Imposter Syndrome Network Podcast
19 September 2023 · 3 min read
I had the honor to join Chris Grundemann & Zoe Rose on the Imposter Syndrome Network Podcast. We talked USNUA, Ohio IX and the importance of one's human network. It was a really fun conversation! Check it out.
The movie theater and the back room
I got into tech because a coworker at the movie theater took a job at a regional dial-up ISP and said he could get me in for a couple of dollars more an hour. Networking was simply what was around me. Then the company merged, our group's jobs went away, and for seven or eight months in 1999 we were told to hang tight. Surfing the internet all day gets boring faster than you would think, so we pulled switches and routers out of the back room, hit the question mark on the Cisco CLI for everything we did not understand, and taught ourselves. Chris had a version of the same story at Time Warner Telecom, where automating the provisioning work freed his team up to get their JNCIEs. Zoë's point was that the shared ingredient is self-motivation, and for me it was that the more I learned, the more I wanted to take the kit home.
The $50,000 script
The reassignment landed me on a new DSL team under my first real mentor, Nathan, who taught me the Linux command line, Perl and Expect so I could automate. My first project was changing the administrative passwords on about 52 DSLAMs across three markets. The script deleted every admin user instead, locked us out of all of them, and required a field procedure with a jumper on each controller to recover. It cost roughly $50,000 in professional services. Nathan could have fired me. He asked what we had learned and suggested we talk about testing before executing next time. Chris's stove analogy is right: you get burned once and you test with the back of your hand forever after. Today my role is less hands-on and more about hiring the right people, but that experience planted the idea that a five-minute-per-box task could be ten minutes for the whole fleet, and everything I believe about automation freeing engineers to think about the business comes from it.
Community and hiring
We covered the USNUA's origin as the Ohio NUG in 2017, the COVID pause that became a template, and the 15 to 20 chapters in flight at the time, including the Vermont launch I had just come back from. Zoë, who insists she is not a social person, said meetups like that were the reason she has the career she has. Chris asked how I find good people, and the answer is the same network: I kept mental bookmarks on the engineers who were good on support tickets years ago, and the people who spend a free evening at a NUG tend to be the ones passionate enough to hire.
Where the imposter syndrome lives
Zoë asked why I stepped back from hands-on work. Partly my engineers told me to, politely, because I had gotten rusty enough to be in the way. Partly the business took me: taxes, raising money, all of it. Volunteering at the Ohio IX is how I keep my hands dirty, with IXP Manager and APIs, without my own staff giving me grief. And when Chris asked the show's real question at the end, my answer was that the imposter feeling is not on the technical side at all. It is on the business side, where I found a lot of shortcomings when I went from engineer to owner. My advice to a younger me: pay attention to the rest of the business you work in, sales, provisioning, all of it, not just the engineering. And when you do not know something, forgive yourself and go ask the people in your network who have built something before.
