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 and Tom's plant. A couple
of the leaves are trying to reach escape
velocity, just so you know.
It's quite perky.
It is.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a happy little plant.
I I think I think all the attention
that's paid to it has been doing well,
has been helping its well-being, I mean. Alright.
Good. I see no rockets on the whiteboard
or anything like that. So
I guess we're we're rocketless this week. So
I guess we'll have to just deal with
it.
That's a sad thing.
And
we have Yvonne in the she shed with
the frog lamp and the grow lamp.
Yes. And my Dieffenbachia.
And what you can't see
is in the window,
I have
two orchids
now that I am reblooming.
So I bought these orchids for $10 a
piece on sale at Home Depot
for the wedding back in July.
And they flowered and their flowers fell off
and that's their life cycle. And now they've
grown new shoots
and each of them has new blooms on
them. And if you've never grown orchids, you
know that they can be a little finicky,
and they're a little demanding. So I'm incredibly
proud
that I've got my orchids
reblooming. Cool. I'm I'm a graduated plant mom.
I'm not just doing the easy Pothos anymore.
Well, we have an we have an orchid
in the living room, which, of course, you
can't see here because I'm in, like, whatever.
And the air roots are now way outside
of the of the pot,
and we really don't know what to do
with it. Like, you don't you can't really
repot it without cutting all the air roots
off.
And so, like, we don't know, like, okay.
If you cut all the air roots off,
do you kill it?
No. Well You don't. Okay. Well, alright. We
might try it then because we've been kinda
scared about repotting the orchid because you it's
like these air roots are sticking out of
the the pot by, like, 12 inches.
They're they're huge.
You didn't know that you came to an
orchid podcast today, but you wanna be sure
you use a really like an orchid like
a bark mix because orchids in the wild
actually attach to trees, which is why you
get all those aerial roots.
So they don't really need to be in
dirt. They just need to be in a
bark mix.
And then you water them when the when
the roots turn silver.
Yeah. Yeah. Be very careful with your orchid
part.
Just saying.
Okay.
I'm supposed to get something from that, and
I'm I'm not picking up what you're putting
down, Russ.
Alright. That's
alright. So
yeah. Most people don't, so it's okay.
So
first thing we're talking about this week was,
this
survey by TechCe,
which I think is a I don't know
much about TechCe,
but I think they are
a research firm for WISP
is my guess.
I I could be wrong, but that it
seems like that would be the realm they're
in. But anyway,
they did a survey on home connectivity,
which was interesting because
if I were to say what's the problem
with home connectivity,
I'm almost always going to say it's my
upstream
because
that's where my problems always tend to be
is with my upstream.
And I don't know if that speaks more
about my upstream or if that speaks more
about upstream or if that speaks more about
the state of my internal network, my in
my house network.
But it's almost always upstream for me.
And yet,
they say
that
what is it? What's the percentage here?
They sample 3,780
people,
blah blah blah,
point put plus or minus 1.6%.
68%
of households reported Wi Fi problems.
18%
daily twelve months. Yeah. And 18%
daily.
Daily? Daily. That is terrible. Yeah. 18%
daily
and another 20%
weekly.
So thirty eight percent
experience problems
once a week.
That's that's crazy.
That's just crazy.
I don't know what I would do if
I had Wi Fi problems once a week.
Run wires. That's what I do. What I
would do. Yeah.
Which, by the way, I do a lot
more of. I I I tend to run
a lot more physical connectivity than just Wi
Fi. I try to move I've always tried
to move towards it.
When I when I built this last new
house I built, not the one I'm in
now, but and we're building another one. But
anyway,
I had two ethernet jacks in each room.
And so they were, like, a 32
port punch down underneath the stairs.
And the electrical guy was, like,
what are you doing?
Have you never heard of Wi Fi?
And I said, yeah. I've heard of Wi
Fi. That's why I'm doing this.
We gotta love, like, on the the summary
of this.
So and and we are telling you about
Wi Fi problems, not upstream connectivity problems. But
it says more than a half or 51%
of consumers would switch providers if issues aren't
resolved quickly.
And then 48 would
percent would switch for better whole home coverage,
which makes me wonder if this study was
sponsored by somebody who's selling in home WiFi.
Oh, it could be. But, anyway,
about one third, so 34% are willing to
pay extra,
which reinforcing
that assurance trumps price. But,
it so in my mind, of course, it's
nonnormative
for the average home Internet consumer.
The the connectivity to your house
is your provider's responsibility, and the connectivity
with inside your house
is my responsibility. That comes from years of
enterprise networking. Yeah. There's a demark That's right.
There's a demark on the outside of my
house
that demarkate demarkates
the point between my network and their network.
Yeah. That's right. That's right. But, clearly,
customers don't differentiate the two. The average
Home user. Homeowner
home user does not differentiate between the two.
And so this
might underscore
the importance
for connectivity providers to put a little bit
more focus on the,
CPE, we would call it, customer premises equipment,
to, be sure that folks get good coverage.
But that is actually
a really hard problem if you're servicing some
customers in
multiunit dwellings, and then you got folks in
big houses that may have
brick walls or stone fireplaces or all of
those things. Like, Wi Fi is,
it can be reliable, but it takes a
bit of engineering depending on the facility that
you're in. Yeah. But but what I find
interesting about this is it seems like what
they're saying is that it's not the upstream
that's the problem most of the time for
people. It's their own home Wi Fi. Right.
And yet they blame it on the upstream.
And they go Yeah. Some Yeah.
Some some going so far as to change
providers thinking that
that'll fix it. Yeah. Yeah.
Well and frankly, if you had a five,
six, seven, eight year old router
and you change providers and you get a
newer router Right. You probably are gonna have
better coverage. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. If you move from something without
beamforming that's, you know, on a lower frequency
or whatever
to something with beamforming.
And beyond all that, people don't think about
this. These home devices,
they leak memory.
And they have buffers, and they get buffer
bloated, and they get all this other stuff.
And so you might just
free stuff up and make it work better
by disconnecting it to put the new stuff
in.
I mean, it may there may have been
nothing wrong with the old equipment at all.
That's my biggest problem in my home network
is every now and again, I have to
just unplug the switch.
And I keep thinking, I should really just
replace the switch, honestly. You know?
But Mhmm. Just like once every month or
two, I just have to unplug the switch.
Not even the WiFi router and stuff, just
the just the switch off the back of
the right WiFi router. It just seems to
leak enough memory that it's just like, I'm
done.
I'm not sending any more traffic. Thanks.
One of the,
responses that I thought was really interesting is
many ISPs market whole home Wi Fi solutions.
Surprisingly, customers of these packages have more problems
than average. That doesn't surprise me at all
because if you go for if you have
one AP in your house and and that
that AP is your router, then that's a
certain amount of complexity and a certain amount
of, you know but the leap from one
to two, now you need a controller.
Now you need,
you know, you have to have the correct
dynamic frequency selection and all the stuff they've
got, like, the leap from one to two
is a giant one.
And,
you know, two to three and three to
four, I don't know exactly. I'm not a
real a Wi Fi person. But Yeah. And
I almost yeah. Because of channels. Yeah.
And, well, it doesn't manage device roaming well.
Like, what happens when you're on one end
of the house, you go to the other,
and your device needs to switch to a
different AP. If if you've got a poor
signal on an on an AP that's on
the other side of the house,
you're gonna have a a poorer experience,
and your device isn't necessarily gonna know when
to switch.
Yeah. So it's,
unless you've got some magic, like, reauth going
on or reconnect
going on in your and and
I've got to imagine that CPE equipment
that carriers are providing even for those paid
services
aren't as feature rich as what those of
us in the industry are used to. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely.
And I wonder too
if
you end up with more provider managed
CPE in higher density housing situations
than you do in lower density,
and that may also contribute to the
provider
provider run CPE
and coverage is worse or feels worse
just because I don't know. Most people who
own a larger piece of property,
they go out and they buy a mesh
system,
they plug it in, and they don't have
a lot of signal interfering with what they're
doing. They don't have their neighbors all over
the place.
But you pack
a 100 apartments in a building,
And the the
you know, first of all,
it's more likely that's gonna be a a
full on service that people just buy,
I think. And the second thing is, I
would suspect.
And the second thing is, there's a lot
of interference.
It's a bad thing. It's because there's not
enough spectrum in the world to,
to not have some of that interference It's
just channel overlap. It just is. Well and
I and I think the the eyeball networks,
the the
ISPs that would be most likely to touch
these issues,
I I worked for one for a while.
It it's really is a matter the business
logic surrounding the quality of the service
is really a matter of how expensive is
it to how expensive is it to maintain
a crappy crappy solution.
Because if it's pretty cheap to maintain a
crappy solution, meaning you don't get a lot
of customer service complaints, you don't get a
lot of technician dispatch calls,
then it's like, well, why why would we
change it? It's cheap to operate and the
revenue is coming.
You know, but then at some point, somebody
sort of snaps and they're like, okay. I'm
done with this. They switch providers, and then
the revenue disappears. But you have enough if
you have enough subscribers,
it's gonna be really hard to notice that.
And the, you know, the switching costs are
pretty significant for most, you know, unless you've
got, like, two or three providers in your
area. But I think it's it's kind of
there there's not a lot of incentive to
make Wi Fi work well if we're people
kind of are conditioned that Wi Fi sucks.
And so I don't know. Like, this this
this thing of 18% of customers have problems
daily. I couldn't tolerate that myself, but I
imagine that there's a lot of people who
are like, yeah. Wi Fi is just bad.
Whatever. Yeah. Probably. Well and
many, many, many users
are now using mobile devices. Right? They're not
using a they're not sitting at a desk
working all day like the rest of us
are.
They're using a mobile device. And if it
gets bad enough, they just turn off the
wireless on their mobile device and keep browsing
over their four g, five g on their
mobile device.
And,
you know, I I heard somebody say recently
that,
you know, it it it it used to
be that your most reliable connectivity was your
home connection,
but now it's changed and that often your
four g, five g on your phone is
more reliable than what you have in your
house. And I think for a lot of
people, that's true. Yeah. Right. And certainly based
on the survey, that's true.
Yeah. The other interesting thing to me, like,
going back to Tom's point about not maintaining
them, is that
39%
of the people in the survey
had a technician
dispatched
to fix
their internal Wi Fi problems. So they're on
managed Wi Fi, managed CPE of some kind.
But only 20% of those visits
no. 20% 80% of those visits made it
better.
20%
failed to resolve the issue.
Now that is to me, that's insane.
That is crazy.
You work for a provider
managing CPE. It's a truck roll. I get
it. You go to somebody's house,
and you walk away without the problem being
fixed.
That
20% of the time.
Wow. That speaks volumes
to the
amount
of effort these companies put into
making this
in home connectivity work.
But, I mean, if you think about these
in home technicians I know when we built
our house a couple years ago and and
we had the Internet installed,
you know,
they had
training
in,
you know,
how to run the cable, how to be
sure they drill through your wall and not
make sure it leaks and to keep the
critters out and,
you know, how to terminate things. Lots of
physical layer one stuff.
But,
most of these techno technicians are not trained
on,
you know, analyzing wireless signals on on Yeah.
You know, on spectrum and and how all
that works. They're you know, the the closest
they may get is, like, hey. If it
doesn't work, look at it
and change it from auto to this to
a to a specific channel and see if
that makes a difference or, you know, like
but it's very
configuration
based training. We'll try this and try this
and try that,
not
here is how Wi Fi's
you know, signal analyzers work and how to
actually troubleshoot the issue. They they may be
like, oh, do you have an old 2.4
phone system, you know, or wireless phone? Like,
that could be your problem. Or is there
a microwave close by? You know? But it's
it's gonna be that kind of very surface
level kind of troubleshooting.
And this and this is where an AI
system actually could be useful,
is you could have the technician
walk around the house with their cell phone
connected to your WiFi,
and they could figure out what the problem
is. Like, there could be a way for
them to see. Alright. When I walk in
this room, that's a problem.
We need to look in that room and
see if there's a piece of equipment that's
causing
this stuff. Right?
Kind of a thing.
So there are
I think there are,
ways that you could do this that would
make this better.
Another interesting thing here was two thirds said
they would use a visual Wi Fi mapping
app.
I mean,
yes. I would. I don't know that I
have one today.
Like, I can walk around my house and
see where the signal is good and bad.
I mean, I'm pretty scattered. I just go
out and throw a mesh system out in
my house and say, well, those are the
two farthest points apart
or, you know, the two centralized
far farthest points apart or whatever.
So yeah. I mean, I think that's that's
valid as well.
The there are some tools out there. For
example, again, when we were building, like, Ubiquiti
has a a tool where you can,
put in your house plans, be sure that
the scale is right, let it know what
the scale is,
and then it will help you figure out
where to deploy
access points in your house for optimum school.
I use that.
And, and and so there are tools out
there,
but there's a certain level of expertise you
need to have to be able to use
them. Now, you know, it's not a survey
tool. It's not gonna it's it's it's not
a, you know, it's not gonna analyze the
signal that's already there, but there are some
some planning apps. But, you've either gotta have
expertise or you've gotta have a floor plan.
You've gotta understand,
you know, even the
the construction of your wall material. You know,
is it you know, are you in a
building that's got some concrete
in the walls or steel?
Or is it, you know, just a standard
wood frame house? All of those things are
gonna make a difference in your Wi Fi
coverage. Yeah.
And, frankly, for
50 to a $100 a month,
most providers,
the the the the revenue is just not
there for them to care. Yep. Exactly. Yep.
That's part of the problem. So another interesting
thing I noticed is he said this report
says anyway,
that
the problems that but the households
with problems tend to have more devices connected.
So, Yvonne, that means
you need to cool off.
So we were we were we were comparing
the number of devices in our homes, and
I really didn't think I was quite this
bad.
But
I have, at this moment,
33
Wi Fi devices
connected in my house.
Of course, that includes
I mean, that that's that's gonna include
wireless speakers. That includes doorbells. That includes the
kids' video game systems. That includes a few
tablets. That includes
oh gosh. I have one,
light switch that's
Wi Fi. I don't do a lot of
that, but I do have one switch that's
Wi Fi because I wanna be able to
turn the device connected to it off and
on on my phone. You know? So we've
got some of those things.
But I have several APs in my house
as well,
and I designed
a wireless network with Ubiquiti APs and a
controller,
and a PoE switch
and all of those things when we built.
So, again,
I'm not the normal user.
No. Definitely not. The normal user has has
about six, it says. Six to 10.
Now I run around 17,
but that's not just Wi Fi.
That's 17 devices.
If I if I were talking about just
Wi Fi, it's probably
there's
there's probably
a dozen, maybe 11 Wi Fi connected and
the rest are wired.
Because I like I like my main computer
to be wired. All my network attached storage
stuff is wired.
You know? I don't I don't my lab
box is wired.
Yeah. I, so there's since we're since we're
comparing sizes, my, I have 12 in my
house, and they're all
it's all, like, TVs and
that's, like, speakers, like, that sort of thing
that you're talking about, Yvonne. And I don't
even have smart appliances. Like, I don't have
smart fridge
or washer, dishwasher, anything. Yeah.
Most higher end appliances
come with all that now, and so I
hooked mine up just because I could. But,
yeah, I have 43
total
devices, including the physically wired ones. So that
includes all the network gear and my son's
gaming PC and yeah. Yeah. Sad. I'm sorry.
It's okay. I don't I don't I try
not to attach.
I intentionally do not connect my
my washer and dryer
to the wife to the home Wi Fi.
I don't know. It's like a thing with
me.
It's probably calling home to China anyway. Yeah.
Probably.
I'm part of the great bot army.
Yeah. It it could be.
People make jokes about that, but I actually
had that happen. I got a little PDU,
a switch PDU that you could log in
and toggle the power,
and I decided
to, do a packet capture on it. And
I looked at it, and I was like,
oh, it really is going to China.
Wow.
That's
that's pretty sad.
So yeah. So I thought that was interesting,
and I think it speaks to
a realm of play a a realm of
things.
It's not just it's I shouldn't say it's
just on the providers,
the
the access providers.
This also speaks to some degree to the
level of maturity
of Wi Fi equipment in the market.
Like, it's not.
This shouldn't,
you shouldn't have to do a site survey
for a small building.
You shouldn't need to do a lot of
this stuff. You should be able to plug
this stuff in
and it should figure out what channel to
go on and it should figure out how
much power to put on which beam.
I mean, if you can do beam forming
in the device,
you can control that. Oh, I'm only five
feet from the wall here, and I'm 20
feet from the wall there.
You can control that you don't put that
much power towards an exterior wall.
Like, there are I there are things
I don't necessarily understand
why,
we don't do more of. But then again,
maybe it's a money thing.
Maybe it goes back to there's no money
in these devices. So
I don't know.
It's where it usually all goes back to,
Russ.
I know. It's sad, man.
So alright. So the second article is about
is on Thinking Sideways, which is a really
cool vlog if you don't follow it.
It's about software development. So it's not
network engineering specifically,
but, you know, we overlap a lot more
now than we used to. Network engineering and
software development are much more overlap.
And it's about apathy.
Alright.
I'm just gonna say,
go ahead, Yvonne. I'll just be apathetic.
So I I I used to work with
a with a fellow, and he was,
he he was an interesting character, but,
he had the the definition
of the word despondent
memorized.
And it's one of the most fabulous definitions
in the English language.
But he would, he would say,
despondent is a deep dejection
arising from the conviction
of the uselessness
of further effort.
And I think that's a pretty good summary
of what it is to be apathetic.
But the the phrase, the uselessness of further
effort.
And and, and and yeah. And and look.
Like, it's
it's very easy to get caught up in
a corporate world where
everybody seems to get the same rewards whether
they, you know, exceed or whether they, you
know, barely scrape by in all of those
things, or whether they grow and improve and
make real substantive changes, or they just kinda
hang out and collect a paycheck.
I think
the latter of those two things is damaging
to us as humans because I think we
need to work and feel productive and, like,
we're creating things. Mhmm. But I also think
apathy is a real
challenge in our world, especially when
organizations
don't connect our work to anything meaningful that
we're actually producing.
Yeah. There's there's a couple of interesting things
here in the causes of apathy in this
article I thought were really good. Like,
the quickest way to cause cultural apathy, so
the author differentiates between
cultural and personal and leadership or job apathy,
whatever,
cause cultural apathy
is by rejecting or suppressing ideas raised by
employees.
I cannot tell you the number of times
I've been in jobs
and people have come up with absolutely drop
dead brilliant ideas.
And everybody
on the team of the entire management says,
nah. We're not doing that.
Or, oh, yeah. Good idea. Good luck with
getting it done in five years.
And that just, like,
just totally destroys your willingness
to continue fighting to get anything done.
And and yeah. I mean, the number of
times I've been told, it's gonna take five
years to develop that. It's gonna take five
years to deploy that.
Well, you don't feel like what's the point
of even trying if it's gonna take five
years?
You know, there's an old saying in the
coding world, it's either two hours, two weeks,
or too long.
Well
and, you know, I think we have also
gotten used to an employment cycle
where folks stay in a role two or
three years.
And if they can't accomplish an objective
within that time frame,
it just falls off the list. It's it's
you know, we've lost the sense of long
term thinking, you know, the value of planting
a tree. Like, we could we could wax
philosophical about it. But,
yeah, that's that's
it's and it's very tempting. It's very tempting
in the moment to be like, well, why
try?
If there's no,
like, obvious reward in it for me that's
monetary
or accolades or something like that. And it
can't it I was gonna say, actually, a
lot of times,
just telling people they're doing a good job
when they, for themselves, can see that nothing
that they're doing
has any impact,
actually, I think increases the amount of apathy.
Because, like, why am I bothering?
You know?
Yeah. I'm gonna be told I'm a good
boy, but
nothing I've done has been deployed
in the last two years. So
you can tell me how good I am.
I this that's neither here nor there. What
matters is is my stuff getting done? Is
my stuff my ideas being deployed? No. If
they're not, they're not. Then too bad.
Another one that's interesting, I think, the companies
handle completely wrong is the wrong job apathy
he talks about or she talks about here.
Actually, I never looked at the author to
see who this is really this person talks
about, the author talks about,
is that, you know, some employees have a
job that isn't right for them anymore and
they're just keeping it out of convenience.
So what I notice a lot of companies
do
is they take this person and they manage
them out
rather than trying to put them in any
place. They say, if you don't perform where
you are, we're not moving you some other
place.
And that just seems so odd to me
because it might not be the person.
It might be the job they're in. And
it might be that if you move them
to a new job, they could perform 10
times better
than what they're doing.
But you just look at them and go,
your performance isn't good enough. You've gotta perform
doing the thing that you don't like to
do,
and it really stinks before we'll put you
in a place where you can do the
thing that's actually
gonna be good for you to do.
And that's just a weird way of looking
at things
to me. But Well, the I mean, the
other side of that is if you have
someone who's not performing
and you move them into some other area,
what's what evidence do you have that they're
going to do any better in the other
area? Mhmm. Then then you end up just
giving a problem to somebody else.
And, like, I I see what you're saying,
Russ, but I also I could also see
how it's like, well,
if we can't if we can't move this
person out, then I'll just move them out
of my area because having people who are
apathetic
is also hard for managers to deal with.
Oh, yeah. Like, it's, you know
Well and and while we're talking about apathy
for managers,
it is significantly
easier
to move a poor performer on your team
to another team
than to manage them out in most organizations.
The you know, you you gotta do your
documentation.
You've got, you know,
you've you've you've gotta have a PIP. You've
gotta demonstrate
given them opportunities to improve. In in most
organizations, there's an entire process that you have
to go through to manage someone out.
It is in it is much easier
to just shuffle them off to another part
of the org,
and they're no longer your problem, which, again,
is just a different type of apathy. It
is it is it is,
you know, it's a lack of concern for
the people that that report to you and
for the organization,
because you're willing to allow that person to
continue
to,
frankly, waste corporate resources
if if they're not able to perform well.
Right? And and,
also, when you have poor performing
employees,
that
increases the apathy of the folks around them.
Yeah. Of course. Yeah. High performers don't are
not interested.
Especially, extremely high performers are not
interested in working with
people who don't care. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.
And
but what the other thing that companies do
that really drives me crazy is instead of
going through the process, they just do constructive
dismissal,
which is make your life miserable until you
quit.
And that's that to me is,
like, you're actually driving apathy in your team
when you do that. People don't think about
this. But you're actually not only hurting the
person you're trying to manage out by playing
that game, you're actually
causing problems on your team. Of course. Because
that because that person
is especially
if the rest of the team respects them
in any way, shape, or form,
you are generating a situation where
everyone can see that you're treating this person
unfairly because you wanna get rid of them.
And that is just not a cool place
to be, honestly.
Just not a cool place to be. But
it's very common in Silicon Valley
in my
in my experience.
I know a lot of people it's happened
to, so it's very,
anyway.
There's a there's a great paragraph here,
where the
the author says,
I also want to point out that employees
don't owe intrinsic
motivation to their employer.
If anything, they owe it to themselves since
they not only will become better at their
job, but also will have a much better
time doing it.
Over time, it might even get them that
promotion that they have always eyed.
And and what I have found
in folks that are that are high performers,
is that if you're able to focus on
a task and continue to grow, even if
you're in a situation that might otherwise
fuel apathy,
that will ultimately have a significantly more positive
outcome for you than had you just given
into the apathy.
And, again, frankly, I I think we are
all intrinsically made to produce
and do something that we find meaningful. Mhmm.
And you'll just be happier
if you do that. Even if it's not
acknowledged,
even if you never get the raise, even
if you never get the promotion. And I'm
not saying you should say stay where you
are if you never do.
But,
but, like, giving in to that,
you know, despondency
is not the right course of action.
Yeah. Yeah.
And and I think there are two other
very
refrain from trying to fix the apathy of
others. You're probably not gonna be able to
do it.
It's okay if you try to fix the
culture, improve the culture, but you're not gonna
fix your coworker who's in, you
know, focus on breaking cultural apathy, not individual.
Although, on the other hand, if the person's
going through a hard time,
like, you can lift them up. You should
be there. You should be their friend. You
should
reach out and try to figure out
what's going on and what you can do
to help because that does help
improve the cultural
apathy problem as well as,
you know, just
being just being a good person altogether.
The other thing that's interesting is don't be
afraid to leave.
The the the author says this a couple
of times. Just don't don't think don't be
afraid to leave Because
if you're in the wrong job,
staying where you are is not doing anybody
any favors.
If you're being managed out, staying where you
are is you're not gonna beat it eventually.
If you're not having an impact on the
culture,
believe if you've been in a job for
three years or four
years and you
have had no impact
or your impact has been removed, you've been
moved into a position where you no longer
have what you think should be
the power over decisions or the point, whatever
that you should,
don't think they're gonna move you back
in a couple of years. Like, don't go,
well, if I work really hard, then somebody
eventually will look on my work and say,
well, okay. I'll I'll bring you back into
no.
No.
It's not gonna happen.
Sorry. It's not the way corporate culture works.
Move on. Well, and especially for technical people,
it doesn't matter.
To some degree, technical excellence is a secondary
concern anyway. Mhmm. Like, you have to demonstrate
to people that the that the success of
the business enterprise
is a result of you. And if you
just sit and wait for someone to come
help you for or, you know, give you
a promotion for being a good boy or
a good girl,
that's depending on them to go find the
needle in the haystack of all the people
that are contributing and figure out that your
needle was important. People don't do that. Yep.
That's exactly right.
And and we talk about this a lot
in manager circles because I I I work
at an organization that that is
wanna,
you know, very high performing.
People are always clamoring for promotions
and for rewards. And and
the folks that are most likely
to get
those promotions
are not the folks chasing them, but the
folks out there doing interesting work that they're
passionate about.
And
so the the more you focus
on
and and need
that,
you know, those external motivators,
the the actually harder it is to get
where you want. I'm not saying that organizations
shouldn't reward people and shouldn't give them,
accolades. They absolutely
should.
At the same time,
the
the most successful path there, even if you
wanna be pragmatic about it, is just to
go do the work and build something interesting.
And then the the other thing I wanted
to just mention is, like,
we need a certain degree of self awareness
so that
we know
what fuels our jets. Because it it may
be different for me than it is for
Russ than it is for Tom.
And and
you have to take control and seek out
what it is that
that keeps you from becoming apathetic. And that's
not always the day job. It could be
a a side project or,
you know, something that you do in your
free time that that gives your, you know,
your life meaning and energy
that may not be the day job, and
that will actually
impact how you show up and perform at
work.
Yeah. Sure.
So that's all I got. Anything else, Tom?
No. On that one? Anything else, Yvonne, on
that one? Nope. It's good stuff. Yep. It's
all good.
I'll try to keep these links and drop
them in the show notes or at least
this one on the apathy.
I'll stick it over in my pile of
things that I need to keep for the
moment.
You know, I live my life in OneNote.
So I'll stick it over in OneNote and
I'm sorry.
I don't know.
When I was doing my PhD,
I needed a place to build outlines of
books in an organized way.
And I tried, like, documents and directories, and
I just was like, this just doesn't this
is not gonna cut the mustard.
So I tried several
notebook type programs, and
I just couldn't there wasn't any of them
with enough levels of
organization.
Most of them have, like, three levels of
organization.
And I really want, like, notebooks,
sections,
groups of sections,
pages, you know, like,
divisions,
like, lots of different so, anyway, OneNote seems
to work for that. So,
anyway alright. Cool. Yvonne, where can people find
you if they want to?
Yeah. A couple of things. So I am
going to be speaking at AutoCon in Austin
in mid,
November. So I don't know if this will
be out after then. If it is, sorry.
You missed me.
But, but, yeah, I'll be at AutoCon in
Austin in September, just talking about the people
side of leading technical projects.
And then you can always find me on
LinkedIn at Yvonne Sharp, on,
x at Sharp Network, and then,
over Packet Pushers. So the Cloud Gambit podcast,
we release biweekly over there. So
give us a listen.
Cool. Awesome.
Tom.
LinkedIn.
Okay.
So funny.
And I, like Yvonne, will be at AutoCon.
I will not be speaking.
My tickets and everything came in too late.
My ship came in too late for me
to do much with speaking at Oticon this
year. But
I am going to be at Oticon. So
if you wanna find me, I'll be somewhere
around
Nokia or just walking the floor or I
don't know. I have no idea what I'm
doing yet. I'm just gonna be hanging out.
So feel free to find me there.
Sorry, Russ, if I could say. So Austin's
my hometown. So I'm here if anybody wants
to go out to lunch or whatever. I'm
I'm not coming to AutoCon, but I'll come
to I'll come see you. So Okay. Cool.
Yeah. Might be. Yeah. Maybe we could have
a hedge
lunch.
Yeah. We could we could find a restaurant
that serves hedgehogs.
Tacos.
That's horrible. Right? That's horrible.
Why would you cut up to that cute
little creature?
They eat the big ones.
They really do. They eat the big ones.
I don't think they eat the little minis,
but they do eat the big ones. This
this one took a turn.
Sure did.
Alright. And you can find is offended. Hey.
The plant is offended.
Wow.
Okay. You can always find me on LinkedIn,
on x's routing geek. Every now and again,
I log in over there. Usually, just to
post new stuff is up all I ever
do. I try to stay active every now
and again, but it's really hard. And
I don't know. I show up on packet
pushers every now and again and other podcasts.
And so, anyway, I'm pretty easy to find.
Rule11.tech
is a good central place to find me.
And thank you for listening all the way
to the bitter end of this episode of
The Hedge. We know your attention is important,
and we live in this attention driven world.
So, again, thank you, and we will catch
you next time.