Human Infrastructure 328: Hired Fast, Fired Faster

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
October 26, 2023

Hired Fast, Fired Faster

by Greg Ferro

Many companies are quick to hire new staff if executives believe that growth or expansion will happen. Executives’ egos are fragile and easily swayed by chasing dreams of the next big thing, a new market opportunity, or whatever’s trendy. There are vast pools of funding and/or budgets available to support the process.

The reverse side is that low growth or a failed market quickly leads to layoffs. Increasingly we see that these so-called leaders do not want to clean up the mess of the failure. Instead of reallocating headcount or finding new opportunities, it's easier for companies to cut entire business units so they can play golf this weekend instead of reworking budgets.

As an example consider the 5G market. In the last few months, Ericsson and Nokia have announced headcount reductions of between twenty and thirty thousand people between the two companies. Unsurprisingly, the much hyped 5G market will be a slow rollout over decades as telcos take their time to replace aging 4G infrastructure after early deployments in key areas.

At Scale, Talent And Hard Work Don’t Mean Much

I take the view that some companies are aggressively hiring to build out new products and markets, but also aggressively firing when the numbers don't work. These events can be driven by inflation, investors/shareholders wanting faster growth/returns, poor decision-making by executives, or similar reasons. The fact is, your personal contribution will have little overall impact on the decision to ditch people.

For Human Infrastructure like you and I, this is a time to be aware. That cool new technology could be your next career wave or a short ride to unemployment. Brand vendors, like VMware and Cisco, with huge headcounts and stable revenues, have yearly purges of thousands. Being talented or hard working doesn't mean much at that scale.

One career tip I've always offered: always be ready to quit your job. Sometimes it's your employer quitting you, but be prepared and it won’t be so bad.

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

A Deep Dive Into RF Offsets - Jake Snyder
Jake Snyder writes about dealing with offsets in a wireless network. In a Wi-Fi context offsets are “the difference between your survey device and an actual end-user device, or it can be the difference between what the predictive design states the signal should be vs what a real device measures.” For example, a wireless survey device might give you one measurement of a signal coming off an AP, but a laptop or phone might produce a different result. This can be a problem when APs are placed based on results of a wireless survey, but offsets between the survey tool and real-world devices could affect, for example, roaming. Jake goes into detail on different ways to account for offsets. You don’t have to be a wireless engineer to learn some things from this post. It raises essential questions for all technical folks: What outcome do I want? How am I measuring for that outcome? Can my design be altered to address the difference between the plan and the deployment? - Drew

On technological optimism and technological pragmatism - Dave Karpf
You may have heard of Marc Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto declaring that technology growth will lead to “a far superior way of living, and of being,” and that anyone who says otherwise is a liar or zombie. This manifesto also has a list of enemies. Heady stuff!

Dave Karpf wrote what could be considered a rejoinder to the manifesto, except that Karpf wrote his piece months before Andreesen’s manifesto appeared. I don’t think Karpf has access to a time machine. It’s more that the ideology of techno-optimism–i.e. all our problems can be solved by tech and only idiots will stand in its way–has been floating around Silicon Valley for decades. But I prefer Karpf’s more nuanced take. He’s not a doomsayer or scold, but he’s also not willing to accept the techno-optimist’s promises at face value. If you don’t read the whole piece, at least read and contemplate this passage from Karpf: “There are no guarantees that things will turn out very well for anyone. A sunny disposition is not an action plan or a to-do list. “Just have faith” is a strategy that forecloses our capacity to challenge power. If the world is going to get better, it will only happen through concerted, shared, collective effort.” - Drew

Welcome to Metric-time.com - Metric Time.com
Today we measure time using a Base12 system: 12 months = 1 year, 60 mins = 5 x12 and so on. For sure Base12 is a useful count because it’s divisible by 1, 2, 3,4, 6 and 12 which is useful way to avoid fractions or decimal points. A metric measurement system is based on decimals: thus a metric minute has 100 seconds, a metric hour has 100 minutes and a metric day has 10 hours. It's interesting to consider how simpler code for metric time would be? - Greg

Kristina writes about her experiences volunteering at a day-long event to introduce 5th-grade girls to tech and coding, including a workshop session on block programming. She notes that the event reminded her of how important it is for technologists to get out of their comfort zones to explore and take risks while looking for solutions. She also writes “We need more initiatives like this and we need more women in tech. Too many times I'm still there alone, among men at tech-related activities, and I want to do whatever I can to contribute to this change.” I think we all can contribute more to that goal. By the way, Kristina is co-host of the Kubernetes Unpacked podcast if you’d like to check it out. - Drew

TECH NEWS 📣

Apple backs national right-to-repair bill, offering parts, manuals, and tools - Ars Technica 
Apple and other equipment makers have fought ‘right-to-repair’ legislation in the past, but apparently Apple has decided to throw in the towel. The company recently announced it will make parts, tools, and manuals available to independent repair shops and to consumers for its phones and computers. Ars Technica speculates that Apple gave in after California passed a right-to-repair law, joining four other US states with their own right-to-repair requirements. Now Apple is backing a federal law in hopes of more uniform legislation. I support a consumer’s right to repair because it can save money and reduce waste. Glad to see Apple on board. - Drew

Death to captchas - Technology Review 
This is an interesting article on how AI has made legacy captchas, which were designed to differentiate between a human and a bot, easier for the bots to beat. Captcha-alternatives are emerging, some of which sound terribly invasive (tracking cursor movements or browsing behaviors, for example), and some of which are slightly more privacy-friendly.

The article describes one option in the later category, called Privacy Pass, thusly: “Before we even open a browser and run into a captcha challenge, we perform numerous actions on our phones and computers—like unlocking them with our faces—that are hard for a bot to imitate. On a Privacy Pass–enabled website, our devices take all that information and attest for us—allowing us to skip the captcha altogether. This data never leaves your device and isn’t shared with the website.”

A private attestation method sounds much more palatable to me, but I’ve also learned never to bet against a) the rapacity of online companies for any crumbs of data that could be used to fingerprint users, and b) the endless cleverness of humans who build bots that can defeat bot-catchers. - Drew

BackBox integrates automated network configuration management capabilities with network vulnerability management into common workflows. NVM is purpose-built for network teams to easily discover and score vulnerabilities in their network, then prioritize and automate updates based on actual risk.

Without entering a credit card you can use it now on a variety of sample network devices in a private sandbox environment here.

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Illuminating Router Vendor Diversity Within Providers and Along Network Paths - ACM 
This paper describes the results of research to fingerprint routers on the Internet to identify the router vendors. The research team developed a tool, Lightweight FingerPrinting (LFP), to identify router vendors using just 10 packets. The paper digs into how the tool works, the different protocols employed, measuring the tool’s accuracy against a labeled dataset, use cases for such fingerprinting, and the results of their scanning. They also compare the performance of LFP to existing tools including NMAP. Lots of interesting detail in here. The abstract is linked above. You can get an ungated PDF of the full paper here. - Drew

Oxidized - Network Device Configuration Backup 
From the README.md. “Oxidized is a network device configuration backup tool. It's a RANCID replacement! It is light and extensible and supports over 130 operating system types.” The README also notes that Oxidized is looking for an additional maintainer. I might have mentioned Oxidized in this newsletter before, but I was reminded of it again by Steve Puluka who has been a Packet Pushers podcast guest and community contributor.

Steve reports, “You mentioned in the GitNops episode the need for git repository of network configurations. There is an open source solution Oxidized that does this. Pull regular backups into a Git repo with version control of the changes. This is the solution we used at DQE Communications as one of the sources in the automation solutions you discussed with Ivan and myself. I just wanted to let you know that this is not just a general open source project but one we actively found helpful. One of the other great features of having backups in a Git repo is the ability to search and ask questions about the entire deployment without touching devices. So you can confirm configurations or missing stanzas quickly. Another feature is the ability to run show commands during the backup operations and save the output. So you can see status at the snapshot time interval for troubleshooting as well.” Thanks, Steve! - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Nokia demonstrates the use of ChatGPT as an LLM conversational interface for SR-Linux command line. Writing plain english request for show bgp neighbours and formatting the log output into tables is interesting example of improving the operational efficiency. - Greg

Cisco and Bang & Olufsen Unveil New Wireless Earbuds for Secure Hybrid Work - Cisco
Cisco announces earbuds from Bang & Olufsen that are optimised for Webex. They are rebadged with a Cisco logo of the Beoplay EX product which sells retail for $399. There won’t be any physical differences because Webex relies on third party hardware for all its functions and I’m not sure what software changes would “features critical for today's hybrid workforce, including enhanced security and device management for IT teams.” I’m guessing Cisco is betting that executives want to get high-quality, company-issued earbuds instead of buying their own, which leads, of course, to tracking those assets. And that tracking would be important when they cost $400 a piece. Oh, and you could justify that because Webex. Golf on Friday is it? Also, sales kickbacks. - Greg

Project Silica - Microsoft
Microsoft has spent six years working to turn glass-based storage into a workable technology. Previously developed as a research project in the UK and then acquired by Microsoft, the basic idea is to target lasers into three dimensional glass substrate which is a permanent write only medium. It requires no power to sustain the data and while tape degrades in about ten years, the glass substrate will last for long time. In my view, this is a true innovation that changes long term storage and it's probably the only ‘innovation’ in data center technology in the last decade. It’s not incremental, it’s a disruptive change that will slowly displace the tape industry. - Greg

LAST LAUGH 😆