Who, me? Techie with three months' experience was sent in as the Cisco expert and proceeded to blow everything up
- ID
- 19739
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 31 Aug 2026, 2:30 PM
- Fetched
- 31 Aug 2026, 3:02 PM
- Provider
- The Register
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/31/who-me-techie-with-three-months-experience-was-sent-in-as-the-cisco-expert-and-proceeded-to-blow-everything-up/5293185
- Source URL
- https://www.theregister.com/headlines.atom
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 31 Aug 2026, 3:03 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
A 'Who, Me?' column shares a reader's confession about being sent as the 'Cisco expert' with only three months' experience to a customer running Nortel kit. After racking a new switch and configuring VLANs, his spanning-tree settings dropped over 4,000 AS/400 sessions, which the customer's IT team had to kill manually one by one because SNA-over-TCP/IP emulation couldn't tolerate a single lost packet.
Why it matters
A relatable cautionary tale about imposter syndrome meets real-world blast radius: a single misconfigured spanning-tree setting on one switch took out thousands of production sessions. The practical lesson is to verify protocol-level tolerances (e.g., packet-loss sensitivity of legacy emulated sessions) before plugging new gear into a live network, and to push back when sent into unfamiliar territory.
Discussion angle
Share your own 'first job disaster' stories and what you'd do differently now—especially around speaking up when assigned work beyond your actual experience.