Unlike this psychology-based post, most posts on this blog will be
quite technical in nature. Internetworking is a topic that has fueled
my life for a long time, and along with several hobbies, has made me
extremely happy. I hope I can share my mistakes as well as discoveries
with others in hopes of helping others attain the dream of being a CCIE.
I woke up this morning with an itch. Actually it wasn’t even morning, it was 2:30am, but there was no going to sleep until I scratched it. So I made my morning shake, you know, so I don’t join the ill who are enroute to obesity. Had a shower and thought about life, as usual. I remembered the words of Kevin Wallace in his great book “Your Route To Cisco Career Success“. He was asked what he thought of a particular tech who had years and years of internetworking experience. Kevin had a different take on the matter. He felt the tech instead had a few months of experience repeated for years and years. The tech didn’t grow in all that time, didn’t study, didn’t obtain certs - no self improvement was attained. So he was basically doing the exact same few activities repeatedly for years. That’s definitely not years and years of on the job experience; I finally agreed with the author. That’s like being a cashier for 30 years. Not much room for self improvement there! Cashiers should be temporary placements, and not long term career goals. But many in the tech industry are just like cashiers, they are tech cashiers. I was one for six years and I realized it just today.
For six short years I worked for UUNET. I was part of the emergency oncall rotation for the Canadian backbone. That should tell you what a God I was. Sure I could shut down half the world’s Internet if I wanted to, but then being out of a job would be the least of my worries. A common joke amongst us was what if the wrong interface was shut? Hardly anyone had any certs.
Despite all of our tech wizardry consisting of Linux skillz, coding prowess, IRC duels and other technolust, none of us ever bothered with the basics: CCNA! Most of us recited the acronym soup before bedtime: MPLS, VPN, BGP4, yadda, yadda. We constantly ran into people with tremendous experience, with ginormous certs plastered after their names on their business cards, and yet given a complex problem at 3am, none of them knew how to solve it, which is where we came into the picture. I wasn’t just pageable everywhere I went, I had to have a glowing persona at 5 minutes notice at all hours of the night, too. Plus, regardless of the wonderful dream I was engaged in whereby I was a giant dragon flying over my old high school, I somehow had to click back to reality and speak to an underground tech who was interpreting Lambert writing verbally! I’m just glad I had such an understanding girlfriend who could sleep through almost anything.
But in all that time, I also never bothered with certs. I donned the same attitude that certs were for dummies and not a God like me. Near the end of my stay in heaven I did attempt the CCNA exam just once. At the time I bought a big red Sybex book and never read it. I figured I knew it all, I was king of 701 and besides, books were for mortals! Boy was I ever wrong.
I failed that exam by a lousy 8 points and lost on thousands of dollars a year of increased salary! Who knew that IPX would be on the exam in the 21st century? I hadn’t encountered IPX in any environment on this planet. Do our Mars colonies use IPX for some reason and hence Cisco kept it on the exam, just in case we ever get, you know, overtaken by our Martian neighbors? I spoke of my IPX woes to a colleague, and he told tales of a fog long ago when IPX ran alongside Banyan Vines! I know grapes grow on vines, right? At least I had heard of IPX, in so much that IP was part of the acronym! That one exam failure did not phase me, I did not try harder one bit, nor did I study from IPX from the book for a second attempt. I wrongly concluded if IPX was on that exam then that surely wasn’t for me. Imagine a 100m sprinter being tested on his ability to crawl? Yeah, he wouldn’t care too much for such an exam either would he?
So for a while now I’ve been feeling pretty high and mighty thinking I’ve got loads and loads of experience to fall back on. I know my craft, I was a 701 tshooter! I should at least be able to float above water or some magical trick like that in the MPLS land, eh? No! Kevin Wallace was right. I did not have six years of experience at all, nowhere near. I had a year’s worth of experience, repeated six times. Yes I’ve learned BGP. And I knew of MPLS. Sure I was the lead technician for the monstrous AS701 migration and I obviously know how to update access lists. But just imagine what I could have known if I studied actively for a cert every day, just an hour a day, for those six years! I’d probably have at least two CCIE certs by now and a job making over $150K easily! But instead of all that, I took on this high and mighty attitude that I knew it all which prevented me from humbling enough to study the basics.
There are probably more techs in my situation than anyone is aware of. It isn’t easy studying for the CCNA when you’ve been the emergency oncall for a country’s backbone, let me tell you. It’s like Michaelangelo learning the basic katas of Tae Kwon Do. He’d feel like an incompetent child and probably get fed up and want to go back to eating pizza and kickin’ Shredder’s butt! But learning these basics, even if they are hardly used in the field, is paramount, and not only for one’s career. Sure I knew that typical MTUs were something like 1500, but why? There’s a whole story behind that simple little number and once I’ve learned it, I found I loved knowing this useless little detail as it opened doors for a whole new set of doors. I had a ton of questions back then, but never once did I take the time to answer them. This is because I was too busy! Personal projects, family matters, life, you know, all the possible excuses one has for procrastinating.
Well no more. Last year I took the ICND1 exam and got over 90%. Unfortunately, considering how little effort I put into studying, as usual, I feel as if I got somebody else’s results. That’s all psychological mind you. So now I’m stuck in the opposite end of the pool, the shallow end. Now it’s so easy that I don’t even want to bother with the rest of the certs. It’s been over half a year and I still haven’t done the ICND2 for the full CCNA cert and Cisco has even announced a new set of exams as of September. My feeling is that if ICND1 was that easy, why bother with the rest? There’s no challenge there.
But this is yet more procrastination revealing it’s ugly three heads. First is the disguise: ICND1 was easy because I did all that stuff for years and years. Second is the truth: ICND2 is difficult for me as it covers concepts rarely encountered at the core.. Third is the rushed dream: I want CCIE today and not have to go through hoops like a horribly abused circus animal. Soon I hope to slay all three heads and pass even the elusive ICND2. My path is fairly straight forward from there. I will briefly jump to CCDA before proceeding to CCNP, after which is obviously the CCIE. I am not too sure if I want to pursue CCAr, or if in between these certs I’ll jump on the Juniper bandwagon as I also have relevant experience there. As long as nobody starts any silly wars we’ll find out how beautiful the future can be.
I woke up this morning with an itch. Actually it wasn’t even morning, it was 2:30am, but there was no going to sleep until I scratched it. So I made my morning shake, you know, so I don’t join the ill who are enroute to obesity. Had a shower and thought about life, as usual. I remembered the words of Kevin Wallace in his great book “Your Route To Cisco Career Success“. He was asked what he thought of a particular tech who had years and years of internetworking experience. Kevin had a different take on the matter. He felt the tech instead had a few months of experience repeated for years and years. The tech didn’t grow in all that time, didn’t study, didn’t obtain certs - no self improvement was attained. So he was basically doing the exact same few activities repeatedly for years. That’s definitely not years and years of on the job experience; I finally agreed with the author. That’s like being a cashier for 30 years. Not much room for self improvement there! Cashiers should be temporary placements, and not long term career goals. But many in the tech industry are just like cashiers, they are tech cashiers. I was one for six years and I realized it just today.
For six short years I worked for UUNET. I was part of the emergency oncall rotation for the Canadian backbone. That should tell you what a God I was. Sure I could shut down half the world’s Internet if I wanted to, but then being out of a job would be the least of my worries. A common joke amongst us was what if the wrong interface was shut? Hardly anyone had any certs.
Despite all of our tech wizardry consisting of Linux skillz, coding prowess, IRC duels and other technolust, none of us ever bothered with the basics: CCNA! Most of us recited the acronym soup before bedtime: MPLS, VPN, BGP4, yadda, yadda. We constantly ran into people with tremendous experience, with ginormous certs plastered after their names on their business cards, and yet given a complex problem at 3am, none of them knew how to solve it, which is where we came into the picture. I wasn’t just pageable everywhere I went, I had to have a glowing persona at 5 minutes notice at all hours of the night, too. Plus, regardless of the wonderful dream I was engaged in whereby I was a giant dragon flying over my old high school, I somehow had to click back to reality and speak to an underground tech who was interpreting Lambert writing verbally! I’m just glad I had such an understanding girlfriend who could sleep through almost anything.
But in all that time, I also never bothered with certs. I donned the same attitude that certs were for dummies and not a God like me. Near the end of my stay in heaven I did attempt the CCNA exam just once. At the time I bought a big red Sybex book and never read it. I figured I knew it all, I was king of 701 and besides, books were for mortals! Boy was I ever wrong.
I failed that exam by a lousy 8 points and lost on thousands of dollars a year of increased salary! Who knew that IPX would be on the exam in the 21st century? I hadn’t encountered IPX in any environment on this planet. Do our Mars colonies use IPX for some reason and hence Cisco kept it on the exam, just in case we ever get, you know, overtaken by our Martian neighbors? I spoke of my IPX woes to a colleague, and he told tales of a fog long ago when IPX ran alongside Banyan Vines! I know grapes grow on vines, right? At least I had heard of IPX, in so much that IP was part of the acronym! That one exam failure did not phase me, I did not try harder one bit, nor did I study from IPX from the book for a second attempt. I wrongly concluded if IPX was on that exam then that surely wasn’t for me. Imagine a 100m sprinter being tested on his ability to crawl? Yeah, he wouldn’t care too much for such an exam either would he?
So for a while now I’ve been feeling pretty high and mighty thinking I’ve got loads and loads of experience to fall back on. I know my craft, I was a 701 tshooter! I should at least be able to float above water or some magical trick like that in the MPLS land, eh? No! Kevin Wallace was right. I did not have six years of experience at all, nowhere near. I had a year’s worth of experience, repeated six times. Yes I’ve learned BGP. And I knew of MPLS. Sure I was the lead technician for the monstrous AS701 migration and I obviously know how to update access lists. But just imagine what I could have known if I studied actively for a cert every day, just an hour a day, for those six years! I’d probably have at least two CCIE certs by now and a job making over $150K easily! But instead of all that, I took on this high and mighty attitude that I knew it all which prevented me from humbling enough to study the basics.
There are probably more techs in my situation than anyone is aware of. It isn’t easy studying for the CCNA when you’ve been the emergency oncall for a country’s backbone, let me tell you. It’s like Michaelangelo learning the basic katas of Tae Kwon Do. He’d feel like an incompetent child and probably get fed up and want to go back to eating pizza and kickin’ Shredder’s butt! But learning these basics, even if they are hardly used in the field, is paramount, and not only for one’s career. Sure I knew that typical MTUs were something like 1500, but why? There’s a whole story behind that simple little number and once I’ve learned it, I found I loved knowing this useless little detail as it opened doors for a whole new set of doors. I had a ton of questions back then, but never once did I take the time to answer them. This is because I was too busy! Personal projects, family matters, life, you know, all the possible excuses one has for procrastinating.
Well no more. Last year I took the ICND1 exam and got over 90%. Unfortunately, considering how little effort I put into studying, as usual, I feel as if I got somebody else’s results. That’s all psychological mind you. So now I’m stuck in the opposite end of the pool, the shallow end. Now it’s so easy that I don’t even want to bother with the rest of the certs. It’s been over half a year and I still haven’t done the ICND2 for the full CCNA cert and Cisco has even announced a new set of exams as of September. My feeling is that if ICND1 was that easy, why bother with the rest? There’s no challenge there.
But this is yet more procrastination revealing it’s ugly three heads. First is the disguise: ICND1 was easy because I did all that stuff for years and years. Second is the truth: ICND2 is difficult for me as it covers concepts rarely encountered at the core.. Third is the rushed dream: I want CCIE today and not have to go through hoops like a horribly abused circus animal. Soon I hope to slay all three heads and pass even the elusive ICND2. My path is fairly straight forward from there. I will briefly jump to CCDA before proceeding to CCNP, after which is obviously the CCIE. I am not too sure if I want to pursue CCAr, or if in between these certs I’ll jump on the Juniper bandwagon as I also have relevant experience there. As long as nobody starts any silly wars we’ll find out how beautiful the future can be.
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