Earlier today Ethan Banks wrote a really good blog posts about “Thoughts on Working as a Consultant for a VAR“. I found his point of view quite interesting and I will say I can understand his points. I can also say that I would rather be a consultant than a full time engineer at a customer site. As a little bit of background I have spent most of my career working as a consultant. I did do a two year stint as network operations manager for a wireless ISP which itself was quite fast paced, but other than that Ive work as a consultant in one form or another.

Maybe I have ADD, maybe I just need to focus, but I have found that constantly having different projects going allows me to satisfy these tendencies. I feel I work better with more than one thing to occupy my time. I see friends who work for enterprise customers who spend their days submitting change requests that third party support companies fulfil, or spend months writing detailed design guides for projects that inevitably get canceled and all that time is spent without getting to touch the things they got into this industry for. Which brings me to my first point…

Toys, Toys Toys!

Im 32 years old, and I still love toys. Sometimes I think the only reason why Im in this industry is the ability to play with expensive and complex toys. And I get paid to do it! I enjoy the challenge of learning a new piece of equipment and deploying it into a customers network. I enjoy learning all the new opportunities that a new software update or a router line card can offer to my upcoming network designs (my sales guys also enjoy being able to sell those things to existing customers… bloody sales drones!).

I have worked at my current employer for 10 months now and in that time I have worked on many projects, not the least of which has included rolling out the second Juniper QFabric deployment in Australia (and one of the first in the world), delivering security solutions based on high end data centre SRX devices including IDP, SSL Inspection and Proxying, a relatively large Juniper MAG deployment across multiple sites with failover, and numerous network audits across many verticals including finance, utilities, enterprise and service provider networks.

The other aspect to toys is the ability to get your hands on all the right equipment to learn and play with *before* you need to deploy it. This really comes into its own when you have…

The right employer

Ethan’s posts hinted at being burned by his previous employer. I know I can attest to that over the past 15 years Ive been in the industry. Sometimes its the customers, sometimes its the employer. The right employer will understand your career aspirations and will endeavour to provide you with all the resources you need to be successful during both your time with them as well as your career beyond them. The right employer understands how often engineers change jobs in this industry and that what goes around comes around.

Your employer needs to understand that certification is beneficial to him, but more importantly that you as the engineer need to understand the content of the exams you are passing. Perpetuating the degradation of industry certifications by promoting brain dumps or becoming a “puppy factory” for certifications churning out sub-par engineers devalues both the certification as well as your ability to sell your services to customers.

The right employer will cover your expenses for gaining certification, and provide you with the resources, both equipment and time, to actually complete these career goals.

If you’re lucky your VAR will give you access to both pre-sales and post-sales implementation work giving you a wider view point of the network life cycle as well as building up skills that end customer engineers will never get to practice. And you will do that many times a week!

Honest about the downsides

• You’re supposed to know everything: I agree with Ethan that this can be stressful, but it doesn’t take long to pick up the habit of either being one google search ahead of the others, or as I often say “Not knowing the answer, but knowing where to find them”. If you work for a consulting firm that doesn’t require your customers to buy some form of vendor TAC support then you are further against the wall and you/they are not operating in your customers best interest. *Always* have the ability to escalate.
• You’re a commodity: Yes you are a commodity, but you also are (should be) “in demand”. If you are doing your job well, and your employer knows how best to leverage your skill set appropriately (not always in your control) then this works in everyones favour. If you are not doing your job well then you shouldn’t be a consultant, and if your employer doesn’t know how to effectively sell your skills you should be looking elsewhere. You will get abused, ignored and eventually get bored and quit or made redundant. Scary truth, but its better to move on and find something you are happier doing.
• You’ll sacrifice your body if you’re not careful: Well I’m not even going to pretend to deny this one. I am living proof that ignoring the health aspects of your life will creep up on you, but Im not convinced this is specifically related to VAR lifestyle. Any high stress, fast paced career can do this to you. You just need to keep these things in check. On a side note to this one, I’ve taken up a Paleo/Primal lifestyle for the past couple of months and Ive found wonderful improvements to my health without major sacrifices (in both time and diet), but thats a whole other blog post!

Mop and Bucket

Yes working for a VAR can be hard work. It can be fast paced and involve a lot jumping between contexts, but if you are like me you just may find that the very draw card to this career option.

Sometimes I dream about working on a single network and finishing all those “little things” that I wish I could implement for all of the networks I build. Then I spend two weeks onsite at a customer and all I want to do is get out of there.

If you are willing to invest 12 months of your life to “give it a go”, you will learn far more in that time, and touch a wider array of equipment than you could hope to touch in 3 technology refresh cycles at an end customer.

And this is what keeps me coming back to work tomorrow!

The Setup

So there I was, setting up my “command centre” for the 15 hour flight from Sydney to San Jose via San Francisco. I had my Macbook and my iPad fully charged, as well as ye olde print book ready just in case. I idly flipped through the inflight entertainment guide to see what movie would be playing on the main cabin display.

“Midnight in Paris” ? What’s this rubbish? Oh… Woody Allen… right… yeah… that’s just what I need 🙁

Thankfully I usually fall asleep the minute the plane pulls away from the terminal and wake up just as we’re coming into land. Should be able to sleep most of the way, and maybe read a few pages of my book between naps. This usually gets me in trouble with my wife, but I was flying solo on this trip so I was free to do as I pleased.

As fate would have it, my Macbook battery was at about 50% just as the movie started so I decided to “save some for a rainy day”.

Let me put on my headphones and see what this movie is like. It’s a Woody Allen flick (in Paris no less) so Im bound to be asleep in 20 minutes.

Oh it’s about “Art” is it? Lets make that 15 minutes!

Why is Rachel McAdam’s character such a bitch? That’s not like her.

Hrrmm… I never realised how much Owen Wilson acting the way he always does was so much like Woody Allen before.

And just like that, I was sucked into watching this movie I had no desire to see!

The Wonder

So the premise of the movie is that Owen Wilson’s character, Gil, is a writer on vacation in Paris. His romantic notions of life in Paris during the 1920’s, during the time of Picasso, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, are at odd’s with his wife and her family. While he wants to revel in the beauty and atmosphere, they are more interested in keeping up appearances.

During a stroll on his own looking for inspiration, and after a few drinks, he finds himself lost as the clock strikes midnight. At this time an old car pulls up along the road and the occupants invite him to join them. During this trip he is transported back to the 1920’s where he meets his heroes Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Gertrude Stein, and a whole host of other literary and artistic greats. Over the course of the movie he spends his days with his family and his nights with his heroes. During his time with his heroes he is able to approach each of them for advice about his book, his personal situation and life itself.

This same opportunity was offered to me back in 2011, and that was why I was on this plane. I had been invited to attend Tech Field Day’s Network Field Day 2 at the end of October of that year. I had actually received the invitation on night of my birthday in early September, and here I was with the opportunity to rub shoulders with my own personal heroes in the networking industry. The likes of Ivan Pepelnjak from a blog I read daily (blog.ioshints.info), Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks from the Packet Pushers Podcast, not to mention Stephen Foskett the man behind the whole event, as well as several regular contributors to the Packet Pushers Community and friends from Twitter. Just like Gil, I had the opportunity to get feedback and advice from those whose advice I sincerely valued. The ability to sit down with both the other delegates as well as the representatives of each of the sponsors was truly insightful.

Coming from Sydney, the “scene” in the whole Bay Area is entirely different to what I was used to. People dressed extremely casually here and there was a vibrant community buzzing with all sorts creative and cutting edge technologies. This was uniquely demonstrated during the Open Flow Symposium that was held on the day before the Network Field Day event began. Both vendors, implementors and attendees were all excited about the possibilities that were coming. Some of these ideas I was aware of before arriving in San Jose, but the depth and pace of these changes took me by surprise. Everybody was open about ideas – both what would, wouldn’t and couldn’t possibly work! Many names and faces I had been following online for the past 18 months attended this event. I was in awe of everything. I dont think I spoke to too many people that day as I was too stunned.

Over the next (densely packed) two days, we were taken from vendor site to vendor site and presented with their latest and greatest – and usually by their brightest. No questions seemed off limits and each of the vendors truly seemed to take on board the questions we raised and the “advice” we offered. These two days were completely information overload mode, and I dont think I was prepared to capture all of the useful information that was being presented to us. I have had to go back and watch the various videos several times to see what parts I had previously missed.

One thing that was pointed out to me by Stephen Foskett as we were driving through all these massive campus buildings was that “Over there is this massive building, costing millions of dollars. They do something in our industry, and I have no idea who they are. And this area is filled with these places. It’s exciting to see so many new companies and wonder ‘whats going on in there’ “.

I had an opportunity to spend intense nerdy times with the other delegates and sponsors during the jam-packed days, then follow on into the night just geeking out because the atmosphere was so charged. Everywhere I turned there were people doing “great things” that I wanted to be a part of.

Just like Gil, I too was caught in the position of “being where I wanted to be, and never wanting to leave”

The Reality

After 5 days away, I returned home to my normal life. Well, sort of normal. My wife was in the middle of a three month stint working in an outback Aboriginal Community School, and I wasn’t going to see her for another week or so. Then there’s all the things at work that needed tending to since I had been away.

I found my self longing to be back in San Jose with the group I had just spent so much time with. It didn’t matter that all the other delegates had returned to their own homes, that is where I wanted to be. And my reality was far removed.

“Nostalgia is denial – denial of the painful present… The name for this fallacy is ‘Golden Age Thinking’, the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the time one is living in. It’s a flaw in the Romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to live with the present.”

This quote above comes from a character in the movie who was a know-it-all A-hole, but he had a point. His witty remark to Gil’s character was both spiteful yet accurate, though his didn’t stop Gil from still pursuing his dream.

I knew that if I wanted to progress it into the areas in the industry that I wanted to be a part of, that I would have to make certain changes to my career path. I mapped out what I felt were a series of career goals and achievements that I would need to accomplish in order to make headway. Since this time I have changed jobs to focus on the particular projects and technologies I felt I needed, buckled down, put in a lot of study and research.

Also during this time I went into “Social Media Radio Silence”, as I was busy focusing on some of my end goals and needs. I was so busy focusing on the future, I was completely ignoring the present. I had lost my inspiration to write because I felt so overwhelmed by all the things I didn’t know. Instead of documenting my discoveries, I was actively avoiding the things I couldn’t answer.

Life got in the way and I was feeling discouraged.

The Re-Awakening

During Gil’s trips back and forth between time periods, he meets a young French girl from the 1920’s named Adriana. Even though she lived in the time period that Gil romanticised, she longed to live in an earlier period of Paris’ history – a time she felt was truly inspired. And fate (and of course the script) would have it, both Gil and Adriana found themselves in Adriana’s romanticised time – La Belle Epoque!

While Adriana is lost in her dream, they meet Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas who themselves were discussing how “this generation is uninspired”. This is when Gil discovered the truth, and had to explain it to Adriana who didn’t want to leave:

“Adriana, if you stay here though, and this becomes your present then pretty soon you’ll start imagining another time was really your… You know, was really the golden time. Yeah, that’s what the present its. It’s a little unsatisfying because thats what life is – just a little unsatisfying”

And in with these words both Gil, and myself of re-watching the film, knew what needed to be done.

If I ever want to write something worthwhile, I have to get rid of my illusions that I’d be happier in the past”

Mop and Bucket

In early February, Stephen Foskett was out in Australia to keynote two VMUG gatherings in Sydney and Melbourne. During this time we spent the better part of two days catching up, discussing life, the industry, and careers. Whether he knows it or not, those conversations really helped solidify some of my goals and plans.

I’ve learnt that Australia is no farther away than I make it, and I can still be quite active and involved even if I am not “in the heart of things”. Positioning oneself to take advantage of opportunities that arise, and to connect with various people both within our industry, as well as the clients we have, is the best way to stay in front of the game and stay involved. This is evident in the fact that I was invited to be a Juniper Ambassador in October 2012.

I would like to think that I have more technical posts coming in the near future, because it certainly feels like a long time since my last one. I’m feeling inspired again, and getting ready to re-engage. And for that, I am truly sorry 😉

PS. Please refer to my Disclosure Statement in reference to my participation in the Tech Field Day events, as well as the Juniper Ambassador program.

Im not sure how many of you follow my wife, @MrsJanitor, on Twitter but we met 7 years ago today.

When I asked about our plans for today she surprised me with some information. Ever the romantic I decided to publicly share my love, and thus I present you:

And to show just how much she “gets me” her only reply was:

Yes, my wife is a high school teacher and she carries her Juniper umbrella on playground duty!

Love you babe and life wouldn’t be the same without you!

PS. Belinda is the owner of all vendor swag that enters this house. So remember that when you are choosing what to hand out guys 😉

Well, now that we’re into February, I guess I should probably do a post about the new website layout I worked on over the Christmas break. Hopefully if your viewing this from my website, as opposed to via an RSS feed, you notice my new theme as well as the amazing new logo provided by Stijn from Studio Stayne.

I approached Stijn in November about some design ideas I had for a logo for the blog, asking very non-creative questions with some pretty broad strokes ideas of what I was after. Within a couple of days he had presented me with a handful of options that were all unique, yet still managed to meet my design “spec”. Im not good at making decisions, but after some ideas back and forth about the things I liked I received several more workshopped ideas taking the best bits of each design. The fact that I am not very creative is probably obvious given the layout of my blog for the previous two years, but taking some advice from Stijn and incorporating his selection of colour scheme into the theme I had been testing out really helped me make the right decisions. I cannot guarantee that the content of my blog posts will get any better, but it certainly will look a lot better while you’re here 😉

I know that a couple of my Twitter and Facebook friends have approached Studio Stayne for some new logos since I released these new designs, and I cannot recommend their services strongly enough. Make sure you take the time to check out the gallery of other artworks he has provided in the past, as some of it is truly amazing. Follow them over at Facebook on their page.

More technical content coming soon!