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What also does not help is that becoming good at networking engineering at scale is something that is hard, if not impossible to learn on your own. Software Eng

What also does not help is that becoming good at networking engineering at scale is something that is hard, if not impossible to learn on your own. Software Engineering is something one can teach themselves on a laptop, learning to design, build and operate networks at a large scale across geographies is simply not possible without being part of the industry. Network engineering talent is incredibly hard to come by in most regions of the world, especially if you consider that ISP networking deals with arcane technologies not really used in most "enterprise" networks. (BGP in various ways, MPLS is a big one, and arcane transports like SONET or DWDM solutions). Sure, one might be able to learn how to configure BGP, how ip works etc from their laptop using GNS3 or a couple of second hand routers/switches, but learning how to design networks at scale is completely different beast. Most people seem to enter the field by getting hired as tech support at a NOC and working their way up from there, which is kind of a grind compared to some more lucrative positions available to people who posses the technical talent.

walrus01 6y ago
I agree with 100% of that - a much harder problem to solve when learning real network engineering is much more capital intensive and requires real financial resources that may be beyond the reach of many.
- kazen44 6y ago
  Also, it is a really difficult problem to solve. Most curriculums of universities and polytechnical schools only focus on the technical, theoretical aspects of network engineering, but getting hand-ons experience in actually running an ISP network is very, very difficult. The market for people who want to get into this line of work is also very small compared to software engineers, programmers and system administrators. The work is usually high risk, technically very complex and it can be very stressful. (It being vital infrastructure, and breaking something can result in catastrophe for your customers in some cases) I sometimes wonder what will happen if we have no one left to maintain the systems so many layers of software and systems depend upon.

walrus01 6y ago

I agree with 100% of that - a much harder problem to solve when learning real network engineering is much more capital intensive and requires real financial resources that may be beyond the reach of many.

kazen44 6y ago
Also, it is a really difficult problem to solve. Most curriculums of universities and polytechnical schools only focus on the technical, theoretical aspects of network engineering, but getting hand-ons experience in actually running an ISP network is very, very difficult. The market for people who want to get into this line of work is also very small compared to software engineers, programmers and system administrators. The work is usually high risk, technically very complex and it can be very stressful. (It being vital infrastructure, and breaking something can result in catastrophe for your customers in some cases) I sometimes wonder what will happen if we have no one left to maintain the systems so many layers of software and systems depend upon.