Pavel Stefanov’s Blog

Last year Csilla Bessenyei (Hungary), Christian Sandescu (Romania), Grega Presenen (Slovenia), Boris Dekovic (Croatia), and I won prizes in the Netriders Challenge, which was the first organised for whole Europe. 24 countries took part in it and not surprisingly to me the winners were all from Eastern and Central Europe. It was 50-50 whether I was to be allowed to participate as I had to be 18 to fly to the USA, but luckily the trip was in January, 2009, which meant I am good to go. The challenge consisted of 3 parts – a theoretical test, packet tracer challenge, and a TAC call. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of Packet Tracer and I have never used it in any of my studies, but I navigated pretty well in the competition. The fun part of the competition was the TAC call, where you had to act as a TAC and an engineer from Cisco would call you, pretending to be a customer and have a problem with its router, and you had to guide him on the phone. Pretty funny as I was not told in advance that I had to be on the TAC side of the call and it was really weird at first :)

On January 11th, I headed to San Francisco with a flight from Sofia. I had never travelled with a plane until then and it was kind of exciting. The flight to Munich was just a few hours and I had an hour and a half stay there to catch my flight to San Francisco. It was a long and exhausting 12-hour flight as we flew all the way over Iceland, Greenland, New York state and down to California. I have to say I was completely satisfied with Lufthansa, very professional work by the crew. If it wasn’t them to feed and entertain us all the time, it would’ve been a very boring flight. Unfortunately, I had no MP3 player as my Zen Vision:M broke a couple months ago and had to listen to Lufthansa’s radio or TV shows.

Anyway, I did not really know what we are going to do there as we received no agenda for our stay so not knowing what it would be made me look forward to it even more.

When I went through the exit gate, a taxi guy was waiting for me outside with a piece of paper “Pavel Stefanov – Netriders”. When we got to the car, I was completely astonished. It was a very nice and spacious Lincoln with leather seats inside. That’s not a bad start, isn’t it? Commuting to the hotel, I didn’t really know where I was. At one point I decided to ask the driver and he said “We are in Santa Clara”. So it’s a big mega polis there including San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Jose and you don’t really know where you are until you see a sign.

I arrived late at the hotel – about 9 pm, and couldn’t make it for dinner with the rest of the guys so I had to meet them on breakfast in the morning. We stayed at Hilton Garden Inn, which is a really nice hotel, and I will definitely stay there if I come back to San Jose some day. The beds were king-size, with 5 pillows, and as I told the guys “sleeping in those beds for 9 hours feels like sleeping for a whole week”. There was also cable Internet (and FREE unlike hotels in Europe) and I was so happy :)

Day 1

In the morning, I met the rest of the winners and Penny Bradley, which made all this competition and trip possible. We were taken to building 5, where we introduced ourselves, met Amy Christen, the vice president of the Networking Academy programme, and then were given a brief presentation about Cisco Culture by Isaac Majerowicz. We were very hungry by that time and went to Cisco’s cafeteria. It is a very big hall with all kinds of food – Chinese, Indian, European, American, basically anything you can think of. There was also a Cisco burger which I had no other choice but to taste the next day, tastes pretty good :) And I had never seen so many engineers at one place, let alone Cisco employees, will never forget that landscape :). My eyes were immediately on the Cisco Merchandise Shop, where I bought stuff for $100 the next day :). Cable Lab with Joe O’Donnel was next on the list. I can tell you one thing – this guy is a guru. He used to be a mountaineer in the past, but like Jeff Doyle, who gave up a career of psychiatrist to become one of the most respected engineers in the field, he decided to go with networking. Joe is currently something like a manager of the lab, a lab in which Cisco has invested at least 200-300 millions of dollars in recent years.

In this room, there are devices downloading channel streams from satellites, those streams are demultiplexed, then encapsulated into IP headers and finally multicasted inside Cisco’s internal network. They use a different device for every one of these processes so what’s that virtualization Cisco is constantly talking about on conferences? :) Anyway, these channels are only used by Cisco employees and Joe makes sure everything works smoothly so that he doesn’t get called by John :) Then we entered the *real* room. We weren’t allowed to take pictures there for obvious reasons, but I can tell you one thing – it felt like heaven – more than 15,000 cable modems making noise and enormous ventilation systems beneath the floor cooling the whole room. Interesting fact – when they moved to the building, it was just a regular room and they had to turn it into what it is now, but not just do the whole moving, they had to do what they did for 6-9 months in the previous building in just 3 days. Can you believe it? They did the whole thing, 15,000 modems, cabling, cooling, content delivery systems, everything. No wonder why Joe feels pretty proud of this accomplishment. Then you would ask, what does Cisco use those modems for? It turns out that whenever there is a new Cisco IOS release, it goes through an enormous amount of testing, and not just testing of new features, they test the new release if it is compatible with every single Cisco IOS release there’s ever been. I was amazed, and still couldn’t explain why I find bugs in the IOS occasionally. The answer was simple “We can’t test every possible scenario, and if even if we could, it is not worth doing it” (or maybe it was “it wasn’t cost-effective”, not sure). Fair enough. They also had some kind of environmental change machine that they use whenever Cisco receives hardware that is suspected to have faults.

Executive Briefing Centre was next. This is where Cisco brings customers when they want to be shown some technology working. It is a beautiful building and the area where we were presented the latest Voice solutions looked more like a disco club :)

I was pretty overwhelmed by the end of the day and really happy with my experience during the day. We decided with the rest of the guys that we were very tired so we went straight to Applebee’s, which is only a few meters from the hotel. I was very hungry and didn’t have a clue how big portions are in US restaurants so I ordered a Santa Fe salad with a chop steak and fries. The guys had a good laugh while I was struggling to finish my dinner.

Day 2

New day, more energy, no jet lag. Speaking of jet lag, my body clock fits perfectly into the Pacific time zone as I used to stay up until 7 am doing labs at home. We had a job shadowing session planned in the morning. We had to choose between Ali Moghadam, a software developer at Cisco, or Dennis Frezo, who is dealing with the development of Packet Tracer. So considering the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that I am not really into this application, I went for the session with Ali. I think this was one of the most productive things we did there. Ali is a very down-to-earth man and was happy to share with us a lot of things. I completely changed my vision of how an employer should treat an employee and how a simple working day should look like. Something I forgot to mention earlier is that when we went into the building at 9 am, there was not a single person in most of the halls (where everyone has its own cubicle). So Ali explained that in Cisco it doesn’t matter when you go to work, when you leave work, or where you do your job. It’s all up to you. You can work at 4 am in the morning in the office, you can work every day at home through a VPN (by the way, every Cisco employee gets a free 800 series router, cool, huh?), it doesn’t matter. All you have to do is keep up with deadlines and do your job. It was also interesting to hear how he got his job and how he got into software engineering. I confessed I knew very little in this area (I still do) and was wondering where he got all this knowledge from. The answer was very relieving – from university! About the interview – it was really fun as he told us he had two interviews, one with Cisco, and one with another company on the same day. He had the interview with the other company first, which went really well, they even sent him the contract immediately by email so he didn’t really try to put much effort into the second interview – a 4-hour interview with plentiful of technical questions. I was surprised to hear that there had been no HRs during the interview and no stupid “How do you see yourself in the future? What are your plans? Describe yourself. What’s your biggest weakness?” type of questions that when you hear on a regular interview, you just want to slay the guy :)

The afternoon was designated to visiting Stanford University. I would lie if I didn’t say I’ve never stopped dreaming of studying there since Jun Kim told me of it. Stanford University is said to be one of the most prestigious universities in the whole world. Classes are very small, tuition fees are very big, and places are very few.

This is an example of taking a class in the beautiful gardens in the campus, speaking of which it is enormous and includes very big territory. It has its own two hospitals, a church, stadiums, etc. The library is impressive, consisting of more than 2,500,000 books and you can practically find any book you want.

Technology – it was everywhere. The university has spent tens of millions of dollars on the most innovative technology. But it’s not just a lot of technology at one place, you see technology integrated and working hand-in-hand with education. Classrooms are state-of-the-art and the university actually has started taking another approach to designing classrooms. As opposed to the regular classrooms where the teacher has its own desk and students sit in front of him on their desks with a white board behind the teacher, the classrooms in Stanford are very spacious, opened and look more like a cafe than a real classroom. They have found that this new approach boosts students’ effectiveness and helps them relieve stress.

The university is where people like William Hewlett and David Packard graduated or children of presidents from the whole world study.

Dinner was at the Campus Cafe and I ate lobster ravioli. They were pretty delicious although it looked more like a soup than a meal.

Day 3

On day 3, we were joined by Bob Schoenherr, organizer of world competitions and network consultant at Cisco. He was born in California and everybody loved him right away. Even at the end of the trip some of us said that Bob was the best part of the trip :)

In the morning, we had a Telepresence session booked in one of the Cisco buildings with friends of Csilla, who were in Hungary. I was very impressed with this technology that I was exposed to for the first time. It is basically three big flat screens, each consuming about 5 megabits of traffic, HDTV cameras, and of course point-to-point links between the places. Telepresence sessions are very expensive because they consume a lot of bandwidth and require very good QoS characteristics. In addition, every Telepresence room must be built in accordance to the same design so that you really get the feeling you are in one room. All that is different in the rooms is the sign on the wall with the city’s name. I really felt we were in the same room. I was even told a funny story where a guy inadvertently dropped his bottle of water and another person from the other end of the session tried to catch it :)

The rest of day was for San Francisco. What can I say? I fell in love with the city. It’s a unique and charming city. San Fran is built on 29 hills and that’s the reason roads there are extremely steep. First station was the seaside from where we took pictures of Alcatraz. We didn’t have much time so we couldn’t visit the prison. A beautiful view from the Golden Gate Bridge was in front of us. Bob pointed out that the bridge is named after Golden Gate (which is just a narrow part of the ocean), not that the place got his name from the bridge.

I felt so small. Apparently, during the World Wars, the Americans laid submarine nets in the ocean to protect from torpedoes and Japanese submarines. It was a quite peaceful place at that time and the city accepted a lot of immigrants from Chine during the Gold Rush, but it turned out there is not much gold in the valley. This is why you can see a lot of Chinese or predecessors of Chinese people there.

At lunch, we went to the wharfs, where we had white chowders. It’s basically a small loaf with a hole in it where the soup is. I recommend eating this if you have the chance to go there. From there we headed to the downtown of San Francisco by cable cars!!! I think this is when we really got the feeling of the city. This area is really beautiful, with a lot of modern architecture and high buildings. Another thing that stuck in my mind was that I could see a real community – from the homeless beggars on every corner to the well-dressed businessman carrying his brief case probably with contacts for millions of dollars.

Chine Town was next – a great chance to walk around this area. I truly felt like being in a Chinese city, but we didn’t stop there for much longer. Bob had mentioned earlier Fry – the biggest electronic store in the world, and Christian and I were eager to go there. He wanted to buy the Creative X-Fi PCMCIA sound card and I wanted to buy the player I could only dream of buying in Bulgaria – Creative Zen X-Fi. The store was gigantic. They sell every single electronic thing available on the market there. It was like heaven for geeks :)

Dinner was at an Indonesian restaurant, food was okay, service was great, drank some very good Singaporean beer.

Day 4

I felt really sad in the morning that we were leaving on Friday. But then I thought “Hey, I have another week in Atlanta”.

Thursday was for Apple’s Headquarters. Cisco and Apple have established a partnership not so long ago and the first fruit from this partnership is WebEx being available on the iPhones. We met Wendy Walker, the Sr. Marketing Manager of the company, and were given a short presentation on what the company has been doing since its establishment, how it progressed to being one of the leaders in multimedia solutions nowadays, and the range of its products. I am not going to lie to you and say this is my favourite company as I am firm admirer of Creative and as I already mentioned I just bought the Creative Zen X-Fi. So my already existing impressions were confirmed – Apple is a very proprietary-oriented company and focuses exclusively on end users. Maybe this is one of the reasons for their success, but sooner or later they will have to open up a little bit and partnering Cisco is maybe one of their first steps. On the other hand, the company idolizes the word “innovative” and I was really impressed with their vision and the fact that they really adhere to it. Their products are made to be very user-friendly, easy-to-use, and last but not least beautiful.

I learned a new, awesome term- BSAs (bandwidth-sucking applications) :D WebEx is probably one of them.

We had a lunch at Apple’s cafeteria and they boasted they stole Google’s Head Chef :D

The last interesting thing for this day was the Compliance Lab with Tonny Youssef. This is where any product that you’ve seen available on the market from Cisco has passed before being announced and where products reach end-of-life before they are even produced :). Here, devices are tested for safety and assurance. Most companies prefer to outsource this kind of work, but Cisco has decided to do this itself. Few advantages – smaller amounts of time for testing, as a result they can create a new product before their competitors, smaller chances of confidential information being leaked out, from what I heard Cisco employees are very loyal. Anyhow, I was astonished to see what hardware is tested against – low temperatures, very high temperatures, earthquakes – 8.1 on Richter Scale, RF and sound emission, high pressure, ability to be used by disadvantaged people, compatibility with other vendors, possibility to stick your finger into the device and get electrocuted, ability of the device to inflame. Amazing, isn’t it? And they video tape most of these procedures and send them to some of their biggest clients like AT&T, Verizon, etc. Cisco is just one of 4-5 companies in the world that does this kind of stuff. So from now on, whenever you’re mad, Cisco hardware is an option… :)

We also got to see Cisco’s data centre, which looked very decent, but Bob told us the one Cisco has in Texas is really one of the greatest and an example of Green IT.

Day 5

Csilla, Boris, and I had to give short presentations to 10-15 people from Cisco about our trip and how it impacted our careers whereas Christian and Grega talked about career opportunities in the IT. Grega and I left earlier because I had to catch a flight to Atlanta so we said good bye and that was it.

This week was one of the best, probably the best, in my life and I will never forget it. I liked a lot of things about the USA and was proven wrong to have any prejudices. I will never ever have such, I’m sure about that. People in the USA are very friendly and are smiling all the time. It took me awhile to get used to it, but I loved it. I met so many new and different people from all parts of the world and I noticed no discrimination at any time. One thing I was unable to get used to was that everything was big – buildings, sings, streets, advertisements, food portions, cars.

I felt kind of sad at the end, but I know some day I will meet these people again and will be back in San Jose and San Francisco, cities I fell in love with.

John O’Callaghan feat. Audrey Gallagher – Big Sky (Markus Schulz a/X Remix)

More pictures from San Francisco & San Jose here.

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