I really don't know how bad all of this is, but it's surprising that graduate engineers don't know how to configure a basic network without DHCP. On one hand,

I really don't know how bad all of this is, but it's surprising that graduate engineers don't know how to configure a basic network without DHCP. On one hand, you can have a router at home from your ISP, and everything seems to work fine. On the other hand, there are a lot of existing misconfigurations and security issues with these routers, which ISPs used to update their firmware automatically.