Happy New Year

My previous boss said there is no real competitor nor real friend, there is only real interest.

I'm glad to prove him wrong.

Real friends do exist, and I've passed through many happy and tough years with them.

Happy new year 2010 to all my friends and family.

Slowing Down

As the end of the year is approaching, few days ago I started my personal review process by looking at the things that I have done in the past. I finally joined Cisco Systems Advanced Services 3 years ago, as per my previous target in life, and it’s been more than a year since I moved to a WWSP practice team that focuses on the NGN Infrastructure and Solutions to cover Emerging Markets. This is the team that I always dreamed to join. This is the place that I wanted to be, at least for now, and I may stick around for a bit longer.

From time to time I like to put a personal target, and I like to visualize it. For example, long before I passed my first CCIE, I already had the picture in my mind about what I would do the day I really got my number. Before I joined Cisco, I used to visualize myself as Advanced Services team member who must provide the best solution to the customers even during a challenging situation. It may sound silly but sometime it can really help in maintaining my motivation to achieve the target.

So while waiting for the year to change in the next few days, I dare myself to put my target-in-visual and share it here, which I may add the version number 2.0 to it to differentiate with the previous one I made in the past.


Wait. No more certifications like CCDE, Cisco Certified Architect etc just as in my previous target? Yup. All those certifications (except the one from another vendor, you know what I mean) are written as my target from the company I currently work for. This means I have to do it anyway and for sure I will get it someday.

No newer product line like the Cisco ASR9K?
I don’t think it’s necessary. My team is dealing with the NGN solutions, so once any customer under the team’s coverage countries starts buying the ASR, the project will come to us eventually. So even without setting up a target, there will be a point in time where I have to deal with it and master the product.

No place as the new destination to live?
I believe home is where the heart is. And my heart belongs to any place where I can be together with my family. So it doesn’t matter if it’s in Dubai, my hometown, San Jose, or even Johannesburg (exclude District 9). Having said that, I don’t think I should mark any place as a new target to live.

My new visualized targets contain all the skills I want to learn, or things that I’ve been doing so far but now I want to put more focus on them. From snowboarding, ability to drive in multiple terrains, photography, playing drum (and forming a rock band?), travelling and a black box that I designate for the target that I can’t share in here because it’s too personal. None of them shows any items that I currently own or I want to have in possession. The pictures illustrate what kind of skills I want to excel, so all the items in there are just the tools to achieve the target.

And the best thing from all my new targets, I can do most of them together with my first kid. No more selfish target.

How about the target I want/have to achieve at work? I still have them, but I don’t consider as my personal targets since they are written anyway and always get reviewed during my company’s annual review process.

I’m slowing down in term of work. It doesn’t mean I will start deteriorating the quality of my work and delivering only rubbish. But it means I will allocate only 40 hours of my time per week to work. Just as what I was asked to do. If I do more in some week, because sometime I have to comply with the project schedule, I will compensate myself on some other week. This makes me able to allocate at least 40 hours per week too to spend with my family. And I can use the rest of the time to achieve my personal targets.

With this mindset, I’m ready for 2010.

Yet Another CCDE Attempt

I've just done my second attempt of CCDE practical exam. It's still a very long, painful 8 hours and frustrating exam. But even I spent only few hours last night to prepare for it I was much happier this time. Probably because I know what to expect.

As part of the NDA that I signed, obviously I can't share much information about the exam content here. But there are several notes I want to highlight from this attempt:

- There are more candidates taking the test in London, 26 compare to only 16 in August, and the administrator told me the testing center is actually capable to hold up to 39 candidates. Is this a sign that CCDE becoming more popular? I don't know.

- At the same time I heard the exam in Hong Kong was canceled due to the lack of demand. It was canceled over there as well on August with the same reason. So the exam is not that popular in the region where english is not the native language? Probably. Probably because this exam requires a lot of reading and number of questions (all in english) that we need to analyze in 8 hours.

- I feel like there were some modification in the questions. No more unnecessary jokes in the email conversation. And the questions are more straight forward. There are still some confusing questions that made me want to bang my head to the computer screen, but the number is much less compared to the previous attempt. Confusing because I can't agree with the options provided in the questions to improve the design. But hey, it was not a real world challenge. It was just an exam, and any exam is meant to be confusing.

- During this attempt I've just realized that this is the most 'vendor neutral' exam from Cisco. The only sign that showing it's an Cisco exam is only the router icon and lots of EIGRP questions! But the focus of the exam is the analytical thinking to provide the high level network design and to solve the problems caused by design flaw. No product limitation discussion. No specific hardware related to Cisco. No Cisco IOS configuration. I believe the skill to pass the exam can be useful and applicable even for another vendors as well.

-What make it difficult for a design engineer to pass this Design Expert exam is: because when we see the scenario in the questions we tend to relate it with the real world design challenge and start getting into detail. I believe that's not what it is expected by the exam maker. The technical scope in the exam is a broad and high level. The most important, I believe, is the ability to analyze the questions and select the answer from the options available.

- Lunch provided by the testing center in London is better than the previous attempt. At least now they have the tuna and vegetarian sandwich instead of ham only. For this attempt I was more prepared: I slept for 7 hours. I had a good breakfast in the morning. I didn't eat much during lunch because it would make me sleepy during the second half of the exam. Remember, we need to stay focus and maintain our sanity for 8 hours.

- Security in the testing center was really tight. Not only I had to show 2 government-issued documents to prove my identity, I needed to sign, got my picture taken, and both of my palm were scanned multiple times! And I thought a simple fingerprint scan was adequate, or perhaps because there are already so many movies showing how we can beat the fingerprint scan easily?

- Last but not least, there were 2 female among the candidates. Good. Another proof that the computer networking world is not solely dominated by men!

Well, the long and painful 8 hours is done.
Now comes the hardest part.
Waiting 8-12 weeks for the result.

Project London II

I got the CCDE result yesterday and it's negative. There are several things that I hate around the result other than the fact that I failed:

- It took about 3 months to get the result
- The result was delivered using a hardcopy letter (what happens to online result? Now I can see the status: Fail in Vue website but no email notification like in CCIE)
- The result only shows the percentage for few generic design tasks: gather and clarify requirement, develop network design etc.
So it does not list in detail the result per technology or per scenario that I believe will make it difficult for a candidate to know his weakness. Getting 50% in develop network design section, for example, I believe it's not a clear feedback in order to be more prepared for the next attempt
- And as per today I can't find any official statement that saying the minimum percentage to pass the CCDE exam. Is it 80% like in CCIE?

Indeed I have booked for another attempt on next Tuesday in London. But at the end of next week I have to submit lots of documents for the project I'm currently working on. And this weekend I have already planned to go camping with the kids.

I don't think I can give up either one for CCDE. So I will just walk in to the testing center and try to stay awake for 8 hours, and rely solely on my common sense.

Let's see.

Career Path

There is no such thing as career path.

I’m talking about a career path for an engineer, or those who want to focus and stay technical in computer networking field, for example, for the rest of his work life.

In some organization this can be seen as crystal clear. There isn’t any path at all for technical person. It just doesn’t exist, especially in an organization where IT is considered as secondary team, formed just to support the mainstream of the company’s business. Once an engineer becomes senior and wants to go to higher level he needs to switch to a managerial level, let’s say by becoming a technical manager. And this means he needs to start dealing with other stuff outside the engineering scope: manage people, budget, P&L per head in his team and so on. In this type of organization if one is keen to stay with the current scope as engineer, then he’s going nowhere. It may be even worst since some organization prefers to “refresh” the engineering division aka removing the old timers and put the younger workforces in order to lowering the monthly pay slip.

How about the technology solution company? It has been said many times that the engineering division is the core key of such company. Technical solution by engineer leads to sales that brought the income to the company hence it must be a haven for engineers to work for such organization? Not necessarily. The key here is still the ‘sales that brought the income’. We need to understand that it’s difficult to quantify an engineering work and get promoted. For example, as sales person in the company one can be given a number of annual targets of sales and if he can achieve or even over achieve the number within several years in the row, the promotion certainly awaits. How can we measure how successful an engineer is using a similar measurement? By looking at the number of US patents he produces or IETF RFC’s he has been involved each year? I’m talking about the engineers who work in the field in general to support computer network systems, as many of us are not that lucky and able to sit in the lab to invent the new technology.

So is there a way for an engineer to have career path?

Yes, there is. Some technology innovation company perceives the importance of keeping good engineers to support the business by making higher technical position is always available. This is the company where an engineer can stay technical and yes he can always climb a higher level until he is called “Distinguished” engineer or even “Fellow”. But still in order to achieve such level in engineering one needs to take control and build his own path, and even may need to compromise.
And as far as I know, a good engineer never compromises :)

First of all, the engineer needs to compromise to accept the fact that the technical team is less likely to be involved in any business decision, like an organization changes. Suddenly the company decided to change the model of the way they do business, including restructuring the engineering team, and let’s just inform the engineers at a very late state. One may comeback from a nice weekend just to find out he now needs to work for another team or to report to another manager. And if it’s not enough with the difficulty of an engineer for being recognized for the works he has done, how about moving him to the new team or asking him to suddenly report to new manager, where he has to start over?

Second, the engineer may needs to compromise by manipulating a technical fact in order to support the business. A solution that may not fit the requirement is proposed due to some other reasons including the political and other non-technical stuff, and now it’s time for the technical person to make it works somehow. A young and fresh engineer may just say NO because he still likes to work with the plain truth, just as what being engineer is all about. But if one wants to climb the ladder in the organization, from an engineer moves to senior level, then to become architect, then to a position called as technical lead, or distinguished or whatever, the organization is certainly expecting him to support the business.
From the way I look at it, it’s just another compromise.

The third and the worst compromise of all, because it’s difficult to quantify and distinguish an engineer from the others, the engineer may choose the short cut by doing anything possible to stay on the spotlight. Some said, to climb the company’s ladder it’s all about making the big noise. But how if the engineer is busy making noise but not the real work? The competition among the engineers may become ugly and no real intellectual property really produced, only the noise or the efforts to be the first to announce a half-done work.

I hope the three above are just my imagination, and as the result of too much smoking Shisha while chatting with old friends last night. But unfortunately, some of them are too real.

So if I knew this all along, why bother even to write it down and discuss it? Life is a matter of preference, isn’t it?

It’s true.

The reason why I brought this up is so all of those like me who think and plan to spend the rest of our time focusing on technical, can set our expectation right. Once we choose to go down this path then we should know the consequences. That it won’t be easy and it will be full with obstacles even to move one grade higher. We have to be ready to see those who choose to be in other department, for example in sales, may climb the company ladder faster than we do.

And I also have a secret to share here. I noticed that to get the promotion as technical person, we don’t have to do great job in every task. But we have to do an extra ordinary job in only a single task. Superb work even in only a single project, in the right time and seen by the right people, can bring us much better result. Just like one great rock show can change the world, as Dewey Finn aka Jack Black said in the School of Rock. And obviously we don’t have to be on the spotlight by claiming someone’s work even if we really desperate to get the promotion.

Will it really work?

How the heck I know? I’m a kind of guy who keeps changing the organization everytime I want more. In the past, to get more salary I moved to another organization. To get a better job profile I moved to a different team. I built my own career path by keep moving from one organization to the others. I’ve never been in the same place long enough to see if my ‘secret career advice’ can really work.

So I will tell you all the result once I really get my promotion.

Disclaimer: the writing expresses my own opinion and it has no relation what so ever with the organization I currently work for. It’s based on my own experience moving from one IT organization to the others, as well as my short experience working as contractor.
And I’m not smoking anything while writing this.

How the Lab Exam Should Be

I have just done one lab exam to complete the internal certification from my organization. I can’t disclose more information about it, but what I can share here is my thought of how the lab exam should be done based on my experience taking that exam.

I said it once that certification means nothing without experience. Passing even a very tough lab exam such as CCIE doesn’t turn us to become real expert directly. Certification can only offers the baseline set of skills, and we should build our expertise on top of these skills, not in lieu of them.

But have you ever wondered how far is the skills tested in the lab exam compare to the ones needed in real life? For example, once you pass the CCIE SP lab, do you think you can just jump into a large SP environment or there is still a huge gap to fill in first?

Let me share my thought of how the lab exam should be done. As usual, this is just my personal opinion. And you know what they say; opinions are like arseholes, everybody’s got one.

1. Lab exam should use the real gear

If you look at the equipments in CCIE SP lab, you will notice that they are not the real Service Provider gears. Cisco 7200 is good, but not as P router! As well as the 2800 and 2600 that are still being used in some lab.

SP lab exam should use high end routers such as CRS, ASR and 7600. As P node, if multiple CRS is considered too expensive, a single CRS with physical partition using Secure Domain Routing can do the job as well. And we all know most of the SP core networks use IOS XR, so at least GSR with IOS XR must be available if getting CRS is not an option. For PE node, if the latest ASR9K is still out of reach at least use 7600 with RSP and ES+ card!
Sound too ambitious? Perhaps. But those are the real equipments being used in most Service Provider networks nowadays.

It’s the same case with CCIE Routing & Switching lab. If this track is supposed to simulate a large Enterprise network, at least Cisco 6500 should be available in the lab.

2. Lab exam should simulate the real scenarios

Okay, you are done with the configuration of the device, and then what? Run a ping test? Verify the config? Run the show commands? It’s not enough!

The lab exam should use traffic generator to simulate the traffic. Once we have the traffic in the network we can verify, for example, if the Quality of Services features really work. The lab should ask the candidate to verify the failover scenario. How we can be sure if the fast convergence feature is already configured properly? By checking the BFD neighbors from show commands? By looking at the NSF and GR config only? Yeah, right.

Why can’t we just run the traffic generator and see the impact of the configuration, or failover scenarios, to the traffic? Even the skill to understand and set the traffic generator is necessary to do the job in real world later on.

3. Lab exam should test the knowledge in proper way

It’s not enough to ask the candidate to configure or troubleshoot something in the lab. Some guys can just get the lab questions from somewhere and memorize the configuration to answer them.

The best way to test the in-depth knowledge of the candidates is by asking them to do the verification and explain the output. For example, during fast convergence test, let’s ask the candidate to provide the convergence time for link failure and ask them to explain why the time can be different between link down and link up (restoration) state. Can they explain why the convergence time can be different if the PE router crashes compare to if the failure happens in P router?

Tricky questions like in current CCIE lab are still important. Troubleshooting skills are still required to be tested in the lab too. But the candidate is expected to be able to explain more ‘WHY’. Not only why it’s configured this way or that way, but as well as why the traffic behaves in certain way when some features are configured or when the failure occurs

I know most of the time it’s unfair to do the comparison between my “ideal” lab exam with the known certification like CCIE.

Take the lab equipments, for example. The real gears aren’t cheap. So a vendor may have only 1 or 2 complete labs that can replicate the real world’s equipment to serve all candidates around the globe. My view on this: that’s fine. Because nowadays we don’t have to fly to sit in the lab physically, we can just do the exam remotely. And the lab exam I described above is to test the skills in specific area. I mean, Cisco may create “Advanced CCIE lab” for specific technical focus with CCIE as the prerequisite, and there are so many tracks available (CCIE SP-NGN, CCIE SP-IPTV, CCIE SP-Wimax and so on). With many options of advanced track available, a candidate can choose which one is suitable to support his daily work so the number of candidates will be distributed to all the tracks.

If time permits, all the explanation should be done with short interview, not only in written. How if English is not the native language of the candidates? That’s fine. With remote lab, more locations can conduct the exam and the candidate can have the proctor who can speak the same language. And the lab exam can take 2-days format just like back there in 2001. Day 1 can be allocated to build the network, Day 2 morning can be used to run the traffic generator and verify the setup. Day 2 afternoon is for troubleshooting section. At the end of each section the candidate is expected to explain what have been done, and the behavior of the traffic in several different scenarios.

Obviously with this new and advanced CCIE track the main objective is to prepare the candidates to able to do the job the next day after they pass the lab, and not to chase the quantity of people to pass it.

Is it possible to have that kind of lab or can it be done only in our dream? Heck, who knows? One day a vendor like Cisco may really create a new certification track beyond CCIE, and they may take all the points above into their consideration.

Ode To The Contractors

"Himawan Nugroho spent his time between jobs last year as a contractor…and discovered it offered a level of control and empowerment that he’d never had before..."

The quote above is taken from an article in this site. It refers to my previous writing about Contractor Wannabe. Well, it's good to know that someone is actually reading that kind of stuff that I wrote :)

I was a contractor, even for only few months. It was during the time when I had resigned from my previous company and before I joined Cisco. Yes, indeed, the article describes exactly how I felt at that time. And I'm discussing again this topic because during the past few projects I've worked with many contractors, and some of them are really helpful.

In this part of the world it's not easy to hire a permanent employee. It takes time and lots of paper work at least for the visa process. And once the project is rewarded we have to start the work immediately, while the process to get someone on board won't be able to catch up. The solution? Hire contractors. They are skillful and available, almost, anytime. How about the working visa? They usually will be involved for short term so business visa should be fine. How about the skill? We can look at their previous experience and even call for quick interview. And once the work has started how if the guy has issue or we are not happy with him? Get the replacement. Easy and no headache. As long as we hire the guy with the right skill and we can allocate the proper work to him, the decision to use the contractors can be really rewarding.

Once I met a guy. He may be the right description of my answer if you'd ask: what do you want to be when you grow old? Single fighter, working for short term, keep moving from one place to another. Living from one hotel to another. His car is always from rental company. He carries his gadgets and magic luggage contains all the stuff he needs to live away from home for months. He got my respect because of the expertise. Got reputation and years of experience. Jason Bourne kind of guy. My kind of guy.

So will I go back to that kind of life style? Not now, at least. Currently I work in a place that I wanted to be. Working in the right team, surrounded by the most talented people. And I have something from my current work that I can't exchange even with a freestyler contractor life: deep level access to the product and technology.

Anyway, I was just trying to build a list of what it takes to become a successful contractor (in network engineering area or technical consulting). With my limited experience as contractor, here it is:

1. Build the reputation. The most important, I believe, are the integrity and responsibility
2. Result oriented. The work must be done successfully no matter what, within the agreed timeline
3. Adaptable, flexible, able to handle the pressure and sudden changes in the project
4. Possess extensive experience in different types of project with multiple roles
5. Able to work independently, but at the same time able to work as part of the team
6. Good communication skill and can easily blend with customers from any types, anywhere, in any circumstances
7. Specialize and focus in one technology area but know other stuff to certain level. For example, expert in Core IP/MPLS network but understand as well the access layer, security, physical layer, data center and so on
8. Able to work as multiple roles: engineer, consultant, architect, project manager etc
9. Always update the skills, fast and continuous learner. Willing to invest on skill update, lab, and any tools that can assist in delivering the work
10. Know how to market yourself: social networking, keep the contacts with previous customers, always update the CV, etc

When I look at the list above, I started to think that the list is a must not only to become a contractor, but as well as to stay competitive in the market even as permanent employee! It may be the one that keep our job during the financial crisis like today. I wouldn't know for sure, but it seems like I will bookmark this post to remind me that even a Triple CCIE can be replaced anytime. And the only ones that can save my job are those 10 points.

To all contractors, this post is for you.