8 posts tagged with "Opinion"

How Economic Growth Reshaped the Gender Equality Conversation

The Great Misdirection​

Have we been sold a false bill of goods when it comes to gender equality in the workplace? When women fought to enter the workforce en masse in the latter half of the 20th century, the vision wasn't simply to double household working hours. Yet somewhere along the way, what was once revolutionary became a requirement—the 40-hour workweek per household transformed into 80 hours just to maintain the same standard of living our parents achieved.

There seems to be an obsession over on Reddit about the Mandela Effect which was named after a collective but strongly held false memory that the eponymous Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the '80s. It seems that our minds can play tricks on us and sometimes things which we clearly remember turn out to be a shared fantasy. I feel a little like this about those weird two weeks in about April 2021, in midst of the 'rona years, where everyone on LinkedIn got Aviatrix certification for free and then shared it with their contacts so that they too could benefit from a free certification in an emerging technology vendor's product. The reason I am not sure if it's a Mandela Effect is that I don't really think I have heard of anyone since who has actually used that certification for anything other than to pad out their Credly.

A Matter of Western Digital Privilege​

In a recent conversation about IPv6 adoption at a Western technology company, a familiar scene played out. Engineers and architects discussed IPv6 implementation as an optional future consideration rather than an immediate necessity. 'We don't really need it yet', was the prevailing sentiment. This perspective, common among Western organisations, reveals a profound blindspot born of privilege – one that unconsciously perpetuates digital inequality on a global scale.

Breaking the Technical Hierarchy Trap​

In the tech industry, there's an unspoken assumption that technical teams should be led by those with the deepest technical expertise. This conventional wisdom, while seemingly logical, may actually be holding organisations back from achieving their full potential. The practice of promoting technical experts into management positions creates a complex web of challenges that ripple throughout organisations, affecting everything from innovation to career development.

Lessons from Personal Tech and Enterprise IT​

Notifications and alerts are ubiquitous in our always-on, hyper-connected world. But as I’ve learnt from personal experience and my work in enterprise IT, more alerts don’t necessarily mean better outcomes. In fact, over-alerting can be downright counterproductive.

Rethinking Infrastructure Support

In the world of IT operations, there’s a metric that network teams know all too well: Mean Time to Innocence (MTTI). It’s the average time it takes for a network team to prove they’re not responsible for an outage or performance issue. While this might sound amusing, it points to a deeper problem in how we structure and organise our infrastructure teams.

The Business Case Challenge

Traditional justifications for SD-WAN adoption have often focused on cost savings versus MPLS or enhanced network features. However, these arguments frequently fall short under scrutiny. The fundamental challenges that limited VPN adoption in enterprise networks – including performance consistency, reliability, and operational complexity – remain relevant despite improvements in internet infrastructure.

Is it as great as Microsoft says or as bad as the customers say?​

When Microsoft unveiled Azure Virtual WAN, it was heralded as a revolutionary solution for simplifying complex networking scenarios in the cloud. The vision was compelling: a comprehensive service that would streamline branch connectivity to Azure, enable seamless hub-and-spoke architectures, provide automated routing with simplified security, and offer easy integration with SD-WAN appliances. For organisations grappling with the intricacies of cloud networking, this sounded like a panacea and I know plenty who fell for it. However, as many have discovered, the reality of implementing and managing Virtual WAN has proven far more challenging than initially anticipated.