The Perfect Position - A Wish List

“If you want to build a ship don’t herd people together to collect wood
and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them
to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

– Antoine de Saint-Exupery

I'm discovering that I'm not an engineer in the same vein that many seem to commonly use that term. I'm probably in the top half – on a good day perhaps even in the top quarter – of networking-specific technologists in my area. It doesn't bother me to have met many I consider better. I keep them in the back of my mind when I need to vet an idea or problem. Or one day hire them. I can stand out well enough technically, but my own selling point is different:

The Project Manager

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.

– James Barrie

I had never had anything, to-date, in the realm of work that I could classify as an actual failure.

Vista - The Boundless Horizon

The Risk in Every Step

When I left the Service Provider, I felt fully capable to comprehend and configure a global service provider Layer 3/Transport network. Many technologies I had configured to the point of comfort: L2VPNs, VPNv4, VPNv6, pseudowire, circuit emulation, and the Provider Core functions. If I had forgotten syntax, it should be trivial to look it up. I had never configured Carrier Supporting Carrier (MPLS over another MPLS network) but I'd done enough reading to the point. VPLS I could relearn. More importantly, I knew when and where these technologies should be used. There was a lot I didn't know, like optical transport rings, WDM, etc., but these were Rumsfield's "known unknowns".

Telework

Telework is wonderful. Telework is misery.

I've been on several telework working groups, and experienced this privilege a number of times. Years ago, I worked on a "half-way" project, a concept known as "hoteling" whereby remote branch offices are set up which are local to the employees and substitute for the primary work site. This variant may include assigned work spaces (cubicles, offices, etc.) or "hot-seating" (pick the cubicle that is available at the moment).

Dataprise - Amid Taller Weeds

At a particularly low moment, I found myself looking online for comparisons of job markets in different metro areas. I found one with ratios of applicants to jobs, not specific to types of jobs.

Los Angeles was 8:1.
Detroit was 16:1
San Francisco wasn't bad. But it was expensive.

But...
Baltimore was 1:1
D.C. was 1:1

UCLA SON, Pt 4 - Failures and Setbacks

For a time, I had the feeling that everything was going the way I wanted it. The major core infrastructure upgrades had become my baby. I convinced the others, trained them in part, and they followed my lead on it. If they weren't direct reports, it sure felt like I was out in front and we were a team.

UCLA SON, Pt 3 - The Big Migration

The Big Migration

With the more immediate problem of a failing network being solved, my attention turned to some of the more enduring challenges we faced.

We were running out of patience from the Dean. We had been running Mercury/Pegasus (oh yes, that!) for our email while everyone else ran Exchange. My boss was belatedly testing Groupwise but with his departure that was it. Campus swooped in and offered their centralized Exchange solution and they took it. The Dean wasn't happy that something so basic and obvious to the users hadn't been provided by her own people.

UCLA SON, Pt 2 - Full Steam Ahead

Whenever a team has spent a fair amount of time together, a group dynamic coalesces which defines how the work will go. Alter the team and that dynamic is thrown out to be reconstructed anew.

We had my boss, professorial in his mannerisms, and we had my senior engineer, who was jovial, down-to-earth, quieter, absorbing information like a sponge to be released at the appropriate times in measured doses. I occupied a middle ground, having a lot still to prove to myself. We used to have really interesting conversations that took up more time than they should.

UCLA SON, Pt 1 - A Path Emerges

I liked my boss. Here was someone who did IT but was something else: a docent at the zoo, an amateur historian who got all his passwords from reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and likely quite a lot more that I never knew. Though not so old, he carried himself with a distinguished, grandfatherly air, often looking out at you over round-rimmed glasses. In way, he seemed from a different time, and when he invited me to his civil war reenactments, the light bulb lit.

UCLA Library - A Foot in the Door

I had spent 5 years working for the UCLA Library as a student. I shunned possible engineering internships (unlike my peers) preferring to travel through Europe. The cost of school was covered so everything I earned myself fed this luxury.

I still had a prejudice to engineering as being filled with monotonous old hallways and dull, laser-focused, non-people-skilled people. Technology had an appeal, what I expected from the work did not. Traveling the world was always a chance for me to experience the unknown, to have to navigate train stations where no one spoke your language to travel halfway across continents, to adapt to different ways of thinking, speaking, doing, to see how others did the same things very differently, and to test myself. I reveled in it.

The Degree

What did I want to do for a career?

I asked myself this in high school as we were all sending out our applications to colleges. Which major? I hadn't a clue. I had very good grades, usually top of the class. I also knew that my above 4.2/4.3 GPA, due to a lack of AP classes offered, still couldn't compare with that of many in the larger public schools.

Engineering was obvious. My father was an engineer. My uncles and aunts were mostly engineers. My mother had wanted to be one when she was younger but picked the humanities. I had always thought of myself through this lens.

Government Contracting

I work in the D.C. metro area.

Federal contracting is all the rage. Every contract needs warm bodies sitting in seats. While those bodies are in place, the government pays the contractor. Those bodies will often be picked up by a new contractor if the contract changes hands.

Impermanence is built into this model. Perfect fits are rare and more rarely long-term. If the contract is lost and no billet available on another of your company's contract, no matter how strong an engineer you are, your value to the company vanishes. I know many engineers who hate this feeling. Every contract turnover elicits heart palpitations.

Good Faith and Vetting the Company

Yet another “hop” invites the gnawing question that you weren’t thorough enough in your vetting of a potential employer. This can be especially true for the first few changes. However, in a good job market, I never saw my first few jobs as failures by any stretch. I simply outgrew the environment quickly. I'd like to believe that I gave enormous value in return for the opportunity afforded.

The Money Question

Changing jobs frequently to change your role may be unavoidable. Your company has its interest at heart, its revenue now and its revenue later. This is completely reasonable. If you feel you have grown enough to merit a change in roles, or title or compensation, you will have to make your case to them on their level. I've known many engineers who become frustrated because the company doesn't recognize how well they're doing on their own. But as much as you want a company to notice you, only a handful will, and behind attentive managers is a very real bottom line. If you want a raise, it will be on their timeline, when they determine that they can and will afford it. If you want a promotion, they need to decide if they can use you in that higher role, and if your changed usefulness outweighs your usefulness in your current role. It's not about you. It's about what they need.

A Consistent Narrative

If you change jobs often, you need a strong, credible narrative as to why you left each position and how this fits into your consistent career goals. This may be the only reason why an employer restores you the benefit of the doubt. If you are consistent in where you do well, then the employer can weigh whether you will do well at his company. In a market favoring IT applicants, I've found some employers who are even biased to believe.

Finding the Path: Choir Practice

These are fun stories I didn't give too much thought to as being relevant to a career. Just good memories.

Moldova, 2000

My much old cousin, Cher-El, had visited affiliated churches in the small country of Moldova, nestled between Romania to the West and Russia. The year before she spent entirely with them and many of the children became like her own.

Finding the Path: Deus Ex Machina

Twice this happened:

In college, they put me in several C++ classes and I did all right. Then came the one course on network engineering. The first big assignment came: program a web server from scratch, using C.

I didn't know C. Turned out to be a different animal. I had to specifically request my C++ classes, for enjoyment. Programming wasn't part of my EE curriculum. It was Computer Science. How could anyone know C then, before coming to the class? Yet many did.

Finding the Path: Romanian Football

The surprise wasn't that I wasn't terribly good with high school football. The surprise was that I played football at all.

It wasn't in my family. I didn't grow up with sports. Older parents, science, academic backgrounds. Also a smart kid, no people skills, often told how smart he was. Not the good kind of smart. Smart enough, but the big fish little pond ego smart, the kind that can be a crutch for poorer people skills. I had a pride that kept all but a few friends away. I was not a team sports kind of person. I could have fun in PE, but it wasn't in my blood. And I worked better alone with most assignments.

Finding the Path

I've long had the impression that some people just know what they are "meant for" from an early age.

You meet people all the time who aren't terribly introspective, they just "do". That's who they are.

Maybe it just doesn't worry them. Maybe it doesn't matter why they do what they do.

I'm led to understand this idea that your job fit you, that you ought to find your niche, be (to some degree) fulfilled, is a peculiar American invention (at least according to my European friends, some of whom have come around to it nonetheless). Other places, work is work, non-work is life.

Career Growth Calculus

It's up to you to prioritize your growth in a position.

Time = Money : we trade our time to the company for their money.

So: Time (ours) = Money (theirs)

This is the general idea, but really:

Time (ours) = Money (theirs) + Growth (ours)

Better or Worse Management

Better...

There is an admitted difference in style to successfully managing employees who do things you understand and who do things you don't. Nearly all of my managers have not understood much about what I do. This does not seem to have greatly impacted whether they were successful and whether I was as well.

Know Thyself

Should I be trying this hard to find a place where I'm optimal, where most of what I can do is used to effect and solves multiple problems for my employer? Or, at its heart, is work simply to be effort expended and paycheck received?

Am I looking for the wrong things in work, when I look for intensity, purpose, growth, and the triumph of successes?

Better or Worse Engineers

The Better...

Lead by example. Once, one of the oldest engineers in the building (a recognized expert in an obscure technology) for many weeks would come over to my distant cubicle and stay late into the evenings walking me through how it worked so I could write a tutorial. He wasn’t from my group, didn’t owe me any time, and I should have been met him whenever and wherever it was convenient for him. This was a profound example of both humility and kindness to a junior engineer. Thanks to this undeserved and unexpected help, I produced the first thing I was proud of there

A Question

I had this question recently posed to me in an interview:

You are a cloud services provider.

You have multiple remote customers separated by any number of AS's from you.

You advertise your BGP prefixes along an optimal path and a sub-optimal path where, receiving both, all customer routers will by default choose the optimal path.

For specific reasons you want to force customer A to install prefixes learned through the sub-optimal path, without affecting any other customers.

You have control over your network only, and no control over any customer or transit networks.

How would you do this?