Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology, business, and culture
with the finest minds in computer networking.
Well, hello, Tom. How are you? Hey, Russ.
I'm doing great. How are you doing?
I'm fine. I I I am examining the
plant to see if there's
any massive changes.
Nope. It's pretty healthy right now.
Have you been turning it regularly?
I have not, but I think my wife
probably has. So Yeah. Okay. Good. Because that
would be that's the best thing to do.
It's a horticultural show, Rick was telling us,
so. Yeah, you need to turn your plants
like you rotate your drinks and you're covered.
It's like a rotational thing. And today we
have Rick Graziani,
So, Rick,
you're out at,
Cabriolet
College, right, in California. Is that the right
Yeah. Cabrio College. Cabrio. See? No. Forget it.
I'm just no good at this pronunciation thing.
I'm giving up. You're doing okay. Really.
Because most most people
also over at, University of California Santa Cruz
and,
whoever else will have me.
Whoever else will have me. That's about the
way I feel right now. So okay.
Cool. So we started out
talking before the show about
theory and practice again. I know this is
like a hobby horse for me. I know
I'm, like, on it all the time and
people think,
could you just shut up about the theory
thing?
So Tom's over here shaking his head. Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I like it. I mean, it's great.
We should talk about it more. So,
you were relating, Rick, that you that your
students Rick teaches college if you haven't figured
this out. He's a professor. So we have
to, like
he's very, you know, he's very fancy. He's
got the background with the, you know, like,
the dark wood and the books and the
cape and the hat, all that stuff there.
Yeah. That's yes. Yes. I have my my
little
cap and gown on all the
So when you walk down the path at
the college, you get that billowing effect from
the Oh, it always.
I carry a leather briefcase.
Nice.
And is it brown or black?
Oh, the brown. It's a little dirty brown
leather briefcase. Yeah. I I I know. I
have to look smart.
It's a book that's on. It's funny I
have the books in the background.
I'm
not even allowed to keep them at home,
and that's really the main reason.
Yeah. I just you know, you know, we
talked about the the the, you know The
Internet yellow pages. Internet yellow pages. Yes. I
still have my copy of the Internet yellow
pages. You know, I wish I had some
of the old old, Whole Earth catalogs I
used to have,
but I threw them around on some way.
I should have just kept them all. Like,
you you remember the whole the whole catalog,
like, you know, Stewart Brand. I I should
have but anyway alright. So
we were talking about theory and practice
and not really practice so much as configuration.
And you were saying before we started that
you have some experiences from your students
who talk about this because they're in the
job market. You
many of many of us are, but anyway,
you're in the job market.
And so
what what are you hearing from the job
market from your students
about this thing?
You know, first of all, I and I
I I mentioned this at the, you know,
before we went,
started recording, but I start every one of
my courses. Oh my gosh. Yes. I know
you're not gonna like this.
But with this quote,
that that from you, that that that reply
that you made to Yvonne Peptimek. Right? Peptimek.
Yeah. Yeah.
On LinkedIn.
And, that, you'll have to spend time in
the theory
and in the history. And I think that's
important too because far too many people become
configuration
experts and don't understand the first thing they
are working on. And
that's true from both standpoints.
You know, quickly on the history,
you know, students
learn all these technologies and protocols. And if
you're kinda old like mostly me, since I'm
the oldest out of the three of us
here,
you know, I I graduated college in '79.
I got my undergrad, and none of this
existed.
I mean, there's a few things happening, but
none of it was taught at school.
But anyway,
understanding
where we are today and the protocols and
things we use today, it was all an
evolution.
It was all Denish Dutt actually talks about
this in his Cloud Native Data Center Networking
book
about, you know, it's it's a problem followed
by a solution, then another problem followed by
a solution.
But not just the history, but the the
understanding,
the theory of all this. I mean, anybody
can you know, it doesn't take much to
to type in a few BGP
commands.
Also, it doesn't take much to black hole,
you know,
you know, Google or YouTube or somebody like
that either.
So,
but, yeah, what I've been It's worse, by
the way, if you do it that in
your China. Just saying.
Okay.
Which is exactly what happened when YouTube was
completely black holed for several days. It was
a Chinese ISP
that disaggregated
YouTube's address space in order to do something,
but it was a phone I don't know
exactly what they were doing, but it was
a fumble finger, and they ended up in
YouTube's address space, and they disaggregated
you advertising
longer prefix matches for the entire YouTube address
space
and basically
took YouTube down. Like I remember Pakistan ISP
doing that back in 1990. It's Pakistan. Yeah.
It's something like that. Yeah. I remember Pakistan.
Yeah. It's like, unless you're a Pakistani
ISP, then, you know, then you can blow
up the entire world, not just your network.
There's a difference between what somebody does that's
important in teaching.
That I I screw up. Nobody nobody remembers.
You know? I'm not gonna make I'm not
gonna make the news.
But,
yeah. I'm just it's it's the the the
like you
like you've said for many years, you know,
just
understanding
what this is working on. And I've got
to say, a lot of students are, I'm
getting a lot of great feedback
from both the students and the recruiters.
Talked to a couple of the last couple
of weeks that is talking about they talk
about, you know, they want they want to
see do the do the students really understand?
Not that they have to memorize. And if
they don't know, don't BS.
They had an exposure of familiarity
with
how things
actually work.
And,
and if they can't remember, they can figure
it out.
And and I think that's so important, especially
what we're doing today.
So are the I'm curious. Are the students
and maybe don't know, but are the students
enjoying this type of interaction or or would
they rather answer different types of questions or?
You know, as far as, you know, as
far as, like,
understanding the concepts and that, I think what
it does is it builds confidence.
You know, when you start doing, like, a
packet walk,
then you actually say, oh, okay. You kind
of
pull back the curtains
and you say, oh, okay. It's not magic.
It's not hard.
It is
tedious at times
and,
detailed. And not that I'm gonna remember everything,
but,
you know, this isn't hard. It's just, you
know, what comes next and why.
You know, I one of the things I
like to talk about in one of my
classes with PacketBox is just something very simple.
Like, you're sending you have two devices,
on,
connected to, you know, a network.
And then there's a layer three switch in
between.
And it's and is that and if the
two devices are in the same VLAN, the
same IP network, how does that layer three
switch? It works as layer two with the
MAC address table. But if it has to
get routed between the two devices, it's gotta
go through the layer three switch acting as
a router.
How does that actually happen? What's actually taking
place
each point along the way?
You know, it's easy to to kind of
configure it
and see generally what's happening, but what is
it from the perspective of the frames and
the packets
and the layer three switch slash router that's
happening? So
I I just know, like, when I pull
that stuff back from the students,
they go, oh,
okay. You're not as smart as we thought
you were, Rick. This isn't that bad.
And part of it too
is just sniffing out garbage,
just building your sense
of what is plausible and what is not.
As an example,
this last week, I saw multiple
email messages on various mailing lists, and I
saw it on LinkedIn and various other places.
Dijkstra's been beaten. There's a better algorithm than
Dijkstra for shortest path first,
and everybody's point to this research paper.
Okay.
I'll bite.
Reality is
Dijkstra is pretty pretty efficient. Okay? It was
written for a six bit machine.
It's pretty efficient.
So what's gonna be Dijkstra?
So you go look and the paper explicitly
says
it's faster than Dijkstra
for an ordered
trees.
Okay.
The fine print. The fine print.
Sorry.
But shortest path first is not an on
unordered tree algorithm
or heuristic.
It must have the metrics must be in
there, and you must have an ordered tree.
Just has the way has to work that
way.
So, no, Dijkstra has not been beaten.
So whatever with your hype.
Well, I'm glad you looked into it because
I saw it everywhere.
And I'm like, and then I saw it
in so many places. The more I saw
it, the more I didn't trust it. Yeah.
Exactly.
But It just we're we're just reposting.
Yeah. Yeah. But why? Why don't you trust
it? Because you've worked with Dijkstra for a
long time, and you know how efficient it
is. And you know how many times people
have tried to beat Dijkstra in terms of
speed. And you know how optimized. It's not
just
the algorithm or the heuristics pure.
It's how much
if you go look at modern Dijkstra code,
modern short pass first first code,
there's nothing there.
It's been so optimized
that there's nothing there. It's like
the list are sorted on, on, in, on,
insertion rather than during the actual shortest path
first. So
the,
so when you run shortest path first, what
you actually do in most implementations now is
just pull the list off the off the
array
because everything's sorted when you put it on
the list.
Like, there's so many efficiencies that they've put
into this that people have thought of over
the years.
It just seems impossible.
Like
so that's why I'm suspicious. That's why I
go dig the paper up. I'm like, what?
Listen. I just learned how to finally spell
his name. So Oh, it's in alphabetical order.
Yeah. There you go. Oh my goodness. Now
now we got you're right. Isn't that d
I k j.
Yeah. But there's an a at the end.
Right. But the r and the a are
not. Right. The r and the t are
reversed and the a, so it's T r
a, but it's I j k
Oh my god. That's so s tra.
So other thing I love about this stuff,
that it's people. You know, I I when
I talk you know, I think students when
they take other, you know, biology, chemistry, physics,
you know, everything kind of has, like, a
sense of
order to it that there's one way of
doing things and, you know, that's but with
networking, it was these technologies were invented by
people like Dijkstra.
Yeah. And,
there's,
you know, there's
there's, as you know, a lot of competing,
protocols and technologies even today, but it's, you
know, there's it's not a this is the
only way. It's
And VHS always wins. I'm sorry. I know
the end of the story, VHS always wins.
Oh, no. Are we gonna talk about Ethernet
versus whatever now?
Oh, actually, Ethernet was about the best.
Honestly, I worked on token ring and token
bus and,
what was the other one? Tommy Conrad
did their thing, and I worked on all
of them. And honestly, even it was about
the best.
So I'm not too unhappy that either that
one. Now. You know, now we're doing rocky,
which just means basically
we're trying to develop
circuit based Ethernet,
like,
Ethernet one because it was stochastic.
Now we're doing circuit based Ethernet.
Yeah. Okay. That's
I remember I had a college professor that
said it was very memorable to me. He
said, Ethernet is just a frame format now.
That's all it is. That's all it is.
Oh, okay. Oh,
CSMACD?
Is there any network currently existing on the
face of the Earth that actually still uses
CSMACD?
You haven't been in, an academic setting.
Libraries or
but yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. We
we got we used to get donated hubs.
Like, everybody was donating hubs for a while
to schools because, you know,
we're we're that that's their idea of helping
schools.
I mean, the only reason I mentioned c
CMSA CD is because of,
Wi Fi and CMSA
CA. Yes. Which is very similar. Yeah. Yeah.
It's it's
It's not not a not really a thing.
Yeah. So you have you have recruiters
who are actually saying
we prefer people with theory. So I find
that astounding. With theory. I I just find
that astounding. Are you sure you're actually talking
to recruiters
and not, like, people who are pretending to
be recruiters?
I'm sorry. Russ Russ is dubious.
Yeah. It's, these are actually people that are
hiring.
And,
you know, I I think what they're they're
trying to
what that tells them is that if somebody
understands the theory,
the concepts,
that they that they can learn.
That they have the ability to understand and
comprehend,
these these
diff sometimes complex and difficult topics,
more than just,
you know, it drives me kinda nuts about
the world of cybersecurity
and everybody wants to go into cybersecurity after
take one or two courses and learn all
these tools. And all of a sudden,
they can be they can they, you know,
think that they can be, you know, get
a job in cybersecurity where they don't really
understand any of the underlying
factors involved in this.
So,
I think employers are seeing for the long
run, if they wanna hire they wanna hire
somebody
that is gonna be,
a long term asset to their company that
they can,
you know,
that they can train, that they can learn,
and they can grasp
what they're doing today and what they're doing
in the future. They'll understand the basic foundations
and concepts. Gotta be able to have that
ability to do it. That's that
go ahead. That I'm also a little stand
astounded and somewhat skeptical
because
because every time I don't know. I like,
who has the time, first of all, to
screen for knowledge? It's harder. Like, it's it's
it's more it's more time intensive,
to see if someone has what it takes
if if they understand things at a theory
level. It's a lot easier to be like,
hey, what, what models of switches have you
worked on? Like, I've seen that in job
requirements before. It just makes me wanna yak.
Like, what what does it matter with the
silk screen on the front of the stupid
switches? Why is this in a job description?
Like, and but but then it's pretty easy,
like, okay. Show me how to configure this,
that, and the other. And you can set
them down at a at a keyboard and,
you know, watch them type to to to
and, oh, okay. Well, they know. And, like,
that's so easy.
Yeah. It's just I I think it's cool.
I'd like to interview at one of these
places, actually.
Oh, one there's one company lately
that,
has hired a couple of my previous students,
and one of the things they really liked,
the students
in their interview,
had a,
structured design topology that we're working on. Now
we they we use Packet Tracer, but it's
it's basically
use you know, they're adding in one of
my classes where we do everything from VLANs
to OSPF
and,
you know, FHRP
and LAN security and and everything else,
EtherChannel.
They they like to they they saw how
the students were
taking this brownfield network and adding to it
and then adding all these technologies
and understanding how they were all coming together.
And the students the students started this. They
they brought this to their interviewer, the two
in particular.
And the company was just kind of like,
wow. I can see that
you're doing it, but you also, you know,
they were they could talk about it.
So so what do you mean you said
the students brought this to the interviewer. Did
they were they just describing, like, here's what
we did in class or what yeah. Tell
me more about that. They, I I believe
they brought one brought their packet of labs
that that they were working on just to
show. And
Cool. You know, the the actually, the crew
ended up, you know, reaching out to me
and some others where at this is at
UC Santa Cruz.
And,
and
and they ended up talking about, you know,
I actually just had last week had them
talking to my class.
But,
they were just very impressed that the students
are not just being able not
just understanding all these different technologies and protocols,
but, you know, putting them all together,
and understanding
the intricacies
and these complex relationships
that happen. You know, they're not experts
And and and the students, you know, they
but they're beginning to see
how complicated all this stuff is
where you start adding different things and it
just kind of it changes
the,
the dynamics of the entire network, what you're
doing.
So they were very,
very impressed by the
that they were working on something like that
they had been working on something like this,
and they understood it.
That's really cool, actually.
Yeah.
So so this is probably one of the
things I always tell people is that
if you're building trying to build your career
in network engineering is to have
a public record of what you've worked on
and it honestly
or what you've spent time with, it honestly
doesn't even matter if anyone else reads it.
Because a recruiter is never gonna know that
only five people read your blog.
For them from their perspective, they're not gonna
be able to tell. Unless, I mean, there's
possibly ways of telling, doing Google Analytics or
whatever, but who cares?
What really matters is that you have a
blog,
Tom. Anyway, what really matters is that you
have a blog
and that you're showing curiosity,
and you're showing
I've gone out and done this, and I've
done that, and everything else.
And yet I know that I've I've had
this discussion for a while too now going
on,
that one thing I really dislike about the
IT world is that
when a company says there are two things
that a company can say to me that
just drive me nuts. The first is your
family.
No, I'm not.
You can just stop right there.
Because you are full of stuff and fluff.
I'm sorry.
That is nonsense on stilts. I am not
your family.
You are not my family.
And all you're trying to do is to
displace my relationships with my family, with a
relationship with you. And all you're trying to
do is make you your company more important
to me
than my family is. But when you're tired,
or you don't have the money,
you're gonna dump me faster than a than
a box of old donuts.
So don't so don't play that game. Because
that's that's total nonsense with me. The other
one that always drives me nuts is,
oh,
we want you to be really smart, but
we don't wanna spend any time or money
training you.
Stop.
I don't know.
Just stop already. Like,
I
anyway.
Do your I'm I'm curious, Rick. Do your
students come back from these,
experiences,
talking about training as a as an incentive
or as a a fringe benefit or anything
or the companies they're interviewing saying, yeah, we'll
we'll help you learn, continue your education?
They're mostly looking for, companies that think of
them as family. No one can.
Yeah. You know,
it's, training is
is important to them.
I think it's also just,
you know, that at first, that first job
out of the gate, they're just they're more
worried about what am I you know,
they're they feel a little intimidated,
a little
Right. You know, they're
not do not have any confidence, like, how
is this what this company wants me?
You know, I've been speaking for over thirty
years and I still feel that way.
But, you know, I mean, a few weeks
ago, I was talking to another company that
was had hired a couple of students. And,
one of the things that they said was
that they what they really liked about the
students was not that they that that everything
that they were had learned or even, you
know, and again, they had used this kind
of this structured design,
labs that they had been working on. But
not that they would be doing that, but
they had the ability
to that that showed their ability to learn
and that
that they were gonna put them through. And
that and we get back to your your
your question about, you know, some training.
That they were that they can that, you
know, they showed that, you know, like you
said, curiosity,
just that being
interested
in
in this whole
group of technologies,
area, whatever you wanna call it, that students
have really no idea what what's what's out
there. But just they're interested.
So do you discuss with your students the
network engineering life cycle from
excitement
to, I can't believe people actually pay me
to do this
to cynicism.
Leave out the cynicism.
Yeah. I was gonna say, let them find
it on their own. No. You know. But,
you know, you mentioned about the family and
stuff. You know, one thing I do, I
you know, one thing I I tell I
talk to them at the end of every
course,
especially the the seniors is I, you know,
I mentioned that. So you you had a
lot of you had a lot of hurt
than I did. You know, the whole idea
that they think on social you see everything
on social media. They think every all their
friends are getting the greatest jobs with these
big companies
living the life.
And, you know, because, you know, well, I
I didn't even know, you know, I had
to go find out if I want to
see what somebody could have. It's really only
10 out of the 100 friends who have
a good job. The rest of them are
still working as baristas,
but they're only paying attention to the 10
who are posting on LinkedIn. Yeah. Exactly. And,
you know, and the whole thing is, like,
you you know, Russ, I I joined the
Coast Guard after college,
and that was the best thing I ever
did. I mean, they gave me opportunities
that
no no company would have given me at,
you know, when I was 22 years old
and and forged a path for me that
I'm doing today that I had no idea
I would be doing.
So it's a lot of it's, you know,
who you work for and, you know, who's
who's and they provided a lot of training.
Mhmm. And,
the other thing too that Russ you know,
you mentioned family. I also mentioned to them,
I said, you know,
remember that
you gotta take care of yourself and your
family
while you are while you're working. They're a
priority because the company is not gonna care
anything about you when you turn
60, 65, 70 years old. And if you
have health issues,
family issues, or everything like that, that you
gave up because you wanted to work eighty
hours a week.
And,
the company's not gonna care about what happens
to you. When they're when you're done, you're
done they're done with you.
You gotta look out for yourself
and your family.
That's the number
number one thing. Keep that in mind.
Yep.
Build your career around your family, not your
family around your career. It's just this is
what you've got to do. You have to
do it as an engineer.
And you have to take care of your
own learning.
You have to stay cur curious.
I mean, I joke about cynicism. We all
all get cynical after we've been I've been
doing this for thirty years.
You're like, you get cynical after a while.
But on the other hand, that doesn't
there's a blend of the cynicism with with
continued wonder and and curiosity that you can
still achieve. I know that sounds really odd
to some people, but, like,
I like this whole thing with Dijkstra.
It's like, it's not just that I was
cynical. It's like, Billy.
Okay. I wanna see the algorithm. I wanna
know how this works. I wanna understand this.
This is a new construction
in in graph theory. I really wanna understand
it. I actually get still interested in new
topologies.
Dragonfly is interesting to me. And I sit
down with a dragonfly, and I'm like,
so how does that scale? How would that
converge?
And I map out convergence processes
for BGP and and link state protocols.
And even the Edge European, I still do
it mentally with the Edge European for those
who think that's crazy.
But, yeah, I map these things out in
my head because I'm still there's still a
lot of curiosity
and just,
I don't know. So so far it hasn't
killed the cat, I suppose.
But that's what I love about this business
too. I I I also mentioned this to
my students. It's it's like the greatest mystery
novel. It's like a mystery novel that never
ends. And if you like this stuff,
you yearn because
you you're you're
curious. You're sincerely curious
about all of this stuff. I mean, I'm
doing a book right now with somebody at
Cisco on,
it's for beginners. It's Python
using Python for automating
networks. It's for the beginner, for the simple
minded like like me.
And, this didn't exist.
I mean, I started out on,
you know,
Prime seven fifty minuteicomputers,
Ungerman Bass, went to Tandem.
You know, there was none of this. Automating
what?
And,
but
I truly enjoy this.
Truly enjoy
pulling back the curtain, bringing back full circle
is,
you know, I I get excited when I
do, you know, looking at VXLAN
and doing and figuring out, okay, what is
actually happening,
and looking at everything from from point a
to point z.
It's Yeah. It's it's it's fun. It's like
the it's it's like, okay. I figured this
out.
I don't know. You know, you're older than
I am, Rick, but somehow when I started,
we only had basic
and assembler
and Pascal.
Oh,
Pascal.
Yes. Now you're talking
and Fortran. I never learned Fortran. So people
are like, why'd you learn C of all
the languages? I'm like, because my choices were
assembler,
Pascal,
and c.
How about because it's the foundation of all,
all networking code? Yeah. It just didn't nothing
else existed.
Well, you and if you they
and COBOL wasn't a choice for you.
Who wants to learn COBOL? Even back then,
you knew you didn't wanna learn COBOL.
Yeah. I I I've been doing COBOL. And
how many how many network protocol implementations are
in COBOL?
I don't know. There are people who would
write
COBOL implementations
of BGP just because it could it could
be done. I mean,
many years ago Google,
right? Yeah. Daniel Walton wrote a wrote an
implementation of BGP in Python
because,
well
Nice. It's there.
Nice. Yeah.
So interesting. So, yeah, so I am a
little bit surprised to hear that recruiters are
looking for talent
in the realm of,
theory, which is actually heartening to me. I
actually like that because it is a struggle
in our world. I was just talking to
somebody
couple of days. Well, even yesterday, I think
it was on LinkedIn,
and they were asking me, so what are
you teaching now? So I started explaining this
basics thing that I'm doing for, or on
Egan Irgan's site.
And I'm like, and I tried to do
this on my own, but I couldn't get
subscriptions
because nobody cares.
Nobody literally cares. Like,
it's so sad to me
that no one cares
about
how
Dykstra works,
you know, down in the dirt and understanding
it. I think the other problem is too
is that when people get into it, maybe
you've seen this, Rick. Maybe there's something you
can think about or talk about a little
bit,
is that
a lot of people think the basics should
be more complex than they are, and they're
more excited about doing
advanced
stuff.
Oh, it's advanced.
And you're like,
if you can do Dijkstra in your head,
that is pretty advanced.
Okay?
Like, that is more advanced than knowing how
to configure
blah dee da or knowing the latest protocol
suite for for Ethernet or whatever it is.
That's advanced,
but they think of advanced as having more,
oh, I I I can I can put
a thousand hours in the lab, so I'm
advanced? You can only put ten in the
lab, so you're not advanced.
That's nothing to do with anything.
Yeah. You see these people doing showing their
con super complex,
I don't even say complex,
busy topologies
with all kinds of devices, switches, routers, and
just like it's
making it more
doesn't make a it means you know more.
You just have to duplicate with the same
thing
many
times. Yeah. And,
I can't say that, you know, it's a
trend with companies. I don't know if it's
I would hope it is, but I don't
know if it's a trend with companies looking
for
the underlying
concepts,
students or
entry level people are knowing the concepts.
But I think it's important because there's so
many companies out there that all they're looking
for is those keywords.
You know, the cert keywords
or they know, you know,
you know, the protocol,
all the,
you know, the out protocol alphabet out there.
Throw it all in there and,
you know, and I can do these things,
but,
I don't get really it's I think it's
it's a
I think these companies are doing a disservice
to themselves
because they're not gonna get the best.
So so we had a couple of people
at Cisco when I was working there that
would interview people in this way.
They would take their resume, and it would
print out a physical copy.
And then they would bring a red pen
to the interview,
and they would start asking questions.
And you would see them writing and writing
and writing and scratching things out. And at
the end of the rest, at the end
of the interview, they would hand you back
your resume
and say, correct it to say this.
That is brutal.
If if I if I could, if anybody
would would listen to me about this, here's
what I would tell them. These companies that
that that you're talking about, Rick, I think
what they stumbled on was actually an indicator
of whether or not this employee,
is gonna be able to stick with you
and learn the new things that come along
and be able to solve future problems that
you have not yet encountered. I don't think
there's probably maybe there's other ways to screen
for that, but and I don't even know
if companies are screening for that. But if
you want in my opinion, if you wanna
screen for the person who can be for
the long haul and can figure out the
next thing with you,
it's the ones who understand the theory. All
the rest of them will either get disinterested
and they'll quit and they'll leave, they'll get
mad because the new thing changed, or they
just won't be able to do it, then
somebody else is gonna hold their hand. Like,
I I really think this is a screener
for people who can stay for the long
haul.
Yeah. That's the perfect way to summarize everything
I said for, like, forty minutes and all
that.
And you know what? We're all tired of
being the person holding everybody else's hand. That's
true. It's true.
You know, it gets talk about cynicism. That'll
get you cynical very quickly.
Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, it's
it's one of those things. But I also
don't know that companies even at my level,
not just beginning level, really a lot of
times value
the theoretical knowledge.
They're very focused on
get this product out the door right now.
And by the way, the other thing that
annoys me, I don't know if you have
anything with this, Rick,
but I'm very much a do the right
thing. Kind of an engineer.
I know it's gonna take longer.
I know it's gonna be harder. I know
it's gonna cost a little bit more money,
but the reality is I have never
ever been in a situation
ever in my entire
life
from working on rebuilding cars
through through working on radar systems,
to working on networks and writing code that
I've ever
found
that doing it the cheap, easy, quick way
was a win. It just never was.
I've never seen it happen.
So
I I know in my work I do
it's another work I do with somebody in
writing curriculum and even trying to write some
books. No, Grace Hopper was one of my
longtime hero of mine.
For those who don't know who she is,
she, you know,
developed the the COBOL language but way back,
back goes way back to the Harvard Northwell.
I'm not not really sure why she's a
hero, you know, with the whole cable COBOL
thing. Was it also Ada? Did she do
Ada?
No. Ada was Ada no. I don't think
I think that was after her. Yeah. Might
must have been, but yeah. Yeah.
But, you know, she she once said, you
know,
we we only look at the cost of
doing something. We never look at the cost
of not doing something.
And,
you know, when you when you when you
do try and scrape and save and get
things do things as cheap and quick as
possible, there's gonna be a cost to that
in the long run. You may not
right away, but you're gonna you're gonna see
it's gonna come back and bite you.
Yep. And it it's in the really end
up costing you more later. Yeah. An example
I use all the well, I've been starting
to use recently is
look at any car company.
Just look at all their designs. Now we
fuss because all the cars look the same.
Blah blah blah. I get that. And that
there's regulatory
reasons for that.
How many car how many car models does
Volvo, for instance, make? It's at least
12
and probably more. I don't even know. I
could go look at their website.
They literally make three cars.
Three cars. Three models of cars. Now they
come with different sheet mod sheet sheet metal.
They come with different interiors.
They come with different wheels. They come with,
like, one is a sport utility and one's
a station wagon and one's a coupe,
but they're the same
platform, and they call them platforms.
Another classic example of this is the Jeep
Renegade and the Fiat 500
are actually
the same platform.
They have different engines, and they have different
sheet metal.
But everything else is fairly much identical between
those two cars.
You'd never think that that could be true.
But what these but what these car companies
have discovered or what they do is they
build a platform and then they build variety
on top of the platform.
And we don't do this.
You know? It's part of doing the right
thing to me is you think through
what is my platform? What's the part that
moves and what's the part that doesn't move?
Right?
I used to have this old professional soccer
player and he'd say, you always kick
like, when you kick the ball,
you don't kick towards the center of body,
center of mass, you kick off from center
of mass because all the other parts of
the of your opponent are missing
or moving. If you're trying to pass the
ball, you give it you you kick it
to center of mass because that's the part
that isn't moving.
Oh.
It's it's an interesting but, anyway, sorry. That's
what I was thinking most of my life.
I mean, you got me,
rethinking
everything.
I was just I was just thinking about
interop when you were saying that. You know?
One player kicking a ball to another. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's true.
I will say the curriculum
work I do, they do
for some reason, they they, you know, people
sometimes they, like, you know, at least they
listen to me. And they they really do.
They did. The work I do on a
curriculum team,
is,
it you know, hardworking and they wanna do
the right thing. And that, I think, is
because they see the benefit to the learner,
the student. And I think that's really
it's,
it there's a passion there. When you're working
in especially when you're trying to help
students, people tend to really will
a little bit more. Yeah. Cool.
Awesome.
Well, I think we can wrap up there,
actually. I think we've captured enough of Rick's
time.
So, Rick, we're gonna bring you back on
sometime. You know? We just need to make
you into another one of the regular guests
to talk about stuff.
So I always wanna and to actually,
you know, see the plant live.
There you go. And so because that's what
I I I tune in every episode is
the plant. And the whiteboard.
The whiteboard.
Yeah. The whiteboard. You know, you gotta look
for what are Tom's kids studying this week.
Yep. Yep.
Because that's what's on the whiteboard.
My background is boring. It stays the same
all the time. You know, I might move
things around, but It's like books you wrote
and accomplishments you have, but now we're gonna
talk about the plant.
Yeah. I had a thing for a while
that every country I went to, I tried
to buy something I could put on my
in my office.
But it it didn't it didn't actually work
out very well. What I did do is
every country I went to, I bought my
daughters both a pair of earrings.
So It's nice. So so now they have
these huge earring collections,
and they can't remember what countries they all
came from, but that's okay.
Yeah. It's, it's still what it is.
All right. Cool. All right,
Tom, say your word.
LinkedIn.
All right, Rick.
You
like this LinkedIn.
Yes. Virtual high five to Rick.
Wow.
You're outnumbered Russ.
Alright.
I guess that's it then. Alright. This is
Russ White and I, you can always find
me here at rule 11 at tech on
the hedge
on LinkedIn on x. Sometimes I'd log in,
not always, but sometimes I'm out there looking
at that.
We know we live in an attention driven
economy, and we thank you for listening all
the way to the bitter end
of this episode of The Hedge,
and we will catch you next time.