don't get bored. It's always different.

Speaker 1: 27:08

Right Always something new.

Speaker 2: 27:09

You did that for a long time right.

Speaker 1: 27:11

Yeah, I did post sales for over five years. Yeah, I enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. I really liked working with the customers and establishing that rapport, building that trust, because it became like this trusted advisor kind of thing, right, like you could do it that way. But now that I know this about your network, there's a better way to do that. We don't want to create more problems in the process Sometimes. This about your network there's a better way to do that. We don't want to create more problems in the process, sometimes the late nights are always fun.

Speaker 2: 27:40

A lot of windows.

Speaker 1: 27:41

A lot of windows and then, depending on it, really depends on the company you work for. So I work for one company. If you're doing the deployment, it doesn't matter that you're up late at night. You're up early the next morning because you got to do support. But then I've worked for other companies where like, okay, you're doing the deployment, we're going to bring in another engineer to do the support so you can get some sleep.

Speaker 2: 28:02

Sounds like a role you could burn out if it's not set up right.

Speaker 1: 28:06

Yeah, that's 100% true.

Speaker 2: 28:09

There was a time in my career where I worked so many maintenance windows over the course of a couple of years I just I started to dislike the whole role, right, Like it's, just it's just a grind. You're like why is my whole life being up at night Beep booping keyboard?

Speaker 1: 28:24

you know why do I do this. It sounded fun in the beginning. It's not so fun now.

Speaker 2: 28:30

Yeah, I mean, this was better than climbing ladders being a cable guy. But oh my God, what's happening.

Speaker 1: 28:36

I yeah, I mean this was better than climbing ladders being a cable guy, but oh my God, what's happening? I will say if you're going to do professional services and I'm speaking from experience it is very certification heavy. If you're going to work for a partner particularly in post-sales, I think, any position at a partner the OEMs require the partners to maintain a certain number of certified personnel at various levels. Right, so many experts, so many professionals. I don't think there's any minimum on associate level things. But you're you're going to be chasing paper for sure In a position like that.

Speaker 2: 29:07

And you have more certs than anybody I know, AJ Murray.

Speaker 1: 29:10

They're they're expired. I actually, I actually just got emails the other day, I believe now all of my Juniper certs that I got so many years ago when we started this podcast. They're gone, they're done Do you think it matters.

Speaker 2: 29:24

That's not what we're talking about here, but just a really quick aside. I mean, once you get the cert for me, if I'm interviewing you and I'm looking at you on paper and I see all the certs you have, I'd be a tool if I'm like well, these are expired, mr Murray. Now you no longer have this knowledge Like. It shows me what a dedicated, diligent you know studying, and I'm just amazed at how many certs you got at that job. Do you think they lose their credibility when they're expired Like for me? They don't, because I know you learn the stuff.

Speaker 1: 29:54

But I didn't maintain it right.

Speaker 2: 29:57

That's what I mean, do you think it's that big of a deal that they're not maintained?

Speaker 1: 30:02

So when I say I didn't maintain it, I did not maintain the knowledge. Sure, If you were to ask me to go do something like, I got automation-related certifications for Juniper. I got service provider-level certifications on Juniper. I could not tell you now how to do anything service provider-related on a Juniper router.

Speaker 2: 30:26

I wouldn't say that's your fault. They weren't deploying that stuff, so you weren't working on it, right.

Speaker 1: 30:31

Sure, but I guess if I were interviewing for a job for a Juniper service provider or a service provider that deploys Juniper, I'm probably not going to pass any sort of technical interview when they're going to ask me questions about well, how do you deploy MPLS on a Juniper router?

Speaker 2: 30:51

No right, that's true. But when I see people with, like I don't know, 29 certs like you or however many you have, I just find it very impressive. Like to me it's almost as impressive as having an ie number, because I know what they went through or I've heard what they went through like get that number, and I know how hard the na was for me and I'm working on my ccmp now and it's not easy and a ton of work. So when I see somebody like you who just has this laundry list, I'm like wow, how did they do that? That's amazing.

Speaker 1: 31:21

It was COVID and after the initial influx of help us work remote and when we kind of like achieve that right, there was this steep dive on the back end and there was a period of time where we didn't have a lot to do. So it was like okay, if you're not working on anything actively, then go chase the paper right. And it's like okay. Well, I don't want anyone to accuse me of not doing my work from home or doing my work while I work from home, kind of thing. So I spent entire days studying for certifications. I didn't have to study at night because I spent so much time during the day studying for these certs. I'm confident if anybody else had that ability, they probably could have done the same certifications in the same amount of time that I did. It's not like I don't feel like I did anything superhuman there.

Speaker 2: 32:15

We got a couple of good comments in the same amount of time that I did. It's not like I don't feel like I did anything superhuman there. We got a couple of good comments in the chat, so Dan has a really good point. He said he thinks it matters if that's the sole focus of your job, right, like if you're a juniper. I see you're going to need current juniper, so that makes a lot of sense. Peter Hunt asked a good question. Do those companies gain discounts from having employees with certifications? That's like partner level stuff, right? I never understood how that worked.

Speaker 1: 32:36

So there are different tiers of partnership, right? Like it might be bronze, silver, gold or platinum or whatever. It's different for every vendor. So in order to obtain that tier, you need to have so many certified people of either expert level or professional level. Or maybe they need to have so many certified people of either expert level or professional level, or maybe they need to have um, you know specific uh, I don't know specialist ones, right? Like, if you want to have some sort of collaboration uh tag associated with your company, then you have to have so many people that are collaboration, expert level certified, Right?

Speaker 2: 33:12

And why do you care about the levels? If you're gold, do you get a better discount on gear than?

Speaker 1: 33:17

like a bronze. Is that why they're chased?

Speaker 2: 33:18

okay, yeah it's just is that? Is that basically why these companies chase paper to?

Speaker 1: 33:23

get that's one of the benefits right like and then you get literally a tighter partnership with the oem, like you get access to the business unit, you get closer or faster access to technical support. You know that, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 33:36

Yeah, more tighter alignment, which will probably get you a better Do they? Last question I know I'm taking this down a rabbit hole. So if they get, if they're gold instead of bronze, and they get a better discount on gear, does that get passed on to the customers or is that just go to the margin of the? I mean, who knows right?

Speaker 1: 33:52

Dep, the margin of the I mean, who knows right Depends. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it really depends. Sure, okay, there's more margin there, and whether or not that discount is passed on to the customer, it's up to the partner, right?

Speaker 2: 34:01

Yeah, it might be or it might not be, I don't know yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:04

I would even say that it's circumstantial. One partner might use that discount to be more competitive in a deal and then on the very next deal, they might say well, we're going to keep them for us.

Speaker 2: 34:17

Yeah, we beat post-sales to death. But before I forget one thing, Mansoor just jumped in my brain for some reason. So Mansoor, who was on our show network engineer for a long time, super bright guy, and then he wound up at TAC. He's working in, I believe, Cisco TAC on some big accounts I think I want to say Google and AT&T, I forget, but again another vendor role that you can go to and he's still in the tech. He loves the technical and he's getting to dive into a lot of cool stuff and he's really happy there too. So TAC is definitely another path.

Speaker 1: 34:51

What else? We got a couple of good, uh, additional comments. So so william said, uh, that his jncip expires next month. Uh, and, and they've rarely used it, um, over the last couple of years, so they they're thinking about letting it just lapse, right like, and I I'd say that's that's valid, right like if, if you haven't touched it, you're not familiar with it, it doesn't like come to you like it used to. There's a certain amount of effort you're going to have to put into study and prepare for the exam again If you're not currently actively working for it. Is it, is it worth it to to pursue something like that? You know, maybe if you're working with a different vendor today, it might be more lucrative to, you know, study for for those certifications and trying to renew something that you're not really using.

Speaker 2: 35:38

I guess the target's always moving right, like you might be a Cisco shop and then they might bring in some other vendor and then you're multi-vendor and then you have to maintain them both. And yeah, I guess it's just and to stay as relevant in the industry. And again, now we're completely off topic of the show, but I think it's interesting. You know, do you get in a point in your experience where certs mean less, right, I don't know. But is paper more? I mean, obviously, in post sales you need it for partner levels. You know, if you have 10, 15, 20 years product experience and engineering, are people looking at your certifications? Maybe they are, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 36:11

It depends on the organization On the customer side too, if you want to have certain support levels, they are required to maintain certified people too. I know that was the case for VMware, right? If you wanted VMware's platinum level support contract this was before the Broadcom acquisition, by the way. I have no idea what it looks like today. Yeah sure, the Broadcom acquisition, by the way, I have no idea what it looks like today, but if you wanted to have that level of support, then you need to have VMware certified professionals on staff. I've never heard of that requirement for a networking specific vendor.

Speaker 1: 36:46

There's also the financial aspect, too, right? So somebody else mentioned in the chat I use a vendor every single day. I just chose not to because I didn't want to put in the time to study and I didn't want to pay for it financially. Right Like, it's expensive. You know, I one of one of the things, one of the benefits of working for the partner, is because they needed the certs, they were willing to pay for it, right Like? I can't tell you how many exams I failed, that they paid for, that I didn't have to pay out of my own pocket.

Speaker 2: 37:12

I don't know if this one counts, but I know and I don't know I don't have LinkedIn up in front of me and I forget. But so, like Duan is an example, lightfoot Is he like dev role, like developer relations?

Speaker 1: 37:24

Yeah, so he's a senior developer advocate and that's kind of like a TME. So the developer advocate role, I think, is something relatively new that's come out right Because of like a TME. So the developer advocate role, I think, is something relatively new that's come out right Because we have a lot more network automation SDKs and things that different companies are making to help with that automation journey right. So again, if there's somebody that can help people like us adopt those technologies, those SDKs, those tools, then that's just going to make sure that we further invest in those products and spend money with them.

Speaker 2: 37:58

Right, because I know there's a couple of those folks that have gone from network engineering and then I remember how did you get into development? Aren't you a network? Now you're in developer land. What happened? But the way you just framed it makes perfect sense. If you're looking at automation platforms, you're going to need people teaching you that right and showing you how to do it Exactly.

Speaker 1: 38:19

Another good point with the partners is usually the partners have labs that folks can use to study for certification. So with the CCIE today there's portions about SD-WAN and DNA Center, or Catalyst Center, what they call it. Today that's not something that you can just go, you know, buy off eBay and set up in your lab. Right. It's really, you know, some gear you can buy and put in your lab. That's not one of them. So they have access to be able to put up these labs and, you know, people can use that equipment to study for these various certifications.

Speaker 2: 38:55

Peter Hunt asked a question and we should probably get to some more. Did we hit them all?

Speaker 1: 38:59

Well, let's go back in a second. There's a lot the chat's busy tonight. I love it.

Speaker 2: 39:02

Yeah, yeah, peter said, andy, what was the biggest challenge working as an engineer at a service provider? So I guess he's talking about when I was working at the NOC Just the complexity, I think, layer upon layer of stuff, that when a customer's stuff isn't working and you have to find their MPLS instance, and then the VRF thing and then over here it was so complex and so confusing and the network was just so bonkers, you know, like it's overlay on top of overlay on top of overlay and all this technology that just magically somehow somebody figured out how to get all work together. I think it's just the complexity of a service provider environment. And I wasn't a service provider like guru, I didn't have certs, right, it was just my first engineering job, great place to learn, but pretty, pretty intense. Let's see, we didn't talk about product management, did we?

Speaker 1: 39:56

We skimmed it, but if you want to dive into it, you would know better. No, I?

Speaker 2: 39:59

I wouldn't, I wouldn't dive into it, but I would just. I would just say that so not product marketing, but product management. So you basically own a product. The equip is like you know, you're the ceo of the product, but basically the buck stops with you. You decide what gets built and what doesn't. Customers come to you with feature requests and all kinds of stuff and you have to decide. You have a limited amount of developer resources that you can build with, so you basically have to prioritize. You just have a ton of requests coming in of things that people want and you have to prioritize what to build and what to not.

Speaker 2: 40:32

That's kind of my very oversimplified understanding of the role. It's a cool role and it seems like I've seen a lot, a good amount of people in leadership in big tech organizations that, like started out in product management. Like the CEO at Juniper is an example, it was like a product manager at one point. Right, it seems. It seems like a very good. If you own a product that does really well and you manage it well, I think it's really good visibility. At the very least you know in that company if not in the industry, a lot of responsibility. What else Long-term leadership roles. Do we want to talk about that?

Speaker 1: 41:11

Yeah, I mean, you know, certainly if you're at a network engineer and you want to step into a leadership role, then you might be maybe like a team lead or a supervisor, something like that, and then you know you can progress into manager, director, vp, you know those. Those definitely are longer term kind of kind of goals, right.

Speaker 2: 41:32

How the hell does somebody become a CTO? Like the C-suite stuff just blows my mind right. You become a manager and then you become a director, and then you become a VP, and that whole path. Just I don't know. I don't know how you do that yeah.

Speaker 1: 41:44

Yeah, I don't know either. I'm not there, but when I think about people that take those kinds of roles, they tend to have a more varied background, right Like they've done a little bit of everything that gives them this wider I don't know wider lens, more kind of experience. I mean typically the people that I've seen get hand-huddled for those kinds of roles that you know they, they have that more varied experience or maybe they've they've done something to like move oceans at a particular company that you know they want somewhere else, kind of thing.

Speaker 2: 42:21

I feel like strategy is a big thing right yeah, absolutely yeah yeah, all right, did we run out?

Speaker 1: 42:27

let's see you know I I think we've talked about a lot. There's obviously a lot of opportunity, right like, like, if you can't get into networking and be stuck in networking, there's so much that you can do. I think, wherever you're at in your career, having an idea of where you want to go now will help be that guiding light for you when you make career decisions going forward, right. So if you've heard us talk tonight and you want to be a product manager or technical enablement, like you or I, content creation is something that you should be thinking about, right. So one of the things that helped me land my role is having the background as a teacher, having the experience of writing lab guides and sharing my technical knowledge through the podcast and the blog articles and all of these other things. So if that's something that you're interested in and it will help build your resume, think about how you can create content that can show how good of a communicator you are and how good of a teacher you are, to kind of land a role like that.

Speaker 2: 43:31

And it's really just, I think, leaning into your strengths right, like that's been coming up for me in interviews because I've been doing it for I don't know the past five to 10 years, like starting with a blog 10 years ago and somebody, when I'm, when I'm interviewing for a role to communicate and create content for a vendor right, for a company, I have a portfolio of work. I have a body of work that I've been working on all this time which is really helpful right, like, oh, yeah, you, you know what makes you think you could do this job. Well, go check out my portfolio. I have, you know, all this because I love to communicate right. So if you want to communicate right, start, you know, creating some content.

Speaker 2: 44:10

Um, dan dan said in the chat, was c was cio for a while, worst decision ever, burned out. But what he said after that I thought was cool. He said you hit C-level role by understanding the business, the technology and the people and how all those interact. It seems pretty intense to me. That's a lot of things to understand and then how they all interplay with each other in an organization.

Speaker 1: 44:34

Yeah, but that's that's a really valid point, right, there are two very different things. Like, you can be the best engineer, systems administrator, whatever, because you know those systems, but if you don't know how they support the business and you know or or if you don't understand the business to be able to link the technology to it like maybe there's a new technology coming out that could really help the business, well, if you don't understand how those two could possibly fit together and what the benefits are to help make the more business agile, right, then it's going to be hard for you to fit into one of those kind of C-level roles.

Speaker 2: 45:08

It took me such a long time to listen to that advice. Yvonne Sharp has been saying it for years. Long time to listen to that advice. Yvonne Sharp has been saying it for years. Like the best thing you can do if you're in a network engineering role is learn the business. Join those calls, the cool you know what I call the Kool-Aid calls. I can't stand those calls right, but you know, learn the lingo, see how they're talking. Find out what's important to leadership.

Speaker 2: 45:27

Because for me, as a network engineer, I just I don't know how common this is, but I feel like speaking to network engineers, like well, it's just the network and it's good and no, it's not the network and it's not broken, it's. I always felt separated from the business, you know, and even the application folks and the devs, you know. Oh, my thing isn't working. Like all right, well, you need port such and such, that wasn't on your request, like it always felt like this tenuous relationship. Everybody was always coming after the network. So I always felt culturally like it was just we were always trying to prove problems weren't the network, but to not get all emotional and butthurt about it and just take a couple steps back and realize there's a bigger picture happening and there's a company running a business that has applications that people have to get to so that they can generate revenue and the network is critical for that and so realizing the part that networking plays into the overall business, that took me a really long time and I kind of felt I don't know, I don't want to say above it, that's not the right word but we had a job to do and we were doing it right, like just keep the network.

Speaker 2: 46:30

I didn't want to be and again, maybe it's the place you're in and the culture but I was so burnt out I didn't care about the business and I know that's a terrible thing to say out loud, but like the network's running, I was up five nights last week, right, like I'm freaking tired, I'm grumpy. I did everything you said. I don't want to hear about the business right now, even though the business is paying my paycheck, but Yvonne Sharp has just been for years. The more you can learn about the business, I think, the better for your career.

Speaker 1: 47:01

It is definitely a level of minutiae that you have to learn. You're already saturated with projects and break-fix and all this other stuff. Now to have to go learn this additional thing the business, the lingo, the things that the business cares about. It's just one more thing to have to do. And if you don't have the bandwidth, I can certainly see why you would hear that and be like, oh no. But I would say, anywhere you're at in your career, if you can learn what's important to the business, what is it that leadership is talking about and if you can link that to what you're trying to advocate for, that's just going to make things easier. I'll give you a good example.

Speaker 1: 47:39

I used to work for a manufacturing company and the leadership was always talking about these large rock projects. So there was always this like there's sand and everybody is working on sand, and then there's pebbles. We might drive over those, we'll feel them, but we can working on sand. And then there's pebbles. We might drive over those, we'll feel them, but we can navigate around them. But then there's these large rocks. They're blocking the road, they're impeding our ability to travel smoothly forward and make revenue goals and do these things that the business wants to do. Those are the big things that the business cares about wants to do. Those are the big things that the business cares about. So if I was able to one learn that these large rock things are important, learn what those large rocks were, now I can look at the technology portfolio and say, okay, I understand this problem. This solution would really help us get over this large rock right. And once you can tell people that and they can articulate it up the chain, that's going to help you get approval and move forward.

Speaker 2: 48:42

Yeah, you had me thinking too of you know, when I say hindsight's always 20-20,.

Speaker 2: 48:46

Right, like when, if I had been more attuned with the business at an old job of mine, I would have seen that all the things that they were trying to enact were for agility Like we need our network to be more on demand.

Speaker 2: 48:59

Like the cloud right, we need to be able to get services. I mean, it took six weeks to get a new VLAN provision in our place. Right, like that's insane when you know now public cloud is a thing and you press a button and it's done so. But at the time again, because we were just drowning in work and I was so burnt out like, well, you know, we, we need the agility of the cloud and you need to learn automation yesterday so that we can become agile. To me, just the con I didn't have the context, like I didn't have this holistic view of what they were doing. I just knew it was more crap that they were forcing down my throat, that I had to do and I was already burnt out. But I think if I had a better understanding of the business and I wasn't, so in my little world and my silo of, like, just leave me alone. I'm drowning already. Like, oh right, we do have to be agile. Our competitors are agile. Like the cloud model is what's, you know, the new paradigm? Right, that's what we need. We need reliable, stable networks that we can just spin up things on demand, because that wasn't what we had on prem.

Speaker 2: 49:51

But the way I received that was just like ugh, you know, it was just more crap. Right, that I didn't have bandwidth for. But now, looking back, like, well, yeah, they were. Just leadership was trying to make us more agile so that we could have faster speed to market and generate, you know, more revenue, which helps us all. Sure, but I didn't hear leadership say that.

Speaker 2: 50:09

So, to that earlier point of, like someone said, you have to understand the technology and the business and the people and how it all works together. Somebody somewhere forgot what it was like to be that schmuck at the keyboard working four maintenance nights a week and when you throw two more gigantic tech stacks on them that they have to learn right away, I think if there was communication down like, guys, we have to do this to compete. The market has changed, you know, public cloud has changed everything and we need to get up to speed on that. I never heard anybody say that. I just heard automate or leave.

Speaker 2: 50:41

So I think how you communicate with your people top down can make a big difference on whether they'll even listen. I mean, I take responsibility for not being more attuned to the business, but I think the way the business talks to the people can help facilitate maybe more conversation than just oh, more crap. Great, when the hell am I supposed to do this? You got kids, aj, how'd you do it? Man, right, that thing I always used to say how do you do it?

Speaker 1: 51:07

How do you find the time? How do you do it? Oh man, we got another good comment here. When you're in a business how would you approach this where the effort is made to keep everything segregated, so it sounds a lot like where you were. So everything's always siloed, it's just big.

Speaker 2: 51:25

I think it's size right.

Speaker 1: 51:26

Yeah, yeah, and I know a lot of. It's like security, right, if you have one person that has the keys to the kingdom, then it's going to leave you vulnerable. So, having the ability to scale and having groups of people that are focused on certain things like you have your LAN team, your WAN team, security team, core team, so on and so forth but I guess the deciding factor is how much communication is going across those teams. Sure, you have your experts, you have the people that are focused, but when you need something from another team, what does that communication look like? And I think that's where, in your case, maybe you didn't need to learn tech stacks, maybe you just needed to learn how to communicate across the silos.

Speaker 2: 52:10

Yeah, yeah, and each silo also has their own processes. So you know again me being crybaby, whiny guy at the time who was just burnt out. Well, you need to move faster. And I'm thinking like well, for somebody to spin up a new app, those app owners have to interact with six different siloed teams and each of them have way too much process because things broke over time. And management adds process to slow it down, to break less things. So it just things took.

Speaker 2: 52:38

Partly why things took forever was because leadership put so much process in place, which it's not their fault. That's what you're supposed to do in these situations. It's what they tell you to do. You got to slow down, we're breaking too many things, right. But then you get to a point where there's a paradigm shift, like public cloud, like well, we got to go fast now. Well, okay, but there's a hell of a lot of process and six different silos that maybe I can't fix that. So you're right. I mean there's communication across silos, there's all the process it's.

Speaker 2: 53:10

I think the bigger organization gets just the more mired and like everything just slows down and it's really hard to communicate to get things done If a company isn't acting as one entity. I think it's really, which might be why there's some really great leaders like C-suite CIOs, ctos. They know, they know what's important and they know how to do that and they know to stay agile and stay relevant. You have to act as one, like there's some companies none have come to mind right now but like they can turn on a dime. They're just everybody. We're doing this now, right, and they'll do that where other places. Just it's really hard to change. People don't want to change, right.

Speaker 1: 53:40

That's true. Well, sir, I want to remind our listeners if you've enjoyed this episode, you can hit that like button and smash that bell icon to be notified of all of our future episodes. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please leave us a review. A little five stars, maybe A little bit helps out. There's now this new feature in our show notes. You can send us a text, you can send us a message directly from the show notes of any episode that you're listening to. You can ask us a question, let us know how we're doing. We love getting that feedback. We love hearing from our. Any episode that you're listening to, you can ask us a question, let us know how we're doing. Uh, we love getting that feedback. We love hearing from our listeners. So, please, uh, hit that link and, uh, let us know what you think.

Speaker 2: 54:21

Wait, who receives those text messages? I have received no texts.

Speaker 1: 54:27

They're not. They're not texts to our mobile devices. Thank, thankfully, uh is thankfully. It goes into our podcast hosting dashboard.

Speaker 2: 54:34

You people better not text me in the middle of the night, that'd be great. Andy's number is Publish it on the site Any questions or comments send them right to me.

Speaker 1: 54:48

Right at the bottom of the website Call Andy. Andy. What do you think? I think that there's so much opportunity for anybody who's currently a network engineer. I mean, if you want to stay a network engineer and just keep doing what you're doing, hey, if you enjoy it, there's no fault to you. But I think there's plenty of other opportunities out there. As we've heard before, like network engineering isn't, as you know, sexier or whatever, as it used to be, and we're trying to get more and more people into it.

Speaker 2: 55:15

Yeah, yeah, listen, it's a great career. It's treated me very well. I love it. The learning never ends, which I love and hate, but right now I love it. And yeah, there's just so many other roles in technology that our skills directly relate to that may even pay better, so it's a really great skill set to have and I thought it was the only skill set I would need for the rest of my career. As it turns out, it's a foundational skill set, so it doesn't seem like it's enough anymore for whatever that's worth, and even if you're just throwing on some automation on top of it, right. But today, route and switch does not seem like enough. Uh, in some places it might be, but sure, I feel like the pendulum is swinging and but yes, it's still a great career. We need to get more people in the field and there are just so many opportunities having this skillset and so many you know we probably talked about 20, 25 of them tonight different things you can do with that. So, yeah, it's a great career, it's a great place to be.

Speaker 1: 56:19

Yeah, I love it. I don't regret getting into it, and while I'm not as much of a network engineer as I used to be I have not configured a routing protocol since last year at this point but I still understand networking and that understanding helps me monumentally in my current position. So I'm trying I really am trying to stay as close as I can to it, partly because we have this show and I don't want to.

Speaker 2: 56:50

I was going to say you just keep running the network, our network engineering, and you got enough street cred. Man, worry about it, right?

Speaker 1: 56:56

right. Yeah, I'm trying to do the rev up to research stuff that's going on right now so that way I can maintain my ccnp. I really, even though I don't touch cisco anymore, I really don't want to let that go. Man, like I, I I still want to do an expert level. Sir, I I just you know I work so hard to get it I really I'm going to hold on to it for dear life.

Speaker 2: 57:15

Can you do CEs for that, ce credits or whatever they're called? Yeah, yeah, I can do CEs to. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 57:20

Yeah, say rev up to research like free CEs. So complete a course, get free CEs that goes towards renewing your certifications.

Speaker 2: 57:30

You can't let your NP expire. Listen, we met through the NP and I know how many times it took you to pass that exam. I don't think you can?

Speaker 1: 57:38

Yeah, I don't think you can let that one go and you're going to get your DE and or IE someday.

Speaker 2: 57:43

So you're going to yeah you got to keep that NP man.

Speaker 1: 57:46

I want the DE. I don't know if I'm going to do the IE. I'm going to have to get a whole new stack of lab routers, if I'm going to have to get a whole new stack of Labrador's.

Speaker 2: 57:51

if I'm going to do that, Do you need your NP for the DE? Is it a prereq? No, no, oh. So then let it expire. Who cares as? Long as you don't need it.

Speaker 1: 58:01

Right, exactly Awesome. Well, this has been another fun episode and we will see you next time on another episode of the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

Speaker 2: 58:12

Hey everyone, this is Andy. If you like what you heard today, then please subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher. Click 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 artofnetworkengineeringcom, where we post all of our show notes, blog articles and general networking nerdery. You can also see our pretty faces on our YouTube channel named the Art of Network Engineering. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.