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Technical Confusion

How often have you learned about a new technology, and couldn’t understand it?  How many trainings and presentations have you sat through that left you in a mental fog?  It amazes me how many technologies we are supposed to master in our industry, and how many we never do.

Let me give an example.  When I heard about “Cloud Computing” I could not, for the life of me, understand what it meant.  I went to meeting after meeting where we talked about “the Cloud” without any understanding of what it actually was.  I knew I used clouds a lot of Visio diagrams, but the MBA-types who were telling me we needed to migrate to the cloud would never be able to understand the Visio diagrams that network engineers make.  It seemed to involve using centralized computing resources, but I’d been doing this for years.  My first ISP accounts were shell accounts.  My email and other services were hosted on their computers.  Nothing was new about this.  In fact, Larry Ellison gave a hilarious talk in which he asked “What the hell is Cloud Computing?”

We all know the “cloud” has in fact made significant changes in how we engineer computing resources, but the truth is, the idea of centralized “compute” is not a new one.  (Side note:  I hate turning nouns into verbs.  “Compute”, “spend”, and “ask” are verbs, not nouns.  The MBAs who invent these terms apparently don’t have to study grammar.)  The scale is certainly different, but we all know that mainframes had both centralized computing and virtualization long before anyone said “cloud.”

SDN is another one.  I was told we needed SDN, but I couldn’t figure out what it meant.  I was a hard-core routing protocols guy.  BGP and OSPF are software.  Ergo, networks are already software defined.

Someone sent me a video from Nicira, later acquired by VMware.  The vague video described slicing networks into pools, or something like that.  I couldn’t understand what this meant.  Like a VLAN?  I finally found a document that described SDN as separation of the control plane from the data plane.  OK, but we already had been doing that in routers and switches for years?  Yes, but SDN was a centralized control plane.  Kind of like BGP route reflectors?  I couldn’t figure it out.  I spent some time getting OpenFlow up and running to try to understand it from the ground up.  What a waste that was.  Whatever SDN has become, it’s certainly not what it was originally defined to be.  And don’t get me started on SASE.

I used to think maybe I was stupid, but now I realized all of these things confused me because they were (a) confusing in themselves, or (b) so badly explained that nobody really understood them.  A little more detail:

  • Some technologies are simply vague marketing terms.  They don’t correspond to anything precise in reality.
  • Some technologies do correspond to reality, but they are simply bucket terms.  That is, the marketers took five, six, ten technologies, and slapped a new label on them.  In this case, you’re looking for some precise definition of term X and you realize term X refers to ten different things at once.
  • Sometimes new technologies are invented, and the inventors don’t want to cough up too much proprietary information.  So the produce vaguely worded marketing content that appeals to “analysts” with MBAs in marketing, but which technical people realize are meaningless.  Said “analysts” now run around creating hype (“You need software-defined cloud secure-access zero trust!”) and now we’re told we to implement it.
  • A lot of technical people are really bad explainers.  Sometimes there is a new technology which is clear and well-defined, but the people sent to explain it are completely incapable of explaining anything at all.

My point is, it’s ok to be confused.  A lot of times we’re in the room and everyone seems to be getting it, but we have no idea what is going on.  Chances are, nobody else really understands what is being said either.  Ask questions, drill down, and if you don’t understand something, chances are it’s hot air.  In a world where we prioritize talk over reality, there seems to be an abundance of that.

6

Cisco Live is over! Long Live Cisco Live!

I think it’s fair to say that all technical marketing engineers are excited for Cisco Live, and happy when it’s over.  Cisco Live is always a lot of fun–I heard one person say “it’s like a family reunion except I like everyone!”  It’s a great chance to see a lot of folks you don’t get to see very often, to discuss technology that you’re passionate about with other like minded people, to see and learn new things, and, for us TMEs, an opportunity to get up in front of a room full of hundreds of people and teach them something.  We all now wait anxiously for our scores, which are used to judge how well we did, and even whether we get invited back.

It always amazes me that it comes together at all.  In my last post, I mentioned all the work we do to pull together our sessions.  A lot of my TMEs did not do sessions, instead spending their Cisco Live on their feet at demo booths.  I’m also always amazed that World of Solutions comes together at all.  Here is a shot of what it looked like at 5:30 PM the night before it opened (at 10 AM.)  How the staff managed to clear out the garbage and get the booths together in that time I can’t imagine, but they did.

The WoS mess…

My boss, Carl Solder, got to do a demo in the main keynote.  There were something like 20,000 people in the room and the CEO was sitting there.  I think I would have been nervous, but Carl is ever-smooth and managed it without looking the least bit uncomfortable.

My boss (left) on the big stage!

The CCIE party was at the air and space museum, a great location for aviation lovers such as myself.  A highlight was seeing an actual Apollo capsule.  It seemed a lot smaller than I would have imagined.  I don’t think I would ever have gotten in that thing to go to the moon.  The party was also a great chance to see some of the legends of the CCIE program, such as Bruce Caslow, who wrote the fist major book on passing the CCIE exam, and Terry Slattery, the first person to actually pass it.

CCIE Party

I delivered two breakouts this year:  The CCIE in an SDN World, and Scripting the Catalyst.  The first one was a lot of fun because it was on Monday and the crowd was rowdy, but also because the changes to the program were just announced and folks were interested in knowing what was going on.  The second session was a bit more focused and deeper, but the audience was attentive and seemed to like it.  If you want to know what it feels like to be a Cisco Live presenter, see the photo below.

My view from the stage

I closed out my week with another interview with David Bombal, as well as the famous Network Chuck.  This was my first time meeting Chuck, who is a bit of a celebrity around Cisco Live and stands out because of his beard.  David and I had already done a two-part interview (part 1, part 2) when he was in San Jose visiting Cisco a couple months back.  We had a good chat about what is going on with the CCIE, and it should be out soon.

As I said, we love CL but we’re happy when it’s over.  This will be the first weekend in a long time I haven’t worked on CL slides.  I can relax, and then…Cisco Live Barcelona!

Do we hate network engineers?

I was doing well on the blog for a few months but lately fell behind.  With (now) 12 people reporting to me, and three major areas of responsibility (SD-Access, Assurance, and Programmability), it’s not easy to find time to write up a blog post.   I have about five drafts needing work but I cannot seem to find the will to finish them.  Sometimes, however, it just takes a spark to get me going. That spark came in my inbox from Ivan Peplnjak.  I like Ivan’s blog posts, which, while often not favorable to Cisco, are nonetheless fair and balanced and raise some very important points.

“Why Is Every SDN Vendor Bashing Networking Engineers?” asks Ivan in the form email I received.  “[T]he vendors know they wouldn’t be able to sell their latest concoctions to people who actually understand how networking works and why some architectures have no chance of ever working in real life,” answers Ivan.  “The only way to sell the warez is to try to convince everyone else how to get rid of the pesky ossified CLI jockeys.”

Now I work for a vendor, and since I deal with the aforementioned products, I guess I am an SDN vendor.  That would seem to qualify me to speak on this subject.  (With, of course, the usual disclaimer that the opinions here are my own and do not represent Cisco officially.)

Selling Concoctions

I must admit, I do want to sell our products.  Everyone at Cisco should want our products to sell.  Just about all of us have a personal, financial stake in the matter, whether we have stock grants or ESPP.  We would be insane not to want people to buy our products.  I, and most of my co-workers, are driven by far more than finance, however.  We all want to know that our work means something, and that we are coming up with innovative solutions to problems.  Otherwise, why show up in the office every day?

We operate in a highly competitive environment, which means if we are not constantly innovating and coming up with better ways to do things, we will all suffer.  You can complain about the macroeconomic system, and believe me, I’m not a Randian, objectivist believer in unbridled capitalism.  But, at the end of the day, a public company needs to create the perception of future value in the eyes of the stock market, and that’s a motivating factor for all of us.

These things being said, I’ve been in product management for a few years now and I have never heard anyone, ever, talk about trying to put one over on our customers.  I’m not saying that’s what Ivan means here, but it’s an accusation I’ve heard before.  In the first place, our customers are network engineers who are quite smart.  If ever I’ve presented to my customer and was not crystal clear on what I was talking about and what advantage it would bring the customer, they will let me know it.  We’re constantly trying to find ways to do things better and make our customers’ lives easier.  As somebody who worked in IT for more years than product management, I’m very interested in this subject.  There were a lot of things that were frustrating and I want to fix things that used to annoy me.  You can argue about whether we’ve come up with the right ideas, but I hope nobody questions our motivations.

CLI Jockeys

Do I bash CLI jockeys in order to sell my products?  I should hope not, given that most of my customers are CLI jockeys, as I am myself!  I have two CCIEs and a JNCIE.  I spent a couple years in routing protocols TAC and many years in IT.  I spent a long time learning my trade and I have a lot of respect for those who have put the time and effort into learning it as well.  It’s not easy.

However, I don’t operate under the delusion that network engineers do a good job of configuring and managing CLI.  When I was at Juniper, I had designed a new NGMVPN system for our WAN.  I handed it off to the implementation team with some sample configs and asked them to come back to me with their plan.  I think we were touching about 20 devices the first go around.  The engineer came back with 20 Word documents.  He took my sample config and copied and pasted it into Word, and then modified the config in a separate Word doc for each CE/PE he was touching.  CLI itself isn’t a problem, but how we manage it.  This is where programmability and automation tools come in.  At the very least Ansible templating would have made this easier.  Software-Defined Networking (a very loose term, for what it’s worth), is not about replacing ossified CLI jockeys but getting them to focus on what they should be doing (network engineering) and avoiding what they should not (pasting stuff in Word docs.)

SD-Access takes this quite a bit further than Ansible, NETCONF, and other device-level tools.  Rather than saying “I want this device to be a LISP MS/MR” and so forth, you just say “I want this device to be a control plane node” and the system figures out what you need.  Theoretically we could change from LISP to some other protocol and the end-user shouldn’t even notice.  The idea here is somewhat like a fly-by-wire system.  When a pilot operated the controls of an airplane, they used to be directly coupled to the control surfaces via hydraulics.  Now, the pilot is operating what is essentially a joystick, providing control inputs to a computer, which then computes the best way to move the control surfaces given the conditions.  This is then relayed to servo motors in the wings, tail, etc.  The complexity of a fly-by-wire system is much higher than an old hydraulic system, but the complexity is hidden from the pilot in order to provide a better experience.  Likewise, with SD-Access, we’ve made the details more complex in order to deliver a better experience (TrustSec, layer 3 routed backbone, etc.) while hiding the complexity from the user.  It’s a different approach, for sure, but the idea is to allow engineers to focus on the right problems, like how to design their network, and not worry so much about configuration.

A New Era?

I’ve written extensively (see, for example, here, and here) about the role for CLI-jockey network engineers in the future.  When airplanes switched from the old dials and gauges to sleek, modern computerized (glass) cockpits, I’m sure some old timers threw up their hands, retired, and got their old Piper Super Cubs out of the hanger to do some “real” flying.  But most adapted, and in the end, saw how the new automation systems helped them do their jobs better.  That’s an era I’m looking forward to.  And as I always, always say, the pilots who fly the new cockpits still need to understand weather systems, engines, navigation, etc.  We still need network engineers who know how networks operate.

Meanwhile, I won’t bash any CLI jockeys and I hope nobody else here does either.

Two Years of Ten Years a CCIE

Two years ago I published my Ten Years a CCIE series.  Actually, I had written the series a couple years before I published it, but as I say in my introduction to the series, I felt it was a bit self-indulgent an uninteresting, so I scrapped it for a while.  The original pieces were dictated, and I’ve been meaning to go back and clean up some of the grammatical errors or grating phrases, but haven’t had the time.  Not a lot of people have read it, nor did I expect many to read it, since I generally don’t advertise the blog in social media, or anywhere really.  But the feedback from the few who have read it has been positive, and I’m gratified for that.

Things have changed a lot since I got into networking in 1995, and since I passed my CCIE in 2004.  But it’s also amazing how much has stayed the same.  TCP/IP, and in fact IPv4, is still the heart of the network.  Knowledge of OSPF and BGP is still key.  For the most part, new controllers and programmable interfaces represent a different way of managing fundamentally the same thing.

The obvious reasons for this are that networks work and are hard to change.  The old protocols have been sufficient for passing data from point A to point B for a long time.  They’re not perfect but they are more than adequate.  They are hard to change because networks are heterogeneous.  There are so many types of different systems connecting to them, that if we wanted to fundamentally alter the building blocks of networks, we’d have to upgrade a lot of systems.  This is why IPv6 adoption is so slow.

Occasionally I poke around at TechExams.net to see what newer network engineers are thinking, and where they are struggling.  I’m probably the only director-level employee of Cisco who reads or comments on that message board.  I started reading it back when I was still at Juniper and studying for my JNCIE, but I’ve continued to read it because I like the insights I get from folks prepping for their certifications.  People are occasionally concerned that the new world of controllers and automation will make their jobs obsolete.

I built the first part of my career on CLI.  Now I’m building it on controllers and programmability.  In this industry, we have to adapt, but we don’t have to die.  Cars have changed drastically, with on-board computer systems and so forth, but we still need mechanics.  We still need good network engineers.

To be honest, I was getting tired of my career by the time I left Juniper and came to Cisco.  I was bored.  I thought of going back to school and getting a Ph.D. in classical languages, my other passion.  Getting married helped put an end to that idea (Ph.D.’s in ancient Greek make a lot less than network engineers) but when I came back to Cisco, I felt revitalized.  I started learning new things.  Networking was becoming fun again.

I wrote the “Ten Years a CCIE” series both for people who had passed the exam and wanted to have some fun remembering the experience, as well as for people struggling to pass it.  Some things change, as I said, but a lot remains the same.  I still think, closing in on 15 years since I took the exam, that it’s still worth it.  I still think it’s a fantastic way to launch a career.  The exam curriculum will adapt, as it always does, with new technologies, but it’s an amazing learning experience if you do it honestly, and you will be needed when you make it through.

The value of a CCIE

In the final post in my “Ten Years a CCIE” series, I take a look at the age-old question: Is a CCIE really worth it? I conclude the series with some thoughts on the value of this journey.

I’ve written this series of posts in the hope that others considering the pursuit of a CCIE  would have some idea of the process, the struggles, and the reward of passing this notorious exam.  I would like to finish this series with a final article examining the age-old question:  What is the value of a CCIE?  In other words, was it worth it?  All of the other articles in the series were written a couple of years ago, back when I worked for Juniper in IT, with only some slight revisions before publishing.  However, this article is being written now (late 2016), in very different circumstances.  I work at Cisco now, not Juniper.  I work in the switching business unit, not in IT.  I work in product management, and as a Principal Engineer have direct influence on the direction of our products.  I specifically work on programmability, automation, and SDN solutions.  As I write this, I see many potential CCIE candidates wondering if it is even worth pursuing a career in networking any more.  After all, won’t SDN and automation just eliminate their jobs? Wouldn’t they be better off learning Python?  Isn’t Cisco a company in its death throes, facing extinction at the hands of upstarts like Arista and Viptela?

Well, I can’t predict the future.  But I can look at the issues from the perspective of someone who has been in the industry a long time now, and at least set your mind at ease.  The short answer:  it’s worth it.  The longer answer requires us to examine the question from a few different angles.

Technical Knowledge

As I’ve pointed out in previous articles, during the CCIE preparation process, you will master a vast amount of material, if you approach the test honestly.  But, as anyone in this industry knows, the second you pass, a timer starts counting down the value of the material you learned.  On my R&S exam (2004), I studied DLSw+, ATM, ISDN, and Frame Relay.  On my Security (2008) exam, I studied the VPN 3k concentrator, PIX, and NAC Framework.  How much of that is valuable now?

True, I studied many things that are still in use today.  OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, and ISIS were all heavily tested on the R&S exam even back in 2004.  But how much of it do I remember?  I certainly have a good knowledge of each of them, but even after taking the JNCIE-SP exam less than two years ago, I find my knowledge of the details of routing protocols fading away.  If I were to take the JNCIE exam today, I would certainly fail.

Thus, some technologies I learned are obsolete, and some are not, but I have forgotten a lot.  However, there are also technologies that I never learned.  For example, ISE and Cisco TrustSec are huge topics that I am just starting to play with.  Despite my newness to these technologies, I do have the same right to call myself a “Security CCIE” as a guy who passed it yesterday, and knows those subjects cold!

So, then, what about the value of the technical knowledge?  Is it worth it?

First, it is because no matter what becomes obsolete, and no matter what you forget, the intensity of your study will guarantee you still have a core of knowledge that will be with you for a long time.  Fortunately, despite the rapidity of change our industry is supposedly undergoing, networking is conservative by nature.  The Internet is a large distributed system consisting of many systems running disparate operating systems and they have to work together.  Just ask the guys pushing IPv6.  The core of networking doesn’t change very much.  You will also learn that even new technologies, like VXLAN, build on concepts you already know.

Second, even obsolete knowledge is valuable.  Newer engineers often don’t realize how certain technologies developed, or why we do things the way that we do.  They don’t know the things that have been tried and which failed in the past.  Despite the premium our industry places on youth, old-timers do have important insight gleaned from playing with things like, say, DLSw+.  It’s important for us not to simply wax nostalgic (as I am here) about the glorious days of IPX, but to explain to younger engineers how these dinosaurs actually worked, so that they can understand what decisions protocol designers made and why, and why some technologies fell into disuse or were replaced.  And, millennials, it is your responsibility to sit up and listen, if not to seek out such information.

Technical “soft skills”

In addition to specific technical knowledge, CCIE preparation simply makes you better at configuring and troubleshooting in general.  The hours of frustration in the lab and the broken configs that have you pulling your hair out ultimately help you to learn what makes a network break, and how to go about systematically debugging it.  Certainly you can learn those skills elsewhere, but when you are faced with the challenge of building a lab in a short amount of time, you have to be able to think quickly on your feet.  Even troubleshooting a live network outage doesn’t quite compare the intensity of the CCIE crucible, the eight hour slog during which one mistake can cost you months of studying.  The exams where I took multiple attempts required me to seriously up my game between tries, and each time I’ve come out a stronger thinker.

Non-Technical Skills

Passing the CCIE exam honestly is a challenge, plain and simple.  It requires discipline, persistence, extreme attention to detail, resourcefulness, ability to read documentation carefully, and time management skills.  While you won’t pass the CCIE without having those skills to begin with, there is no question that the rigors of CCIE preparation will help to hone them.  You will be a better person all around if you submit yourself to the discipline of passing the exam honestly.

It’s a bit like studying the martial arts.  Most martial artists will tell you that, in addition to being able to deliver a mean axe kick to the head, they have achieved self-discipline and confidence from their practice of martial arts, and that they find these skills apply elsewhere in life.  It’s true of any rigorous pursuit, really, and definitely true of the CCIE.  Personally I have no doubt that the many hours of laborious study have made me a more detail-oriented and better engineer.

Employment value:  Employee’s perspective

In my own case, my CCIE certification was directly responsible for my getting hired at Cisco TAC in 2005.  It was absolutely essential for me to move to a VAR in 2007.  Believe it or not, it was critical in my getting a job at Juniper in 2009, and having two CCIE’s and a JNCIE helped open the door to be re-hired at Cisco in 2015.  Obviously, employers see value in it.

You still see CCIE certification listed as a requirement in many job descriptions.  Without one you are cut out of those positions.  Many employers see it as a key differentiator and qualification for a senior position in network engineering.  VARs are still required to have a number of CCIEs on staff, so for some positions they will only talk to someone who has a CCIE.

Rarely is it the only qualification, however, and rarely is it enough, on its own, to get you hired.  Shortly after I passed my second CCIE I got laid off from the VAR where I worked.  I ended up interviewing at Nexus IS (now Dimension Data), another VAR, a couple months later.  Having been out of work I was rusty, and the technical interviewer grilled me mercilessly.  I’ve stated in the past that I don’t find this sort of thing productive, and I was uncomfortable, and didn’t have a great performance.  Despite the fact that I had two CCIE’s, and despite the value of such credentials for a reseller, I got a call from HR in a few days telling me that they chose not to hire me.  (These things often work out in the end;  I am in a good place now, and I wouldn’t have made it here if I had stayed in the VAR world.)  The entire experience reinforces a point I made in my Cheaters post:  don’t think an ugly plaque and a number are a guarantee of employment.

That said, there is little doubt that a person with X skill-set and a CCIE is in a better place than a person with just X skill-set.  As I said above, the certification simply opens doors.  You cannot rely on it alone, but combined with good experience, the certification is invaluable.  I would never have made it this far without one.  Now it’s true that there are some very talented and knowledgeable engineers who don’t have, and in some cases disdain, the CCIE.  Many of these folks do quite well and have successful careers.  But again, add the famous number and you will always do better in the end.

Employment value:  Employer’s perspective

Let’s turn it around now, and look at it from the perspective of a hiring manager.  When I have the stack of resumes in front of me, how important is it for me to look for that famous CCIE number?

This is a much harder question to answer, and I’ve touched on some of the problems of the CCIE above.  If you are looking at somebody who has a CCIE #1xxx, you know you are getting someone with age and experience.  But if you’re looking for someone to do hands-on implementation work, will this be the right candidate?  Maybe, of course, if Mr. #1xxx has been doing a lot of that lately.  The point is, you can’t tell from the number alone.

Now let’s say you are looking at CCIE #50xxx.  Does her CCIE number mean she will be the perfect fit for the hands-on job?  Quite possibly, because she has a lot of recent hands-on experience.  Will she be unqualified for the management role because she lacks the experience of CCIE #1xxx?  Who knows?

The point is, from a hiring manager’s perspective, the CCIE is simply one piece of data in the overall picture of the candidate.  It tells you something, something important, but it’s not nearly enough to be sure you are picking the right person.  If you are hiring for a VAR and just need a number to get your Gold status, then the value of the CCIE jumps up a little higher.  If you are just hiring a network engineer for IT, you need to take a host of other factors into account.

At the end of the day, I hope that people don’t make hiring decisions based on that one criterion.  I had one job where we hired in a CCIE (against my advice) because the hiring manager believed anyone in possession of a CCIE number was a genius.  (See “The CCIE Mystique”, here.)  The guy was a disaster.  Did he pass by cheating, or was he just good at taking tests?  I don’t know.  I’ve also known many, many extremely smart and talented network engineers who never got their CCIE, including several who just couldn’t pass it.  Keep that in mind when you are getting overly impressed with the famous four letters.

SDN and the New World Order

I would like to conclude this post, and this series, with a few thoughts on the relevance of CCIE certification in the future.  Various people in the industry, most of whom hold MBA’s in finance or marketing, tell us that CLI is dead and that the Ciscos and Junipers will be replaced by cheap, “white-label” hardware.  Google and Facebook are managing thousands of network devices with a handful of staff, using scripting and automation.  A CCIE certification is a waste of time, according to this thinking, because Cisco is spiraling down into oblivion.  Soon, it will all be code.  Learn Python instead.

I’d like to present my thoughts with a caveat.  I’m not always a great technology prognosticator.  When a friend showed me a web browser for the first time in 1994, I told him this Web thing would never take off.  Oops.  However, I have a lot of experience in the industry, and right now my focus at Cisco is programmability and automation.  I think I have a right to an opinion here.

First of all, there is no question that interest in automation and programmability is increasing.  All of the vendors, including my employer, are devoting a lot of resources towards developing and increasing their programmability and automation capabilities.  I’ve spent my first year here at Cisco working on automating network devices with Puppet, Ansible, Python, and our own tools like DCNM.  We’ve been working hard to build out YANG data models for our features.  I barely touched Expect scripting before I came here!  Customers are interested in managing their networks more efficiently, sadly, sometimes with fewer people.

Let me look at this from a wider perspective.  As computing power increases, are humans redundant?  For example, as a pilot I know that it’s entirely possible to replace human pilots with computers.  Air Traffic Control could relay instructions digitally to the computers that now control most airplanes.  With ILS and precision approaches, airplanes could land themselves at most airports.  But would you get into an airplane that had no human pilots?

The problem is, even in the age of Watson, computers react predictably to predictable circumstances, but predictably badly to unpredictable circumstances.  Many of the alleged errors that are introduced with CLI will still be introduced with NETCONF when the operator puts in the wrong data.  Scripts and automation tools have to power to replicate errors across huge numbers of devices faster than CLI.

At the end of the day, you still need to know what it is that you’re automating.  Networks cannot go away.  If all the Cisco and Juniper boxes out there vanished suddenly, our digital world would come to a screeching halt.  We still need people who understand what switches, routers, and firewalls do, regardless of whether they are managing them with CLI or Python.  Look at the cockpit of a modern airplane.  The old dial gauges have been replaced by flat-panel displays.  Do you think pilots no longer need to study weather systems, aerodynamics, and engine operation?  Of course they do!  Just the same, we need network engineers, a lot of them, to make networks work correctly.

As to whether Cisco itself goes away, who knows?  Obviously returning here, I have a great deal of faith in the company and its ability to execute.  I think that a lot of the industry hype is just hype.  Sure, some of the largest network operators will displace our hardware with Open Compute boxes.  Sure, it will hurt us.  But we are still in most networks and I don’t see that changing for a long time.

Closing thoughts, and a postscript

I began this series with an article on what I called, “The CCIE Mystique.”  I don’t know if that quite exists the same way it did in 2001 when I started this journey, but I suspect it is still there a least a little bit.  Those of us who have been through it have had the veil pulled back a bit, and we see it for what it is:  a very hard, but ultimately very surmountable challenge.  A test that measures some, but not even close to all of the skill required to be a network engineer.  A ticket to a better career, but not a guarantee of one.

Being back at Cisco has been an amazing experience.  This is the company that started my career, and that has built an entire industry.  I’d be happy to finish things out here, but I have no idea in this age of mass layoffs whether that will be possible.

I had an interesting chat with the head of the CCIE route/switch lab curriculum not long ago.  I must say, that for whatever complaints I have about the program, I was quite impressed with him and his awareness of where the program is strong and where it is lacking.  I have no doubt that those guys work very hard on the CCIE program and it’s always easier to sit on the sidelines and complain.  Ten years ago, when I started this journey, I wouldn’t have believed I would be at Cisco, helping to develop and market products, with a lab stocked full of gear, chatting with a CCIE proctor.  Everyone’s path is different, and I certainly cannot promise my readers that investing in one certification will land them a pot of gold.  There were a lot of other factors in my career trajectory.  But at the end of a decade (actually 12 years as I write this), I can say that the time, money, and effort spent in pursuit of the elusive CCIE was well worth it.

As I close out this series I hope that my little autobiographical exclusion was not too self-indulgent.  I hope that those of you who are new to the industry or studying for the exam got some insight from the articles.  I hope that any other old CCIE’s who stopped by relived a few memories.  Thanks for reading the series, and good luck on your studies!

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