Do You Need To Answer That Question?

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We’ve all been in a situation where we’re listening to a presentation or in a class where someone is sharing knowledge. The presenter or expert finishes a point and stops to take a breath or move on to the next point when you hear a voice.

“What they meant to say was…”

You can already picture the person doing it. I don’t need to describe the kind of person that does this. We all know who it is and, if you’re like me, it drives you crazy. I know it because I’ve found myself being that person several times and it’s something I’m working hard to fix.

Info to Share

People that want to chime in feel like they have important things to share. Maybe they know something deeper about the subject. Perhaps they’ve worked on a technology and have additional information to add to the discussion. They mean well. They’re eager to add to the discussion. They mean well. Most of the time.

What about the other times? Maybe it’s someone that thinks they’re smarter than the presenter. I know I’ve had to deal with that plenty of times. It could be an executive that needs to clarify the message or add in the important talking points that marketing has decided on so that everything sounds right.

In the latter cases, the reason why someone needs to jump in and answer the question is less egalitarian. They’re not trying to raise the body of knowledge or educate the people in the room for a noble reason. They’re looking to be the center of attention. They want to take all the agency of the presenter and show how smart they are or make sure everyone knows how important they are.

I’ve been at the point where I’ve almost asked out loud, “If you’re paying this person to talk why do you feel the need to talk over them?” For a CEO of a company that should be the end of the discussion. For the smart person in the audience they’ll probably have a more pointed response. The result is hopefully the same. Why are you the one talking when everyone came to hear the person you interrupted?

Ask Your Own Questions

I’ve struggled with this myself many times. I’ve wanted to add to the conversation. I’ve felt like if I could just clarify this point things would be way more clear. While I may feel like my info is the most important to impart what I’m trading away by doing that is robbing the person presenting of all their agency.

It really hit me last year when I was a Wood Badge course director. I was intimately familiar with the curriculum and knew every lesson we were trying to impart to the participants. We had also chosen our staff members to present on specific lessons. Each of them had time to prep and understand the material and knew what they were supposed to accomplish. Someone without awareness might have thought they knew the material better than anyone.

I found myself wanting to add to the conversation after every presentation but I also knew it was my place to watch and make notes, not jump in. How would it look to the participants if I kept interrupting the presenter to add my points? They would have stopped listening to the real presenter and just waited for me to speak. That’s not the preferred outcome for someone to present material.

The other thing you have to ask yourself in that situation is “what does this do to the presenter”? How would you feel if someone kept interrupting you if you tried to make a point or teach a lesson? I’m all for deferring to people with more knowledge or experience but if someone is constantly interrupting me for pointless reasons or to restate something I’ve said I would be furious. I’d never want that person to be in the same room as me when I’m trying to present. Minimizing your presenters is a great way to ensure they never want to work for you again.

To me, the best way to support your presenter and the lesson they are teaching is to stay quiet. If you feel like you need to add something wait until the very end so they don’t feel like you’re stepping on them. Even if they say something incorrect and you feel the need to call it out, do it quietly with the presenter instead of making a scene. If the presenter corrects themselves it looks way better than having someone else do it. And above all, remember that everyone’s skills and viewpoints are valid and you aren’t an authority. You’re a voice in the conversation.

Tom’s Take

I really love sharing info and answering questions. I like teaching. But I have learned over the years that there is a time and place for things. And if I’m not the one that is designated to be teaching or talking I really need to keep things to myself. Stealing someone’s agency makes me look bad and makes the presenter look weak. I would rather help where I can and build up a future rock star presenter than steal their thunder and make them look silly. I still have moment where I need to work on it but I hope that I’m better than I have been in years past.

A Year of Consistency, Again

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2024 was a year of being busy. You probably noticed as a loyal reader because my output on this blog fell off quite a bit. I wanted to get back on track per my New Year’s Day post. How did I do? Sixteen posts for the whole year. Barely more than one a month.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t busy. I have been working hard to bring great Tech Field Day events to the community. I’ve become more active on BlueSky as the community shifts there due to the craziness happening on Twitter/X. I have been getting more and more briefings on technology, which I’ve been writing up on LinkedIn. And of course I’ve been active on the Gestalt IT Rundown and the Tech Field Day Podcast

I also ran almost every day in 2024. I mentioned on Facebook that “consistency beats quantity”, which was a phrase that encouraged me to try and run at least one mile a day in 2024. That ended up being 901 miles of running for the year, with November and December having a LOT or running. I plan on keeping that going in 2025, where I’m aiming for 1,000 miles. It will be a challenge but I’ve never been one to shy away from that.

Coming Up

Where does that leave writing here? I still try to get that done when I can. Usually when I have something interesting to say. In years past I’ve tried to post every week or even two weeks. I’ve written about tech and leadership and even writing itself. I’ve tried to cover the gamut of things that are important to me.

2025 is the fifteenth anniversary year of me starting to write. The industry has changed quite a bit. Networking is focused more on moving data to the cloud or getting inputs to AI algorithms. Wi-Fi is getting faster and opening new spectrums. Security is crazy and provides the kinds of headlines that could keep one busy with breach analysis every week for the rest of my career.

However, I don’t want to just hit the highlights. I want to bring you analysis and insightful things to make you wonder about where the tech is going. I want to highlight important things that you need to be aware of. In short, I want to bring thought behind the words. Ironically it has become extremely easy to write in 2025 with the advent of AI text generation. Every writing tool integrates some form of text creation, whether it’s generating paragraphs from prompts or just analyzing your writing to figure out how to better say something. That means that there are more words out there saying a lot less than they ever have before.

I want to make sure I’m bringing you the kind of content that you want to read instead of just posting because I need to create something. That’s how I felt for a very long time. This year caused me to post less but it made me think more about what I wanted to say. I don’t think I’m going to get back to posting weekly but I do promise to get more out there for you as long as you keep reading it.

Cutting to the Quick

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No doubt you’ve seen the news that Intel has parted ways with Pat Gelsinger. There is a lot of info to unpack on that particular story but we did a good job of covering it on the Rundown this week. What I really wanted to talk about was a quote that I brought up in the episode that I heard from my friend Michael Bushong a couple of months ago:

No one cuts their way back into relevance.

It’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I wanted to talk about why he’s absolutely right.

Outcomes Need Incomes

Do you remember the coupon clipping craze of ten years ago? I think it started from some show on TLC about people that were ultra crazy couponers. They would do the math and they could buy like 100 lbs of rice for $2. They would stock up on a year’s worth of toothpaste at a time because you could pay next to nothing for it. However, the trend died out after a year or so. In part, that was because the show wasn’t very exciting after the shock of buying two years of hand soap wore off. The other reason is because people realized that a lot of those deals required you to make some investments first. Sure, you could buy all the dental floss you wanted for $3. But you had to buy it at full price and send away for a rebate. Or you had to hope that someone at the register would triple your coupon first.

I bring this up because it illustrates an issue with company finances too. There are two ways to increase profit. You can sell more things or you can cut costs. Most companies do the former because it’s the fastest way to make money. You sell more goods and you take in more money. Sounds easy, right? Once you make those sales you have to take away your expenses, like labor and overhead before you arrive at net profit. While you do need to keep an eye on those costs some people take it to the extreme, much like the ultra couponers above.

I usually see this expressed when a CEO is let go and their immediate successor is the Chief Financial Officer, or CFO. On the org chart the CFO is almost always considered to be the second in command after the CEO. Why? Because they deal with the money. They figure out how to make the most money and reduce costs as much as possible to make the most net profit possible. On paper that sounds like a wonderful idea. If this person is in charge of the money why not put them in the charge of the business?

My issue comes when the newly-minted CEO is only concerned about costs. You see this with decisions like cutting workers or selling off pieces of the company to reduce overhead. It is often expressed by seeing a company “tightening the belt” so to speak in order to make more money. Again, a great theory on paper. Companies do need to control expenses and it can be a great way to reverse your fortunes if you’re struggling. But what happens when you run out of expenses to cut?

Ninety-Day Executives

The real reason why you can’t cut your way back into relevance is because cost cutting puts your company on the back foot from the start. If you’re only worried about how much something costs you’re not going to want to invest in anything that could bring long term gain. You’re only looking at the immediate horizon. Why spend money to make money?

Of course, we all know the companies must invest if they want long-term success. Intel is a great example. The current plan of investment into chip foundries is going to pay off in the future for sure. But that future is years away. Intel has to forgo immediate profits in favor of future success. That’s literally how investment works. If I want to make money in a savings account I have to put my money in there and not touch it until it makes money. That’s how opportunity costs works and it spares no one.

However, opportunity cost has a darker counterpart, namely the quarterly cycle. See, companies don’t operate on a five-year timeline. Or a fiscal year. They really operate on a three-month rolling timeline. Everything that happens needs to impact the current quarter. Every decision must make money by the end of the quarter. Why? Because every quarter a publicly traded company must release a report to investors detailing how much money they made. If the investors don’t like the report they lose confidence and the value of your company could drop if they choose to sell off stock in your company.

So CEOs, especially the cost-conscious ones, are driven more by the need to succeed and be profitable every quarter rather than run into the issues of not making enough money for the past three months. They would rather recognize immediate gains rather than invest for the future. And how do they accomplish that if there isn’t more profit to gain from selling things? By cutting costs even more. Hence the Bushong quote above. CEOs that have no vision will make things look great for investors for a quarter or maybe two until the easy costs are cut. Then it’s time to produce. However, you’ve stifled your workforce and your research teams because they weren’t making immediate profit. So your company is now in trouble because there isn’t a way to produce more income and costs are at a minimum.

And the investors? They only care about how much money you’re going to make the end of the quarter. They don’t care about last quarter or next quarter. Just now. They want their $2, as in the paperboy from Better Off Dead. Which leads to a feedback loop that can destroy a company. Pat Gelsinger was facing that feedback loop at Intel. Investors wanted their profits at the end of this quarter and Pat and the rest of the industry could see it was going to take longer than that to succeed. Who won? Well, the board didn’t retire.

Tom’s Take

I know it sounds a little harsh, but I’m tired of investors driving companies into untenable positions because they can’t imagine investing for the future of a quarter from now. As much as we make fun of day traders for not having vision some quarterly investors are no better. They just have a little more patience. If we started building companies that are in it for the long haul and make investment decision based on calendar years and not quarterly cycles I think we would have more robust companies overall and less reliance on cost cutting as an emergency profit making button. And we wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not we were cutting our way to a profit or cutting off our nose to spite our faceless investors.

AI Should Be Concise

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One of the things that I’ve noticed about the rise of AI is that everything feels so wordy now. I’m sure it’s a byproduct of the popularity of ChatGPT and other LLMs that are designed for language. You’ve likely seen it too on websites that have paragraphs of text that feel unnecessary. Maybe you’re looking for an answer to a specific question. You could be trying to find a recipe or even a code block for a problem. What you find is a wall of text that feels pieced together by someone that doesn’t know how to write.

The Soul of Wit

I feel like the biggest issue with those overly word-filled answers comes down to the way that people feel about unnecessary exposition. AI is built to write things on a topic and fill out word count. Much like a student trying to pad out the page length for a required report, AI doesn’t know when to shut up. It specifically adds words that aren’t really required. I realize that there are modes of AI content creation that value being concise but those are the default.

I use AI quite a bit to summarize long articles, many of which I’m sure were created with AI-assistance in the first place. AI is quite adept at removing the unneeded pieces, likely because it knows where there are inserted in the first place. It took me a while to understand why this bothered me so much. What is it about having a computer spend way too much time explaining answers to you that feels wrong?

Enterprise D Bridge

Then it hit me. It felt wrong because we already have a perfect example of what an intelligence should feel like when it answers you. It comes courtesy of Gene Roddenberry and sounds just like his wife Majel Barrett-Roddenberry. You’ve probably guessed that it’s the Starfleet computer system found on board every Federation starship. If you’ve watched any series since Next Generation you’ve heard the voice of the ship computer executing commands and providing information to the crew members, guests, and even holographic projections.

Why is the Star Trek computer a better example of AI behavior to me? In part because it provides information in the most concise manner possible. When the captain asks a question the answer is produced. No paragraphs necessary. No use of delve or convolutional needed. It produces the requested info promptly. Could you imagine a ship’s computer that drones on for three paragraphs before telling the first officer that the energy pulse is deadly and the shields need to be raised?

Quality Over Quantity

I’m sure you already know someone that thinks they know a lot about a subject and are more than happy to tell you about what they know. Do they tend to answer questions or explain concepts tersely? Or do they add in filler words and try to talk around tricky pieces in order to seem like they have more knowledge than they actually do? Can you tell the difference? I’m willing to be that you can.

That’s why GPT-style LLM content creation feels so soulless. We’re conditioned to appreciate precision. The longer someone goes on about something the more likely we are to either tune out or suspect it’s not an accurate answer. That’s actually a way that interrogators are trained to uncover falsehoods and lies. People stretching the truth are more likely to use more words in their statements.

There’s also more reasoning behind the padding. Think about how many ads are usually running on sites that have this kind of AI-generated content. Is it just a few? Or as many as possible inserted between every possible paragraph. It’s not unlike video sites like Youtube having ads inserted at certain points in the video. If you insert an additional ad in a video that is a minimum of twenty minutes how long do you think the average video is going to be for channels that rely on ad revenue? The actual substance of the content isn’t as important as getting those extra ad clicks.

Tom’s Take

It’s unlikely that my ramblings about ChatGPT is going to change things any time soon. I’d rather have the precision of Star Trek over the hollow content that creates yarns about family life before getting to the actual recipe. Maybe I’m in the minority. But I feel like my audience would prefer getting the results they want and doing away with the unnecessary pieces. Could this blog post have been a lot shorter and just said “Stop being so wordy”? Sure. But it’s long because it was written by a human.

Semper Gumby

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By now I’m sure you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” If you work in IT or events or even in a trade you’ve seen things go upside down on many occasions. Did you ever ask yourself why this happens? Or even what you can do to fix it? What about avoiding it completely?

I have done a lot in IT over the years. I’ve also been working hard as an event planner and coordinator with Tech Field Day. The best lessons that I’ve learned about anticipating disaster have come from my time in Scouting. I’m often asked by companies “how did you know that would happen?” I almost always answer the same way: “I didn’t know THAT would go wrong, but I knew something would. I just kept my eye out for it.” It almost sounds too simple, right? But if you are familiar with event planning you know it’s almost a law, just like Mr. Murphy’s famous version.

How can you anticipate problems and still manage to make things happen? You can’t always fix everything. However, you can make sure that people don’t notice the issues. You just have to be willing to bend a little with the new situation. Rolling with the punches, as it were. There’s no better mascot than Gumby, the beloved childhood clay toy. Borrowing “semper” to be translated as “always” as in the Marine motto of “Semper Fidelis” (always faithful) and you arrive at the unofficial motto for most scouting events. It’s something we’ve always repeated during our Scouting events as a reminder to stay flexible. I even have a little Gumby with me to serve as a reminder courtesy of my friend Rebecca Koss after a particularly fun bout of necessary flexibility when delivering a course during COVID.

Always Flexible

Things go wrong more than we’d like to admit. We’re late for an appointment. We’re missing a page out of our workbook. A butterfly flapped its wings in the Sahara and now your hard drive is blank. Whatever the reason for the troubles you still have something you need to do. It’s way too easy to just admit defeat and hope that you can make a better attempt the next time. Or, you can bend a little and try to make the most of it.

“Semper Gumby” doesn’t mean you quit. It doesn’t mean you scream and yell and cry because things aren’t fair. It means you assess the situation, apply some flexible thinking, and you make it work. Nothing is perfect, but our response to that can be pretty close. You just have to accept that the more set-in-stone something might be the more likely it is that you can do a reasonable job of it when things go wrong and still do well.

Here’s an example. You’re teaching a day-long seminar course and you’re running behind. Specifically, you’re running behind because a fire alarm went off and you wasted half an hour on something that’s outside your control. Does it suck? Yes. Does it mean that things aren’t going to be perfect? Absolutely. But will it be the end of your class? No. Because you can be flexible and claw back some of that time to make it work.

You’re probably already formulating in your head how you could get that time back. Shortening sections by five minutes is a great way to reclaim time. You can also rearrange the schedule on the fly to focus on the important lessons so people get the critical information. Not everything lends itself well to this kind of remix. If lessons are dependent on other information you can’t rearrange them. But if you can move things or even change their content you can work some magic. Group discussions can become more focused lessons. Ten minutes of note taking can be four minutes of notes being shared on a projector and copied.

Go With The Flow

What if the hassle is because someone is terminally late? If you’ve ever worked with an important vice president in a company you know they’re constantly running behind. Sometimes that’s on them. Their calendars are always super packed and their appointments always run long. It’s because their people book their appointments short to keep them moving. But that extra five minutes they want to take to finish something up makes their last appointment an hour late. Sound like the doctor’s office to you?

How can you anticipate that? Well, honestly, you can’t. If you’re flexible you can make it work. VP running ten minutes behind? Fine. Have someone else start presenting in their place. Move on to the next part. Unless that VP is holding some kind of crucial information you can probably start the meeting without them. Especially if they’re just “framing the discussion” or some other thing that shows what they’re adding is less than necessary. Plus, if you start the meeting without them they’ll mention to their people that they need to get them in early next time to avoid interrupting next time.

Flexibility doesn’t mean you don’t have rock solid deadlines. Some things have to happen at a certain time or in a certain way that can’t easily be moved. The flexibility part comes when you learn how to adjust so that things flow smoothly around them. Imagine a boulder in a river. The river can’t move the boulder. So it flows around. Soon the river either wears away the boulder or accepts that it won’t move and continues on the path. The boulder is none the wiser and the river accomplishes its goals.

Tom’s Take

The next time you find yourself stressed out because something isn’t going to plan, don’t scream at the heavens. Just breathe and think of a little green cartoon character. As it was phrased in the 1984 Dune movie, “bend like a reed in the wind” and find a way to be flexible in your approach. You might not be able to affect the kind of change you want but being open to the idea means you can find a way to make something happen that will keep your meeting or lesson on track. If you do it with enough flourish people might even believe that was the plan all along. Just be flexible.

Delegation And You

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I once again loved this episode of the Art of Network Engineering featuring Mike Bushong. He is a very astute judge of character as well as how to apply social skills to your tech role. Definitely listen to the above episode if you’re interested in countering cognitive biases.

In the episode, he told a great story of how he had a pivotal career moment with one of his managers that led to some important introspection. I won’t tell his story but the summary is that he had taken on way too much work and way too many roles and he blew up at his manager because of the stress. She leveled him with a quote that rang true for me:

“No one knows everything you’re working on. They just see that the thing that’s important to them is late.”

That’s not the verbatim quote but that’s how I remember it. It’s definitely something that I’ve been thinking about since the previous episode when he mentioned it the first time.

Load Bearing and Busting

The odds are good that we’re all doing way too many things right now. Whether it’s doing more work in our role or taking on way too many projects in our free time. The human mind seems to crave stimulation and we provide it by keeping our brain so busy that it never has a moment to rest. Sometimes that happens because we’re too focused on saying “yes” to everything and pleasing people. For others it comes because we want to be the focal point for everything that happens in our team or organization.

Taking on too much work is manageable in the short term. We can rearrange deadlines and burn the candle at both ends to make it all work for a few weeks or months. However, when the amount of work that we have to do or the number of projects we have started eventually collapse under their own weight we feel exposed and angry. We’re mad because we’re overworked, yet we are the ones that caused the situation. We’re frustrated that so much relies on us without realizing that we could have said “no” at any time and had less to do. We’re upset that we have too much to do AND that we are the architect of our own struggle.

I feel this in so many different ways because I’ve lived it. I have a hard time saying no. I don’t even take my own advice. I delude myself into believing this time will be different and that I won’t get overwhelmed. Somehow I’m always proven wrong when too many things are going on all at once that require me to do them because I’m the one that made it that way.

No matter how talented we are at project management or learning or any skill you can think of there is only so much we can dedicate ourself to doing. Once we hit our limit everything suffers. If you’re familiar with Quality of Service policies it’s why adding one more packet to a congested link doesn’t just hurt the performance of that single packet but of the entire link overall. Going past your limits makes everything worse.

Finding Your Focus

Just today I heard a wonderful quote from Krazy Ken of Computer Clan fame:

“Focus is about saying ‘no’.”

Declining to do something because you know you’re hit your limit isn’t negative. In fact, it’s the smartest thing you can do to help those around you. If you’re always agreeing to do something when it is brought to you then what exactly are you focused on? If anyone can give you a task and you just preempt everything else are you even focused at all?

I’ve felt this over the past year in a very specific area. I’m the course director for my local Scouting America’s Wood Badge course. If you think I’m busy in my work life I can promise you that my volunteer work in Scouting is even busier. I do way too many things. That was brought into sharp focus for me last year when my time to step forward as the course director was apparent. I had to assemble my team and get everyone working toward the goal of putting on this wonderful course. But I couldn’t do it entirely by myself. I had to rely on my team to get it done. The amount of focus that it takes to make this happen meant that I also needed to step back from some of my other roles.

It was hard to do this! I’d spent years leading a pack and volunteering to be on every training course that I could think of. There were even other opportunities that I wanted to explore that I knew would take just as much time as the thing that I had committed to doing. I had to decide what was most important for me. And I had to realize that while I was delegating things to my team I was also responsible for something even more important. My job was to not take on any new responsibilities until we finished this course. Letting go is hard. Not picking up things to replace them is even harder. My brain craved the stimulation of having something to think about. I didn’t want to just go over the same list again and again to make sure things were headed in the right direction.

When you take on too much you do your entire team a disservice. If you’re not available to help because you’ve agreed to do something that someone else could or should be handling you’re holding everyone back. The modern interpretation of this comes from the excellent Phoenix Project book by Gene Kim. Everyone knows about Brent by this point. The single point of failure in the organization. But how many of us recognize that Brent is a problem because of his necessity to the organization and still do what we do either out of a desire to be more helpful or out of a need to control everything?

Delegation is about focus. It’s about saying “no” to things that you know someone else not only can do but should do. It’s about eliminating distractions and poring your energy into something that needs it. It’s easy to say that someone who has too much to do is unfocused. But when you frame it as a problem of choice it becomes easier to see where the changes need to be made. Some things are absolutely going to require your attention. You’ll know what those are because they are so intrinsically linked to you that they’ll fail without you. But don’t think that everything needs your attention. That’s how you find yourself in the trap and lose focus.

Tom’s Take

As of this writing, I’m two weeks away from the start of my Wood Badge course. I have a great team that has done so much over the past year to be ready to put on a wonderful leadership seminar. But they could only do that because I trusted them to make it happen. I’ve done this a number of times already and it would have been easy for me to jump in and offer way too much advice or even take on the tasks myself. For the first time in a very long time I knew the answer was to sit back and do the least amount possible. Not because I was lazy or malicious. Because I knew they needed to feel like they had an impact. I needed to focus on the important things. I needed to be available to those that needed my help, not doing their job for them. If you find yourself in a similar situation ask one very important question: “What would Mike Bushong do?”

Experience Expansion

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Recently at Networking Field Day, one of the presenters for cPacket had a wonderful line that stuck with me:

There’s no compression algorithm for experience.

Like, floored. Because it hits at the heart of a couple of different things that are going on in the IT industry right now that showcase why it feels like everything is on the verge of falling apart and what we can do to help that.

Misteaks Hapin

Let’s just get this out of the way: you are going to screw up. Anyone doing any job ever for any amount of time has made a mistake. I know I’ve made my fair share of them over the years. When I finished chastising myself I looked back at what happened, figured out what went wrong, and made sure that it didn’t happen that exact same way again. That’s experience.

Experience is key to understanding why we do things the way we do them or why we don’t do something a certain way. You know how you get experience? By doing it. It’s rare that someone can read a book or a blog post about some topic and instantly know everything there is to know about it. Experience is the process of taking all that knowledge and applying it in a successful way. As the quote above states, you can’t rush that.

Can you accelerate some of the process? You absolutely can. You can tell your coworkers not to use a server or that they need to configure a function call in a certain way. However, a lot of figuring things out is learning what didn’t work and not doing it again. Trying to rush that process either leaves gaps in knowledge or creates situations where people are pushed way above their skillset into roles that demand more applied knowledge.

Fast Track

Here’s where I think the disconnect is coming from. People are trying to get into roles that have experience requirements that are beyond them. That means they’re trying to bluff their way into a place they shouldn’t be. It’s a two-part problem that is going to require some introspection on sides of the discussion.

For the workers: You are going to get experience. You’re going to get it doing the job. There’s no VR training for routing loops or cloud outages. There’s no way to compress the lessons you learn on a conference bridge at 3am trying to figure out why CrowdStrike is acting screwy. No one could have predicted the way that particular bug could have affected so many systems. No amount of reading up on null memory pointers or dirty initial environments is going to show you the results of that. You’re going to have to see it. You need to work on it. Then you need to commit the results to memory.

Yes, that means you’re going to have some long hours in the office or the lab trying to figure out race conditions or learn why a certain setting should never be enabled. The more you try to take shortcuts the more likely it is that you’re going to find those skipped lessons coming back to haunt you.

For the employers: Let’s stop lying to ourselves. You don’t need 10 years of experience in a 4-year old programming language and a masters degree in quantum mechanics to program VLANs. Everyone in the industry is laughing at your attempts to weed out the most unqualified candidates automatically by claiming you have to be a genius to get an entry-level job in today’s environment. It’s also disingenuous because you’re putting these lofty goals as requirements and then offering a laughable salary. What you’re really saying is “we pay poorly for overqualified people because we don’t want to train anyone for fear they’ll leave to get more money.”

If you want to pay for junior-level salaries then put junior-level qualifications on the job. Hire people that need experience and give it to them. They’re more likely to be happy getting to learn in a role and potentially stay to become senior as you reward them for gaining experience. Lastly, if your operation is so critical that it can never go down or be impacted for any reason by people learning a trade then you should be compensating the employees you do have 5x what they’re making for the stress you’re making them endure.

Tom’s Take

Shortcuts miss out on the journey. Maybe you get there faster but then you’re waiting around for the rest of reality to catch up to you. The culture that puts ridiculous requirements on entry-level roles is the one that encourages entry-level people to spend 100% of their time studying and cramming with zero experience in order to get a role that lets them gain it. Years ago I said that apprenticeships are key to filling these gaps and that message resonants more with me every day. If we can’t convince people to take their time and get experience and if we can’t keep companies from requiring so much of people that have so little, maybe it should be time to expand how we teach and train. Because experience is an uncompressable algorithm.

The Keynote Answers You Expect

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Keynote Starfield

Good morning! How are you?

I’d like to talk about keynotes, again. You know, one of my favorite subjects. I’ve been watching them intently for the past few years just hoping that we’re going to see something different. As a technical analyst and practitioner I love to see and hear the details behind the technology that drive the way our IT companies develop. Yet every year I feel more and more disappointed by the way that keynotes take everything and push it into the stratosphere to get an 80,000 foot view of the technology. It’s almost like the keynotes aren’t written for practitioners. Why? The answer lies in the statement at the top of this post.

Perfunctory Performances

When most people ask someone how their day is going they’re not actually looking for a real response. They most certainly aren’t asking for details on how exactly the person’s day is going. They’re usually looking for one of two things:

  1. It’s going great.
  2. It could be better.

Any more than that drags someone down into a conversation that they don’t want to have. Asking someone about their day is a polite way of acknowledging them and making a bit of small talk. The person asking the question almost always doesn’t care. Think back to a time when you asked that question and someone unloaded on you with all their issues like a car acting up or a baby that wouldn’t sleep through the night. Did you actually want to know that? Or were you really trying to avoid awkward silence during a transaction?

That same rule applies to a keynote address. CEOs and leaders have a ton of information they would like to share with the world. They want to talk about their advantages and their investments and how they plan on being the best company in the market next quarter. However, the audience is like the above example. They don’t care about the details in the answer. They really only want to hear two things:

  1. The company is doing great.
  2. We made some stuff that will make us better.

That’s it. That’s the only two things you need to say during a keynote to keep the audience happy. Boil every keynote you’ve ever watched down to the minimum and you’ll see that right there. Even when the company hasn’t been doing so well it’s always framed as a path to getting better. If the company doesn’t have something super exciting to show you they’ll either dress up something they’ve have for a while or talk about new partnerships that will deliver The Thing that everyone wants to hear about.

You may think to yourself that this is silly. You are the one that wants to hear about the technical implementation details and the integrations. You want to understand how this fancy new AI/ML/VR/AR/OMG/WTF implementation works. I’m right there with you, friend. But I have some bad news for you. We aren’t the audience for a keynote.

Audience Participation

Who is the audience for a keynote? It’s an easy question to answer for any company anywhere. Just look at who i sitting in the front section in the middle of the room. Keynotes are designed to appeal to exactly two groups of people, not counting company employees:

  1. Investors
  2. Analysts

That’s it. The peanut gallery behind that section couldn’t matter any less. Sure, they’ll clap when some new announcement gets made. Or they’ll enjoy the slick video that has been put together by the marketing team. Unless the company is trying to set some kind of tone with a huge audience those people behind the investors and analysts might as well not even exist. You want proof? Why is the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple’s HQ only a 1,000 seat room? Even with millions of Apple fans out there? Because they only care about analysts and investors. Just like every other company.

When you realize this fact you note why keynotes are structured the way they are. Investors only want to hear the company is doing well. Their investment is protected and they will make money. How? With these new things we’re going to show you. Likewise, analysts like hearing the company isn’t going to go out of business next quarter but it’s the tech that gets them excited. But analysts are usually specialized enough that they only care about two or three things in a big keynote. They’re more likely to want to pull someone aside and ask them more in-depth stuff after the big show as opposed to getting all the big details on stage when they’re having a hard time keeping up with the announcements anyway.

Tom’s Take

Because these two groups only want to hear those two specific kinds of answers that’s all the keynote is going to provide. It’s just like someone asking how your day is going. Once you know they don’t really care to hear any of the details you start answering with simple statements designed to mollify them and no more. Why bother making someone uncomfortable with the details when they don’t really want to know them anyway? Better to just stick to the script and keep them happy. Honestly, I’m at the point where I realize that keynotes aren’t made for me. I’d rather find the time to talk to someone in the hallway later to learn the real details as opposed to the choreographed performance for the audience in the front row. Maybe then they’ll tell me how their day is actually going.

The Legacy of Cisco Live

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Legacy: Something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past. — Merriam-Webster

Cisco Live 2024 is in the books. I could recap all the announcements but that would take forever. You can find an AI that can summarize them for you much faster. That’s because AI was the largest aspect of what was discussed. Love it or hate it, AI has taken over the IT industry for the time being. More importantly it has also focused companies on the need to integrate AI functions into their product lines to avoid being left behind by upstarts.

That’s what you see in the headlines. Something I noticed while I was there was how the march of time has affected us all. After eighteen years I finally realized the sessions today have less in common with the ones I was attending back in 2010 than ever before. Development and advanced features configuration have replaced the tuning of routing protocols and CallManager deployment tips. It’s a game for younger engineers that have less to unlearn from the legacy technologies I’ve spent my career working on.

Leaving a Legacy

But legacy is a word with more than one definition. It’s easy to think of legacy as old technology or technical debt. But it can also be something you leave to the next generation, as the definition at the top of this post says. What we leave behind for those we teach and lead is as important as any system out there. Because those lessons persist long after the technology has fallen away.

For the first time that I could remember, my friends were bringing their kids to the show. Not to enjoy a vacation or to hang out by the pool. They were coming because it was time for them to step forward and lean and make connections in the industry. Folks like Jody Lemoine, Rita Younger, Martin Duggan, and Brandon Carroll shared the passion and excitement of Cisco Live with their older children as a way to help them grow.

We’re not done with our careers yet but we are at the point where it’s time to show those behind us the path. It is no longer a race to consume knowledge as quickly as possible and put it into use. It’s about helping people by leveraging our legacy to teach them and help them along the way. Our group welcomed the kids with open arms. We talked to them, shared our perspectives, and made them feel welcome. We showed them the same courtesy that was shown to use years before.

Inspiring Others

The legacy of Cisco Live is more than just teaching the next generation. It’s seeing the way that the conference has transformed. I will admit that my activity on social media is a pale comparison of what it used to be. The face of Cisco Live is now influencers like Lexie Cooper and Alexis Bertholf that have embraced new platforms and found their voice to share content with others in a way is comfortable for them to consume it. The number of people that want to read a long blog post is waning. Concepts are communicated in short bursts. That’s where the next generation excels.

Seeing people running across the show floor to meet new creators like Kevin Nanns reminded me of a time when I was doing the same thing. I wanted to know everyone that I could to learn as much as possible. Now I get to see others doing the same and smile. New face are meeting their heroes and building their communities. The process continues no matter the platform. People find their voice and share with others. Whether it’s a podcast or TikTok or a casual conversation over lunch. It’s about making those connections and keeping them going.

Tom’s Take

That’s where I started. That’s why I do it. To meet new people and help them build a community. I have my community of wonderful Cisco Live people. I have Tech Field Day. I have The Corner, which is my most lasting Cisco Live legacy. I’m excited to see so many people passing their legacy along to the next generation. I love seeing new faces in the creator space popping up to share their stories and their journeys. Cisco Live will be in San Diego in 2025 and I can’t wait to see who shows up and what legacy they’ll leave.

Butchering AI

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I once heard a quote that said, “The hardest part of being a butcher is knowing where to cut.” If you’ve ever eaten a cut of meat you know that the difference between a tender steak and a piece of meat that needs hours of tenderizing is just inches apart. Butchers train for years to be able to make the right cuts in the right pieces of meat with speed and precision. There’s even an excellent Medium article about the dying art of butchering.

One thing that struck me in that article is how the art of butchering relates to AI. Yes, I know it’s a bit corny and not an easy segue into a technical topic but that transition is about as subtle as the way AI has come crashing through the door to take over every facet of our lives. It used to be that AI was some sci-fi term we used to describe intelligence emerging in computer systems. Now, AI is optimizing my PC searches and helping with image editing and creation. It’s easy, right?

Except some of those things that AI promises to excel at doing are things that professionals have spent years honing their skills at performing. Take this article announcing the release of the Microsoft CoPilot+ PC. One of the things they are touting as a feature is using neural processing units (NPUs) to allow applications to automatically remove the background from an image in a video clip editor. Sounds cool, right? Have you ever tried to use an image editor to remove or blur the background of an image? I did a few weeks ago and it was a maddening experience. I looked for a number of how-to guides and none of them had good info. In fact, most of the searches just led me to apps that claimed to use some form of AI to remove the background for me. Which isn’t what I wanted.

Practice Makes Perfect

Bruce Lee said, “I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.” His point was that practice of a single thing is what makes a professional stand apart. I may know a lot about history, for example, but I’ll never be as knowledgeable about Byzantine history as someone who has spent their whole career studying it. Humans develop skills via repetition and learning. It’s how our brains are wired. We pick out patterns and we reinforce them.

AI attempts to simulate this pattern recognition and operationalize it. However, the learning process that we have simulated isn’t perfect. AI can “forget” how to do things. Sometimes this is built into the system with something like unstructured learning. Other times it’s a failure of the system inputs, such as a corrupted database or connectivity issue. Either way the algorithm defaults back to a state of being a clean slate with no idea how to proceed. Even on their worst days a butcher or a plumber never forgets how to do their job, right?

The other maddening thing is that the AI peddlers try to convince everyone that teaching their software means we never have to learn ever again. After all, the algorithm has learned everything and can do it better than a human, right? That’s true, as long as the conditions don’t change appreciably. It reminds me of signature-based virus detection from years ago. As long as the infection matched the definition you could detect it. As soon as it changed the code and became polymorphous it was undetectable. That led to the rise of heuristic-based detections and eventually to the state of endpoint detection and response (EDR) we have today.

That’s a long way to say that the value in training someone to do a job isn’t in them gaining just the knowledge. It’s about training them to apply that knowledge in new situations and extrapolate from incomplete data. In the above article about the art of butchering, the author mentions that he was trained on a variety of animals and knows where the best cuts are for each. That took time and effort and practice. Today’s industrialized butcher operations train each person to make a specific cut. So the person cutting a ribeye steak doesn’t know how to make the cuts for ribs or cube steaks. They would need to be trained on that input in order to do the task. Not unlike modern AI.

Tom’s Take

You don’t pay a butcher for a steak. You pay them for knowing how to cut the best one. AI isn’t going to remove the need for professionals. It’s going to make some menial tasks easier to do but when faced with new challenges or the need to apply skills in an oblique way we’re still going to need to call on humans trained to think outside the box to do it without hours and days of running simulations. The human brain is still unparalleled in its ability to adapt to new stimuli and apply old lessons appropriately. Maybe you can train an AI to identify the best parts of the cow but I’ll take the butcher’s word for it.