17. Network Engineering is a Dying Career Field – Tech Field Day Podcast

Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where each episode we bring together a group of IT experts in the field of enterprise IT to discuss a variety of specific topics, premises, if you will, on a variety of technical subjects. This podcast is an association with the Tech Field Day event series, which is a part of the FU room group, and includes delegates from the Tech Field Day event series. This episode is being recorded during networking field day 35.

Before we jump into the premise for the episode, I'd like to have our guests introduce themselves, starting with Andy. Hey, I am Andy Leff, career network engineer and, uh, host and co-creator of the Art of Network Engineering podcast. Hey, I'm Ron Team Lu.

I'm a architect of networking and other things for a children's research hospital. And I'm Tom Hollingsworth, a former network engineer who is now an event lead for the tech Field day event series, specializing in networking, security and wireless. Now the introductions are outta the way.

Let's jump into the premise for this episode. If you're watching this podcast, you probably heard about us regarding an episode that we recorded earlier this year called No One Wants to Be a Network Engineer anymore. It's by far the number one podcast on our channel.

And these two gentlemen have something they'd like to say about it, and I figured I'd jump in because I have a lot to say about it too. So let's kick this off of course by making a very, um, pointed title that network engineering is a dying career field. Alright, Andy, you, you kind of kick this off.

What's, why is it dying? So I run a network engineering podcast, right? And I haven't wanted to say it on that one, So I So you're gonna say it on mine instead?

So I wait until I came on yours. No, but it's been something that's been on my mind for a while, right? I've been in tech about 15 years, networking for about 10, and I don't know when I got in, I was really excited about it.

It was a great career, a lot of growth, and I felt like, well, everything's connected to the network. We're always gonna need networking. This is important.

There was some statistic I saw when I was a cable guy, like the number of connected devices was, it was almost like Moore's Law, like it was like doubling every year and like, oh, it's five and it'll be 10, right? So I just looked at the growth of the network, I'm like, wow, this is gonna be a really great thing. Um, and right before this episode, I think what kicked all this off as I had said to you guys, like, I, I don't think today, 10 years ago, I would've told my kids, it's a great role.

It's a great career, you should get in it. And I guess my experiences over the past 10 years or so, just I feel less and less like it's a, it's a good career and I, I guess we can get into to some of the why's, but I think that's the high level premise of, you know, I, I'm not gonna tell my kids again in network engineering. Mm-hmm.

That's a pretty powerful statement. Remington, what do you think? Yeah, it's a tough one.

Like, uh, we were talking about it earlier as well and, um, you know, similar, right? I got into the field, it was booming. There've been lots of eras in in tech where networking is a booming, uh, component of what's happening.

And it's really sort of been shrinking. And, you know, uh, we have a internship program that we run and, and we do have interns that come and we're glad to have them. We do have networking interns, um, this year, which is great.

Um, but when we actually get into the nitty gritty of what the network is supporting and how it functions and what it does is when I, I see a lot of those folks kind of sort of tune out or turn off or not want to go into the field, they want to go into other, what seemed like more glamorous or more interesting fields, cybersecurity, doing something with ai, you know, those sorts of, of efforts. And so, um, it really kind of struck in my mind that like, ah, when he said it, I really, when he, when Andy put this out there, I was like, I don't think that's accurate. And then I thought about it more and more.

I was like, I, it does kind of match. I, I really don't understand why we don't have more people coming into the field. It's, it's generally a well-paying career.

It's an inside career, you know, I mean, there's so many things that are great about being in network engineering, but yet postings are out there and we just can't get folks. So it's, it feels like a dying. So obviously it's been a while since I've been in network engineering, uh, at least 12 years as the recording of this podcast.

So I'm gonna respectfully disagree with you two gentlemen, and I'll tell you why. I don't think that network engineering is a growing career field by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't think it's dying because there are still COBOL programmers and mainframe engineers out there, and they're going to be there for ever. And part of the reason for that is kind of to what Remington, what you said, the way that we highlight these fields.

Yes, I will be the first person to tell you there is nothing exciting about the world of network engineering. Do you like working long hours? Do you like being berated by your coworkers?

Do you enjoy making a pittance for the amount of effort that you put into things? Then boy, have I got a career field for you? But I think that as more opportunities exist in enterprise IT cybersecurity is actually a really good example of this.

People are gonna wanna chase that because it's cool because I get to put on, you know, shades and I get to counter the hackers and I get to do OPSEC intelligence and, and find out who's doing stuff. And we don't do that anymore in network engineering. com was, was the rage.

And yeah, if, you know, when that was a big thing, that was 2001 and it took a market crash to shake everybody out. And I think that what's happened is, is that network engineering is still reeling from the last few kind of readjustments and nobody sees it as the thing I want to do. The people who are doing it see it as the thing I'm good at doing, and therefore they're kind of defending their turf as it were.

Can we talk about those readjustments you're talking about like cloud AI automation, like all the things that Yeah, I think that, so the cloud was probably the biggest thing because it changed the way that we operationalize our networks. Now suddenly we are talking more about doing things like deploying networks in a way that makes it quick to, you know, provision ports and, and assign VLANs for lack of a better term. But more importantly, it, it created like this service provider service model where I go in and click buttons and get my functions.

I no longer need someone who's skilled in remembering what the HSRP MAC address offset changes are. Just like, uh, there was a time I had my a plus, I had to memorize comport addresses and I had to know which IQs work for which devices. And my son is a computer guy and he has no idea what an IRQ is.

Yeah, I think those are all really valid points. Um, you know, the, the network engineering, you know, if it, even if it's not a growth area, 'cause it definitely was a growth area. Mm-hmm.

Like, it was exciting to get into networking and do things like you said, um, if it's not a growth area, though, I feel like there is a natural attrition component that really does turn it into the dying side of the career ladder. And in much the same way that AL or FORTRAN or one of those others, like totally agree, they're not going away. I mean, IBM still sells mainframes, so technology is gonna be here for a long time.

And, and I, and I respect that and there will still be network engineers, there will still be a need to do networking, but as in terms of a career path, right? As in I'm gonna start off maybe in help desk or some other lower IT or technical function and I'm gonna move my way up and I'm gonna graduate into being a network engineer. It doesn't really feel like there's any that's a thing anymore.

And, and you know, when we were talking earlier about, um, network engineering, it's like, okay, well if I'm gonna deploy automation, I need automation in order to allow me to go do higher value things. But what are those higher value things that I'm going to go do? So I feel like a lot of the network engineering component has either been commoditized out, um, because we're consuming it through cloud or some other factor, right?

Or it's been moved into a different role that's handled by someone else and it's not really what we think of or what we have historically called network engineering. Um, the other thing I would say is that I feel like there is real engineering that happens in networking, but for a lot of, a lot of, uh, environments, we don't really have to do that much real engineering the way that you did before, right? Like thinking through what our oversubscription ratios were and how we were gonna handle routing, how do we handle tuning?

A lot of that stuff has sort of been abstracted out of it. And so the real engineer engineering component of it is, has been fading. Um, in my mind, I think cloud was the first threat that I felt, right?

Like, oh, you don't have to know how networks work. You just click a button and ta-da, there's your network, right? And you can build, you can build there.

Instead. I'm like, wait, what about everything I know and everything I've been doing? And then like you said, automation, right?

Like, so I, I, you know, I worked at a vendor and most, uh, you know, the business, right? Like I, I kind of, I feel like I've seen behind the curtain a little bit and the people who sign pos to buy things from vendors, you know, when, when they keep saying like, well, how many of my people can I get rid of if I buy our automation solution? It just kind of shook me.

'cause I'm like, whoa. We're saying like, well, don't be threatened by automation. Just, you know, it's a new skill set.

You just have to skill up. You know, like, well, I don't wanna learn development, but okay. And then when I saw in vendor life that it really was, again, this could be my cognitive bias, right?

Like just based on my experience, but, um, if decision makers at corporations at Fortune 100 companies are saying, how many of my network engineers can I get rid of if I buy our automation platform? Like, how can you ignore that? How can you tell me that network engineering isn't a dying career when, so, you know, I was threatened by cloud, right?

I was threatened by automation and I know that it's the wrong framing because I've talked to other people in the industry who are like, well, you just have to skill up and you have to learn that. But I don't know what I thought was a foundational skill that, like you were talking earlier, it's kinda like a utility now, right? Like, it's just, people expect it, it's just there.

And, uh, I, I feel like people don't really think about it. And I, I like how you framed it before the, before we started recording, what did you say? Like, you know, the first seven years, like the first two years, you're getting punched in the face, right?

And Tom, you kind of alluded to it too, like, everybody's yelling at you. You're a dog, you're the plumber, you're like digging the roads, right? Nobody cares.

I don't really feel I, I came up in a knock, I came up in FinTech, like the developers were, 'cause they're revenue generating, right? Like they were treated like, you know, princes and the network people. It was just a different culture.

Like, you shut up, you get on the phone, you get it fixed, like what are you doing? You're a call center. So there, there's just a big culture, I think, how can I tell my kids, oh, you'll spend the first five to seven years like working three maintenance windows a week and on call and getting called away from your family when things break.

Like it's not as sexy as, like you said, you know, cybersecurity, right? Getting the hackers, But cybersecurity faces the same problem. You are not gonna go out and be the rock star on TV telling people how, you know, apple got their iCloud passwords hacked.

You're gonna spend a lot of your initial career weeding through Syslog and you're gonna be doing a lot of of DFIR stuff, but not the fun stuff. Like that's what a lot of people don't understand about those cool sexy careers. Because I can remember when I was in college studying MIS and, um, everybody wanted to be a consultant because that's what you, that was the job, was you go out, you make a lot of money as a consultant.

And I distinctly remember one of my, uh, professors, Jack Warner, who said, okay, how many of you guys wanna be a consultant in this programming class? Everybody's hand went up and he said, okay, how many of you want to be programmers? Like two hands went up.

And he said, you do realize that if you're a consultant, you're gonna be writing program, right? Find you. Jack Warner was a COBOL professor.

So that should tell you how long ago that that conversation happened. But the, the point of fact is, is that a lot of people wanna skip to the end. They want to get to the part where they're making lots of money and driving a fancy car and they're well respected.

But as we've learned over the years, that respect is not something that's given. It's earned. And we have to make a lot of mistakes before we get there.

And I feel like a lot of people don't want to accidentally forget the ad command to the vlan, or they, what do you mean I created a race condition? I was supposed to tag those routes. Anybody out there who's a network engineer knows exactly what I'm talking about, right?

But we get to that point where we understand that. And as much as we try to impart that to the junior people that we're mentoring, sometimes you gotta make that mistake. Yeah, I think that's a huge point too.

Like, I mean, it's very difficult. All of us made a lot of mistakes. Like, I mean, it's fun to sit around and talk about the blast radius of your worst mistake, right?

And compare war stories. But I think as well with businesses, because the network, right, because the infrastructure has become so much more critical to what business does now, the tolerance for failure and mistakes has declined for a lot of folks. And we can talk about why that shouldn't be, but I do feel that that's kind of a, a common thing.

And so I feel like there's less space for those folks to make those errors. And so I think it feels less and less forgiving as time goes on. Um, But at the same time, we also have access to a lot more resources than we did in the past where they just assumed that if you've consumed everything there is to know about this particular topic, you shouldn't make those mistakes in the first place.

And yet we still do. Yeah, I think that's another, uh, excellent point. Uh, the other thing that I was thinking through is that a lot of the networking that historically, you know, at a smaller company you would have someone who could do some networking or have some network engineering skills.

I think a lot of that is kind of going away though. I mean, kind of coming back to the idea of it as a shrinking career field, um, because stuff has gotten good enough, right? I mean, infrastructure's gotten good enough.

The switching capacity is enough, right? So you don't really have to replace as much. You're not doing as much maintenance once it gets in and it's stable.

It works. And the revolution in advancement in wifi really means like once the WiFi's up and it's functioning, no one needs to touch it, right? The SaaS, the cloud component, the consumption of those services, that moves a lot of that kind of out of our hands.

And for the, those junior folks, for those early folks, right? That kind of goes away. So yes, there's still artisanally crafted networking that has to happen with genuine real engineering.

But for a lot of those entry, um, more junior folks to get started in simpler, more basic environments, which we all potentially had the opportunity to probably do, I feel like that a lot of that's going away. And because of the drive of the importance of the network, I also think there's increasing concern or drive to make sure like, no, no, we need experts to do this, right? We're not gonna, I get that you're interested, but this is important to our business.

We can't let you mess around with this. You know? And so that cuts off that capacity for those folks.

So what you're saying that pro prod is not my lab. Everybody has a lab, Tom, some of us are fortunate enough to not have it be in production. Sure.

That's fair. And I hope I'm wrong. I love network engineering.

It's much better. I was climbing ladders, getting chased by dogs and yelled at every day as like a cable guy. Like, and then I went and network engineering and, you know, almost doubled my salary.

And like you said, now I'm sitting at a desk. I'm not in the heat on, on ladders and stuff. So I, it's been a really good career for me.

But, and maybe this is just what happens over time. We just kind of get cynical and jaded and like, oh, back in my day, right? It just, it feels, I see a trend in the industry and, and it, it just concerns me that the network, our skillset to me just seems less and less valued or important or respected over time.

And again, it could just be my cognitive bias on it, but it just Feels weird. Well, let me pose this question 'cause it's actually one of my favorite little stalking horses of the whole thing. Part of the reason why our jobs have been so hard is because of the way that all these protocols interact together, right?

We've, we've had to do the whole, you know, this one's running OSPF, this one's running E-R-G-R-P, we gotta get 'em to work together. We've had to configure HSRP, VRRP, split brain, all kinds of this stuff. And then we said, enough is enough and we're gonna fix this so we don't have to do it anymore.

Did we engineer the engineering out of the network? I think the answer to that in many cases is probably yes. Like we, we've tried to, I mean, businesses because people are expensive.

The skill sets were hard. They were rare, right? So I mean, that made it, that made it exactly what it was a very valuable, expensive thing to maintain.

And um, and so there's a lot of effort obviously to chase that and to make it less expensive, more reliable, more consistent, more, and you know, all of those things sort of pull back on the engineering component. And it's not to say that network engineers can't provide value to the business. I think we, I don't think we're arguing they can't.

I think the real conversation is just, there seems to be a need for more of us, but there aren't more of them around. And it doesn't seem like a lot of people are moving into it. And maybe it's because it is reliable enough and we have engineered that difficulty out.

Um, maybe we should have never put it in in the first place. I don't really know that that was much of an option. But, um, I don't Know.

And you made me think of like when you said the business, right? Like, I'll push back on that a little bit. We had network standards, like places as I've worked and there's a way to do things and you know, what's the right way to do.

But then this BU shows up and they got $50 million from a client and we have to build this thing and it has to be built in two weeks, or we're gonna circumvent as many standards as we can. 'cause we gotta get it up because this new app is ready and the timeline expired on something else, right? And like, so we've, the technical debt that was built up, at least in places I've worked at, created this complexity so that we went outside of our standards.

And then someday, if you do that long enough and enough places, you right, you're in a maintenance window, you touch something, it blows a bunch of things up and then they're p****d off at you. Well, the business pushed us into bad decision making. We knew what was right, but they said, no, we have to do this because of money.

And then that caused problems. So like, to put that on network engineers I don't think is particularly fair because the business drives all those decisions. So I'll push back on that a little bit because it, why did the company come to us and say, this network has to be turned up in two weeks because we could do it.

Oh yeah. So if, if you don't believe that, that the problem with network engineering is the fact that we have the capability to do the things that are impossible, go ask the accounting department to get that invoice paid early and they'll tell you the same thing that everybody else in every other organization says, can't do it. Not possible.

And that's the ultimate goal that we're striving for, is we just wanna make things predictable and easy to deal with. If as the networking team we had pushed back and say, we can't build that network in less than 30 days, yeah, there's gonna be grumbling and growling and griping. But what ends up happening is, is they come to us with 40 days now and they say, okay, you, we have more time for you to do this.

Now is this gonna be enough? Because as much as we have been told for years that networking is the department of no, it's really the department of no, but let me look at it. And that's where we get into problems.

Like you said, in order for us to meet these deadlines, we work overnight maintenance windows, we cobble things together that probably shouldn't have been cobbled together and we made it work. But now we're reaching the point where that doesn't happen anymore. I mean, again, if you've watched anything that I've recorded in the last seven or eight years, you know, that vMotion is my favorite thing to pick on because it was a dirty hack to make software work better.

And it wasn't until we moved to the cloud where vMotion was no longer an option that software developers had to start rewriting their software better. So in a way, we engineered the complexity out of the network by getting rid of the things that we were relying on to make it less complex in the first place. Yeah, I mean, it's a valid point.

Um, it's a valid point. So what can we do to make network engineering more exciting to people so they actually want to do it? I, so we talked a little about this yesterday.

I, I think a a for, from my perspective, a lot of what we have to do, I think is actually be passionate about it in a positive way. I think a lot of our general demeanor, um, could be offputting to new folks, right? We talk in jargon, we talk about the late, the late hours and the maintenances and you know, those sorts of things we talk about being on call, right?

So we, we tend to kind of, when we nasal naval gaze, we tend to focus on negative things. That's all people do, right? But there are amazing great things about being in network engineering too, right?

I mean, generally speaking, you get paid well, like I said, you get to work inside and yeah, you do have to do maintenances, but you know, increasingly there's a flexibility that comes with that, with remote work, with a flexible schedule potentially, right? So yeah, I do have to go back and do maintenance from 10 to two, but it also means that when my kid comes home at three in the afternoon, I can pause for 40 minutes and go hang out with my kids, right? Or I can shift something else around in order to, you know, um, in order to go do something I wanna do in my regular life.

And there are a lot of professions in which you cannot do that, right? Even professions that you get to work somewhat remotely for. So there are a lot of upsides to it.

Um, I do think that there's still a lot of potential, um, value that can be driven to businesses from network engineers. Um, and so I think highlighting those, highlighting how you can provide value into an organization and demonstrating that to, uh, a younger group of folks is, is a way to move forward. I think it's on us, right?

Like it's, it's why I create the content I create. It's why I do the, the podcast I do. Or trying to tell the stories of people in the industry to, you know, create awareness to get the word out there.

And, and like you said, technical jargon. Like I had a thought coming in on the flight here, like if there's a way that we can make, you know, Alexis Bertol, she's always about, you know, how can we make network engineering cool again? And I think we have to relate this technical jargon that doesn't make sense to anybody.

Like if we can, like, if we can make it funny or entertaining or relatable, like I was telling you last night, my wife played basketball. So if I'm trying to explain something technical to her, I always relate it to something that she knows. Like if we can relate what we do and the protocols and the silliness to something that the everyday person can relate to, it might seem a little more accessible to, I don't know, the senior in high school looking for a major or maybe somebody in college looking for.

Because it is a very kind of, I dunno if esoteric is the right word, but just this weird techie kind of thing that like doesn't make sense to most people. I think it's on us, the people public facing that do the job. If we can communicate our passion and the cool stuff about it and kind of make it a little entertaining and maybe funny here and there to get people's attention and go, oh, okay, that, that actually sounds pretty cool.

Um, it might turn the tide, right? I don't know. Beyond us going on a high school tour talking to seniors about how great networking is, I, I don't know what else to do, right?

I think it's important that we step forward, especially the people who have been doing this for a while and act more as mentors and teachers than gatekeepers because we've seen this a lot in technology. How many times have we recorded podcasts that say Technology X is gonna take your job away. It's not.

Um, well, I, okay, sorry, let me rewind. It's gonna take your job away if you're bad at your job, because that's the thing that always happens. The storage admins and the virtualization admins became cloud admins.

The bad ones didn't, they went off and did something else. Just like the bad network engineers are gonna go off and be cybersecurity experts or AI prompt generation experts. Thanks.

And the ones who really have a passion and who want to do the job are gonna stay there because they know they're good at it because they know they have good capabilities and they wanna make sure that there's something for the next generation to do. And I think that that in a way is good because shaking the tree does let the bad apples drop every once in a while. And I'm not saying that the people who are bad at their jobs are not bad intentionally, but maybe this is just not a good fit for them.

And this is something that we see across all organizations everywhere, is that people who are just in it to make a quick buck, do the minimum amount of effort necessary to get something done. And when the next opportunity arises, they're off on that journey. And you all know those people because they hit you up on Facebook every time they're invested in a new LL or MLM and they're trying to make some quick bucks on that.

Just look around to the people who are lifelong doctors, lifelong lawyers life. You know, we say those professions because they have kind of a gravitas to them. In fact, engineering as a professional, a lot of my friends are legit, like civil engineers, mechanical engineers.

Yeah. I get a lot of crap from people online. 'cause I tell people I'm an engineer and you're like Canadians, especially if you say I'm not a professional engineer.

I'm a, I'm a a play acting engineer. But we still hold those, uh, professions in a, in kind of a high esteem, wireless engineering, network engineering, you know, cloud engineers, ai, prompt engineers, not so much. But you know, I think what we need to do more outreach of making sure that people know that this job isn't going anywhere.

Yeah, you're right. We're probably not gonna mint a million new engineers next week. But I also remember at one point in my learning career that MIS was the largest single major on the University of Oklahoma campus.

We had something like 2,500 MIS majors three years later. com crash. Because what happened was, is that everybody looked around and suddenly realized the quick bucks aren't here anymore and they vanished and left it to the real folks.

Yeah, I think that's a really, um, interesting and salient point, right? Which is talking about it, but also making sure that people understand like, hey, passion, our interests, those are all things, but also this is a, this is kind of an advanced trade and like all advanced trades, you're not going to move there to your earlier point in a single year, right? Like, this is gonna be a journey.

So you need to understand that and you need to sign up for that. And you need to understand that yes, you will get to the point where you get to have all the things that you want, the flexible career, the work from home, a really high paying job, you know, all those things that absolutely can happen, but you're gonna have to work a while before it hits, right? Like there isn't a, it doesn't have the appeal of trying to make a quick buck, but to your point, a lot of those other roles don't have quick bucks either.

It just, in certain markets there is a greater scarcity I think of, of technical competence than maybe in network engineering. And maybe this is part of the situation too. And so with even less skills, you can still get paid really well, right?

And so I think there's a little bit of a balance that's maybe happening there too. Um, but I'm glad that Andy continues to make great content. I'm glad that Tom, you continue to make great content.

I'm glad I get to join the content once in a while to try to help share my passion and my interest in it. Um, so I think this conversation changed my mind because I'm thinking I flew halfway, I flew across the country to come to networking field day. I spent six hours on the plane studying for my CCMP.

I've talked about nothing but networking for the past two days. So maybe dying is an overreach of, you know, I I think that you've brought up some really good points. You too, to kind of make me rethink.

There's always gonna be network engineers, like you said, there's COBOL and, and mainframe folks. Um, but it's changing and change is scary and I don't like it. I mean, that's ultimately the, the reality of it is that we don't like change.

We don't like seeing things that we've invested effort and time into changing underneath us and we're uncomfortable with it because it's not the same anymore. But maybe that's part of becoming a mature growing person, is that we've hit a comfortable point in our careers where we've solved a lot of the problems and we don't need to look for them anymore. Now it's the people who climb to the top of a mountain and enjoy the view for a little bit.

But there's always gonna be that group of people who look around and go, yeah, but there's a mountain over there that's just a little bit taller. And if I start now, I can get on top of it before the storm hits. And I think that we as network engineers need to encourage more of those people to be a part of our industry and our part of our career path because the people that rest on their laurels are always gonna be looking for a way down the mountain as quick as possible.

But the ones who want to climb that mountain over and over again are the ones who will feel a greater sense of self-worth when it's all said and done. That'll just about do it for this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast. I wanna thank our guests for joining us and I also wanna thank you, our audience for listening in.

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