My grandfather was a practical man who had little use for formal education. He earned his bachelor’s degree in agricultural science from the University of Washington. “I didn’t go to the graduation,” he liked to say. “They mailed me the diploma in a tube!” He ended up running a successful chemical wholesale company, half of […]
Category: Perspectives
Layoffs, redux
Cisco Systems, my employer, laid off 4000 people yesterday, 5% of our total headcount. I’m lucky enough to still have a job. I know people who were unlucky. There but for the grace of God go I. It is a strange feeling working in corporate America, where a giant sword of Damocles hangs over your […]
Whither SDN?
In a moment of curiosity, I looked at the Wikipedia definition for Software-Defined Networking: “Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to network management that uses abstraction to enable dynamic and programmatically efficient network configuration to create grouping and segmentation while improving network performance and monitoring in a manner more akin to cloud computing than to […]
Quarterly Thinking
I think political commentary is the death knell of a technical blog. I cover a lot of ground here, but the (apparently 5) people who read this blog aren’t visiting for my political opinions. Thus, I’m taking a big risk in saying the following: Donald Trump has a good idea. It has nothing to do […]
You’ve got mail!
I wrote a post recently back about my near-death experience due to lack of sleep after being asked to lay off five people. The Wall Street Journal, right on cue, publishes an article entitled “Layoff Tactics Keep Changing, and the Blunders Keep Coming” (paywall). It seems that when Amazon decided to lay off 14,000 (!) […]
AI and VibeConfiguring
While I’m talking about AI… (is there anything else to talk about?) I’m known to be cautious about AI and exactly what it can do. My skepticism is misplaced, you might say. After all, isn’t AI replacing thousands of coding jobs? It’s going to come for network engineers too! I’ve been playing with Warp, a […]
AI layoffs meet insomnia and cops
The flip side of my most recent post was covered by the WSJ (again, paywall) in an article from about Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, who thinks that AI will wipe out tons of jobs–a prospect he seems quite happy about–joining the ranks of Mark Benioff in celebrating putting millions of people out of work. Since […]
Bubbles, dotcoms, and AI
Today the Wall Street journal published an article (paywall) asking if the AI-boom data center mania might be inflating a bubble along the lines of the “internet’s infrastructure build-out in the late 1990s”. Well, gee, ya think? I lived through that bubble. Right when I was graduating college, the Internet (I still use the capital […]
The joy of expertise
I’ve been working in the lab again, and I attempted to log in to one of my switches (IP addresses have been changed to protect the innocent): $ ssh admin@10.10.18.73 Warning: Permanently added ‘10.10.18.73’ (RSA) to the list of known hosts. admin@10.10.18.73’s password: Permission denied, please try again. Huh? I checked caps lock, and even […]
Topological Qubits
I’ve been very unconvinced on the reality and benefits of quantum computing. Sure, a lot of people with fancy degrees from fancy places say it will work miracles. Sure, they make really impressive machines with cooling units that look like they’ll beam you into the movie Tron. Sure, Microsoft just released a new chip with […]