Any future for Network Engineers?

Any future for Network Engineers?

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if you get to an interview and you say i have ccna or i have ccmp everyone's like okay that brought you to this table now what so we did this before but i'd like to get an updated list are there any top five top ten technologies that you think are really important and are there any is there any path to get there well you see it depends on whether you're looking short term or long term short term today i would go with automation or cloud these are the things that will be probably in greatest demand in the next three to five years long term learn the fundamentals is networking still relevant is it still a good career so if someone's thinking about becoming a network engineer you know should they rather just become a developer or do something else you know in the end it's all about selling yourself right yeah you know the best jobs are the ones that you don't apply to the best jobs are the jobs that are created for you because they want you hey everyone it's david bumble back with another interview but in this case i've got ivan i've had ivan on my channel before ivan is one of the guys in networking that i respect most and i really respect his opinion ivan welcome thanks for having me back it's always a pleasure ivan you've been in this industry for many many years so i'm going to too long no not at all i'm going to try and extract your wisdom and your experience to help people who are sort of starting in this industry ivan let's start with this question because i think this is a question that a lot of people are asking we see a lot of new technologies we see things changing clouds becoming more important uh cisco devnet has become this big thing automation has become the stead this big thing is networking still relevant is it still a good career so if someone's thinking about becoming a network engineer you know should they rather just become a developer or do something else well how do you think we'll move bits around with pigeons which telepathy it's a good good point yep so networking will always be around it's just that you know for the last 40 years we thought that we were demigods and special and we are not so networking is becoming a discipline like everything else in the world plumbing power transmission construction building roads building highways building airports mechanical engineering you know a usual discipline with experts technicians road workers in our case configuring vlans you're not selling this because you know to tell me if you told me like 20 years ago when i started or longer than that i'm going to be like a plumber i might have looked at a different career and it's not an effect no no no no you are designing power transmission i think you've used that analogy before can you explain what you mean by that because the big concern is will i get a job and will it pay me enough so that i can feed my family that type of thing yes and yes so explain your your power in transmission discipline you need some experts and those experts are by definition rare unless of course we're talking about archaeology where in slovenia we need one archaeologist per year but we train 20. that is a problem and the other 19 are probably selling fries i don't know what they're doing but in every sufficiently complex technical discipline you don't have too many experts because people are just not willing to invest the amount of time and effort to become experts in that discipline ccie is what you would call an expert as a right to you know how far i don't let's say the okay so what we should really do is we should start with the definition of what an engineer is not you know the networking engineer which is really a glorified cli jockey sorry about that but it's someone who understands the fundamentals who understands the scientific principles not that we would have any and then uses those to build stuff out of well-defined components and if you are working in mechanical engineering you have your components and you build bridges for example or you build rockets or you build cars if you are in networking you are you have your access points you have your routers you have your switches you build networks hopefully there would be some science behind building networks but we're not getting there because the vendors are strongly opposing that just take a look at the debate how much buffering we need in the switches and anyone with any scientific background is telling you with properly implemented stuff we would need shallow buffers and every vendor is selling you deep buffers because that's more expensive but that's a different story yeah i mean i mean it's good that you mentioned that i just want to tell the audience you know what i really like about you is that you you don't you're not beholden to a vendor you give it as it is so it's great to get your opinion on the stuff so sorry can continue yeah well as i heard from one of the vendors once as long as i'm practicing equal opportunity snark he's okay i like that yeah so anyway uh you need people at various levels of expertise and obviously if we go to i don't know power transmission if you are designing electricity inside an apartment building it's not trivial but it's not nearly as hard as designing a new power transmission line across the country yeah so you need you know expertise at various levels and just try finding someone who will design electricity in your apartment building they are rare and unavailable and bloody expensive so every sufficiently complex discipline eventually gets to that point where you know because it's not sexy there aren't that many people interested in it and people who are in it are rare and unavailable and therefore a little bit on the expensive side okay so it doesn't apply to lawyers because there are too many of them but they're still expensive that's a different story that's a good point so i'm starting out so assume i'm young and i'm starting out i'm looking at becoming a ccna so that's where i'm starting i mean what you're talking about is perhaps years down the line and i i want to have a discussion with you about like certifications but just to try and peg it so that we have kind of an idea of skills um if if i'm thinking about becoming a ccna would you recommend it today um how many years before i get to like kind of that level i mean you're talking high level are you saying that there aren't many jobs for new beginners are you saying that like it's going to take me many years to make a success of my career i'm just putting you on the spot ivan because you know trying it it depends on how you define success yep so if you uh you know if you take a look at the mechanical engineering there are you know people making tools and these are highly qualified people and but some of them only have an equivalent of a high school but they know what they're doing they've been doing that for ages they're good at their job and they're respected and reasonably well paid but that's already four years of education you want to get a mechanical engineer there's another three to five years of university or college and then if you want to become an expert in i don't know tool design you need another three to five years of experience so add that together you are at 10 to 15 years so what do you expect in networking i mean it's i think it's a lot of people especially with assets and i want to let's start i don't know if it bears on what you're saying but let's talk about certs because you know our certifications valuable in in today's world um would you recommend certifications i mean i keep pointing to cisco certification you know for two reasons number one uh decent certifications uh have some reason behind the things you have to learn so there is a reason you have to learn switching and routing and how bridging works yada yada with ccna obviously like 20 of that is probably marketing crap and another 30 percent is cisco cli who cares about that but like half of it is fundamentals and you have to learn fundamentals eventually or you will never become an engineer i mean you can get engineer in the title and still don't understand how things work but that's a different story that's the peculiarity of our industry you know instead of giving you a raise they give you an engineer title and now you feel great that's a different story so yeah certifications are relevant because you know they're structured it's like going to university and study for three to five years why do you go to university i mean eighty percent of the things you learn there will probably never be useful in your life but you have a structured curriculum and you go through that and you learn a little bit or a lot depending about many things that you would never touch otherwise because you wouldn't be forced to do it and you know that we are all lazy oh yeah uh so yeah certifications are good for the same reason they force you to learn things that you wouldn't learn otherwise and also there they are you know like the baseline enabler let's call it that way because eventually you will have to get a job and somehow you have to prove to whoever is hiring you that you're capable of doing that job and having a certification doesn't hurt now obviously people are going around finding a job totally wrong way because you know you put together your cv and they all look alike because everyone is using the same cv polishing service and everyone has the same source and then everyone is sending their cvs to every job opening posted on the internet so i'm getting 100 identical cps what do i do yeah i throw them all away and i hire a friend because at least i know him honestly it's a problem i mean a lot of young people are really struggling because how did they i hear these stories over and over and over they they they might get a whole bunch of suits they're still struggling to get a job and then one of the problems is experience thirds don't have help you if you can't prove to the company that you are adding value so how do i do that i mean i want to put you on the spot you know yeah let's say you're hiring someone so i'm a young person i've perhaps got a ccna how do i they always want experience so how do i get experience without having a job and how do i get a job without experience you know it's that whole volunteer come on so volunteer do something so give me examples find someone who needs his network fixed do it for free in the evening so you're like a small medium business a school church something like that school church charity someone that you love helping don't do it for a business because you know they're making money out of that but the charity set up a website for a charity install a wi-fi for a charity connect a charity or a church or your local football club what do i care to the internet do something useful document that write about it when you get to the interview when you get to you know through all the showstoppers and everything and you get to the interview you want to say i did this in my life and i solved this problem this way and i was successful because whatever if you get to an interview and you say i have ccna or i have ccnp everyone's like okay that brought you to this table now what i like that it brought me i like what you just said now it brought you to this table now what yeah i mean i started working when i was in second grade of high school okay give us an age because that might not be the same for everyone ah 15 15 okay yeah something like that and you know i was working for peanuts yep but they did pay me because there was some value in what i was doing and they felt charitable and paid me a little bit but i got experience i actually developed something i got something up and running and i could say well i did that you can't find anything join an open source project every open source project could benefit from someone who could write documentation write the bloody documentation for an open source project write unit tests do whatever just do something don't camera how it's hard to get experience so in other words you're saying you've got to make it happen so try and volunteer do something but help out you don't don't you know count on the environment the society the government whoever to solve your problems move around do stuff so that gets me to you you mentioned a keyword and i want to i want to ask you about that you said document so what's your feeling about using social media blogs um doing something like where you put it out there like videos whatever what do you think about that i mean you you know in the end it's all about selling yourself right yeah you know the best jobs are the ones that you don't apply to the best jobs are the jobs that are created for you because they want you so how do you persuade someone that they want and by the way this works i know a guy straight out of university he was working on an interesting field and he got some other interesting experience and in the end it took a year or so but in the end he bumped into someone who was so delighted with what this guy could bring to the table that they went ahead and just created a job opening for him scrapped together the budget wrote the job description he was the only one applying he's working there now but it was him bumping into someone and telling him what he did during his studies and that guy was like yeah we need someone like you so yeah you could do that or you know you could document what you're doing you have to you have to build your brand but you don't build your brand with 140 character long opinions unlike you ivan don't build your brand with likes on facebook or posting pictures of you know cat videos that's crap so how do i do it how do i do it do something document what you've done publish it so you're talking about a blog video that type of thing or uh well it depends on what kind of brand you want to build you want to build a professional serious brand well you're aiming for an expert right so yeah written word probably still works better than you know you being an actor in a video uh impart there's another problem honestly some kids are natural talents and they could just appear in a video and they would ace it yeah it took me i don't know about you but it took me ages to get proficient in presenting stuff yeah i mean i think we're we're a different generation that's why oh no partly no no no you're seeing the top zero one percent of the kids for every kid acing it in the video they're like thousand kids who can't open their mouth when the camera is running that's a good good point that's a very good point very good point so and also you know if you are writing something you can edit it well publish it eventually you know perfect is the enemy of good and published yep i like that yep but you can fix stuff which is harder to do with video i do a lot of video videos can be very tough but i prefer video than writing but it's i think it's well so do i i honestly prefer writing but getting stuff out as video is faster yeah also yeah and based on the size of my audience because your audience is your potential audience is huge yeah there are gazillions of ccna aspirants in the world how many people really want to know how a new technology works maybe a thousand worldwide me 2 000. yeah yours is much more niche so yeah exactly the written is perhaps better for what you're going for is what you're saying or well uh you know it's all about what brand you want to present yeah you want to be someone serious write something you want to be implied in hollywood act but but basically i mean you mentioned you know build your brand so this is all part of brand building so what's your opinion about like posting on linkedin um i've seen you i've seen you put on twitter you know like oh it's a pity everyone's putting stuff on on linkedin wow no no no no no not linkedin linkedin is reasonable okay so first uh figure out how ephemeral the stuff is that you're using uh twitter i i i'm really upset about people writing long threads on twitter yep because that's gone in a week no one will find it after two weeks unless you are looking for that quote by cloud borat you know uh to air is human to deploy the error on thousand servers is devops or something like that that one you can find with google otherwise you know finding anything on twitter is ridiculously hard it's tough so you want to have a longer form text if you decide that you want to write and then the question is where do you want to publish it linkedin is not bad because you know it's professional audience so if you publish something on linkedin you will probably reach people who might be interested in what you have to say um i prefer you know this is another one of those things if you want to get experience do something why don't you set up the file structure on your file system and then figure out how to use hugo or jekyll or which whichever of this static side generators and then you put all this into git and you push it to github or git lab and you set up github actions or gitlab actions bam everything is published automatically and you have your own website to click on linkedin but i know exactly what you're saying you know that there's a lot of experience in just doing that yeah and you can turn that into a blog post or into something and the really interesting part of that experience is that a you built something b you got experience with certain tools that not everyone in your industry is familiar with that engineer i mentioned you know yeah as part of his not being in his industry experience he learned git now he's preaching git to that company because you know they have nothing in place or so i was though uh so you get experience you build something whereas you know uh typing into a web form on linkedin and pressing publish what does that teach you nothing but the same thing with wordpress don't use wordpress wordpress is for people who use i.t it's not for people who work in i.t

if you work in i.t learn something it's interesting i mean i have a different perspective to you because i think linkedin and those kind of platforms are really good because your reach can be much bigger than just putting it on your on your on your um on your website but i like what you can do always sorry you can always put it on your website yeah and then write a summary on linkedin exactly i was gonna say that's what you do very well you'll write something on your website and then you'll talk about it on twitter or in other places yeah well i publish it on twitter and linkedin because i seriously don't consider facebook or any of the variants like what's it whatsapp instagram you know all that crap i have a different perspective to you but i know what you mean um no no you have different audience yes yeah but honestly we are talking about building a professional brand yes would you hire someone to pull a power transmission line across your country based on his facebook posts it depends but i know what you're saying yeah yeah so anyway the the other important thing is that you own the content yes because you know what i just described i can push it to gitlab i can push it to github i can push it to bitbucket if it still exists all of those are free i could push it to s3 on amazon if i wish so i can publish it anywhere i just point my domain to that particular location and i can move from github to gitlab because i hate github this week because it was bought by microsoft i can move back from gitlab to github because i hate gitlab because it's down this week and i can do it immediately because i own the stuff if i publish on linkedin and they decide to change their terms of service good luck i just understand what you're saying i like the idea of putting the the main article on your website and then putting a summary or uh something short to that on on social media you you kind of do that so it's good to see that did you want to say anything else about that or i'm going to ask you the next oh yeah oh yeah i have a particular extra grind okay sorry it's called what medium don't ever use medium it's funny you know it's um i found that linkedin works really well just for reach but i understand what you're saying it's a different you see linkedin is sort of fair relatively as much as a social media platform can be fair and it's a value proposition yeah it's yeah you have to be registered because you know this is for professionals but once you're registered you're on there and that's it whereas medium is you know like the pharmaceutical the colombian pharmaceutical model you get three stories per month three and then you have to register and then we'll start tracking you okay that's yeah i haven't used medium to be honest i've always used linkedin or my own website yeah i know i i i get links to interesting stuff that is on medium and then i immediately noticed how they tried to track who i am and you know pull me in and uh some stories are like oh no this is only for subscribers which is okay but some stories are like oh this is like your third story this month and now you really have to register yeah it's those paywalls or those things where they force you to register a real pain i agree yeah i mean let's be honest if you want to have subscribers then ask me to register yeah don't dangle something in front of me and then you know bait and switch oh now you have to register i understand the frustration yeah so sorry go on whenever you're ready i'm going to throw the next question at you okay do it so ivan you've mentioned get already so it's interesting what's your opinion of cisco devnet and that those kind of certifications they can't hurt yeah uh so you see it's always the question of where you're coming from and why you need certain things yeah so if you are an existing networking engineer and you think that you have to become a programmer which is a wrong idea but we can go there some other time uh then yes something like devnet is the right thing to do because you already have networking expertise you know nothing about python and rest api and git and all that stuff you have to learn those things if you're a developer then you already know all those things and if you want to be you know a network automation developer then maybe you should focus more on understanding how networks really work because you know you have the developers that can develop anything and are not good at anything and then you have people who have actually worked in some industry for ages so for example you might have a mediocre developer who has been working in chemical industry for the last 20 years he will beat any wizkid because he knows all the dirty details all the requirements all the regulations all the audits you have to go through whereas you know someone who might be a brilliant programmer has no idea about the industry and the same thing if you want to be a good developer in network automation space then maybe it's more than python maybe you should know how networks really work do you do you think there's going to be a trend where network engineers the traditional network engineers are replaced with guys who do automation is it are we kind of all forced to do automation now well you see uh the way we've been doing things in the past is crazy yeah i mean just configuring the same crap on thousand remote office routers manually and using excel to replace the ip prefixes in your configuration it's the future what stone age are we living in exactly uh so yeah we we need to clean up the crap that we're in and uh one way of cleaning it up is through network automation but you know like an accountant probably won't write excel macros maybe a networking engineer doesn't need to write python scripts maybe you should offsource this to someone who actually understands python yeah it's it's interesting what you said there i mean it's um cisco seemed to be pushing a lot of people to network engineers to become developers or automation guys if you like automation people what's your opinion everyone is doing that does it make sense i don't think so so do you i remember you've mentioned this before do you are you still of the opinion that it should be like a network person working together with a developer and creating if you want to get good results yes okay that's interesting but because honestly uh you remember what we were discussing previously you need like 10 plus years to become an expert in any industry yep so you invested 10 years into becoming a networking expert and someone invested 10 years into becoming a really good software engineer and now you want to waste the next three years of your life learning python why exactly so my counter to you would be years ago and i mean this is just me trying to trying to you know put myself in the in the shoes of the audience years ago we had telephony people and then we had network engineers and then the market changed and network engineers had to learn about telephony and that whole industry got revolutionized where people like network guys do both now so is it not going the same kind of thing going to happen perhaps yeah well honestly how much telephony is left yeah i mean it's it's all voice over ip is that what you mean or it's like soft phones first a lot of organizations are going to mobile only yep so who is how many voice over iep phones have you seen lately no it's a very good point i mean that that industry has moved even further now so i mean i i i did a lot of voice over ip stuff but i mean now i wouldn't worry too much but this seems to be you know even in the traditional voice over ip world i was working for a system integrator and we had a few people that would be voice over ip experts for the rest of us it was just a stupid application running on top of our networks yeah it was a bit more demanding it was running on udp it didn't tolerate jitter it requires certain bandwidth so yeah you had to provision all that but honestly voice over ip that's an application i mean do networking engineers care about my sequel i i know where you're going with this i mean for me or what you're saying but for me it's like um and we're running out of time so i'm going to push you on this now what do you think are the top skills in the next few years because we've kind of mentioned automation you've mentioned git that a guy did but like if i'm starting today is there any kind of path that you would recommend someone take based on what you've seen like do i become a ccna do i go and do devnet is it what are the sort of the technologies we did this before but i'd like to get an updated list are there any top five top ten technologies that you think are really important and are there any is there any path to get there well you see it depends on whether you're looking short term or long term short term today i would go with automation or cloud these are the things that will be probably in greatest demand in the next three to five years long term learn the fundamentals ip routing hasn't changed in 40 years ethernet hasn't changed in 40 years everything with it was up the speeds 400 gig ethernet is still ethernet yeah it's still running ipv4 and ipv6 on top of that and it's still transporting more ipv4 than ipv6 tcp is slowly changing with quick and things like that but ospf is there bgp will not go anywhere arp will be there forever because you know if you have layer two and layer three you have to map them somehow so regardless of what you know pays the bills learn the fundamentals because eventually you will need them yeah and eventually every environment will get to a point where the network will be down and who will troubleshoot that the python guys the cloud guys or someone who took time and learned the fundamentals you

2021-03-11 21:47

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