标签: networking

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There are instances where networking can hurt you if you strive to "lose friends and alienate people." That may be an excellent movie title but not words to live by. In this blog, I focus on the good, and how you can use networking to advance your career. My full-time job: Obtained and advanced by networking Generally, the more appropriate way to leave a job is to be extremely nice to everyone and keep in touch after you leave. You never know when that will help you, especially if you stay in the same general geographical region. This has worked out well for me in several instances. In my current job, I had worked with one of the engineers at another company. I got along with him very well at the first company, and he helped me get the job at the second. Not only that, during negotiation it was extremely helpful to have him there to provide some guidance. Some companies just won't negotiate on certain things (like holiday time), but others will. Having a "man on the inside" is excellent to find out more information. Besides the process of actually getting the job, it was great to have someone I knew in the new job to introduce me to my new coworkers. It takes a while to get used to new faces, so this helps smooth your transition out. Additionally, having someone who you can trust that's been with a company for several years is a great resource for other more ambiguous questions. What's tolerated for company Internet use, who should you be nice to, or even whether or not you can take a snack break in the morning are good questions for a former/current colleague. My gig at EE Times: Another product of networking You might have inferred from this column that writing for EE Times isn't my full-time job. Interestingly, my part-time writing "career" started on Hackaday.com under the editorship of EE Times' own Caleb Kraft. After a year and a half of that gig, Caleb told me that he would have to let me go. With a gig like that you never know when things are going to change, and the site was going through a major transition. I wasn't too upset, and said something like "nice working with you." It wasn't personal, or even a reflection on my performance, but even if that had been the reason, there's no reason to leave on a bad (or possibly worse) note. Fast forward a few months later, and after keeping in touch (and on good terms) with Caleb, he offered me a gig writing for EETimes.com. It's been a fun assignment, and in addition I've been able to do several speciality articles for Hackaday. Whether you're a freelancer, business owner, or traditional employee, networking is an excellent way to get noticed and advance your career. It's been said that "It's not what you know, it's who you know." This may be true, but just as knowledge can be increased through study, schooling, or experimentation, "who you know" can be increased as well. If you both know the right people, and know what you're doing, you certainly have a recipe for success. Jeremy Cook is a manufacturing engineer with 10 years' experience and has a BSME from Clemson University.

In my previous blog , I discussed how networking can hurt you if you strive to "lose friends and alienate people." That may be an excellent movie title but not words to live by. In this part I focus on the good, and how you can use networking to advance your career. My full-time job: Obtained and advanced by networking Generally, the more appropriate way to leave a job is to be extremely nice to everyone and keep in touch after you leave. You never know when that will help you, especially if you stay in the same general geographical location. This has worked out well for me in several instances. In my current job, I had worked with one of the engineers at another company. I got along with him very well at the first company, and he helped me get the job at the second. Not only that, during negotiation it was extremely helpful to have him there to provide some guidance. Some companies just won't negotiate on certain things (like holiday time), but others will. Having a "man on the inside" is excellent to find out more information. Besides the process of actually getting the job, it was great to have someone I knew in the new job to introduce me to my new coworkers. It takes a while to get used to new faces, so this helps smooth your transition out. Additionally, having someone who you can trust that's been with a company for several years is a great resource for other more ambiguous questions. What's tolerated for company Internet use, who should you be nice to, or even whether or not you can take a snack break in the morning are good questions for a former/current colleague. My gig at EE Times: Another product of networking You might have inferred from this column that writing for EE Times isn't my full-time job. Interestingly, my part-time writing "career" started on Hackaday.com under the editorship of EE Times' own Caleb Kraft. After a year and a half of that gig, Caleb told me that he would have to let me go. With a gig like that you never know when things are going to change, and the site was going through a major transition. I wasn't too upset, and said something like "nice working with you." It wasn't personal, or even a reflection on my performance, but even if that had been the reason, there's no reason to leave on a bad (or possibly worse) note. Fast forward a few months later, and after keeping in touch (and on good terms) with Caleb, he offered me a gig writing for EETimes.com. It's been a fun assignment, and in addition I've been able to do several speciality articles for Hackaday. Whether you're a freelancer, business owner, or traditional employee, networking is an excellent way to get noticed and advance your career. It's been said that "It's not what you know, it's who you know." This may be true, but just as knowledge can be increased through study, schooling, or experimentation, "who you know" can be increased as well. If you both know the right people, and know what you're doing, you certainly have a recipe for success. Jeremy Cook is a manufacturing engineer with 10 years' experience and has a BSME from Clemson University.  

Initially, I planned to write a blog about networking, but I soon realised that there are two sides to networking. If done correctly, it can help you get a job or find out more about a certain employer. If done poorly, it might cost you a great opportunity. Here are my thoughts on this important skill, starting with the bad. How to burn bridges I recently saw an article on Medium.com titled " I wanted to work at Apple really bad, and now not so much ." Jordan Price writes about how he was extremely excited to get a six-month contract job with Apple. However, he didn't get along at all with his immediate supervisor, who insulted him and generally treated him with little respect. Price finally had enough and left without notice one day. On one hand, I can't blame him. I've worked for a few terrible bosses. At one company in particular, leaving in this manner probably wouldn't have been a bad idea. On the other hand, publicly insulting the largest US company won't win Price many friends. It's possible that parts of the company are excellent places to work, so this may come back to haunt him. Additionally, he was working for a third-party placement firm, which wasn't happy (to put it mildly) with him that way. Nevertheless, if Price's public appeal is seen by the correct person, maybe it will work out well for him in the long term. Certainly, he's not the only person disgruntled with how he's treated at work. Personal experience In my own work experience, it's really hard to tell if I have lost an opportunity due to someone who didn't like me or whom I offended somehow. If it has happened, I would guess the conversation went something like this. Boss: Hey, Jim, didn't you work with a guy named Jeremy Cook at KludgeCo years ago? Jim: Oh, Jeremy, yeah. Well, he was OK, but I didn't really like that he did X, and that he was kind of a Y person. It's possible that never happened. I like to think that I get along with most people. I do remember one instance where a colleague asked about a resume that the company had received. Since my cubicle was adjacent to his, he turned to me and said, "Didn't Jim work with you at the Stamping Shack?" Apparently, I gave him a sordid expression and said something to the effect of "Jim— bad ." I didn't feel great about it, but I'm fairly certain he didn't get the interview. Hopefully, I haven't convinced you that I'm a terrible coworker, or that I regularly say bad things about people. I've had many good experiences with networking, and I have been happy to recommend quite a few people for jobs. I'll share a few of my positive networking experiences in another post, now that the bad part is over. Jeremy Cook is a manufacturing engineer with 10 years of experience and has a BSME from Clemson University.  

Networking gear companies are bullish about the multicore processors and are seeing tangible benefits from them. Let us look at the reasons for the same.   If we look at a networking equipment like router it has two broad components: the data plane and  control plane The data plane is also referred as the fast path. This is the code that gets executed when a packet (like ethernet packet) comes on an interface like ethernet port. It is a real-time task and throughput of the system depends on this code. It is not a complex logic but it is typically handcrafted for higher throughput. It does not need much OS support. To process a packet, it refers the the “forwarding table” which is set up by control plane.   The second component is the Control Plane, also referred as slow path. It contains code for different protocols, that perform many functions like updating new routes, processing control packets and setting up forwarding tables which is accessed by datapath. If route from A to B is broken, it means a route is changed, and forwarding tables need to be changed to reflect that. This code is typically large, runs on top of an OS, runs infrequently, and is compute intensive.   In the early days, designers used to have same CPU handling both data plane and control plane leading to poor performance. If higher priority is given to the control plane against the data plane, processing of packets gets delayed , which leads to packet queueing, congestion and packet drops. If data plane gets higher priority than the control plane, then the  line events (e.g. link up/down) or the control plane indications (e.g. route change) get analysed lated.   To avoid this, system designers used to have two processors, one for control plane and other for data plane. Control process runs the routing protocols, computes the forwarding tables, and updates the same for data plane processor. But this had consequence of increased cost.   Now, multicore processors allow running of control plane protocols on a single core and allow running of  data plane code on other cores.   Availability of cheap cores has helped data plane immensely. Since the packet processing algorithm is essentially similar for all packets, it allows the partitioning of code to use the multiple cores and get performance boost.   First way of partitioning of data plane works like this: Suppose the dataplane code has 3 logical functions f1(), f2() and f3(). Now we can write the code in such a way that first core runs f1() and passes control to second core to run f2() and third core to run f3(). In this “pipelining”, the number of packets currently under processing is equal to the number of cores in the pipeline. By designing this pipeline efficiently, we can increase throughput multiple times.   The alternative to this partitioning is to have all the cores run the same code that read packets from the same input stream and write to the same output stream. Whichever core is free, picks up the next packet from input stream for processing. The full functionality of the packet processing pipeline is applied on the input packets by a single stage as opposed to sending the packets from one stage to another. It is also possible to have a hybrid model, where both models can be combined.   To summarize, the availability of multicore processors is a big blessing for for networking gear designers. It allows them to partition code efficiently (control and data plane codes) and also get performance boost by using pipelining in data plane code to get higher throughputs.   Semicon companies like Cavium, Tilera, Freescale all have multicore network processors and have helped to develop better networking gear for market.