The CCIE is Dead? - Really? - That's what I'm told. | Let's talk about it.

hey this is jeremiah welcome back to my basement today i am wearing a blue purpley pocket tee obvious stain right here i think this is the same one i was wearing uh last week i uh when i when i got married when so my second marriage my current marriage um so this was uh years ago but um you know my wife and i were trying to be smart and we had this book about it had like a hundred questions or 150 questions or 300 i don't know what it was questions to go over with your partner before you get married and it's uh made a lot of sense to go through it for some reason people are willing to get married or go into committed like you know buy property together long-term committed relationships without ever actually discussing important topics like the big stuff like kids religion politics but also the little stuff like you know chores and i don't know whatever else so this book was really it was well designed to help you answer a lot of those questions and one of the questions was about laundry and so we're talking about you know how we do our laundry and and uh my wife said okay here's the deal no more clothes on the floor i'm i'm just i can't deal with it no clothes on the floor and i said uh okay listen here's how i do my clothes my work clothes i wear the work clothes they go to the laundry when they're clean i immediately hang them up because i don't want to have to iron them but my non-work clothes my casual clothes they go from laundry to clean laundry basket to i wear them to when i get in bed that night i put them on the floor and eventually they'll make their way into the dirty laundry basket and then back into the laundry but they never see a drawer they're never put away they're never folded and they spend time on the floor and i told my wife listen i'm a 35 year old man i have done this been doing this my entire adult life and i'm sorry i'm not gonna change and that was just one of the things where she was just like uh okay like i'm not gonna fight you about if it's you know whatever so um yeah so it's one of those things like my clothes so apparently i wore this last week well you really wanted to know about that didn't you let's uh so what do i want to talk about well man yesterday i put out a video about ccie and you know i've been kind of open the last few months it has not been going good and things are kind of on hold and you know whatever i'm trying to like be realistic about it because i don't want to get too depressed about you know things but stuff's going on in life that's really just keeping me from studying it's the way it is it'll eventually clear up and i'll get back to studying it is what it is but man i got a bunch of comments from people who were you know telling me that the cci is dead it's dumb don't waste your time don't waste your money nobody wants ccies anymore what a waste and you know like i gotta say that's a little scary what if i put all this time and energy and effort into the ccie and i don't get anything for it what if i can't even get a job what if i wasted all this time and thousands and thousands of dollars in books and lab and study material and going to take the test you know it's it's nerve-racking it's a little scary what if they're right and you know the thing is in some ways they're right but in a lot of ways they're wrong and i want to talk about it um so let's kind of get into this here there's just there's so many different angles worth covering and i guess one of the first things that it's worth noting is you only know what you know i see a lot of people who they get into a career in i.t that career is relatively narrow they work in hospitality they work in uh you know the medical industry or they work in the banking industry and that's where they're at and they're always at you know some within that constraint and you also see that most people let's actually let's draw this out let's draw this out let's come over here and yes and we'll go a little bit thicker okay so let's let's do this this is going to upset some people and the truth is i don't care this is reality so this is a population and this is intelligence and we'll just abbreviate that iq i'm writing on a little tablet forgive me and what we see please forgive i'm gonna do the best i can uh what we see is intelligence is a standard distribution all right here's average intelligence so everyone over here everyone on this side is below average and everyone on this side is above average all right now this is important to understand for for many reasons but this becomes really important as we move into this more advanced uh you know economy that is based on uh not so much labor where labor is going away and it's about it's not so much who can who can run the machine at the factory who can pull the lever or stomp the pedal which i did i used to work in a window factory and i did both of those things pulled lever and stomped the pedal pushed a button to build windows it's no longer about that because basically you know anyone can do that maybe except for you know here's here's like the the percentage like these people are just i'm sorry it's very difficult for these folks to participate in the economy like they're just not smart enough their brains just are not working enough [Music] you know say let's go like an orange so you know these people they're uh they're the manual laborers right these are the folks who are doing the manual labor they can handle that job just fine now someone doing manual labor might be smarter than this but this person is really limited to that manual labor then you have you know like let's say up to about here this is a big chunk of the population and these people are the vast majority of people right and they're working all the main jobs and some of them aren't so bright some of them are pretty bright but they're working in the vast majority of jobs then you come over and you have let's say these people here we have the beginnings of the intellectual mentally you know slightly above average so these are going to be your you know tier 2 i t folks tier 2 tier 3 i t folks these are going to be your [Music] you know there might be lawyers in here there might be doctors if you've ever worked with doctors you know not all doctors are geniuses there's a lot of middling doctors um so these are going to be your professionals right and then we're going to come over to here and here we have these are your advanced professionals so the blue blue folks are maybe programmers the green folks these are the senior programmers these are the senior network engineers these are the people who are designing chips you know so someone's like say a senior network engineer could be on the high side of the blue or maybe the low side of the green and then you have we'll just call this white these are the super smart people these are your advanced surgeons your advanced phds you know this is a small part and you know this is not accurate right i suspect this white part is probably smaller um these blue and green parts might be distributed a little bit differently but so here is roughly intelligence so you need to be aware of this why do you need to be aware of this well quite frankly and this again you know this is kind of mean to say but reality is sometimes mean is most of the people in it are going to be you know from here to here right these are your help desk these are your tier one these are your tier two people and a lot of the people that are going you know what what you're gonna find is when you when you start to advance when you start to succeed these people want to keep you down they want to hold you back because what happens for them is they've hit the wall you know this tier one person right here you know he he was struggling he worked to get his ccna and he spent two years studying for his ccna he finally after two years of studying passes the ccna but he still struggled like he can't really go anywhere beyond that that's that's the most he can do and he's he was able to get a tier two job in networking that's all he'll ever do we have this person over here i'm talking in cisco terms because you know i know that all top my head here's a person you know cisco guy he got a ccnp right and he's he worked hard at it he got it he's now tier three he maybe he's even an you know engineer and but the thing is he knows he can't do any better i worked with a guy and i hope i hope he doesn't see this because you know we are friends but this is the truth i worked with this guy he was a smart guy he was working in a different department but i saw that he had potential but i also knew that in the department that he was working in he really didn't have the money to to pay for career advancement and the company wasn't going to pay for it but i you know i like this guy i knew he had potential so i sat down and said listen um i think you can do this if you promise me to study every day i'm just asking for like a half hour every day i will pay for your study material and i'll pay for you to take the test so he did it he got his ccna and then i think he got his ccna voice which i think was a thing back then and he might i don't think he ever has got a ccnp but he he was operating in that level like a ccnp voice engineer and he was very you know well respected within our company did a great job it got to the point now i had already left the company but the company needed a cc or excuse me a voice ccie they needed a ccie voice they had to have one to maintain their status with cisco this guy says hey i can do it i'm smart i can do it they built him a lab the company paid for him to build a lab they gave him time off months and months where he just worked from home and studied he took that test the ccie voice test five times he failed every time before he finally just gave up he's a smart guy but he's over here and he peaked he he maxed out that's all he's ever going to do he's going to be a high mid tier low top tier engineer that's the most he can handle this is difficult for people to understand and it's difficult for people to accept because we're all told you can do anything you can be anything no you can't we are in fact limited by our by many factors our own intelligence is is just one of them so as you begin to succeed in life insert you know excel you're going to find that look if you're here these guys are going to want to pull you back and if you're here these guys are going to want to pull you back and you know vice versa there's always going to be some people who are in your life and they're encouraging you to move forward but you're also going to find that there's other people who are just frankly they're jealous or they're scared they don't want to be left behind or if you can succeed what does that say about them if you can succeed then they must be a failure or you must be better than they are and so you know it just it with our heads and so we we actually try to hold people back it's it's hard to get upset with people for doing that because it's just human nature but you're going to experience this all right now i'm not saying that the people who are criticizing me in the comments are not intelligent people they very well may be very intelligent people and maybe they they are smarter than i am i don't know but i am saying that as you try to advance yourself you're going to run into naysayers this is part of the issue but that's only part of the issue there's quite a bit more to talk about so hang in there now let's talk specifically let's talk about one other thing about intelligence let me i'm going to clear this up let's do one other thing about intelligence here uh you've probably heard of this before it's called the dunning-kruger effect i'm not going to try to spell it the dunning-kruger effect another chart so this is how much you think you know versus how much you actually no and what we find and this is pretty universal is that people who know so this is down here you know very little and i hear you're an expert expert novice when someone is a novice they tend to drastically overestimate how much they know about something they tend to consider themselves very smart on a subject and you don't have to look very far in today's world to to find that everywhere you turn the world is overwhelmed with experts in uh virology everybody's an expert um i'm sure they couldn't pass a uh an eighth grade biology test but they're all experts in immunology virology and then as you learn more you begin to recognize oh i don't actually know very much and that drops off pretty quick and then to get to the point where someone who's actually fairly well versed in a subject considers themselves to be pretty ignorant of the subject and then as you learn more you begin to recognize that you learn more until you get to about here so even an expert in a subject will often feel they'll self-assess that they are less um i don't know complete on a subject than a complete novice so the expert will think that they know less why the novice thinks they know more someone in the middle thinks tends to think they know very little why is that well because as a as a complete novice you don't even know all the stuff you don't know but once you've gotten here you begin to understand whoa there is a lot of stuff i have no idea about and then once you get to the expert level you say okay i know that there are certain things i don't know at all but there's actually a lot of things that i do know quite a bit about so i'm pretty much in the middle now how does that relate to what we're talking about with the ccie well what you'll find is you'll find a lot of ccna level people who think they know a lot about networking they pass their ccna they've studied eigrp and ospf and they've they've understood they understood the basics of switching and spanning tree and vlans they know quite a bit about networking and then here you have your cc and p perhaps and they have a better view they say well there's a lot that i don't know but i'm still pretty good i'm still pretty competent in networking after all i know ospf and i know a little bit of bgp and so i've just actually i would say the ccnp is maybe more accurately over here the ccna is maybe over here not everybody not everybody some people have an accurate assessment and then you start studying for your ccie so this person is still a ccnp they're studying for this ccie and maybe they've only just started studying or they've been studying for a few months they've taught they've they've touched on all the topics and at this point this is when it just hits you as a ccie candidate that me i know so little you know as an example i i should have grabbed it ahead of time i can see from where i'm sitting but i have my books my stack of books that i'm reading specifically for my ccie a couple of those books are for the ccnp i have so let's let's just do like this oops so i read a couple books from my ccmp maybe like this much you know like maybe 2 000 pages 1600 to 2000 pages for my for the entire ccnp all the topics all the routing all the switching everything a couple of books actually yeah a couple books for the ccie i have a stack this big just for tcpip just for tcpip not even all the routing just tcp i have a stack this big just bgp just bgp more than the entirety of the ccnp just for bgp i have a stack about this big just for uh multicast i have a book a couple of books just for vpns so you know here's my ccnp say 2000 pages for the ccie we're looking at 10 times that much in reading material not talking about all the videos and the labbing just reading ten times as much so when you when you get to this point and you realize ah i don't know anything it can be a little disheartening but then as you learn more and more and more you're eventually going to get up here and i suspect that when you pass your ccie you know depending on your experience maybe you're closer to here and then you keep working in the field and maybe you'll get get up to there but that's also important to understand because the simple truth is most people who if they have not done the ccie they don't even know what it is they really they only have a vague conception i think the reason why is because if you look you have the cc and a transitioning into the c c n p and for most of its lifespan the ccnp is you know maybe two uh two to let's say two to four times two times to four times the amount of information needed for the ccna oh i'm cut off at the top there let me fix that so this is like two times to four times the amount of knowledge and people think that it must be the same thing for the ccnp it's uh you know it's roughly two times but the ccnp the ccie is at least 10 times so if the ccnp is already say three times what the ccna is then you're looking at actually i'm not sure how to do that is that 30 times the amount of information i don't think that's right is that right that might be right it's a lot more but people don't think that they think that it's it's this it's just it's linear it's not linear it's if anything it's more exponential growth curve so there is a lot more information for the ccie so but people they get it confused and they think it's just oh it's not that much okay so that's kind of the misunderstanding but let's let's let's go just a little bit deeper into this misunderstanding about what is the ccie because i think people when they hear cc they think oh it's cisco it's just routers and switches real simple stuff i mean you know some ospf some bgp whatever well here's the breakdown for the ccie let's take a look at it in the first thirty percent so this is only thirty percent of the entire uh lab test here we have all your switching protocols your vlans your channel groups your spanning tree all the different flavors of spanning tree the cisco spanning tree the industry standard spanning tree and it's not just like configuring this is well we'll get to that in a second then you have all your routing concepts how routing works summarization uh policy based routing vrf authentication and then we get into the actual routing protocols eigrp ospf version two and three bgp multicast all right most people think well okay that's that's the ccie no that's 30 that's less than a third of the ccie that's a fraction of the ccie then we get into all the new software-defined software-defined access software-defined wan all the other new protocols you gotta learn isis lisp all the protocols that go into making sda and sd-wan work right then on top of that you need to know mpls and vpns you need to learn your infrastructure security here's another 15 of the so this is securing your devices all the management protocols securing access to the devices securing uh automation of the devices i think this also includes um i thought this also included maybe not um all the different network services so like bg or excuse me like uh nat pam sure uh dhcp is in there somewhere oh the dhcp equality is service so there's all that and then on top of that is automation and program programmability json xml linux shell uh python ansible's in here somewhere http request netconf and yang rest config yang a remote procedure called google remote procedure call so and here's the thing that a lot of people don't get especially when you're thinking about that whole you know with the ccnp with the ccn a and the ccnp this is mostly about configuration oops this is mostly about config and a little bit of troubleshoot all right ccie is different ccie is complete c-o-m-l-e-t-e protocol understanding wow man i cannot spell for anything understanding not good what do i mean by complete protocol understanding when you're looking at a ccie level you're not learning how to configure something i mean you are but you're learning all of the protocol what makes the protocol work what does the packet look like what are all the timers for the protocol what are the different options for the protocol you need to understand how it works when you're at a ccna in a ccnp level the vast majority of your understanding is how to configure something and the vast majority of your troubleshooting is looking for misconfigurations when you're at the ccie level you're looking at the actual packets understanding what is being transmitted what is being received what is being sent back why aren't they working together looking at the actual flow of data what's really happening versus how is this supposed to work with the cca you have to understand how it works why it works with the ccna and the ccnp you have to understand how to set it up it's so different it's such a hugely different skill set and mindset that people don't understand just the vast chasm between your ccnp and your ccie so that is you know we're already a half hour in that is just how people misunderstand what the ccie even is but there's more to it there's actually more to it so let's talk about some of the other things first off people say and this is this is a true and fair criticism that if you're getting your ccie you're focused on cisco and not everybody uses cisco and so you know you're never going to be able to get a job because what enterprise uses only cisco well again let's talk about see this is the confusion they're confusing ccnp configuring versus ccie understanding when i am when i am done with the ccie you understand the protocols so if i'm on a cisco box or juniper box or an hp box all i have to learn is how to configure it differently i already understand the protocols how they work how they talk to each other what the options are i just need to look up the command that's not that complicated it's not that big of a deal you know becoming fluent and comfortable with a different vendor will take a little bit of time but you already have the majority of the information because you rather than memorizing commands which you did have to do for cisco you also learned and understood the underlying technologies the industry standard technologies that are going to exist regardless of vendor so a huge chunk of what you're learning for your cca a huge chunk will translate to other vendors so yes when i'm done with my ccie am i going to go get some juniper certs yeah i am it'll be easy because i'll already know the technology i just need to learn the commands it's also worth knowing that cisco is still they've lost a lot of market share look they're not the 50 uh you know or they're not the 85 90 percent market share they once were they're 50 market share but keep in mind that's half of all network equipment half of all network equipment is cisco the other half is everybody else cisco everybody else so where are you going to spend your time are you going to study the thing that is sold more than anything else or are you going to study the thing that is a growing company and has a lot of potential or this growing company has a lot of potential or this you know well established company but they're still only they're not this they're this so again 50 cisco 50 everybody else you have to make a choice why not learn the big boy especially at the ccie level when a huge chunk of that knowledge will translate to all these other ones i think the last thing i want to cover is this idea that networking is dead about a year ago i was talking to a friend of mine and this guy is an intelligent guy he's a friend of mine he his career is kind of interesting because he has he started off he did a bunch of like not entry level but like tier one tier two type jobs and kind of like jack of all trades jobs which are also tend to be lower tier you know for smaller companies where he's the the desktop guy and the website guy and you know he's doing everything so he knows a little bit about everything and he managed to get in with the company kind of worked his way up and in while working his way up learned a lot about cloud uh specifically azure aws and azure but i think specifically azure and then he left that company and was able to secure a pretty sweet gig because of his azure experience so he is a cloud guy at this point in his career he's a cloud guy through and through he knows what he's doing and we were talking he said dude you're wasting your time on your ccie there's no more networks networking is dead it's all it's all cloud now man it's all the cloud you there is no more networking well that's interesting and a lot of people share that view and it's wrong it's wrong well why is it wrong well because you uh mr admin you know you're sitting at your uh your pc here and you're connected to the cloud so all you see is the stuff on your screen and you know that that same stuff exists in the cloud so to you it's just the cloud there is nothing else but what is the cloud well first off your pc has to connect to the cloud so you still have your enterprise network or you still have your vpn at home that connects you to your enterprise network or you still have your isp that's all networking then in the cloud what are you actually connecting to you're connecting to a server a server that's in a rack what's at the top of the rack a switch there's a row of racks what's at the the end of the row more switches what do those switches connect to they connect to bigger switches what do those switches connect to they connect to big routers right what do those routers connect to they connect to service providers and isps what do those service providers look like well their network is what it's a bunch of switches and routers switches and routers didn't go away well you say but jeremiah yes they did it's now all virtualized okay so what happens do i care if i am working on a box that has a cisco badge on the front or if i'm logging in oops i don't know what that's supposed to be or if i'm logging in to a virtual instance that is an application and that application says cisco or whoever no i don't care but it's still networking it's still a firewall or a switch or a router even if it's virtualized it's still networking you still gotta speak networking protocols you still gotta configure routing you still gotta configure switching it's all still there it's not going away however that being said and we talked about this recently it is changing it is changing because what we're going to see is that the jobs are going to start to look like this we're down here we have tier one type jobs help desk type jobs monitoring type jobs and then what used to be tier two through three there's not gonna be a whole lot of stuff there this is all going to be automation there's going to be a few jobs and these people are going to be mostly devops people but then coming back over here where we got tier 4 through like you know architect there's going to be those jobs still going to be there they're still going to need to be people to design the network to do the advanced stuff the stuff that's too complicated for the automation to do reliably and easily you know a lot of this stuff is just going to be clicking check boxes or you know uploading some code but there's still going to be plenty of network audits you know operations and troubleshooting that's going to require a real person most of these jobs are going to go away so what do you need to do well you need to get yourself over here if you want to work in networking what's going to happen it's we already see it and if you look at the comments on my video you see it what is happening these people are all saying networking is dead and from their point of view it is so what are they doing they're sublimating off they're going to cloud they're going to uh you know some some form of security which is important you know so they're leaving they're going to find other opportunities which means the people who have positioned themselves to be here are going to see their salaries begin to rise what we've seen over time recently is you know the ccie used to be godhood right when i first got into so this is like 1998-ish ish i was in a job i wasn't really happy i'm looking for other jobs i'm on a job board what do i see i see a job for a ccie that job in today's money when adjusted for inflation was paying about a hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year plus the company a company owned lexus so you got a luxury car to drive to use and a hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year for your ccie pretty sweet that those days are gone those days are gone we've seen that the ccie salaries and their you know uniqueness and specialness and desiredness has slowly dropped off when i finish my ccie you know i'm hoping that i'll be able to i'm probably going to start because i've been out of it for a while i'm hoping to start around 80 and quickly work my way back up to like the 125 ish thousand dollars range you know that's what i'm hoping to get back to but it's not the 170 grand and a lexus like it once was now however and we've all the reason i know this and you can say jeremiah no you're wrong you're wrong and maybe i am wrong but the truth is i have already seen this if you've been in the industry long enough you've seen the cycles of technology as technology comes and goes new things come old things go the old things that some sticks around and what you see is that as people leave networking because you know it's just not as it's not as uh sexy as it once was those salaries then begin to climb again so i am hoping that i can get a few years in and are in the 125 range and then switch over to a consultancy or you know where i become an independent contractor or consultant and i can make good money for the rest of you know until i retire doing you know in you know odds and end projects as the demand for the ccie love that high-end networking continues or increases because there's fewer and fewer people doing the job as an example of this i used to work with a guy who oops he he was an expert in a specific type of phone system and the thing was everything was moving to voip and those older style phone systems were dying off well the company i was working for we had a lot of customers with those older style phone systems so we had people on staff who knew those older things they tended to be older guys they were some of them were approaching retirement and one of the guys that i worked with he wasn't approaching retirement but he happened to know this one phone system he literally got a job working in a tropical paradise making very good money because he knew this older technology that most places have phased out so he managed to you know his his career had gone from here he took a little dip as the technology became less and less popular but then he shot back up as all the people kind of dropped out of that field and made his skill set more rare so that's kind of the wave that i expect to ride at the same time it's also worth noting that i'm not putting all my eggs in the cisco basket people seem to think that because i'm working on my ccia i'm putting all my eggs in the cisco basket no the moment i finish my cca i'm immediately starting on juniper immediately i want to get some juniper certs i want to do some cisco security stuff and then i want to look at maybe aruba or hpe and see what else is out there and go from there and then i want to go back to school so this is this is an ending this is a never-ending journey until the day i retire of constantly adding new skills building new skills so within a year after my ccie is finished i expect that i will know a lot more about cloud than i do today i will know a lot more about other vendors than i do today but you have to like i don't understand what these people are saying like i'm wasting your time with cca why learn all those those protocols and technologies in depth when you can you learn get four different certifications at a high levels or whatever you want to call it a a mid-tier level of knowledge because you know that's the way to really advance your career is to be mediocre at a bunch of things like yeah you can make a good living doing that or you can make a really good living being smart and really knowing the technologies and whatever so um that's my two cents about this whole thing and i could be entirely wrong but uh i don't think i am so we'll see how it plays out hey thanks for watching i'll see in the next one

Channel: Jeremiah Wolfe

Views: 1,673

Keywords: CCIE, IT Certification

Id: M1UtAAckEZo

Length: 44min 46sec (2686 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021