CAREER – rule 11 reader

Personal branding and marketing are two key topics that surface from time to time, but very few people talk about how to actually do these things. For this episode of the Hedge, Evan Knox from Caffeine Marketing to talk about the importance of personal marketing and branding, and some tips and tricks network engineers can follow to improve their personal brand.

Evan Knox’s personal site

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Michael Natkin, over at Glowforge, writes: “That’s a funny thing about our minds. In the absence of information, they fill in the gaps and make up all sorts of plausible things, without the owners of said minds even realizing it is happening.” The answer, he says, is to overcommunicate. Michael joins Eyvonne Sharpe, Tom Ammon, and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to discuss what it means to overcommunicate.

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Many engineers have heard about the wide variety of Network Operator Group (NOG) meetings, from smaller regional organizations through larger multinational ones. What is the value of attending a NOG? How can you convince your business leadership of this value? In this episode of the Hedge Vincent Celindro and Edward McNair join Russ White to consider these questions.

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In this episode of the Hedge, Ethan Banks, Ethan’s old-timey routers, Tom Ammon, Tom’s printer, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White sit around the virtual hedge to talk about networking fundamentals. What are they, why are they important, how you learn them, and how to be intentional about your career.

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CHINOG is a regional network operators group that meets in Chicago once a year. For this episode of the Hedge, Jason Gooley joins us to talk about the origins of CHINOG, the challenges involved in running a small conference, some tips for those who would like to start a conference of this kind, and thoughts on the importance of community in the network engineering world.

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If there is one thing I notice when I look around at the IETF—and many other places where I meet a lot of network operations and engineering folk—it’s that we all seem to be getting a bit older. This should lead us to an obvious question—what are we doing about bringing up a new generation of network engineers? David Huberman joins Tom Ammon and I to discuss this interesting question. David i s involved in a number of community-based efforts to train next generation network engineers, some of which he discusses in his excellent article at the APNIC blog.

According to Michael Natkin, “in the tech industry, with our motto of “strong opinions, loosely held” (also known as “strong opinions, weakly held”), we’ve glorified overconfidence.” Michael joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the culture of overconfidence, and how it impacts the field of information technology.

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I failed to include the right categories the first time, so this didn’t make it into the podcast catcher feeds correctly…

Network engineering and operations are both “mental work” that can largely be done remotely—but working remote is not only great in many ways, it is also often fraught with problems. In this episode of the Hedge, Roland Dobbins joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of working remote, including some strategies we have found effective at removing many of the negative aspects.

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Nash King (@gammacapricorni) joins Russ White and Tom Ammon in a wide ranging discussion of ethics in IT, including being comfortable with standing up and saying “no” when asked to do something you consider unethical and the virtue ethic. This is meant to be the first of a series of episodes on this topic.

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Working in information technology is notoriously stressful — but why? In this episode of the Hedge, Sonia Cuff, Denise Donohue, and Russ White dig into the reasons information technology tends to produce so much stress, and what we can do about it.

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