CAREER
Hedge 222: Get out there and publish!
Eric Chou joins Tom and Russ to talk about the importance of creating content, and the many tools and ideas you can use to get out there and publish. You’ve heard us talk about this a lot–now it’s time to get out there and publish.
Hedge 211: Learning About Learning
How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.
Making Networking Cool Again? (2)
Network engineering is not “going away.” Network engineering is not less important than it was yesterday, last year, or even a decade ago.
But there still seems to be a gap somewhere. There are fewer folks interested than we need. We need more folks who want to work as full-time network engineers, and more folks with network engineering skills diffused within the larger IT community. More of both is the right answer if we’re going to continue building large-scale systems that work. The real lack of enthusiasm for learning network engineering is hurting all of IT, not just network engineering.
How do we bridge this gap? We’re engineers. We solve problems. This seems to be a problem we might be able to solve (unlike human nature). Let’s try to solve it.
As you might have guessed, I have some ideas. These are not the only ideas in the world—feel free to think up more!
If you walk into a robotics class, even an introductory robotics class, you see people … building robots. If you walk into a coding class, even an introductory one, you see people … writing software. If you walk into a network network engineering class you see … someone lecturing about the OSI model, packet formats, or how to configure BGP.
What problems are people learning to solve robotic engineering? How to build a robot and get it to do something to solve a real-world problem. What problems are people learning to code solving? How to tackle some real-world problem.
Sure, the problems being solved at an introductory level might be trivial, like: “Read this file and spit out a sum of the numbers in the fourth column.” But they are still starting, right from the beginning, by taking requirements and converting them into solutions.
What problems are network engineers learning how to solve? How to choose hardware, string it all together, and configure BGP.
Do you see the difference?
All engineers solve problems—it’s the nature of engineering. But are we creating a mindset in prospective network engineers, or even adjacent fields, that we solve real-world problems? Or are we giving them the impression that we solve whiteboard problems by talking about bits, bytes, configurations, and cable types?
Have you ever seen the glazing over of eyes while explaining how you put four transport protocols on top of one another (look at all the pretty tunnels)? How about when you create a chart showing how TCP and QUIC can be “kind-of sort-of” forced into the OSI model? Or when you spin out your BGP packet format charts, showing how we’ve (mis)used address families to carry everything anyone can imagine?
I’ve been teaching this stuff for years (okay, decades). Over time, I’ve moved away from teaching configurations and packet formats. I’ve gone from Advanced IP Network Design to Computer Networking Problems and Solutions. These are very different ways of looking at network engineering.
Focusing on real-world problems would help connect business and other IT folks to the network, connect theory to practice, and people to network engineering. Going home at the end of the day saying, “I solved a problem,” can be satisfying. Going home at the end of the day saying, “I configured BGP?”
Another thing adopting the mindset of solving real-world problems might do is help us lose unnecessary complexity. I know complexity is necessary to build resilient systems; we cannot build what we build without creating and encountering complexity.
But we often run ourselves into the ditch on both sides of the road.
We unintentionally build too complex because we try to make it too simple. Quick, which is simpler: building a data center fabric with one routing protocol or two? A single chassis system or several smaller fixed format devices? A proprietary system or something built on open standards?
How many balloons fit in a bag? (thanks, Don)
Failing to start with the tradeoffs, and thinking through what problem we’re actually trying to solve, leads to unnecessary complexity. Such designs might not immediately fail, but they will fail, and “it’s so complex” just isn’t an excuse.
Don’t even try to tell me there aren’t any tradeoffs. If you think there aren’t any tradeoffs, that just means you haven’t looked hard enough. Go find them, think about them, and document them.
We also build complex things because we think it offers job security, or it’s neat, or we like to feel like the kid who says to the world, “look what I built!”
I know it’s exciting to hear stories about that time someone rescued a network from a major failure—after all, that’s solving a real-world problem. Building a network that just works might be “boring,” but it solves many more real-world problems than raising a network from the dead.
We love our fashionable capes, but … capes can get caught in a nearby jet engine. Lose the cape. In the long run, it’ll make network engineering more attractive as a career field and field of knowledge.
The Bottom Line
No, the sky is not falling. We still need networks, and we still need network engineers.
Yes, there is a problem. Too many companies are going “to the cloud” because they cannot find people qualified to build and maintain their very complex networks. There’s too much centralization and too little oppeness.
So maybe let’s stop saying “we don’t need network engineers.” And maybe let’s really think about how we’re building things. And maybe let’s focus on solving real-world problems, starting from day one in network engineering classrooms.
Network engineering is still cool—let’s go out there believing—and selling—that idea to the world.
Making Networking Cool Again? (1)
Is network engineering still cool?
It certainly doesn’t seem like it, does it? College admissions seem to be down in the network engineering programs I know of, and networking certifications seem to be down, too. Maybe we’ve just passed the top of the curve, and computer networking skills are just going the way of coopering. Let’s see if we can sort out the nature of this malaise and possible solutions. Fair warning—this is going to take more than one post.
Let’s start here: It could be that computer networking is a solved problem, and we just don’t need network engineers any longer.
I’ve certainly heard people say these kinds of things—for instance, one rather well-known network engineer said, just a few years back, that network engineers would no longer be needed in five years. According to this view, the entire network should be like a car. You get in, turn the key, and it “just works.” There shouldn’t be any excitement or concern about a commodity like transporting packets. Another illustration I’ve heard used is “network bandwidth should just be like computer memory—if you need more, add it.”
Does this really hold, though? Even if we accept the car and computer memory illustrations and individual routers like these things, is an entire network system like a car? A closer analogy for a network in the world of cars would be an entire transportation system.
You have different kinds of physical transport (rail, over-the-road trucks, air travel, ships, etc.), each with its characteristics, and all of which must be connected to move physical objects from one place to another. There must be some kind of “control plane” that coordinates, shared addressing, formatting rules, etc.
While a single car might, in some sense, be a commodity at this point (and I’ll bet there aren’t many car owners who would wholly agree with that characterization), I don’t see how we could call an entire transportation system a commodity—especially if we want to say “the skills needed to build a transportation system just aren’t needed any longer, there’s nothing more to learn, this is so … boring …”
Let’s dispense with this idea that networks just aren’t needed any longer. We must still build networks that carry traffic between servers, cities, countries, and continents. Building these networks is still a hard problem. Even if there is less room to improve these things than ten or twenty years ago, the problems are still hard. Even if many problems are solved at a broad level, not every problem is solved in every network in the universe.
A more reasonable take on this perspective is that networking skills are diffusing into a larger information technology (IT) skill set. Perhaps IT, in its relative “youth,” divided too sharply and finely—we created too many career fields. What is happening right now, then, is just a kind of right sizing in the market.
Network engineering skills, in fact, do seem to be dispersing to one degree or another. But let’s put this in perspective.
The first point is I’m not convinced there are fewer network engineers. Instead, it’s more likely there are just as many network engineers as there ever have been, if not more. Perhaps, though, “real” network engineering has been growing linearly while all the other IT fields have been growing at a rate faster than linear (I don’t want to say exponential, just something more than linear).
In a world that counts lack of growth as a failure, networking growing at a slower pace than, say, programming seems like a failure from the outside. People like to follow winners; growing is winning; network engineering is not growing as fast as other things, so network engineering is failing.
I dislike the modern progressive mindset—but while I’m working on something in this area, this isn’t the time or place to dive into this topic. Let’s agree that we must let go of the idea: “Growing slower is a failure.”
Returning to the idea of transportation—I will just about bet automobile designers built entire departments in the early days of car manufacturing. Today, there might be just as many automobile designers as ever. They’re just buried in large car manufacturing, servicing, etc., companies, so it feels like there are a lot fewer than there were.
Just because most new engineers must learn many different things, and network engineering skills are diffusing into many different areas of IT, does not mean network engineering is dying, regardless of what it might look like from the outside.
Second, there is nothing wrong with network engineering skills diffusing into the larger IT skill set. Has anyone reading this ever really been a “pure” network engineer? If so, I don’t know whether to envy or feel sorry for you.
When building networks in the military, I had to deal with all the politics of customer relationships and understanding mission needs. When taking cases in technical support, I had to deal with time management and customer-facing skills—and I needed to learn or use coding skills to be an effective network engineer. Today, I do network engineering, like I always have, but I work on security, privacy, DNS, coding, and all sorts of other things.
I cannot think of a time in my career when I would have considered myself a “pure network engineer.” I’ve always had to find and build adjacent skills to design, build, and maintain networks. I would say this is truer today than ever, but I do not believe my skills as a network engineer are any less useful than they have ever been.
Where does all of this leave us?
Let’s continue the discussion in part 2 next week.
Hedge 207: Being a Network Engineer with Phil Grevasi
What does it mean to be a network engineer in today’s world of information technology? Phil Gervasi joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of network engineering, and what it’s really like to be in this small corner of information technology today.
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Hedge 206: Taking Care of Yourself with Ethan Banks
As we reach the end of what has been a hard two-year stretch for what seems like the entire world, Ethan Banks joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. In the midst of radical changes, you can apply self-discipline to make your little part of the world a better place by keeping yourself sane, fit, and well-rested.
Hedge 192: Addiction Recovery
Addiction and addiction recovery are not a “normal” Hedge topic, but addiction afflicts many people in Information Technology. We’re all “hard driven” types, who feel failure keenly, and we tend to spend more time working than is probably healthy for us. Brett Lovins has been through addiction and recovery, and joins Tom Ammon, Russ White, and Eyvonne Sharp to talk about this high impact topic.