Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology,
business, and culture with the finest minds in
computer networking.
Hello, frog. Hello,
Yvonne.
I have to say hi to the I
have to say hi to the frog lamp
too.
Yes. The frog lamp is here. Tom is
not here today. I have a new plant.
This is alive. That's a grow light shining
down on it. This is called a Dieffenbachia.
And just for those who haven't been checking
in on Twitter, I've chosen my middle aged
lady hobby,
and it is plants.
So I've become a plant lady.
And you said grow lamp and then said
whatever that word was, which I assume that
was a strain of weed, but then I
looked at the plant and go, oh, no.
That's Yvonne's not growing weed. That wouldn't that
wouldn't really fit with you. It's not who
you are. It it's not. It's not. Although,
there are days.
But I but I could use something to
relax.
Right? Which are just misplaced plants? It's a
different back. Yeah. There's several different varieties. I
have a small one in the house. I
have this one.
And so yeah. So we'll see how it
survives.
Alright.
Probably better than Tom's.
We'll see.
No. It's it probably better than Tom's. Okay.
Tom's not here, so better than Tom's. Absolutely.
Better than Tom's. Exactly.
And then we have Ethan
with us today. We're we are
honored to have the great and mighty Ethan
Banks with us.
Home of the lucky.
Those sorts have not been strung together before,
Russ. Thank you for that. Really made by
Friday.
Nice to be here on the hedge.
He's looking a little blue. He's got a
blue shirt on. You can't see him, but
he has a blue shirt on and a
blue background. And, you know, we're he's a
little but we'll try to cheer him up.
People like the blue background. I don't know.
Some people do. I guess Russ doesn't. I
need to pick a he's talking about my
my YouTube background. That's that's kinda blue purple.
Whatever. I have blue green
over there, so it's okay. It's fine. You
know? Blue's my favorite color.
Just so you And that cardigan you have
on, whatever that is, would look perfect with
this background I've got here. Probably not enough
contrast, actually. But they're in the same color
family. Yeah. That's right. We do. Ethan Ethan
and his wife. You're the one who's the
odd man out here.
Thanks, Ethan. He's used to it.
I have been the odd man out for
thirty years, so
it is what it is.
So
I have been running into this a lot
recently. I'll just kick this off and and,
you know, everybody just jump in whenever.
I've been running in this a lot lately,
and maybe it's just because I'm old. Maybe
it's just because literally, maybe it's just because
I'm old.
I have noticed
what appears to me to be
a lack of depth
in the network engineering world, and combined with
that, a lot of old people who have
the depth are retiring.
Well, define depth. You've got
13 books to your credit, something like that,
and you're probably working on six more as
we speak. And you've been around for a
long time. You work in the IETF. So
depth to you and depth to other people
are probably different things. So how do you
mean depth?
Well, I mean depth even in the sense
of knowing more than one protocol
any longer. Almost everybody knows BGP, and they
know Ethernet, and that's what they know.
And there ain't nothing else.
There's got they got nothing else in their
in their toolbox.
And thought BGP was the one protocol to
rule them all when it came to networking.
It's the garbage can of the Internet.
There we go.
We just throw everything in there
and hope for the best. Maybe it's maybe
it should say it's the junk drawer, not
the garbage can.
Well, okay. So hang on. You're saying people
know BGP?
Mhmm. But you can't know.
BGP to me is like the if you're
coming up as a network engineer, it's it's
sort of the last routing protocol you learn
because you cut your teeth on
simpler protocols
like,
like RIP. You go very basic, understand how
that works, get your head around that, then
you can build on that and move to,
other protocols. You can figure out OSPF and
ISIS. You might be if you're in the
Cisco land, maybe you spend some time with
the EIGRP, and you build
on routing protocols and principles and how they
work, and you learn about things like,
split horizon and poison reverse and and a
bunch of other concerns. How do you prevent
a how does a routing protocol prevent loops
and so on? Then you move to BGP,
which kind of blows up half the things
you thought you knew and or reapplies them
in different ways, and you gotta have that
background to be able to put that together
to get your head around BGP.
No. These people just know BGP.
They've never deployed, run. They don't even know
how rip works. You say the words Bellman
Ford to them,
what do you mean? What is who who's
Bellman? Is that a protocol?
Like, Bellman Ford, who is that? That's two
last names. But nonetheless, that is actually what
I'm encountering. I'm encountering that, and I'm encountering
a number of people who don't seem to
understand the hardware limitations of or what a
router actually does.
Like,
it's a router.
It has six one hundred gig ports on
it. It should be able to route 600
gig.
Yeah. No. No no matter what operation you
mean, like, NCAP, decAP, and encryption, and these
sorts of things that Yeah. Are highly dependent
on the silicon and what that chip has
been designed to do or not do,
which is a massive exercise in trade offs.
Yes. And and that the idea that there
is an actual backplane
that has its own set of limitations
or,
other other processing capabilities that are happening inside
of that router where there there are chips
that have to do work.
And, you know, and I and I think
in in the defense of a young engineer,
you know, a few years ago, it became
really popular to deploy BGP in a data
center.
Mhmm. And and in in your, you know,
your leaf spine networks,
it's it's entirely
possible that, you know, especially if they haven't
worked in a campus network or they haven't
worked in an enterprise environment,
that you have engineers that have never ever
seen some of those protocols that for,
those of us of the, you know, I'll
just say gray beard variety even though that
doesn't exactly apply.
That,
you know, they were just the understood
protocols of of our day. You know, you
you would never run BGP
in a in a,
you know, campus network or even in the
data center back in the day. And really
my first exposure to BGP came when we
started doing wider networks and Internet connectivity.
Right? Which, believe it or not, wasn't always
a thing.
That's right. Not all networks connected to the
Internet
at one time in the world.
Yeah. And I hear what you're saying, Yvonne,
but that also speaks to
are people not changing jobs as often?
Or is it just that everybody's building networks
the same way,
and therefore,
nobody has it's you know, Ethan, you said
this once, and I heard you say it.
I know you said it.
Ethan said a lot of things. I understand.
I got, like, a hon. What did I
say that I'm not gonna remember saying? Go
ahead, Russ. Go ahead.
And it it actually had an impression on
me, by the way. You know, it it
made a big it made sense to me,
is that there is a vast difference
between twenty years of experience
and twenty years of the same experience 20
times.
Yeah.
Right?
If you say I said that, I I
it sounds like something I might have said
because, that's been
that has been my experience.
Moving around to different jobs and working on
different networks with different needs and requirements
and constraints to how you build the network
forces you to come up with different solutions.
Walking into a shop that's a Cisco shop
and then later going to a shop that's
anything but Cisco
creates a whole different,
environment and mindset. And so, yeah, that that's
right. If you do the same thing over
and over again,
you don't learn nothing, or you don't you
you only learn one thing. Just keep repeating.
Is that a so, again, I back up.
Do do a lot of people not change
jobs anymore and get that kind of experience?
Am I crazy? Like, I know I change
jobs a lot more than some people.
Although, I'm just offsetting my early career. You
know, I was at Cisco for sixteen years.
So now to make up the average number
of job changes for a network engineer over
my life,
I have to change jobs more often. I
mean, if you're in tech, I thought changing
jobs was normal either because
you kinda had to if you wanted to
move on with your career because most of
us in tech tend to get stuck if
we stay in the same place because there's
nowhere else to go,
or,
you get laid off. That seems to be
another trend in, in certain of the tech
companies anyway. And so you kinda have to
go, you know, find something else.
I I mean, who who stays at the
same company for forever and ever? I don't
know. Are are you are you speculating that's
a thing, Russ? Or do you is that
what you're going to do? Yeah. I'm trying
to understand why the depth that I am
so accustomed to among the old folks
is not there in the younger folks. Is
it is it just because they're younger? I
think that's the deep are you in your
twenties, seriously?
Do you really wanna know the answer
to that?
Not as deep as the rest of today.
I can guarantee that no matter how good
you were in your twenties. And I and
I know you were. I know some of
you the radio stuff you did and, you
know, various things. You were a you were
a tech nerd
even as a a a younger man,
but still you didn't have the That's fine.
Plus years of experience that came has come
for you since then. Yeah. Of course not.
But, again, I go back to,
is that the is that really the only
thing that's going on here? Or is it
that everybody's building networks the same way?
So even if you go to five different
jobs in five different companies,
you end up with the same experience at
all five companies.
Well, I think it's I think there's something
else going on. And I let me I'll
give you a a take here. So I'm
this is the third show I've been a
guest on this week, and this this
similar kinds of topics have have come up
on each show.
But
I have been working on a new podcast
called n is for networking, and that is
a show about networking fundamentals because we're finding
that with
people who are trying to break into the
networking field,
the technology stack that we use to deploy
standardized
vendor configurations
now, however you they're sort of they're validated
designs, they're certified designs, however you wanna describe
it,
are things that we grew up with, but
they're looking at this kind of inscrutable stack
of things, not seeing all the different pieces
and parts that make it up. It's like
one thing.
Okay? So in MS for networking, I'm working
with, Holly Metlitzky.
She's got
two ish years of experience working at Juniper
as a sales engineer.
WhipSmart,
aggressively going after certifications, trying to learn stuff,
and we're talking through topics together. She's like,
that's what that means.
That's how the that's how you put that
together.
Wait. In the guide I used to build
this out for a customer, it says to
do this, but I've never understood why. What's
going on?
Because they're not getting that in in the
training is a is a piece of it.
I think another piece of it is we're
getting queries from people who were like, I
want you guys to do an episode on
EVPN VXLAN
because that's what, apparently, the environment is that
they're operating in or that's what they're being
told to deploy. They need to know this
technology.
You know how it took us decades to
get to EVPN VXLAN as a solution. It's
a ton of technologies that all of that
LANs
and tunnels and end tie, end LANs and
tunnels and n tie
NCAP and DCAP and, encryption potentially and translating
from VLAN to VXLANs. And why did we
need VXLAN to begin with? It's this huge
set of problems and solutions that have come
and gone, and we didn't have a control
plane originally with VXLAN, and there was multicast.
And
just to get you to a point where,
like, okay.
Now with all that background,
you can we can begin to have the
EVPN VXLAN conversation.
It's
a piece of of knowledge. Yeah. I think
that's absolutely true as well. I'm sorry, Yvonne.
I don't know if you wanna jump in
there, but just give me a second. No.
I'll say this. I do a lot of
training, and I face exactly the same problem.
I get constant flows of people saying,
can you do advanced topic x?
And you're like,
okay.
I understand that you need to learn
Rocky.
I understand that you need to learn what
a dragonfly is. I got it. You wanna
get into the AI field or whatever it
is.
I get that.
But do you have the foundational knowledge for
me to explain it
to
you without having to spend four hours or
ten hours or twenty hours doing so? And
then when you start to explain it and
you're like, I understand where you are, I
need to explain,
cloth fabrics before or or butterflies before I
can get to dragonflies.
And they're like, I don't worry about doing
no no no no no no. I just
wanna be able to work on that network.
And you're like, that's
not the way this field works.
That's not the way our knowledge works
as engineers.
I'm sorry, but it's just not.
So Yvonne, toss in. I know you were
gonna say something. Well, gosh. I have so
many thoughts. I think first,
you know,
folks need practical knowledge to be able to
get a job. Right?
And
and so I I really understand
this. Hey, I need to know this very
specific thing.
Yep. We also have
this,
you know, cultural
theme of our training that was let me
show you how to configure it, not let
me show you exactly how it works.
And there's way more to know
than than there was when the rest of
us started twenty, thirty, forty years ago.
Yep. And where do you start in the
abstraction?
Like, where do you start? Do you go
all the way back to,
you know, ones and zeros and bits on
the wire and how all that happens?
Do do you do you start with that?
Okay. There's three years of,
you know, background, whether we're talking about,
you know, how things work at the physical
layer and Ethernet
and very fundamentals of encapsulation.
And at that point, it's three or four
years before somebody has the information that they
need to be able to get a job.
Right? And so it's it is a challenging
problem.
I think,
you know, we are missing this whole internship
kind of process where you take a more
senior person, you bring a more junior person
alongside of them, they work alongside of them,
they do things and then they ask questions
and learn as they go.
I think that's a better model,
but I don't I don't know if that
exists.
And now, you know,
there's just so much to know.
And it's
it's and I don't think we've figured out
how to how to get people in that
pipeline in a way that's effective for them,
our organizations,
and still continues to leverage all this knowledge
of folks who've been around for a while.
Yeah. I think I think so. We've hit
three things so far, which I think are
interest couple of three things I think were
true. One is, I think that I still
think that all the technology has become so
standardized
that you don't move from one company to
another and get something different.
It's it's all the same. Every company, they
do the same thing.
They use Ansible or whatever it is. They
use, you know, the same five set of
tools.
I think that's The the technology stack is
standardized, you're saying? Yes. Yes. Okay. So so
you never step outside that technology stack.
If you never if you never work on
a network that actually runs ISIS or SPF
Mhmm. You never really understand link state protocols.
Right?
So how how how can I fuss about
somebody not knowing link state protocols
when there aren't many networks in the world
that run link state protocols anymore?
They all run BGP.
And so you're like, okay. But there's there's
a depth problem there.
I think the second thing was Yvonne is
saying is that
we don't mentor.
We don't do anything.
We just bring people in and throw them
to the walls. I mean, my first day
at Sysco,
I I walked in the office in at
the Hardwood Hotel, as we called it,
and they said, there's the TAC. So I
walked over to the TAC, and they said,
we've gotten you a set of 12 dot
o or eleven eleven dot whatever it was,
10 dot x, whatever it was, documentation,
and there was a magazine rack,
you know, that was two feet wide or
three feet wide. And there was this huge
group of books in it,
and they said, here's the telephone. Here's your
son workstation.
Take cases.
Have that.
I mean, there was literally there was no
training
because
you know?
So what you did instead was you learned
to ask questions
of everybody around you, and you were slow
taking cases at first until you ramped your
knowledge up.
So part of that problem is
businesses expect people to hit the ground running,
and they don't expect there to be a
time when they have to pay them and
ramp up.
So maybe that's another part of what Yvonne
is talking about.
I also listened to a great podcast, Lenny's
podcast. Let me see if I can I
can pull up, but they were they were,
he was interviewing,
basically, a hotelier?
It's it's called Lenny's podcast.
Okay. Yeah.
But he was interviewing a hotelier that was
hired
by Airbnb.
He was not a technical person,
but he had he had built his own
chain of hotels and he was
in his fifties,
nearing 60
when
Airbnb
hired him as a consultant working with 20
developers.
And he was talking about a lot of
what he brought the conversation
was not just, hey, let me show you
how this looks and feels
from the perspective of a different generation,
but brought this experience
that,
just young folks don't have. And I also
think
there there is
a preference
toward youth and energy
that doesn't
always take into account the wisdom
of folks who've been around a while. And
I think that's a that's a component too
that, you know, hey. These these young upstarts,
they're gonna move fast. They're gonna do all
the things. They're not gonna overanalyze.
And you don't have to pay them as
much.
And to work more hours.
And and but there's a degree of balancing
that with
the, oh, yeah. You know, don't go there.
There'll be dragons. Like, been there, done that.
I know that when this happened, I've seen
this before.
Mhmm. And the the pattern matching that comes
with experience,
and and we we have to find a
way
to
capitalize on that
while at the same time
getting value from
youthful energy,
which brings its own
benefits.
Mhmm. Because,
y'all, there are some things, like, I'm just
not doing anymore,
you know, that that I would do in
my twenties,
you know,
that were great for me and great for
my organization at the time, but I'm I'm
not there anymore.
Yeah. Like, when I was in Cisco TAC,
we had what we call BIC duty,
b I c.
And it was on Saturdays and Sundays. Because,
of course, TAC coverage has to be 24
by seven seven days a week. You can't,
like, just not have the TAC up.
And so the way tech worked was there
was a rotating schedule around the world. We
picked up from Amsterdam,
Mexico City, whatever. We had this whole thing.
San Jose picked up from us. It's like
all the sun coverage is is what we
call it in the sales world. Yep. Exactly.
And so Saturdays and Sundays had to be
covered. And there were people
who
were written up
negatively
on their reviews because they would not take
Saturdays and Sunday shifts.
They were like, we offer you x amount
of money to work on a Saturday or
Sunday. What's the problem?
And they're like,
they're called children.
Those sweet angels aren't problems. Russ.
You know?
It was like, if the youth wanna work
on Saturday and Sunday because they're single,
great for them.
But leave us old folk alone. We have
kids.
Right?
And I don't know how much the IT
world accepts or understands that
at a lot of companies.
It feels a lot like they don't,
especially now.
But I don't know. So maybe that's a
component
of the whole
we're not raising up you the ute.
Well, I also think there is
a youthful confidence
that,
fades
over time.
It it it eventually gets replaced by
a sturdier
set of wisdom.
Right? Cynicism.
But,
you know,
there
I remember
like, raising my hand and thinking, I will
do that. How hard could it be? Yes.
You know?
And then you get into it and you're
like, oh,
maybe I shouldn't have raised my hand
for this thing in this time frame.
A lot of that's part of the process
though, and and I I think that the
challenge is
not
leaning on that wisdom when it's available to
go, oh, you know what? This might not
be the right way to do it. The
other thing
that those of us who
are been around a little longer, a little
bit more cynical, is, like, we can't always
show up and say, grumble, grumble.
No. That won't work. Grumble, grumble.
And then go back into our hole.
Right?
That's why that's what I want my job
to be, Yvonne.
I want to be
the cranky old man who sits in a
quarter
next to my frog lamp
and just sits there. And then somebody walks
up and says,
will this work? And you say, no. Now
go away. Moron, go drive, man.
I had this friend, Doc Slice, who always
said, I wanna be the world's number one
expert on a protocol nobody uses.
So you can't fire me because I'm the
only expert in the world, but
no one uses it, so I have no
customers. See,
that's
Ethan is pondering that
very deeply. Well, I'm I'm I'm I'm going
through the different, the way you set up
the problem and you're complaining about network engineers
that are, you know, up and coming and
should have some level of knowledge, but lack
depth in in the sense of they don't
have as broad experience as I'm worried about
it. I'm worried about it because I'm worried
about where the field goes from this. But
go ahead. Sorry, Ethan.
Well, I
you know, the journeyman thing or the intern
thing or however you wanna describe it. Right.
That's that's a challenge that's been in our
industry for a long time and that what
being a network engineer
means is different from what it means to
be
a,
on the road to becoming a master electrician,
which is a defined path, and there's,
regulations around that and and so on. There's
nothing like that and hasn't been in networking.
We've this is a conversation that's happened, you
know, many times before where we call ourselves
engineers, but that's not what that means to
other people who call themselves engineers. It's kind
of a different thing.
So what is the path? I mean, there
is no path, and and companies aren't
financially incentivized
to have you
that young person, younger person come in and
be mentored.
There's
some talk that
AI is gonna take away
those entry level positions that you would use
as your stepping stone to get
your
to get that knowledge, that baseline foundational knowledge,
that you need.
And that's what the ultimate impact of AI
will be on those roles, I think, is
to be determined. And I think there's a
lot of excitement and hyperbole around it at
the moment, but it'll have some impact,
I think.
Hard to say what.
I think it's gonna exacerbate the or ex
exasperate the problem or whatever you say. It's
I think it's gonna make the problem worse
Because like you said, I think it's gonna
knock out some of the first rungs of
the ladder.
Yeah. Whether it's the first three rungs or
the first five rungs, I don't know. But
I think it's actually gonna knock it. It's
gonna make this problem I'm talking about worse.
Another challenge that
we benefit from as an industry having people
with broad experiences that many networks are implemented
in in in different ways. Now, Russ, you're
saying,
everybody's running BGP everywhere. Well,
yes and no. It all depends on, where
they're at. The smaller networks, probably probably not.
There'd be less motivation for them to have
done that.
Larger networks,
it doesn't seem to be the way a
lot of shops have gone.
So another question
is what technologies and networking are aging out
that we
do we not need to really
be as concerned about a link state protocol?
Because
we've kinda standardized on, this is the way
we build the data center these days on
BGP, and we can argue
those of us with, you know, the the
gray in our hair about I was gonna
say beard, but, Yvonne, you don't have one.
Mercifully. Thank you.
For now.
There's still a chance, man.
But the Oh my goodness.
But,
you know, to me, the technology stack is
so huge, especially when considering history.
Like, Rusty, would you hold it against someone
that they don't know anything about AppleTalk, IPX,
or DECnet? Yes.
But, obviously, that those are irrelevant technology. I
would. I actually wouldn't because those are old
technologies nobody uses anymore.
And you can learn, I think,
most of the same lessons about protocol design
through other protocols.
Right? Like, I do I do think there's
some
value in having learned a frame relay
and
ATM way back in the day. But the
value is is when you come to me
with the broadcast and unknown
network
in the Bums traffic,
broadcast and then multicast
in
EVPN.
You just wanna say that. I know you
did. Yeah. I did. I just wanna say
that.
It is
I grasp it, like, twice as fast as
anybody else because it's the same thing.
Yeah.
Right? Yeah. Yvonne Papaniac wrote a post about
how ultra Ethernet is like x dot 20
it's the reinvention of x dot 25. It
is. He made his points of comparisons. Yeah.
Yeah. It's the same thing.
So yeah. So I think there's value in
having that experience, but I understand that that
experience that type of experience is gonna age
out. That's just gonna happen.
But I mean, on the Internet globally,
like, when we did the issue of networking,
Paul Micropetrius was still around. Paul Vixie was
still around. A lot of these people,
were still around,
and now
some of them aren't.
And so I wonder how much knowledge we're
losing, and I wonder about
and and maybe network engineering just doesn't need
as as broader knowledge anymore. Maybe it's just
everybody standardizes and,
you know,
it becomes a less
intellectually deep field just because of the way
the network engineering works.
If everybody can standardize
one or two or three ways to deal
with a network,
it gets easier to automate it, and it
gets easier to apply AI to the configuration
and design problem and specific other problems that
come in where you want AI to look
at changing network conditions and make changes because
you've bounded what the network's gonna look like.
And that, I think, just having
boundaries on what a net how a network
has been configured, what its topology looks like
means that
applying software to the problem gets a bit
easier. There's a lot fewer corner cases you
gotta code for and consider. Yeah. But then
that worries me in a different direction, which
is that, like Yvonne said, somebody says I'm
gonna do this,
and there's nobody
in ten years perhaps who can say, oh,
yeah. We tried that before and, really,
that didn't work very well.
That's every IETF meeting, though.
You know what I mean?
It's it's it's folks that are standing up,
and if there's not the right person in
the room to say, yeah. We tried that
before. No. Then
Well, and and there's that there's that saying
that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does
rhyme. I mean, there there is sort of
this human condition
of
people making the same mistakes
every, you know, from a from a, you
know, political or government perspective, every couple hundred
years, you see the same ideology
emerging with the same impacts. I so I
think some of that is is just gonna
happen.
And and I also think, like
like Ethan said,
that there is value in standardization.
I think that the the thing that I
feel like we've lost a lot of is
that
full stack connection,
which is like all the way down to
the hardware layer.
What is, you know, what are the fundamentals
that we have to have in hardware to
get the performance that we need and how
do we scale that?
Because I feel like a lot we've abstracted
so much that
a lot of people never ever ever ever
think about
that from a performance
standpoint.
And we will a hunger for that kind
of knowledge, though. I will I will say
that looking at,
packet pushers,
heavy networking statistics and the sorts of shows
that people
listen to, what what downloads are popular. One
of the most popular shows we did in
the last, I don't know, year or eighteen
months was how does a packet move through
a switch? And we did a a fairly
heavy discussion of that.
So it's not
as if people don't want to know. There
there is a thirst for that kind of
knowledge.
So maybe it comes back to a question
of, of training again and how do you
for us, it's the age old problem. We
we've we've had this discussion over the years
too. Is there something like a a vendor
independent certification
that would, take us down this road and
and be broadly applicable for all the vendors
where they'd all be happy that this certification
exists? I would I would love for that
to happen. I mean, I don't know. I'm
not seeing it all the time in my
training. So I do a three or four
hour class now in how routing's routers really
work.
It was I can do six hours or
eight hours on that topic.
But
the attendance of that class is no more
than
like
the class I get the most people for
is how the Internet really works.
That's literally the biggest seller
in my in my stable of classes that
I teach. Keyword selling, whereas I'm giving a
podcast away for free,
and people pick and choose what they wanna
listen to because we're publishing,
more content than they can listen to and
they need to be selective.
They can just pick a talk. Oh, that's
interesting. I wanna see that. As opposed to
someone who's paying for a class and or
choosing
paid training that drives them towards a professional
goal such
as a certification that they think will help
them get a better job.
Well, I wonder if the certifications
themselves haven't hurt us in the area of
breadth of knowledge.
How do you mean?
Oh, they're very vendor specific.
They're very task oriented.
I mean, when I came up, we have
the CCIE, then we have the CCIE security.
We have the CCDE.
And for some period of time, the CCAR
by the way, I got I I got
an email the other day that they were
looking for a CCAR for a particular role
at a particular company. And every time I
get these emails, I'm like, I'm not really
sure what to tell you. Like, there's there's
12 of them or 10 of them or
something. Gonna say there were never more than
I didn't think it's 20. I'd ever even
achieved that goal. No. It's it's more it's
it's between eight and twelve, I think. I
I don't remember exactly.
But In the world. In the world. Yes.
So I'm like, well, good luck finding one
of those.
Who's willing to take your job? I don't
know. You know, it just seems crazy to
me. But anyway yeah. You know?
But I believe that as the certifications have
become narrower,
and as they have become more focused on
interacting with vendor gear and product,
they have actually lost their breath.
Holly has complained about this, my and it's
for networking cohost, and that she's done a
whole bunch of certs in the Juniper ecosystem.
And she says they're great about teaching you
how to configure things, how to stand up
this service, how to make the box go
wee,
but not about the theory behind it and
and what else is going on. I I'm
beginning to work through the CCNA blueprint just
to see what Cisco wants you to know.
I actually bought their the current official exam
guide because I I wanna get caught up
on where this program is at in, in
2025
and see what they're teaching. Because I've heard
this complaint that, that what you're exactly describing,
Russ, that the the certifications have gotten too
vendor specific, too focused on
vendor gear and their way of doing things
as opposed to broad network knowledge, which those
of us that cut our teeth on Cisco
certifications,
that is how we learned by and large
what we know
for our foundation. And what you need to
know. And what you need to know. Right?
Like, that that cert program would tell you
things that you didn't even know existed,
but that you needed to know. Let's say
you weren't running OSPF in your work network.
You're running the AGRP,
but your certification track would help you see
that, oh, there is this protocol called OSPF.
It works differently.
It's a thing I need to know to
get my certification.
And so at least you had some exposure
to it. Right?
And I think that's been a thing that's
been lost maybe. Yeah. I would agree. I
think it is something that's been lost.
So yeah. I mean, I don't think we're
gonna solve it. I was just curious what
everybody thought were the
drivers. Like, is this really happening? Am I
crazy?
To some degree, you're both saying, yeah, you're
a little bit crazy, Russ. You know, you've
been at this for thirty years, and what
you think
is depth is is.
But I think you have, on some level,
some some perhaps unrealistic expectations of people both
of their age and then because you are
who you are.
You to think you're the the the color
of the lenses through which you look is
a bit,
yeah, it tints things kinda heavy.
Do you agree, Yvonne?
I think
for
you, depth means something different than it means
to the average bear.
Just just because for you,
things that are really deep and interesting
are almost
unreachable
for somebody who's been in the business for
ten years.
Yeah. Could be. That could be.
But it doesn't But I don't I don't
think you're generally wrong in,
hey, like there's there's a gap and there
are these things missing
and
there's a whole universe of knowledge that people
need that they don't even know. It's
it's not exactly Dunning Kruger, but kind of
kind of in that family. Like, there's so
much to need to you need to know.
You don't even know all the like, you
don't even have your list right yet of
all the things you need to know. Right?
Yeah. And that and that I think is
part of the problem.
Is that
as Ethan said, and as you said, Yvonne,
actually, I think Yvonne said at first was
that, you know, the the certifications used to
be a road map over what people who've
been in the business a lot longer than
you thought you need to know. What is
the body of knowledge you need? What's the
mental map?
I don't think they're that anymore.
I don't think such mental maps exist.
And I I think
Microsoft
probably
was the the first company that I realized
they were doing this.
But their certifications
were as much a marketing tool
as a technical enablement.
That because I I remember taking a Microsoft
certification where the answer to every networking question
was routing and remote access
regardless of what the question was. Right? What
do you use for this routing and remote
access? There was never a, oh, you need
to do this at a different place in
the stack.
Right?
And I think they,
in air quotes, innovated there.
And,
and that that is
kind of a
course of action that that organizations have taken
because, like, hey, certification problems are expensive. Like,
what's the ROI on it? Well, the ROI
on it is that we have an army
of people who are familiar with our stuff,
who are gonna pitch it to their leadership
to
install it. And so now we have an
army of internal salespeople that are certified on
our stuff, that are gonna wanna deploy the
next best thing because they're certified in our
stuff.
That was the Cisco model back in the
day, and I believe it is a big
part of the reason Cisco has been as
successful as they've been over the decades.
They're still the juggernaut.
It's a different vibe now in 2025 than
it was even ten years ago. But
but, yeah, that model exactly what you described,
Yvonne. I was one of those people. Started
out
working for a Cisco partner and then getting
a CCNA and then
migrating,
my talents to wherever I was at,
some company that needed that was a Cisco
shop and then doing Cisco things and buying
more Cisco stuff, talking to my Cisco rep
because that's
what I knew. And someone said, I think
a Juniper box or I think this or
I think that. And I go,
yeah. I I don't I don't trust that.
System in the front is probably not gonna
work. Right?
That's some of that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's part of
it. Happy. Buddy, you're up. So you keep
what's your quarterly spend gonna be? Let's go
out to lunch. You know? They they buy
you sushi and tell you how smart you
are and show you the next thing that
they have on the truck. No. That's right.
Sorry. Yeah. That's right. No. It's true. Speaking
of being jaded.
Those things happened. That's yeah. It was life
for a long time. Yeah. It was. And
then I think the third thing is the
missing of,
like, just the roadmap in general. Like, I've
been trying to build this 40 to 50
or it's probably gonna be one forty or
fifty hour course
of, like, what I think you need to
know about networking from day zero
all the way to e the EVPN,
which I'm It's gonna be more than forty
or fifty hours, and I'll tell you why.
I began working on that mental map for
the n is for networking series, and it
came up with 250
topics more or less off the top of
my head that was kinda stream of consciousness.
Just building
high level categories and then here are some
topics either broad or some specific technical things
and Yeah.
And then and kinda like, I I just
need to stop because there's more. This I
think there's actually a lot more, but I
just need to stop now because this is
five years worth of content if we record
every week, which is
daunting. So Yeah. Yeah. We should trade outlines.
It would be interesting because I know the
way you think versus how I think. They'd
be different but compatible out lines. Yeah. Yeah.
That's that's probably what would happen. Yeah. And
so there's that
And maybe the way to think about that
is how do we group these things
into
mental models that translate from one to the
other. Right? Yeah. Because you know how you
talk about how,
you know, a newer newer protocols are very
reminiscent
of of older ones. Right? Like, group things
together, like, hey. Here's this thing, and here's
these principles, and they transfer to x y
z.
But, that that's a whole another challenge,
altogether Yeah. And would be fraught with debate.
Yes. So roadmaps,
mentoring,
certification is not playing the role of road
maps anymore.
The bottom
rung ladders of the rung being kicked out
by AI, which we haven't really talked about,
but that's, like, being intentional about, from my
perspective, not using AI to solve basic problems
for for some period of time or in
some cases, just so you build the intellectual
virtue of having the knowledge
and the skills. Right? It's great to use
AI as an augment when you're in a
in a hurry, but maybe you ought not
use AI when you're building your lab to
learn OSPF. Maybe that's not the right place
to use it as AI.
So maybe all of these things
together are really passed forward.
This not really you can't solve this problem
at all that I can think of. I
mean, I remember
when I when I was in global escalation
at Cisco and I went over to deployment
architecture,
one of the reasons I moved out of
global escalation at attack and into engineering
was because somebody set me aside and said,
as long as you're in global escalation, that
slot is filled.
You need to walk away from that slot
so that someone who's junior to you can
grow into it.
Mhmm.
Right?
So that's actually one of the reasons I
left global escalation at Cisco and went to
engineering
was to make space for other people.
And I don't know the senior people do
a good job today of leaving space for
other people
in in many ways to grow into this.
That's a that's a, like, a whole cultural
thing. Like, look at The United States
governing bodies. Right? Like, some of y'all need
to just step aside.
What what what I will say though is
that if you're early in career,
acknowledge that you got a lot to learn
and find somebody to kick ideas off of
before you go on a wild hair and
think you know exactly how to do it.
And if you've been around a while,
find somebody who's
new and up and coming and learning and
has questions and is willing to ask them.
I mean, I think that's,
you know, something we can do practically
to to make a small difference,
and then kinda share that a little bit.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's actually harder to do
mentoring than you think. For all you folks
out there who are like, oh, I'd love
to have Russ or Ethan or Yvonne as
my mentor.
First of all, there's a time issue, but
second of all,
you have to learn to ask questions.
Because because part of the problem with mentoring
is everybody walks into mentoring, and they think
my mentor is gonna basically give me a
free education.
And that's actually
not going to work because
it's time intensive
and it's a problem.
You need to
get out and do things and then ask
questions of your mentor about, like, why was
this working this way? Why was that happening?
Because it's very hard as it as somebody
who's mentoring other people, I can just do
my little forty hours with the class with
you, like, you know, whatever, but you can
just pay for that, and it's done.
Right? So I I don't know how useful
it is for me to try to educate
you.
I don't know. It has to be a
partnership. It's Yeah. But because believe it or
not, like,
once we get to once you get to
a certain point in your career, the the
the world has changed enough to where you
don't really know exact like, you know what
your path was, but it's changed enough that
it's gonna be different. Yep. And you have
some basic principles,
but and you also don't know where somebody's
actually at and what their questions are and
what they need in the next step. So
Yep. It's it's it's yeah.
It's it's not a straightforward
thing. Nope.
Alright. I think we covered everything. I think
we have beat this horse
dead. And the rule is always when the
horse dies,
dismount.
Not before you have to make sure the
horse is actually dead. And then it's like,
alright. I guess I guess I'll get off.
Oh my goodness.
Alright. So, Yvonne, any last thoughts before we
wrap up and call it a day?
Nah. I'm good.
Okay.
We will miss the frog lamp while you're
gone.
It'll be here. It's not going anywhere.
And, Ethan, any final thoughts before we wrap
up and
If you're breaking into networking, if you're getting
started with it,
just be patient. It took us decades to
build all the stuff that's out there and
there's a lot to learn. So, just just
be a little patient. It won't all come
at once.
Yep.
And and I'll say I didn't talk to
somebody earlier this week who's early in career
who has some questions. And and
and what I said is, like, you're doing
it.
Like, I know you look ahead of you
and you see all these things, you know,
but, like, you're actively doing it. If if
you have a job
anywhere near the industry
and you're working
and you're learning,
you're doing it
and keep doing it.
And then
no experience is bad experience when you're early
in career.
Like, just about everything you learn
is a thing that you can use
in the next step. Right? Just just
go be helpful,
make a contribution, and continue to learn the
things and and show up and be curious.
And believe it or not, you are actually
doing it. And if you care,
you're head and shoulders ahead of most of
your peers. So Yeah. Yeah. So Yvonne, where
can people find you? I know you have
a new podcast. Well, I keep saying that
and it's not new anymore.
Well, so it kind of is
because so the the
the cloud gambit is now a new member
of the packet pushers network. So we're excited
to be over there. Oh, I'm so sorry,
Evelyn. Hey. We're, you know, like, hey. It's,
over a decade ago, I probably made my
first guest appearance on a Packet Pushers podcast
and really felt like that was big and
a big deal and special. And so it's
fun to be part of that network now.
So you can find me and William Collins
over there.
I'm on LinkedIn also, or you can find
me on Twitter at Sharp Network.
Alright. Ethan,
Packet Pushers. We know that much. But
Yes.
I'm, right. Packetpushers.net.
You can hear me weekly on the Heavy
Networking podcast. I'm also on the Tech Bytes
podcast, and the n is for networking
podcast. Heavy networking is what it sounds like.
We we go deep on a lot of
stuff.
We got a show coming up on space
networking, Russ, that we're doing with, with Scott,
Scott Johnson coming up pretty soon. We're gonna
be talking about
the bundle protocol and how TCPIP
is not well suited for high latency environments
like space, but interplanetary
networking is a thing. That and and much
more practical, I suppose,
network topics we cover and heavy networking. And
as for networking or basics, and Tech Bytes
will keep you up with all the latest
stuff coming
from the vendors that they want you to
know about. Buy our new this because it's
awesome. And we'd say, is it awesome, though?
Let's let's talk about that. And, we have
those conversations. You can find all that stuff
at packetpushers.net,
and I'm on LinkedIn. That's the only social
media that I do. I'm happy to connect
with you, and I'm connected to thousands of
other people. So if you like to connect
to people who have lots of other connections
just to get you closer to all those
other people, I'm one of those I'm happy
to connect with you if, if you're a
network engineer or someone in tech.
Alright. Cool. I'm Russ White. You can always
find me here at the hedge @rule11.tech.
On LinkedIn, I'm like Ethan. I'm happy to
connect with most of the time. If you're
in network engineering, I'll connect. I'll I'll reciprocate
the connection.
I don't actually spend a lot of time
trying to find people to connect to. But
if you connect to me,
then I'll often just reciprocate the connection,
unless you're, like, trying to sell me,
I don't know, a franchise. SEO guidance.
Yeah. Plus one to that.
Yeah.
If you're trying to sell me a franchise,
don't don't bother.
So unless it's a franchise in network engineering.
So okay. Well, we know we live in
an attention driven economy and that your attention
is the way the world goes around now
is paying attention to things. So we are
happy that you spent all this time listening
to Ethan and Yvonne and I ramble on
about
what is wrong with the networking world and
how we tried to fix it. So thanks
for listening all the way to the bitter
end, and we will catch you next time.