Cynicism and Regret Are Powerful Design Tools

Question : “Greg, do you trust any­thing at all ?“
Answer : “Yes, I trust the les­sons that I learned last time I got it wrong”

Your Personality is part of the design

Many engin­eers are not really in touch with their feel­ings, prob­ably most people are not but engin­eers work on facts, knowns, proof and tan­gible ele­ments. But your per­son­al­ity has a sig­ni­fic­ant part to play in the choices that you make when designing.

Choices ? Yeah, choices. Hundreds of little choices that add up to big impacts. Like these ones:

• Should I get the Blue Coat SG810-​​10 or increase the capa­city for the SG810-​​25. Could I trade off the extra cost to get lar­ger ProxyAV to improve the anti-​​virus scan­ning per­form­ance instead ?
• A couple of stack­able switches or should I choose a C4500 chassis with a low end super­visor ? What about a second hand piece of kit ? Would that work here ?
• Should I get that IOS IPBase image, or Advanced IP Services image just in case ?
• That Cisco ASA5510 fire­wall, should I get the redund­ant pair or would one do ? It’s not a really import­ant func­tion here so we could cut corners there. They are pretty reli­able aren’t they ?
• Single mode fibre or mul­timode ? Is it ninety metres from rack to rack, can I just guess ?

In these cases, it’s your out­look that decides whether you are pos­it­ive or neg­at­ive. If you are feel­ing good, you might go for the more aggress­ive choice and fight for the extra money. But after a long week, you might have had enough and decide togo for the easy life and just go cheap.

It’s fair enough.It’s the choices that you make that all come together into the final solution.

Regret

In these moments I draw upon the dark well of regret in my soul. Because I have made these choices in the past, and then regret­ted them later. I look back and wish I had done it dif­fer­ently, or pushed the point a bit harder to get the right equipment.

Regret reminds me that there is right way, and you need to strive for that. For those of us who are in the same job for many years, think of all the prob­lems that are in your net­work and wish you had of done dif­fer­ently. Like not buy­ing that Checkpoint fire­wall, or repla­cing it when you had the chance two years ago. Or get­ting the lar­ger load bal­an­cer only to find it wasn’t needed after all.

Regret is a power­ful tool to remind you to make the right choice.

Promises Promises

We all joke about Account Managers and Sales People. Those people who are account­able to their com­pany, not yours, and have about as much man­age­ment skill as a foot­ball team (most prob­ably because that is their only qual­i­fic­a­tion, sport).And yet, some­thing hap­pens to those sales people, who are oth­er­wise hon­est but their income depends on selling you some­thing, any­thing. When they prom­ise that their product /​ com­pany /​ ser­vice is:

• mar­ket lead­ing, if only you con­sider a small enough part of the market.
• Oh yes, my fire­wall will pro­tect from all known strains for H1N1
• We expect the per­form­ance to be much greater than that lis­ted on the bro­chure, we took the worst case for those tests
• We expect to have that product ship­ping next month.
• No, our soft­ware pro­cess ensures that we don’t have many sig­ni­fic­ant bugs.

So now it’s CYNICISM that stops me from accept­ing that any­thing as truth. It’s cyn­icism that

• gets the vendor to put all their claims in writing
• to meas­ure the telco deliv­ery time to install a cir­cuit, and then raise the issue to senior man­age­ment the day the dead­line passes
• that I delib­er­ately over spe­cify the product because I have to assume that per­form­ance is MUCH less than the promised

Trust no one

In short, a good designer trusts no-​​one, believes noth­ing, and assumes the worst case. Why ? Because then you will never be let down.

This may not be the most joy­ous way to live your life but the altern­at­ive is muh worse. If you have spent time sur­roun­ded by failed tech­no­logy pro­jects such as Storage Upgrades that blew up or Server Migrations that cor­rup­ted the data, or the Network expan­sion to shut­down the entire data centre, then you might want to start think­ing about Cynicisim and Regret.

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