The end of June 2022 marks Valerie Maguire’s retirement from the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, and the commencement of a time when individuals in other fields, with other interests, will benefit from her talents and commitment to a job well done. ICT industry professionals worldwide have benefited from Valerie’s talents and commitment for decades—either through her work directly with customers of The Siemon Company or through her individual expert contributions to the development of cabling and networking industry standards. Upon hearing of Valerie’s impending retirement, we at Cabling Installation & Maintenance had the opportunity to speak with Valerie and some executives from The Siemon Company about her career, the impact she has had on colleagues close and distant, and what’s ahead in her immediate future.
A combination of skills that distinguishes Valerie Maguire from many is her engineering acumen together with the ability and willingness to explain technical concepts in ways meaningful to lay people. Her responsibilities with Siemon have taken her into conversations with other contributors to the IEEE’s 802.3 standards about 10GBASE-T’s PAM-16 encoding scheme, and into conversations with cable installers about the harmful effects of untwisting a pair of copper conductors too much. Often these conversations on different ends of the technical spectrum would occur within days of each other. But she didn’t necessarily see these discussions or these topics in her future prior to beginning her academic pursuit of electrical engineering.
Taking a pragmatic approach
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to be an engineer,” Maguire said. “My father told me to go to school and get a good degree. ‘You can always be a SCUBA instructor later,’ he said.” Valerie’s father worked for the telephone company, and his responsibilities included troubleshooting circuits. He kept examples of printed circuit boards he worked on, and every time he solved a problem he would document the problem and the solution in a book, which he would refer to later if needed. That home-made encyclopedia of PCB solutions foreshadowed Valerie’s encyclopedic knowledge of copper cabling technology.
She put herself through college financially, and during her college years she began working on the production floor of The Siemon Company. Other than a brief stint in an engineering role with a cable manufacturer, Siemon has been Valerie’s place of employment ever since. The company’s chief technology officer John Siemon recalls, “When Val worked in our research-and-development lab, she was instrumental in providing backup for standards work, as well as developing test and measurement. Her success was, in large part, thanks to her knowledge and integrity. With Val, it’s integrity-first, always. That approach combined with her vast engineering knowledge has been a good fit for her standards work.”
Indeed, Valerie Maguire is most widely recognized in the ICT industry for expertise and education she has provided about technical and, in particular, standards information related to balanced twisted-pair copper cabling. She has amassed countless contributions to multiple standards bodies, including the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Her name and image frequently have appeared on stage, online, and in print as an educator. In 2013 she was chosen by readers of Cabling Installation & Maintenance as one of twenty professionals who have made positive contributions to the ICT industry.
Recently she told Inside Networks magazine, “The benefits of contributing to standards development run the range from being able to work alongside world-class transmission and subject-matter experts, to having the ability to influence how emerging application needs drive cabling innovations. Immersion in standards is an ideal way to gain insight into where the market is going …”
Val added, “Everyone in our industry uses and relies on the expertise and guidance provided in the standards. They are as integral to an IT expert as a map or GPS is to a family planning a road trip. Personally, I find standards development work to be very rewarding. When I was editor of the ANSI/TIA-568-B.2-10 Category 6A standard, it was neat—and nerdy—to be able to say that I saw the draft before anyone else in the world.”
But John Siemon’s comment about Maguire’s integrity gets to the heart of the legacy that she leaves in the ICT industry. “Her technical expertise is unsurpassed,” John said. “But her character—the ability to find common ground, talk to people, and work the consensus process—greatly contributed to her success in standards development. There are times during standardization when a roadblock looks insurmountable. But there’s always a way, and Val has the ability to find that way. Her visibility to the industry is amazing. She is viewed as part of the Siemon brand, and I couldn’t be prouder of that fact.”
Multi-dimensional contributions
“It would be tough for some people to imagine Val doing anything other than standards,” John continued. “But a lot of her job has been to support customers. She is a sensei to our technical support group, and to our customers. If they need to get comfortable with recommendations or plans, she is part of that support organization. Every time she gets involved, it is a positive experience. Customers walk away from the conversation knowing more, and able to make informed decisions. You don’t hear Val talk about part numbers; she talks solutions.”
Carl Siemon, The Siemon Company’s chief strategy officer and formerly its president and CEO, echoed his brother John’s sentiments about the fabric of Val Maguire’s lasting impact on, and appeal to, the industry. “If I had to pick one word to describe Val’s character, it would be integrity,” Carl said. “We know she’s extremely knowledgeable. Many will try to dress up an answer to a question. She doesn’t. You can always believe what Val says. That quality helped her build trust and respect in standards work. Early in her career, she became a leader in standards work, moving initiatives forward. That was good for the industry and good for The Siemon Company.”
In January 2020, The Siemon Company instituted the Rock Star Award, an internal award created in honor of the late Bob Carlson, a talented musician who had been the company’s vice president of sales and marketing, and Val Maguire’s boss, before succumbing to pancreatic cancer in 2018. Carl Siemon said the award is given to an employee “who consistently goes above and beyond to benefit the company. Our inaugural honoree was Valerie. As much or moreso than anyone else, she embodied all the values that went along with the award.”
Both Carl and John pointed out that Val made numerous customer visits to the Middle East, where cultural norms had the potential to make interactions difficult or uncomfortable for a woman. “In a market where females generally aren’t part of the business, Val was a star,” Carl said.
“Making a business trip to Ohio is one thing; making one to the Middle East is another,” John said. “Val is very confident and intentional in her acts. And her credibility is without question.”
Some may refer to Valerie Maguire as a gender trailblazer, with her aforementioned success in the Middle East as well as her prominence in an industry that, in North America and throughout the world, is male-dominated. She takes a pragmatically different view. “I’ve always been respected for doing my job,” she said. “Perhaps at times it was easier for me to be remembered because I am a woman. But my work supersedes everything else. If you do your job and do it well, everything else will fall into place.” That humble statement is truer than Val Maguire may have been thinking when she said it. Because she did her job so well, structured cabling projects fell into place across the globe.
One example of Val’s work benefitting many traces back to the days of manufacturers’ printed product catalogs. John Siemon recalls the company’s catalog “always dedicated about 30 pages to helpful information, including definitions and other references. When the hard-copy catalog was going away, we asked how we could continue to provide that information. Val had the idea of The Standards Informant.” The Standards Informant is a series of web pages, which can be found at The Siemon Company’s website, that details standard documents and standards-development activities. “Val made sure that anybody with access to the web had access to information that’s relevant to the industry.”
Always a copper queen
When we interviewed Val about her impending retirement from the ICT industry, she emphasized that it is a turn in the road of her life, and not the end of her professional endeavors. In fact, it’s not even the end of her work related to the element copper. Restoring antique copper cookware, an activity that started as a hobby, is now her primary business focus. She set up a studio for that activity and founded Southwest Hand Tinning. “My goal is to return beauty and functionality to copper pans ravaged by time and neglect,” her website explains.
“Copper is a soft metal,” Val told us, launching into an explanation that could have focused just as easily on solid-conductor cable performance as on pots and pans. “Copper pots must be re-tinned every 10 years or so,” she added, making it clear which direction the conversation was headed. “Nobody really does that re-tinning, but I loved the idea that I could have a pot that is more than 100 years old and actually cook with it.” Re-tinning had been a task carried out almost exclusively by gypsies who took their craft from town to town. “When I first tried re-tinning, it was as if I had done it in a past life. So I worked on a few pots and sold them on eBay.”
And a passion project was born, which now appears it will occupy the time and talents of a woman who spent three decades devoting much of her time and some of her talents to the networking and ICT industries. Val’s foray into copper tinning has evoked some memories of her early days with Siemon, and has had the earmarks of a full-circle revolution. “An appraiser reached out to me and wants me to give a talk on copper pans at a gathering of appraisers. You just have to say yes to opportunities like that. If you sit around and wait for something to happen, you’ll be sitting around for a long time.” The invitation was reminiscent of Val’s first technical presentation at a BICSI conference, during which crosstalk and insertion loss were prominent themes.
Val speaks enthusiastically about her tinning business. “It is somewhat serendipitous,” she notes, adding that several of her academic and professional achievements suit her for the role. “My formal education helps. I took French in high school, and it turns out that just about every book on the subject of tinning copper pots is written in French.” Her electrical engineering education and professional experience come into play because copper tinning is really the creation of chemical reactions to clean the substances and remove carbon.
She said copper tinning has also instilled a new perspective on some aspects of work, effort, and success. “I have always been a black-and-white person,” she explained. “With copper pots and tinning, the best you’re going to get is perfectly imperfect.” And that’s perfectly fine with her.
Her work with copper cookware will bring back to life family heirlooms, and bring together generations of family who never physically met each other when a great-grandchild uses the same pot that a great-grandparent used to prepare a family meal. In that sense, Val believes that she will provide an enduring legacy.
She shared a conversation she had with Wayne Larson, another long-time contributor to standards development organizations, who agreed with Val that it is important to do something in life that has meaning.
“I can bring a pot back to life, and someone will cook a meal with it. Every pot has a story. Somebody loved it. For years I’d frequently ask myself, what am I going to leave behind when I die? I said I’d build a stone wall, and it will be here when I’m gone. I never built one. With these pots, I have answered the question of what I’m going to leave behind.”
This author has had the privilege of working with Val Maguire on a number of projects over the past couple decades. And this interview about her retirement is the first time she made a statement I’d contest. Val claimed not to have built a stone wall that will persist after her departure. I disagree. She is inextricably associated with standards development from the TIA and the IEEE. At Cabling Installation & Maintenance, we have stated many times that standards are the bedrock upon which most networks and structured cabling systems are built. Val Maguire not only has built stone walls that set the border between a technically sound network and an unsound one; she has been a stalwart contributor to the foundations of communications networks serving past, current, and future generations. Millions of people who never met Val Maguire have benefited from her efforts. The many who have met her have benefited even more.
We at Cabling Installation & Maintenance wish Valerie Maguire the best in her next chapter. The ICT industry’s loss is the copper cookware market’s gain. They soon will know the uniquely gifted person they have encountered. And when experts in that field ask where she has been all these years, we hope the memories will make her smile.