Category: Cisco

Dear Cisco,

Please do not make your shows permanently online only.

Apple has announced that its 2020 WWDC this June will be online only due to the coronavirus, but they have suggested they might keep it online permanently going forward. I know on the surface it looks like a great idea: Save money! No travel! No hotel or airline headaches!

But online loses the whole purpose for an event: Relationship building and human contact.

A lot of engineers and developers in this world each sometimes feel like a lone tree in a large forest when they need to get verification. They’re hoping what they are doing makes sense and takes them in the right direction, but they want to reach out to verify that with someone they know. Meeting real people at the Cisco Live, Cisco Connect and DevNet events puts human faces on the Cisco online ID. They’re people you know and trust, not some untouchable individual in an ivory tower that does not have time to get to know the common person.

During the past few years, numerous Cisco employees have helped my team and I with a range of both mundane and complicated problems. That would have never happened if we hadn’t made personal connections with them first.

I would have never known that some Cisco people are avid drummers, or restore vintage video game systems, or ride the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, or talk gloriously about video compression codecs. Or tell the a V.P. at Cisco that her new board of directors gig at a large company is in my home town (well, that conversation didn’t happen yet because of a scheduling conflict, but it will at the next show). And most of the Cisco technical employees you see online all the time are just good people and will absolutely and passionately point you in the right direction if help is needed.

Personally, if there had not been a Cisco Live or DevNet Create, I never would have ventured into the Podcast Zone and actually done a podcast with some amazing people. It took cajoling in person to make me take that leap.

Online meetings are great for keeping in touch throughout the year, but the personal face-to-face meetings and chance encounters at the shows are critical to the way we do business and keep our careers moving forward. At the conventions, you never know who you will run into between sessions or while wandering around after hours — chats that could lead to lifetime associations. I’ve lost count of the people I have met on the bus going to and from the conventions (or sponsored Cisco Events) — even at the McDonald’s in Barcelona. All these in-person moments keep our keen sense of passion within the community alive and vibrant. You learn, and your source of information learns too, creating a self-renewing circle of mutual information sharing.

Talking about creating the Pixar campus, Steve Jobs said it was designed “with collaboration in mind. Rather than separating animators, executives and editors in different buildings, I brought everyone under the same roof — with the idea that chance encounters would lead to the cross-pollination of ideas.” We should all make maintaining in-person encounters a cardinal rule.

Even after forty years of being an engineer, I still bring the same passion to solving problems, creating new ideas, and carrying other people along who don’t quite have the same forward-looking vision. That passion is a great catalyst to talk, in person, to other people that have the same passion. We should always champion in-person opportunities to champion those passions.

Now back to your regularly scheduled program.