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In 2007, I left Cisco after two brutal years in high-touch TAC.  I honestly hated the job, but it was an amazing learning experience.  I draw on my TAC experience every single day.  A buddy of mine got a job at a Gold Partner, offered to bring me in, and I jumped on the opportunity.  Things didn’t go so well, and in 2009, I was laid off and looking for a job again.  That’s when another buddy (buddies help!) called me and told me of an opportunity at Juniper.

I knew little about Juniper.  We had a Juniper SSL box in the network I used to manage, but the routers were mostly for service provider networks.  When I was at TAC, I had one case where a major outage was caused by misconfiguration of a Juniper BGP peer.  But otherwise, I didn’t know a thing.

The opportunity was to be the “network architect” for Juniper’s corporate network.  In other words, to work in internal IT at a network vendor.  It seemed like a good career move, but little did I know I would be thrust the corporate politics at the director-level instead of technical challenges.  I ended up spending six tumultuous years there, with several highlights:

  • My boss disappeared on medical leave on my very first day.
  • I was re-assigned to a Sr. Director who was an applications person and not knowledgeable in networking.  He viewed the network a bit like Col. Kendrick, the Marine, viewed the Navy in the movie A Few Good Men:  “Every time we gotta go some place to fight, you fellas always give us a ride.”
  • I proposed and got buy-off for a program to ensure we actually ran our own gear internally and to ensure we built solid network architectures.
  • I subsequently had the program taken away from me.
  • I found out a job posting with the identical title and JD to mine was listed on Juniper’s public site without my knowledge.
  • My manager was changed to a person two pay grades below me in another country without even informing me.  (Someone noticed it in the directory and told me.)
  • I quit in disgust, without any other job.
  • I was talked into staying.
  • After another year or misery, I was demoted two pay grades myself.
  • I focused on doing the best job I could ended up getting re-promoted to director and left on good terms.

Some of the above was my own fault, much of it was dysfunctional management, some of it was the stupidity we all know lurks in every good size company.  I actually bear Juniper no resentment at all.

I worked at Juniper in the pre-Mist days, and in the midst of the fiscal crisis that began in 2008.  We went from CEO Kevin Johnson’s rah-rah “Mission10” pep rallies that we would be the “next $10B company” (uh, no), to draconian OpEx cuts when a pump-and-dump “activist investor” took over our board.

At the time I was there, Juniper made some mistakes.  NetScreen firewalls had done well for us, but then we made the decision to kill the NetScreen in favor of the JunOS-based SRX.  This is the classic mistake of product management–replace a successful, popular product with a made-from-scratch product with no feature parity.  There were some good arguments to do SRX, but it was done abruptly which signalled EOL to NetScreen customers, and SRX didn’t even have a WebUI.

We also did QFabric while I was there.  We installed one of these beasts in a data center on campus.  I have no idea if they improved it, but the initial versions took a full day to upgrade.  Imagine taking a day-long outage on your data center just to do an upgrade!

Another product that didn’t work out was Space.  JunOS Space came out at the time when the iPhone was still new.  Juniper borrowed the idea.  Instead of building an NMS product, we’d build a platform, and then software developers could build apps on top of it.  Cisco might be able to get away with that approach, but Juniper didn’t have enough of the networking market to attract developers.

In addition, a bunch of other acquisitions fizzled out, including Trapeze, our WAN accelerator, our load balancer.

All that said, Juniper had some fine products when I worked there.  (And believe me, my current employer has had many failures too.)  I got my JNCIE-SP, working on MX routers, which were a really good platform.  I thought the EX switches were decent.  And the operating system was nicely done.  Funnily enough, I worked a solid year on the JNCIE and promptly went to Cisco.  I never renewed it and now it’s expired.

I left after meeting with a strategy VP and explaining our mission to use Juniper’s corporate network to demonstrate how to build an enterprise network to our customers.  She looked at me (and the CIO) and said, “Juniper is done with enterprise networking.  I’m not interested.”  I left after that.  In her defense, Mist was years off and she couldn’t have seen it coming.

She was right, in that Juniper certainly had a core SP market.  Juniper came about at the time when Cisco was still selling 7500’s and 12000’s to its service provider customers, dated platforms running a dated OS.  Juniper did such a nice job with their platform that Cisco had to turn around and build the CRS-1 and IOS-XR, both of which had, ehm, similarities to Juniper’s products.  Juniper really couldn’t crack the enterprise market while I was there.  The lack of a credible wireless solution was always a problem.  Obviously Mist changed the game for them.

Juniper always felt like a scrappy anti-Cisco when I was there, but it was fast becoming corporatized and taken over by the MBAs.  Many old-schoolers would tell me how different things were in the startup days.  It still always had the attitude of an anti-Cisco.  One of our engineers ALWAYS referred to Cisco devices as “Crisco boxes”, and when I announced I was returning to Cisco, a long-time IT guy called me an “asshole”.  A couple funny stories around this:

A customer came in to our office for training and looked in the window of one the data centers nearby.  He saw it was packed with Cisco gear and subsequently published a video on social media captioned “Juniper uses Cisco.”  He didn’t realize that we leased the building from another company called Ariba, and the data center was theirs, not ours.  In fact, we worked very hard to not run Cisco in our internal network.  Juniper subsequently asked Ariba to block out the window.

One time we solicited a proposal from one of our largest service provider customers to host a data center for us.  The SP came back to us with an architecture which was 100% Cisco.  Cisco switches, Cisco routers, Cisco firewalls.  I told the SP I would never deploy our DC on Cisco gear.  What if a major bug hit Cisco devices causing outages and our data center went down too?  What if we got hacked due to a Cisco PSIRT and it became public?

The SP didn’t care.  We were their customer, but they were also ours.  They used Cisco in their data center, and had no desire to re-tool for another vendor.  I escalated all the way to the CEO, who agreed with me, and the deal was scuttled.  Ironically, I used this story in my Cisco interviews when asked for an example of a time when I had taken a strong stand on something.

I work at Cisco now, and even ran the competitive team for a while.  Competition is healthy and makes us all better.  I actually value our competition.  Obviously my job is to win deals against them, but I have friends who work at Juniper and I have friends who work at HPE.  We’re all engineers doing our jobs, and I wish them no ill will.  I always respected Juniper, their engineering, and their scrappy attitude.  While I know some of this will be retained as they get absorbed into a large corporation, it’s definitely the end of an era, for the industry and for me.

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I feel a bit of guilt for letting this blog languish for a while. I can see from the response to my articles explaining confusing Juniper features that my work had some benefit outside my own edification, and so I hate to leave articles unfinished which might have been helpful. In addition, WordPress is not easy to maintain and I keep losing notifications of comments, which means that when I am not logging in, I miss the opportunity to respond to kind words and questions.

As it is, my work explaining Juniper to the masses will have to be put on hold, as I have left Juniper after six years and returned to my old employer Cisco! I worked at Juniper longer than I had anywhere else, and it’s amazing to consider that I just closed the door on half a decade. But, I even after attaining my JNCIE I always felt like a Cisco guy at heart, and so here I am again. A few random thoughts then:

1. I interviewed for a number of jobs, and now that I am hired I can say that I really hate interviewing. My interviews at Cisco were very fair and reasonable. Just for the heck of it I did a phone screen with Google and completely bombed it. I’m not ashamed to admit that. I’m not supposed to reveal their questions, and I won’t, but they were mostly basic questions about TCP functionality, and MAC/ARP stuff, and it’s amazing how you forget some of the basics over the years. I wasn’t really interested in working there so I did no preparation, and in fact the recruiter warned me to brush up on basics. I just figured my work and blog show that I am at least somewhat technical. I plan to write some posts on the art of technical interviewing, but I was certainly underwhelmed by Google’s screening process, as I’m sure they were by my performance. I really wanted the Cisco job, and what a difference attitude makes! (Oh, and I completely munged an MPLS FRR/Node & Link protection question, less than a year after passing the JNCIE-SP. Uh, whoops.)

2. I bear Juniper no ill will. It was an interesting six years. When I came on board, during the Kevin Johnson years, it was all rah-rah pep talks about how we were going to be the next $10 billion company (errr, no…) followed by a plethora of product disasters. Killing off Netscreen gave the firewall market to Palo Alto, Fortinet, and amazingly resuscitated Checkpoint. Junos Space was a disaster, and Pulse slightly less so. QFabric was not a bad idea, but was far too complex. You needed to buy a professional services contract with the product, because it was too complex to install by itself. And yet it supposedly simplified the data center? There was a fiasco with our load balancer product. And then came the activist investors with their Integrated Operating Plan. I will permanently loathe activist investors. Juniper was hurting and they just magnified the hurt. There’s nothing worse than a bunch of generic business-types who wouldn’t know a router if they saw one trying to tell a router company how to do its business. They thought they could apply the same formula you learn in B-school to any company no matter what it manufactures or does. Then we had the CEO revolving door.

Despite all of this, as I said, I like Juniper. I did ok there, and there are a lot of people I respect working there. Rami Rahim is a good choice for CEO. I left for personal reasons. They still have some good products and good ideas, and I think competition is always good for the marketplace. For the sake of my friends there, I hope Juniper does well.

3. If you read my bio, you will see that I was THE network architect for Juniper IT, meaning I covered everything. This included (in theory at least) campus LAN, WAN, data center, wireless, network security, etc. I did something in all of these spaces. It was a broad level of knowledge, but not deep. That’s why I did my JNCIE-SP–I was hungering to go deep on something. My new job at Cisco is principal technical strategy engineer for data center. This is an opportunity to go deep but not as broad, and I’m happy to be doing that. The data center space is where it’s at these days, and I can’t wait to get deeper into it.

4. Coming back to Cisco after an eight year hiatus was bizarre. It was cool to pull up all my old bugs and postings to internal aliases to see what I was doing back then. Heck, I actually sounded like I knew a thing or two. I was thrilled to find out I am on the same team as Tim Stevenson, whose work as a Cat 6K TME I admired when I worked in TAC. Just for fun I walked though my old building and floor (K, floor 2) and nearly fell over when I saw that it looked identical. I mean, not only the cubes, but there were these giant signs for the different teams (e.g. “HTTS AT&T TEAM”) which were still hanging there as though the intervening eight years had never happened.

Unfortunately, I have to leave a few in progress articles in the dustbin. First, I shouldn’t really be promoting Juniper now that I am working for Cisco. And second, I’ve lost access to VMM, the internal Juniper tool I used to spin up VM versions of Juniper routers. However, I hope to start posting on Cisco topics now that I have access to that gear. Cisco’s products are generally better documented than Juniper’s, but I promise to fill any gaps I might find. And I will leave my previous articles up in hopes that they will benefit future engineers who struggle with Junos.

Onwards!