In the last 6 weeks, I've had about 12-15 different headhunters call me out of the blue, looking to get certain networking positions staffed.
My phone hasn't been ringing like this since over 2 years ago.
Is anyone else tracking increased headhunter activity?
(Greenspan be damned; I've got my own "Leading Economic Indicators.")
The last two times, I had blazed through the exam, finishing very early, and then using some of the balance of my time to review my solutions. You can only review your work so much before going crazy, so I'd left fairly early in each of those attempts.
When you finish as early as I did, that gives the lab proctors time to grade your exam the same day, and each time, my score reprt had been posted by the time I'd finished my 3 hour drive much.
In both of those attempts, I'd driven home feeling very confident, alomst certain that I'd made it. In both of those attempts, I'd come up short. That'll shake your confidence.
I've been doing Cisco networking for 9 years; I'm not some rookie with a study guide. I took each of those failures very personally, and it really was having an adverse affect on my life.
This time, I took a different approach. I made a deliberate effort to complete this exam as slowly as possible, but not so slow as to prevent me from finishing it.
You have 8 hours... In the past, I'd finished in 5 hours, and 5.5 hours. This time, I took 7 hours.
In the past, I'd reviewed my solutions over and over again for and hour and a half, or two hours.
This time, I reviewed everything just one time, in about 30 minutes. I caught two errors, and corrected them, and when I was done going through it all, I got up and left with only 15 or 20 minutes left until "time" was called.
This time, my score report was not waiting for me when I got home. I got to go through the night of the exam thinking "Well, at this point, I still haven't failed it."
I fully expected to have my results by 10:30am the next day... It had never taken longer than that.
I kept checking... No email. 12:30pm. Nothing. 1:30pm. I logged into the website, and my results were not yet posted. 3:30pm. No change.
The waiting was killing me, but all through it, I was able to keep saying to myself "Well, at this point, I still haven't failed it."
On into the evening... 8:30pm... 9:30pm... 11:00pm... No results. I went to bed a full day after having taken the exam, and still I hadn't failed it. I was anxious, but willing to continue waiting, so long as the wait was worthwhile.
This morning, I check my mail at 7:00am, before leaving for work. Nothing.
On the drive, I called my boss, and we commiserated about how crazy it was that I hadn't yet heard. My Mom hadn't called, fearing the worst, and knowing that I'd be in no mood to talk about it had I failed.
When I arrived at work, at about 9:20am (Goddamn DC area traffic...), I set up my laptop, VPN'd home, and started downloading all my email. My buddy came over to my cube, and we were bullshitting. When a break in the conversation came, I glanced back at the mail client.
There it was... I message received at 8:30am from the CCIE program. It came while I was driving. I didn't open the message, logging directly into Cisco's website to go right to the results page. I quickly navigated through the site to the certification section, and began logging into my results page. It occurs to me now that I'd been holding my breath since I saw the email message...
There it was:
Status: Certified #XXXXX
I clicked on the link to the actual score report, which on failures, gives you percentages in broad categories... You got 45% in Exterior Routing Protocols... 87% in Quality of Service... Etc.
Instead of a real score report, it read:
Name: XXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX
Candidate ID: XXX-XX-XXXX
Test Date: SEP 22 2003
Test result: PASS
CCIE Number: XXXXX
Wow... I've wanted this for 8 years, and I started getting serious about it some 3 years ago. I never abandoned my life, studying for 8-10 hours a day like some many people do. I simply plugged away, a few hours here, a few hours there. Take a class. Buy some equipment for "the home lab" (See my last journal entry for details). Read a book.
Most of my studying had been based on my failures in prior lab attempts. "Crap, QoS killed me... I need to study that when I get a chance." "Damn, I know I lost 7 points on those Multicasting tasks." "Egads, I can't believe I couldn't figure out how to do ISDN callback."
If you take the test enough times, eventually you'll study everything you need to.
I am reminded of some unforgettable words:
"Follow your dreams, you can reach your goals...
I'm living proof. Beefcake! BEEFCAKE!" -- Eric Cartman
Well said Eric... Well said.
I'm sure you've got movies like that... Movies you just can't help but watch whenever they come on. I've got a few like that.
Patton is one of them. Doesn't matter what I'm doing, if I stumble across Patton while channel surfing, I can put down the remote control. Magnificent bastard.
Two of the three Die Hard movies have the same result. The first movie, Die Hard, is a classic. Sometimes, during the annual Christmas movie viewing routine, I like to sneak Die Hard into the DVD player, hoping nobody will notice. It's so festive. I'm also hooked on Die Hard with a Vengence. Gotta love Samuel L. Jackson's character in Die Hard 3.
Speaking of SLJ, I'm going to have to add Pulp Fiction to the list. Caught that one the other night and couldn't help but watch it. (It kind of sucked, because I was about to go to bed... It was almost midnight on Wednesday, and I was tired... I mistakenly went through the channel guide one last time before turning off the TV, and there it was... No sleep for me.) Didn't like Pulp Fiction the first time I saw it, but it kind of grows on you. Now, I look back and wonder why I didn't like it at first.
In the same vein, I guess you'd have to put Reservoir Dogs on the list too. Great movie.
I also can't seem to get enough of Harry Potter. It's not like I watch it every time it's on, but it's definately my favorite thing to have on in the background while I'm in the middle of doing something else. Doesn't hurt that HBO's got it on twice a day lately, it seems.
LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring is similar. I like having it on in the background while busy with something, but there's a subtle difference. Generally, this movie ends up stealing my attention from the other task, and I end up concentrating on the movie. Not bad, I guess, but dangerous when time is short, because it's a long movie. I have to make an effort not to put this on when I've got something important to do.
Of course, this all started because I was working on something here in my basement. It's barely a basement any more... It's a dedicated home theater. 65" Mitsubishi HD set, 7.1 surround, deep burgundy walls, and heavy velvet curtains to obscure all light from the outside.
Toward the back, I have my desk set up, facing the screen. Right now, piled on top of the desk, in addition to my main desktop computer, are:
I'm down here gearing up for the CCIE lab again. I've been to it a few times, each time doing a little better than the last, but not quite good enough to put it behind me.
I have to be honest. I haven't passed yet because my study ethic has blown chunks. In addition to being generally lazy when it comes to study, I also don't have much of a financial stake in passing. I'm a veteran, and I'm using my GI Bill benefits to cover the hefty cost of the exam. Since I don't plan on attending college any time soon (ever), I'm going to lose my benefits if I don't spend them on something. May as well be this. Each attempt costs $1250, which I pay out of pocket initially, but I get it reimbursed the following month.
As a result, I haven't studied as long or hard as I should have. This time, however, I have put more effort into it, mostly because I'm tired of driving back and forth to Raleigh every few months. That said, I still haven't logged as many quality study hours as I would have liked. Generally, I've been at it 12 to 16 hours each weekend for the past 6 weeks. I haven't spent much time at all weeknights. I'm just too tired when I get home in the evening.
Well, break is over. Back to the stack. Wednesday is my next showdown.
I hope I've done enough.
What did surprise me was that they are in the midst of a catastrophic network failure affecting not only the Washington, DC, metropolitan area, but also taking down San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, and a number of other good-sized, but geographically dispersed, markets.
(My buddy and I, both serious network guys with over 30 years experience between us, including a lot of time in the carrier space, can only come to the conclusion that PSInet was not paying it's bills. No single equipment failure, or loss of a POP, could possibly result in the carnage of this magnitude.)
Wow, sucks to be them, and by extension, sucks to be us. Fortunately for me, the last time we experienced an outage, my company's owner sought my guidance in getting some Internet redundancy in here. I had been lobbying for this for quite a while. Like most companies today, our fortunes are won and lost on the delivery of email. An Internet outage represents the loss of opportunity, and revenue, and in these trying economic times, nobody can afford to squander opportunities.
Understand that we are network integrators. We design, sell, and install network services for our customers, from infrastrucure components like circuits, routers, and switches, through server building and maintenance. When our customers are looking to ensure their connectivity to the Internet, we propose multiple providers, terminating to seperate edge routers, and guide them through the process of obtaining portable IP address space, and an Autonomous System Number, so that they can run BGP upstream ensuring their reachability in the event of a single provider outage.
" Great!, " thought I.
What did we end up with? It fell a little short of what we like to install for our customers. We got a second Internet connection in the form of a 768k/128k ADSL link. Terminated to the same edge router, no less. No BGP for us. The barest minimum.
The most redundancy I could get out of this was for email, using an additional MX record, and some fancy port forwarding on the edge router.
At least email would continue to flow in the event of an outage, and for a time, is functioned perfectly.
That is, until PSInet's secondary nameservers, slaves to our own Master here at the office, expired the cache, and now refuse to respond to queries for records for our domain. This is, of course, because some moronic MCSE was left to handle our DNS configuration, and like a tool, he set the SOA expire time to 1 day.
Like clockwork, after 24 hours of circuit outage, PSInet's DNS servers decided (because our MSCE told them to) that it could no longer trust the information in it's cache, and expired all of the information for our zone. Two lessons to take from this are:
So yesterday, even with our Primary circuit down, we were able to receive email with almost no loss of performance. All was right in the world. Then, as the 24 clock ran out, all of the sudden our inbound email ceased to exist.
The topper was this morning, when one of our directors said to me:
"Hey, I don't want you to take this personally, but seriously, how do you guys (the engineering staff) sleep at night? I've got a $60,000 order out there, but I can't receive the email. Just trying to keep the lights on in this place."
My response (and I am not embellishing):
I got right in his face, pointed my finger in the general direction of his office, and said "You can take that shit somewhere else."
If this company had listened, just once, to the recommendations that I had made, they never would have known we had an interruption. Not only would we have abandoned the sinking ship that is PSInet over 1 year ago, but we'd have had two legitimate Internet connections to two seperate Tier-1 providers, and we'd have been announcing our own routes via BGP. In addition, our "Mission Critical" applications (Email is mission critical, but they would probably think it was a good idea that our completely worthless and devoid of content website was also always available) would have backup servers co-located in the facilities of a 3rd major provider.
I mean, you have to make a decision. Is email mission critical, or isn't it? There are no half measures; there's no middle ground. If the absence of email is more costly than the price of ensuring its availability, then you implement the bulletproof solution. Every goddamn time. Period.
But what else is new... The cobbler's kid needs new shoes. We sell technology solutions. We don't use them.
I hope the problem doesn't get solved.
I went on to describe that in addition to my company not paying for some training, not paying my expenses while at training, and forcing me to use my vacation time (which is far from plentiful to begin with) while attending training. To add insult to injury, I didn't have enough vacation time on the books, so they also docked me a days pay.
I did go on to say that I had a great salary, and that the salary was the single biggest factor in my decision to put up with their shennanigans.
It appears I spoke too soon.
Last Friday, my company asked me to take a pay cut. I know what many of you must be thinking... "Well, a lot of companies have had to cut people's pay in order to avoid layoffs... How much? 10%? 15%?"
Ha!
I just took a 33% pay cut. That's right, 1/3rd off the top. "Everyone took a 33% pay cut?" No, just me. I repeat... *I* took a 33% pay cut.
Needless to say, I'm not very pleased about this, and while I agreed (As my reduced compensation amount is still far more attractive than what I can expect from the unemployment line), I'm actively looking for employment elsewhere.
I think back to the heady days of the late 1990s when knowledge and experience were king, when there was a shortage of veteran technical talent, and seasoned professionals could afford to resign there position on Friday, and land a new gig cold the following Monday by lunchtime, with a 15% to 20% jump in pay, and a lovely signing bonus. I remember all of the start-ups, flush with venture capital, and the stock options that were worth a gold mine because nobody could imagine a technology based IPO that wouldn't shoot through the stratosphere.
I remember *turning down* a kick-ass job at eBay (I still have the offer letter, circa Summer '99) because my own company at the time made a delicious counter-offer for me to stay, and then a few months later, another company trumped them by a long shot.
Those were the days... In addition to competing on salary, companies had to offer all manner of additional compensation just to stay competitive. Signing Bonuses. Ridiculous amounts of Vacation. Mandatory annual Training. Stock Options. 401ks with 100% matching. Free Lunches. Free caffine of every sort. Recreational facilities (Video games, Nerf toys, Foosball). Quarterly and Annual bonuses.
How I miss them...
Today, the classified listings in the newspaper are few and far between. Monster.com gives me a couple of relevant postings a week (None of them in my region), whereas before, I honestly didn't have enough time to read through all of the results of my personalized search agent. No employment website has more than a couple of valid returns. The old results used to resemble a Google search on the word "and." Your search returned 64 trillion documents, items 1 through 25 displayed below. Jobs were so plentiful, Job listing websites were an industry unto themselves!
Fortunately, things are starting (just barely) to improve. My wife scoured several of the employment websites on my behalf, and managed to find 20 or 30 good jobs in the DC Metro area. If my Security Clearance were still active today, there would have been a couple of hundred worthy of my interest.
It will take me a while, but I have no doubt that I'll get another good job within the next couple of months. In the interim, I'll simply have to keep looking, all the while making a deliberate effort not to dwell on "the gool ol' days."
I see this comment again and again, in all manner of threads on Slashdot. Mostly, it's meant as critisism of people that start up a new project that duplicates the solution provided by another project.
It's true that there's a tremendous benefit to the reusing of code, and that in may cases, it would probably be more efficient to extend the functionality of an existing piece of software, rather than to begin again from scratch, but really, what's the difference?
They make it out as though the resources of the new project take away from the resources of the existing project, when in truth, that is probably not the case. That only happens when a project is forked, and a group of developers defect to the spin-off project.
Competition is a good thing, if not for the competitors, then certainly for the end users. There is a certain amount of vanity that comes along with the development of open source software. While many projects exist to satisfy the needs of the initial programmer, today, it seems as though most projects begin development with the intention of having their chosen application used by the greatest amount of people possible.
In order to facilitate that kind of adoption amongst users, your application must stand out from others in some way. It must run faster... It must incorporate a unique and/or useful feature that is lacking from other projects... It must have a more elegant or attractive interface... In short, it must appeal to the end user in a signifigant enough manner that they choose to use it.
The end result is that we learn what is truly useful to the end user, and as a result, that feature gets incorporated into all of the competing projects.
Then, it is up to the individual projects to find that next useful feature that will set them apart once again as the best of breed.
The other thing I find funny about the "Don't re-invent the wheel" expression is that the wheel, throughout it's history, has been re-invented, improved, and refined a number of times.
First, they were solid discs made of stone... Later, they were made of wood... Eventually, spokes evolved. Then tires came onto the scene. Older materials have been replaced a number of times, and the designs have been altered repeatedly.
"Good Enough" has it's place, but there are few things yet devised by man that cannot be improved or refined. To people that are willing to undertake a software project that we may all benefit from, I say do so, and wether you reuse existing code, join an existing project, or begin from scratch to build an application or server that has in essence been done before, good for you.
We are all better off because of it.
Since then, I went back to read some of his journal entries.
He makes this statement:
I don't think communism is all that bad. Its human nature that is the problem. Human nature is all about hoarding goods and services, trying to get rich for doing nothing, and not thinking about any generations past potential grandchildren.
I don't think he's aware of the fact that his assertion is precisely the reason that communism is so bad.
Plainly, Communism is bad because it runs contrary to human nature.
Communism would be ideally suited to humankind if it were in our nature to experience the same amount of concern for a complete stranger in another part of the world as we experience for a family member, or a friend in our locality.
However, that is not how we, as a species, are wired.
Does the death of an elderly person in Bangladesh affect us as would the death of one of our Grandparents?
When we see a village in Thailand ravaged by a Typhoon on the news, does it have the same impact on us as seeing the devastation left in the wake of a Tornado in the American plains?
Personal relationships, and proximity, dramatically affect the way we react to events.
This is human nature, and human nature is what it is. It cannot be changed, or altered.
At an intellectual level, we can compare the circumstances of two events, and make an objective assessment as to the level of tragedy. But at an emotional level, we cannot make those kind of distinctions. We "feel" differently based on whom is involved, or where an event occurs, based on it's proximity to ourselves.
Certainly, it sounds like a noble trait to be able to view all people with the same distintction, to care about them all equally, and to take a personal stake in their well being.
The reality is that we cannot be taught how to feel. Nature has already programmed us, and that programming cannot be undone.
Communism, Socialism, Marxism, etc... They are all the same, differing only in manner, or degree. These socio-economic systems are all doomed to failure because of their fundamental incompatibility with human nature. Every time they have been put into practice in the real world, the results have been devastating, and if they are attempted again in the future, the results will most assuredly be the same.
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are forever doomed to repeat them.
UNIX is hot. It's more than hot. It's steaming. It's quicksilver lightning with a laserbeam kicker. -- Michael Jay Tucker
