The Glamorous Life of a Systems Engineer (SE)
Hello World!
Ah, the live technical demonstration. That hallowed rite of passage where Systems Engineers show off bleeding-edge technology to prospective customers. You will need to perform the entire demo with the flair of a Las Vegas magician, albeit with more firewalls and fewer of sequins. You built the demo, and then you tested it. It worked flawlessly in your office Friday at 4:59 pm. So naturally, it will totally flop in front of a highly skeptical live audience Monday morning. Oh, and your boss might even be there too.
Let’s talk about some of the pain points, and more importantly the cures. Spoiler: duct tape isn’t one of them, but it comes close.
The Evil Demo Gods Are Real, And They Are Petty: Your demo has a 100% failure rate the moment customers are watching. Especially ones who “just want to see how it handles spoofed addresses.”
The Cure: A sacrifice to the demo gods may help (I suggest offering them a large Catalyst switch). Or failing that, have a local off-line version of the complete demo ready to go. Bonus points if it still looks like a live environment – I like to call this “Live-ish Mode.” Also include a full sequence of screen shots, like the storyboard for a new Marvel film. Note that this workaround also covers other eventualities such as Wi-Fi “guest network” failures.
Version Mismatch Roulette: Wait – this isn’t the right software version! Why did this update overnight? Who authorized this?
The Cure: Freeze your environment in advance. Create a VM snapshot. Or Docker it up. If it actually was stable, do not update it. Ever. You want to run the demo with last week’s bugs, not today’s exciting new (and mostly unknown) bugs. And for the love of Birkenstocks, turn off all auto-updates.
Customer Environments from the Ninth Circle: The customer insists that you run the demo in their environment. This turns out to be a Frankenstein hybrid of Windows 10, Ubuntu, and a firewall config that was last updated during the Bush Administration.
The Cure: No. Just no. Politely decline. Tell them that your demo is “preconfigured and environmentally sealed for optimal fidelity.” They won’t know what that means, but they’ll nod anyway.
Audience Participation (a.k.a. Demo Sniping): What about that one obnoxious customer who insists on typing extraneous inputs, “just to see what happens”?
The Cure: Smile. Nod. Then say, “Great idea! Let’s do that after the demo.” And then quickly switch screens to your backup system labeled “Unbreakable_Lab_Final_v7_for_real_this_time.” Alternatively, leave them with a sandboxed clone of the system and let them hack themselves into a corner.
You’re the Narrator, Tech Support Rep, and Custodian: You’re demoing. And explaining. And fixing things. And checking logs. And smiling. And sweating profusely.
The Cure: Rehearse like your career depends upon it (because it kind of does). Have talking points, pause points, recovery scripts, and funny anecdotes. Use a clicker or shortcut keys so that you’re not playing with a mouse. Practice with someone who will pretend to be a hostile customer, preferably your most cynical teammate.
Security Demo Irony: Imagine this: You’re demoing a security solution and your demo triggers your own internal security policies, or those at the customer site. Whoops.
The Cure: White listing, or temporary exclusions. Make sure that all of your local endpoint protection, proxies, and NGFW are not treating your own demo like a hostile nation-state.
Murphy’s Law Has an NDA with Every Vendor: If anything can go wrong during a demo, it will – and your VP will be watching over your shoulder.
The Cure: Build redundancy into every step. I’ll say it again: redundancy. Have multiple paths, multiple tools, even multiple laptops. If a demo feature bombs, pivot. “That’s actually a great segue to discuss our threat detection engine…”, and BOOM, you’re back in control.
Final Thoughts: You’re an SE, Not a Magician: The audience doesn’t care how you do it, they only care that the demo worked. There will be gremlins and imperfections. So, anticipate problems, stay calm, laugh with the audience, and then move on. Let’s face it: if you can survive a live tech demo, you can survive anything.
Stay tuned for more nerdy columns about my experiences as an SE.
