Boot Camp

Ritualized hardship

I just took over an orphaned High School AP Computer Science class. Never thought I’d get to be a HS teacher! It has me remembering this story when I was both student and teacher and things didn’t go so well.

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Three weeks in sunny Redmond, WA they said. We’ll put you up in groovy digs. It’s with all your best work buddies! Fame and fortune will follow you the rest of your days.

All false. Well, nearly all. Redmond in the winter — you’re never seeing the sun. Corporate housing is a special case of dismal: rental furniture has this … smell. Fame and fortune — debatable.

Whatever. But what I wasn’t ready for was the ritualized hardship of Boot Camp.

To understand what happened, you first have to have an inkling of the importance of certification. Many industries have this. Look, I have this piece of paper, a badge, a jumble of acronyms in my signature — I am qualified. JD, MD, CPA, PhD, … The tech pinnacle of this at the time was: CCIE. Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert. Truly, these guys were wizards.

Honestly, they still are. They build the network that supports the network. There is no internet without the plumbing CCIE’s build and configure. The project I worked on had a ton of network dependencies, and so we were playing on their turf. Cisco was Microsoft’s enemy — and we were jealous of their wizards.

So we (Microsoft) introduced our own ‘elite’ certification program, calling it … Masters. ¹ Microsoft Certified Master or MCM. It didn’t last — after all, software that complicated is ultimately crappy software — but I got sucked in at the very beginning.

When our fledgling product failed — under my watch — during implementation at one of our largest customers, I got deep to figure it out. ² We did figure it out, and I loved the challenge and so I stuck with it — traveling the world with a group across the product team, consulting and support — teaching classes and introducing our latest releases as the product got successively better. The product grew quickly, it was a good time.

So, when we introduced Masters, I was happy to be recruited for the first class of a new ‘elite’ tech squad. Classes were called rotations, and this was Rotation Zero.

Yes I was already bald, but still.

Twenty of us converged from all over the world to build the course. For three weeks, 10 hours a day, we lived in a gray room in tired Building 10, in the middle of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. ³ Sitting to my right was Arif — the most amazing consultant from Indonesia. His fingers flew so fast across the keyboard you could see the heat rise. Sitting to my left — Alex, the brain behind our edge servers — firewall traversal tech that I never did and never will understand. My still good friend Johan from Denmark sat behind me.⁴

Everyone in Rotation Zero took on teaching a module in the course, building out the content and labs for future rotations as we went. I taught the video segment. I’ve forgotten more about the deep interworking of live video than you will ever know.

Three weeks of this ended in a final exam. Were you a Master? The exam was hyped from day 1 — the guy running the show loved telling us how hard it was going to be and so we better put in the time or we wouldn’t pass. It was manufactured prestige — building lore to be retold, so Microsoft could say they had Wizards too.

The format was brutal: 8 hours straight at a keyboard connected to no less than 8 virtual machines, switch and gateway, building and troubleshooting the most diabolical scenarios imaginable.

One guy brought in a half dozen 5-hour Energy drinks, lining them up at the edge of his desk, slamming a different flavor down every couple of hours to survive the day. ⁵ We weren’t allowed to leave the room lest we cheat. Going to the bathroom was an ordeal.

I liked the learning and the building and the teaching, but what was up with this boot camp approach?? In the military, boot camps are designed to break you down so you can be rebuilt as one of the faithful. I wasn’t storming the beach at Normandy. I was building and fixing corporate computer systems. Also, I wasn’t 18 — I was good with who I was and had self-selected this job. The corporate cult-of-personality, religious devotion to the cause, well it started to bug me.

I didn’t pass the test. My eyes burned after 8 hours staring at a screen, madly trying different configurations of the most cryptic shit ever. We all met at a bar afterwards to blow off steam and I was so burnt. At first, I felt bad that I hadn’t passed, then I felt mad that it was so ridiculously hard after I had put so much of myself into building up the program, including leaving my family for 3 weeks — all to be treated like some kind of raw recruit.

The master of masters approached me several times after that, asking me if I wanted to retake the test. I did not. I was done with that bullshit.

But I liked the people who stood up to be part of the priesthood, signing up for Boot Camp. It’s always about the people, trying to make it even if the system is flawed. It’s not unlike my High School kids desperate for help to pass the AP test. So, I kept teaching Masters. Every subsequent rotation I traveled back up to Redmond to teach the video module.

I taught 22 more rotations, and each one was a lot of fun. ⁶

1. A buddy reminded me that the original name was Rangers and the guy who ran the first rotations was ex-Army. So.

2. For the tech interested, root cause turned out to be stored procedures or ‘sprocs’ — code blocks that run inside a database for efficiency. We were migrating a massive customer from Cisco’s competing product and their users had large established ‘buddy lists’ of contacts. Our design didn’t account for that scale — some users had thousands of buddies. When the sprocs trying to optimize message distribution fired against those giant lists, the servers fell over.

3. If anyone from Rotation 0 is reading this, send me that picture we took at the end in front of building 10! I couldn’t find it. I feel like it was around 2010?

4. Yes, they made us sit in alphabetical order.

5. That’s 30 hours of energy.

6. My favorite part was Video Jeopardy at the end of the day where I split the class into teams and gave away prizes. Maybe I can pull that off for my High School kids before they take the AP Test.