Dunno … I have a friend who is his own boss and he says that his boss often makes him work nights and weekends to get things done more quickly. He says his boss is often a real a$$hole!
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Yep, I worked for myself for a while. I discovered I was an overly demanding boss that wanted both excellent quality, on time delivery and the best prices.
It was a relief to go to work offshore and put in 120 hour weeks. Spend a week or away from home, and do dangerous things in dangerous places.
Cheers
Qazulight
4 Likes
I’ll meditate on this new information!! 
Meanwhile back at the ranch…
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WTH
I spent the longest 3 months of my career as a Sales Support Specialist. My job was to take sales orders (circa 2000) for tariffed optical circuits. Run them through a spreadsheet and see if they qualified, if they did get the engineering done, get buy in from each entity with a stake in the project, nail down a time line the hand the project off to a project manager.
We did have cost controls of a sort. However, I remember getting an order from one of the wiz bang neato wowwy companies that was one step into bankruptcy, and questioning selling them the half million dollar 5 year contract. I was told we could not hold up the contract as it might look like we were trying to bankrupt them. So passed the project, I am pretty sure the circuits never got installed.
That was a pretty intense time. I was one of 4 Sales support specialists and I started enough optical circuit builds in Houston in those three months to double the SBC optical backbone in Houston. I have no idea how much the rest of the team started.
Took my tools back and been a tech ever since. Never been really happy, but they keep paying me a lot to do a little so I keep showing up.
Cheers
Qazulight
3 Likes
This has been going on a long time.
There was mine collapse 30 years ago. It went back to incomplete routines. The mining company never recovered killing a bunch of people.
BP blew out a well, killed a bunch of
people and polluted the Gulf of Mexico. The cause was everyone expecting someone else’s safety to catch
any problems. BP was essentially destroyed.
These were not too big a deals. Wait until instability in the core backbone network rolls through what is becoming an asynchronous ethernet system. When the whole core timing fails, the whole core fails. Think a week with no credit cards, cell phones. electronic wire transfers, very limited internet - if any. Nation wide commerce will come to a grinding halt as there are few if any back office systems that can work on paper and cash.
That will be an interesting week.
Cheers
Qazulight
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What does this mean exactly? As far as I am aware, BP is still one of the 10 largest oil companies in the world and has nearly $200B in revenue.
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It always starts with a product. Henry Ford, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Sam Goldwyn, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell. It also requires some salesmanship, and some product originators have that, too (Steve Jobs for instance, or have a partner who has that trait.)
But inventors aren’t perfect either, sometimes they get so caught up with their baby that they don’t see the category moving past them (Henry Ford) or can’t seem to make the numbers work.
Accountants are good and necessary - and I couldn’t have had my career without them - but generally speaking I’d rather have a sales guy with a strong product guy right next to him, or a product guy with a strong sales guy in the 2nd chair, than an accountant anywhere near the top 1 or 2 position.
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Wendy,
The core network under the circuit switched system we used is a Synchronous, system with timing held in dedicated overhead. It also uses GPS clocking from NIST.
However, the core is backed up by Cesium beam clocks in the central offices and the
SONET equipment itself has clocks. The NIST is Stratum 0 and the Cesium beam is stratum 1. Secondary offices have stratum 2 clocks. The SONET equipment can have internal clocks with stratum 4 clocks which can only hold timing for a very short time without an external reference.
Now the core is moving to native ethernet with the optical system using DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing)
So now the core is up against timing an asynchronous network, a network that in the core is running not at 1 or 10 gigabits, but at 400 or 1000 gigabits. At these speeds and over longer distances the timing is critical. A lot of this has been addressed with recent IEEE updates to the protocols. But it still has gotchas.
The fear of a Broadcast storm is so big that one of the first things a new CCNA ( Cisco Certified Network Associate) candidate is taught is how to prevent them when configuring routers. A broadcast storm will shut an ethernet system down in a heart beat. Because of this, a broad cast storm is extremely unlikely. However, the mitigation measures can leave equipment without an input needed to maintain clocking.
Just like a sudden drop in power to the power grid can cause power plants that are working properly to shut down in a cascade. A loss of timing in the right place and at the right time can roll through the backbone network. Not really “can” but “does”. So far the network has been resilient. However, as we discussed in the thread about operational CEO’s vs financial CE0’s maintenance is deferred, programming is “agile” meaning deployed with less testing and troublesome internal rules are circumvented by reclassifying services so that they are not critical services.
As ethernet is pushed into the system, at some point, critical services, like the core backbone, become entangled with “competitive” services. The problem with this is a failure or misconfiguration in the non critical services may be able to propagate into the core backbone. Yes! Of course the executives and the top engineers think of this. But, the compensation incentives work against this.
This is just on aspect. As a layer zero guy, the physical layer, ethernet is layer 2 and layer 3 I am concerned mostly with just moving bits from point A to point Z. I see just at my layer the care for the physical plant is poor. But even a massive failure at a critical facility, would not take down the entire core. However, a massive failure at a critical facility might be able to propagate through the entire core if the safeties were not being observed and there was a human error in response.
The unassuming central office building in Omaha has Century Link, AT&T core and AT&T mobility in it. Now imagine a massive fire in that building. But a major east west route, and a major north south core route would be lost. At the same time, there would be a huge failure of AT&T mobility both because the switching equipment was lost and because the connectivity provided by the core network and the ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier in this case Century Link) would be lost. There would be other issues, a lot of Strategic Air Command administrative communications would be lost as well as FAA circuits, water control circuits, gas line control circuits, and electrical power grid circuits. Add in the loss of all 911 and E911 along with First Net and you have a situation where critical personnel cannot not be brought to bear to recover.
As the loss of network capacity would be significant, the core network would start dropping bits on low priority communications and rerouting. Most of this would happen in less than 50 milliseconds, much less actually. If there was a mis configuration that was never tested because the network never experienced that before. . . well . . . lets just be reminded that most of M2 is in the form of bits, not physical currency.
Cheers
Qazulight
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