VLOG 2: CCIE how hard is it? Is it worth it?

[Music] hello everybody han song here to talk about career advice and technology kind of a vlog series so i'm getting back to the thumbnail that you saw here so whenever you see the green border that means it's going to be more like a podcast talking about things etc if you are here for the tcp course this is the border and thumbnail that you would see okay and you can see that um anything with a blue border means it's the actual tcp packet analysis content itself so tune in for that if there are enough questions for follow-up i'll make a detailed q a session and that'll have an orange background i talked about this in my previous video on packet analysis but i'll do this for a couple more sessions so that everybody gets used to it when you see a green one like this it means we're talking about industry advice etc so last week or two weeks before the career advice video was cut very abruptly right i talked about the cci lab and then boom game over it was because i don't want these sessions to last too long 15 minutes at most i think is a good number 15 20 minutes at most so i'll try to keep it to that length so getting back to the cci lab it yes it's a hard certification but it's not the holy grail it's not the end-all be-all someone asked me hey how hard is ccie now keep in mind this is a two-day lab that i talked about things have changed now it's one day and i'm okay with it one day because i thought the troubleshooting scenarios were a little bit contrived i don't know that there were real world examples there were more kind of gotcha you know stupid things that no you would hardly ever see in the real world so i thought i thought it was kind of a waste of time the first half day was setting up ip addresses who who can't do that right if you can't do that you shouldn't be sitting for the lab certainly so if you take those two things away it does come down to one day worth of test however when i took it the first time i actually failed and i know why i failed i was freaked out about it i let the moment overtake me and it started when i showed up at the door i showed up at the door there was a ten of us waiting i think it was and we're just you know hey how you doing how you doing the proctor opens the door and says oh john and jimmy uh you guys are in the rest of you didn't make it to day two have a nice life we'll debrief you later and then they said oh you four you're new come over here so i think eight people failed two went on so i guess they had 10 or maybe it was six and two i'm not sure but point being the vast majority failed and didn't advance to day two so i went oh man this sucks so i was already kind of psyched out i was already excited and i let the moment consume me so when i was starting to configure things and it wasn't working i didn't take my own advice of systematically troubleshooting that scenario and so what happened i ran out of time and and while i made it to day two i didn't progress after that okay i was so upset at myself that i came back and i refreshed that cci scheduling site i'm not even kidding every 30 minutes because people drop out right they drop out in and out so i was i can still picture myself sitting in long island city building of city group and just keeping refresh refresh refresh refresh and sure enough something opened up a week later so i signed up immediately so after i failed the first one two weeks later i rescheduled it and i went and told my boss uh john at the time hey john i need you know a couple days off i'm going to retake this cci and he says um i don't think you can take retake it that fast and i was like what are you talking about they let me the system let me do it okay so i signed up for it i showed up took the test and i didn't let it consume me because i knew what i was up against and i passed with flying colors in fact my proctor told me when we got to the the troubleshooting session he said after lunch at day two after lunch he said that was the final thing left he gave me kind of a talk and said hey hans now that you're a ccie don't find those stupid problems try to find the real problems related to routing and whatnot and i thought wait i'm sorry what did you just say and he said you know you have enough points to advance just represent yourself in troubleshooting and i was the happiest person alive conversely the person that was with me who made it to day two was struggling he was struggling and struggling struggling and at the end he might have gotten some extra time because this was his fifth attempt and i don't know i don't know that i would attempt something for the f you know five times because fundamentally i must be doing something wrong right so i would have taken a different attack plan like what am i doing wrong that i failed a test five times am i not studying right am i not doing things so anyway i thought there was some self analysis missing from that person but i don't know what happened to him i don't know if he passed or not but but again back to the story on day one when i was sitting at bgp my route reflectors weren't working it wasn't coming up and i couldn't i didn't understand why until i troubleshot and the person behind me used my route reflector by mistake because you have kind of you know you're you're assigned by row and column what server and ip your route reflectors you you're supposed to use he used mine and he kept overriding my configs and obviously it was set up for his and mine didn't work i called the proctor and said listen my config is good i know it's good but this guy screwed up and overwrote my stuff he looked at it and said yeah you're right but i can see your config it looks good move on and i said whoa i said can you make a note on my test paper and sign saying that you checked it out and said no i'll be here tomorrow i said i know but you know no offense but one in a million if you somehow can then the new proctor won't know i'm sure every student says oh yeah but it's right and somebody else screwed up right in this case it actually was that case so he wrote saying you know han songs configs are okay he co-stood and overrode his and whatnot but it again it didn't rattle me because i knew my stuff was good and it was correctly configured and then the he gave me that pep talk after lunch saying you're cci now make sure you troubleshoot the good stuff and not the the you know gimmicky stuff and i did and he gave me that post-it note with my four-digit number and i was very happy and people always say that you're never as sharp as the day you leave the lab after you get your number and it's true and it's you know we have other things to do and you start to lose it but because you built up such a solid foundation it takes a long time before all of that goes away i don't know if it's ever will go away in fact i still remember the address space that they gave me during the lab to slice it up i can actually recreate the entire scenario on a piece of paper and so you know the point here is that it's hard but it's about getting back to the original question that i never asked answered how hard is it think about 18 credit hours of sophomore level engineering workload and you're taking the finals in one day so 18 credit hours of sophomore level engineering workload all of that whole entire semester everything all 18 hours you take the final on one day that's about the equivalent workload not impossible but not easy either okay so that's kind of the cci story now the the other part of this is certification versus not certification it's the age-old debate is it worth it is it not worth it um and here's the thing it can't hurt you to have it in fact don't take certification for certification's sake with the exception that when you submit your resume your cv the hr person can't understand the jargon that you may be using or what you even wrote in the cv or resume but they do know what ccie and other certifications are right so they have a checklist of things and nowadays with ocr i'm sure it's you know pre-processed before even a human looks at it so for that sake it's good to have a certification and i'll tell you a story i was interviewing for an operations position i was helping to interview for operations team and i have a standard question that i ask i always use oh you should always have a standard question you shouldn't do it off the cuff because it's not fair sometimes you ask hard questions sometimes you ask easy questions always use the same question so that everybody's abilities can be tested using a common uh data point and he passed but he was struggling quite a bit he was struggling with the foundational concepts as opposed to how do you do x y z and he admitted to me he was nervous wreck and he said hanzon i know i'm a ccie but i don't have any practical experience i did it because i needed a career change i studied my ass off and i came from kind of a mainframe background i saw the world changing studied and became a ccie but zero practical experience and i recommended him for hire not because he told me that because he showed commitment he showed progress by jumping ship and taking on a pretty hard certification track and studied it well enough to understand the concepts and i've i've told this to everybody that i hired i can teach you technical things i can't teach you ethics work ethic morals good good you know don't be a jerk right that rule so study hard and pass the test because it'll help you open the doors from an hr perspective the other thing is don't ever try to bs your way through a technical checkout because the other person will know okay and the last thing you want to come off is is you're on that bubble of making and not making it and they cut you off because you try to bluster your way through technology i never understood this if someone asks you a technical question there's a technical answer so if they ask they of course must know the answer so why would you try to bluff your way through that so don't do that admit right away i don't know that or say you know that's actually just um rote memorization stuff i've memorized it once i don't have it now but it's on google i can find it in 10 seconds why don't we talk about the concepts behind that you can take it that approach if you do understand it and then the other one is you know i talked about in the first session how do you get more i said volunteer right so do volunteer because it's practice that makes you good malcolm gladwell wrote a book i think it was malcolm gladwell that it took ten thousand hours of training to become good okay at anything whether it's professional sports and whatnot and if i go back to my career and i think back ten thousand hours is about right the amount of time you have to invest to be really really good at it so again going back to that you know be 100 committed or go work elsewhere that i talked about in the first session make sure you're committed because this is an ever-changing field right we in technology live in dog years because the advancement of technology is so fast every year is like worth seven years in just about any other field if you're a carpenter which i don't i wouldn't mind being because i love woodworking but if you're a framer the the way to frame a house changes over time now there's passive house versus you know there's house wraps there are zip systems and flashing systems that change but if you look at the last 20 years it's not radical change whereas in technology 20 years ago versus now you wouldn't even be able to understand the concepts of what we do today from back then so make sure you read voraciously that i like i talked about volunteer and get that 10 000 hours in somehow what even if it's studying it's okay because if you have that knowledge the baseline knowledge then you can apply it once you get that opportunity and you can show it off during your interview and i i mention i think i mentioned this in my previous video your toolbox and certification courses and schools are teaching you how to use the tool okay and your job is to collect those tools and put it in your toolbox because at some point you're going to use it and so that's my advice to you is get the certification help open hr doors be confident in your interview but don't try to bs your way through that okay so the other story that i'll tell you is um you know people start out with help desk and they sometimes move up right help desk to maybe systems engineering servers and desktops to maybe network engineering and and whatnot and packet analysis is helpful in all throughout the case and you might think you can't do that you can't really start off from help desk and move up so i'll give you proof positive that's possible i was working on a project where it was for senior executives very very senior executives of city and i wanted to do a site visit because it's it's not too far from where i live and i did and the the project manager said hey hanson would you mind if so and so tagged along because he he's on the help desk helping the execs and it would be good for him to see the physical location and no issues so he came and we got to talking and he was studying he knew how routing and switching work but not in any detail he understood the concepts of it and this one i was able to configure bulk of it offline because you know just layer two switching and simple routing so while i had a change control and everything else i kind of cut and pasted it before and before i turned it over to operations who would then check it to make sure it was part of the made sure that it was per the change control and i said hey do you want to try it because i explained to them what it is i was doing why you know why i was typing these commands and what it means and how this spanning tree and this other things and how they work and you know kind of ten thousand foot view and he kind of grasped it grasped it and asked the next logical cogent question and i knew then that he had that esp the technology esp that i talked about he was inquisitive he was smart he wanted to learn and maybe was it two years later i got an email because he still worked at city he emailed me with his number good for him and then he went on to get yet another number so i think i had four people that i'm not saying i tutor them but i inspired the wrong word i introduced them to what's out there in the world of ccie and all four became ccies okay so it's it's doable i wouldn't be sitting here telling you this if i thought it was an impossible thing to climb ccies you that may not be the thing for you that's okay because there's security track now and it's easier to break in now because people expect you to be specialists the the demand for you know generalists at a very high level is not there they understand that there's too much to know so they try to pick somebody who's a specialist so pick security pick networking packet analysis sits on top of both network and actually all three right application but very few application people have the wherewithal to understand the networking but the reverse is true network people tend to understand generically how applications work but package analysis is kind of that unifying theme that sits on top of all the silos so make sure you get some practice in when you're sitting around airports airplanes that's a great time to get packet capture because airports are very very congested from air spectrum perspective airplane high high latency so you're getting a very different view of what abnormal packet trace looks like so do that get your 10 000 hours in okay so i think i'll wrap up for today because we're almost approaching 15 minutes don't forget though that keep an eye out for these types of thumbnails i'll mention it one more time green is what we're doing today which is advice orange is q a and blue is actually the wireshark blue is actually for tcp traces and those eagle-eyed people might know that my shirt color matches a thumbnail right how about that so so much for not being fashionable with that i'll leave it to you the next session i'll talk about is probably the major fails that i've had in my professional career i mean catastrophic failures that i can laugh at now but back then it was pretty brutal and aaron in one of my videos actually commented on saying hey hansen was great working with you he was the uh the not a benefactor but the what would be the word not victim either but more victim than benefactor of my claim and the fail and i'll explain what that abject total failure was and the circumstances behind it because it's humorous and i hope you get a chuckle out of that so we'll talk about that next time major fails and if you have some ideas and if you've had some major fails make sure you subscribe and comment so that we can all learn from that okay all right thanks have a great weekend take care guys

Channel: Hansang Bae

Views: 1,063

Keywords: Tcpip, wireshark, sharkfest, packet analysis, protocol analysis, sniffer, ethernet, technology, network engineering, SE, systems engineer

Id: CEfdNUgRZ3g

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020