Reaction: Billing by the Hour
A very common mistake I see among engineers of all stripes is a failure to fully appreciate the value of time—both what it is worth, and how to make your time more valuable.
What I normally see is something like this—I should be making $x/hour, because I have this specific experience, or that specific skill set. This focus on hourly pay, however, is actually counter productive. For instance, I recently ran across an article in a publication for graphic designers and illustrators (a world I have followed since I lived it in many years ago)—
To begin, what does Kyle mean when he says to “bill by value” rather than billing by the hour? Once, when I went into a lawyers office, I noticed he had a sign on the wall that said, “Lawyers don’t charge by the bullet.” The point the lawyer was making Continue reading
Weekend Reads 022318: Copyright, walls, and botnets
Akamai’s Fourth Quarter, 2017 State of the Internet, was released today in which it states that the analysis of more than 7.3 trillion bot requests per month has found a sharp increase in the threat of credential abuse, with more than 40 percent of login attempts being malicious. Additionally, the report warns DDoS attacks Continue reading
Short Take: The Broadcom SDKLT Announcement
My first short take at The Network Collective is up discussing the Broadcom SDKLT announcement. Does this really mean the end of vendors or network engineering? You can guess my answer, or you can watch the video and hear it for yourself.
History of Networking: Policy with Joel Halpern
Policy at Internet scale is a little understood, and difficult (potentially impossible) to solve problem. Joel Halpern joins the History of Networking over at the Network Collective to talk about the history of policy in the Internet at large, and networked systems in general.
Enterprise versus Provider?
Two ideas that are widespread, and need to be addressed—
First, there is no enterprise, there are no service providers. There are problems, and there are solutions.
When I was young (and even more foolish than I am now) I worked for a big vendor. When this big vendor split the enterprise and service provider teams, I thought this kindof made sense. After all, providers have completely different requirements, and should therefore run with completely different technologies, equipment, and software. When I thought of providers in those days, I thought of big transit network operators, like AT&T, and Verizon, and Orange, and Level3, and Worldcom, and… The world has changed since then, but our desire to split the world into two neat halves has not.
If you want to split the world into two halves, split it this way: There are companies who consider the network an asset, and companies that consider the network a Continue reading
Weekend Reads 180216: Skimmers and MITM and x509 Covert Channels, oh my…
He got the idea while analyzing the Vawtrak malware after discovering that it read multiple fields in the X.509 certificate provided by the server before proceeding. Jason initially thought these fields were used as a C2 channel, but then realized that Vawtrak performed a Continue reading