This is why I continue to maintain that ops and SE excel at remaining distinct fields, though I certainly don’t mind overlap. Most of my friends are software d

This is why I continue to maintain that ops and SE excel at remaining distinct fields, though I certainly don’t mind overlap. Most of my friends are software developers and/or software developers working on cloud-based stacks. Two of those friends lead the platform engineering groups at their respective companies. One of them has a very basic understanding of networking and could figure out how to do subnetting that didn’t come out of the box, but they’d need to stop and go learn that. That isn’t everyone by any stretch, but I see it more often than not these days. I agree fully with the idea that younger professionals aren’t as used to the infrastructure underneath the infrastructure being as complex as the higher layers of the OSI model that they’re frequently more experienced with. What I hope we don’t end up with is a future where all the data center people and all the network engineers (and so on) are almost exclusively employed by a small number of mega-corps. It’s important that knowledge and experience in the fundamentals of the networked world remain widely distributed and openly accessible.