68. Network Engineers are Facing an Identity Crisis – Tech Field Day Podcast

Network engineers are a very special breed. They are the firefighters, they are the knowledge bases, they are the people that make things happen. However, has anybody talked to them recently to find out if they think that still in this episode of the Tech Field Day podcast, network engineers are facing an identity crisis?

Welcome to the Tech Field Day podcast, where each episode we bring together a group of IT experts from across the enterprise to discuss a single topic or premise related to enterprise IT Tech Field Day is a part of the Futureum group, and each episode we feature delegates from our Tech Field day event series. For this episode, we are recording on site at Networking Field Day. Before we introduce the premise for the episode, I'd like to take a moment for our guests to introduce themselves so you know who they are.

Starting with Ryan. Hey, I'm Ryan Harris. Uh, I'm a senior engineer.

com. Okay, Chris. My name's Chris Grundman.

I am an executive advisor on network infrastructure, uh, topics. I also am a co-founder of the Network Automation Forum, Nathan Nielsen. I'm a solutions architect at Worldwide Technology.

I am on LinkedIn and I just created a blog site that doesn't have any postings yet, but it will following this event and it's called The Route Reflector. Alright. Thank you all very much for joining us.

Let's jump into the premise for this episode. A person hunched over a keyboard furiously typing in console commands, holding ethernet cables, praying that the packets will start flowing. We all know what a network engineer looks like, right?

But Dewey, really, because in this episode, network engineers are having an identity crisis. It may not be news to you because if you've been involved in this industry for the past several years, no doubt you have heard various forms of technology is gonna take my job. Whether it's automation, orchestration, ai, you name it.

We have really been inundated with a large group of people telling us that our jobs are gonna be redundant sooner or later. But secretly in the background, some of the aspects of our jobs have been changed or made redundant. That example of someone furiously hyping on the CLI that's considered old school now, uh, now we are spending a lot of our times, uh, reacting with chatbots or logging into GUIs to be able to get better visualization of the network.

I guess the question that I wanna pose to the panel of guests here is, do you feel like network engineers have had an identity crisis? I will definitely say that the, the CLI is very clearly dead as everybody knows, nobody has used A CLI in probably decades at this point. Um, but truthfully, I mean, I don't think this is really that new 'cause I think people have been saying that we have to learn Python for like a decade or more now.

Um, and you know, there's, every vendor has their gooey and their, their centralized management platform that makes everything two clicks and is the super easiest thing that you've ever used. Right. Um, and some of that is somewhat true, but I mean, to a certain point, I'd say a lot of times I'm still logging into ACL.

I'm still running commands. I'm still doing the same things I was doing 15 years ago. Um, but then I am doing other things.

So, uh, it changes, but I don't think it's changed away fundamentally from where it started. So, anyone else? Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I think it is very interesting. I think there is somewhat of an identity crisis happening. I think that, um, at the network automation forum we set out to answer the question, why haven't we seen full adoption of network automation yet?

And I think one of the answers is identity. Um, and what I mean by that is we tend to, as, as human beings, not just network engineers or anything else, um, pick up different aspects of our lives as part of our identity, right? So maybe your political party or your religion or your sexual orientation, or there's all kinds of things you can adopt into your identity.

Now. They don't have to be part of your identity. You can let them go.

Um, well, theoretically anyway. And I think that, um, for a long time network engineers have tied their identity to their ability to function on the CLI. Uh, that doesn't necessarily mean that's going away, but things are evolving, I think.

And so when you look at, you know, from the question of why hasn't network automation taken off more, I think one of the reasons is that we were kind of trained to believe that our ability to work quickly on CLI is important and is part of, you know, we've adopted that as part of who we are. Uh, I think it's kind of like, um, we were talking about the industrial revolution earlier and like the second or third industrial revolution was when assembly lines started coming out, right? And all of a sudden people who had, you know, be, become artisans and craftsmen of like, you know, filing down pieces to put sewing machines together, um, wasn't necessary anymore because we could manufacture parts that were high enough tolerance that you could just put them together without having to go in there and do all that artisanal handcrafting.

And I think that as we, as networks become more and more fundamental, whether they're becoming commoditized or not, I think part of making the network more reliable is making it more standardized. And as you make it more standardized, there's less room for the arts and crafts of, of, you know, putting this thing together in a very special way. And really one of the ways to make your networks more reliable is to build them the same every time.

Mm-hmm. And so that can infringe on this identity that like, no, no, it was my brain. It was my hands.

You know, that, that created this thing. And if that goes away a little bit because of just standardization, um, I think that can take a hit to people's identity for sure. Yeah.

I, I definitely, uh, agree with that. I, when I was packing to come out here, I found I still had a console cable in my backpack. Right.

Just because that's what it's, it was natural for me to know that, hey, when I go somewhere, I may have to get out and connect to something and, and get something going. Um, and I, I've also had had jobs where it was, um, you know, I was the one that that knew where all the skeletons were hidden. I was the one that, that knew this network inside out.

And I, I was needed. Right? There wasn't, there wasn't something that could come in and replace me.

'cause I was the one that knew everything. And, you know, and, and I really, I claim to fame is not the right term. 'cause I'm not famous at all.

But my, my what really like kind of set me apart in my career and made me successful was my ability to jump on a command line and really just bang out some, some troubleshooting or, oh, we've got this outage clear the way I'm gonna, we're we're gonna get this up and going, you know? And, and now I, I mean, I thought it was really cool when, when, hey, we can have secure CRT up. I've got 15 tabs open and I can type this one command.

It goes to 15 switches at a time. You know, I thought that was, that was useful. There's also danger in it though, right?

Because maybe some of those tabs shouldn't have been open and I shouldn't have pushed that config. But then really this, the, the whole automation movement, you're right. That was the first time I heard like, oh, automation's gonna take our jobs.

Adoption is something that I have personally struggled with. Like, I feel like, um, I mean, yes, I have, I, there's an orchestration platform. There's, there's a tool that I have to where I can, I can come up with templates, I can standardize a config, I can push this out.

And now that I'm on the partner space and I'm, I'm going from one network to another network, to another network, to another network, it's, it's really helpful to have some sort of normalcy between 'em. And I do feel though that I'm, I fall behind in areas where, okay, yeah, there's, there's orchestration happening. We're we're using things like, um, you know, netconf to, to deploy configs to these devices.

But there, there, there's an overlap. Like that line started blurring between developers and, and network engineers during this, this whole automation movement. And there's times where conversations are a little over my head and, and I'm, it's a networking conversation I'm having with the networking team, but we're talking about things from like A-C-I-C-D perspective.

We're, we're talking about these this way that we've got this, this tool automating this one function. And I'm like, okay. I, I think I sorta get that.

But so my personal identity crisis there is like, man, I, I don't, I feel like I'm falling behind on something that I shouldn't be falling behind on because I don't know automation like, like Chris and, and others do. So that's, you know, am I in the right spot? Am I still doing the right thing?

Am I gonna be obsolete here in a little bit if I don't keep going this way? Or is it this thing that I need to learn now? Like that's the, that's the crisis that I deal with.

Yeah. I think it to, to Ryan's point though, it's not new. I mean, I remember 'cause coming up from like an ISP background and building service writer networks.

So like, you know, learning BGP and OSPF and ISIS and really getting hardcore into, you know, deep networking topics, uh, I had no idea how DNS worked in the beginnings of my career, right? And I had, and then I had to learn that because there was reasons, you know, that that actually impacts and networking things. And then later on I had to learn more about how applications work, because that's what the network and the data center was there for, or how, you know, printers work because on the campus network, you know, so there's always been this kind of growth, um, at least for me anyway, where I've always kind of, I've always felt to some degree felt a little bit behind.

But I think that's also part of working in technology, is knowing that, you know, things are going to end, maybe you get really, really good at, at a particular piece of hardware, a particular piece of software and or particular methodology. And then, and then that changes, right? You can kind of get into these dead ends and things like that and, and being able to back outta that and learn something new.

I, so I guess what I'm saying is I think that learning and getting better and growing should be part of the identity. And if you, if, if that's the main part of your identity, if, if growth and learning is how you identify yourself as a network engineer, then maybe you don't have an identity crisis when these things come up. So I think, uh, for me, a lot of like the identity and of the identity crisis is, uh, FOMO in a lot of cases is seeing what other people are doing.

And, um, they're not doing the same things that I am. Right. Um, you know, I, I go online and I see, uh, you know, people using, uh, you know, doing chat ops and like rolling their own stuff and like dealing with, uh, you know, LLMs and doing some really, really cool stuff there.

And then other people are really diving deep into different, you know, automation, uh, realms. And then other people, you know, are going off on other paths and, you know, doing data center networking, which, you know, I've dabbled in, but I don't do that day to day and, you know, six months to a year or later, you know, I haven't touched that. It's like some of that's forgotten and, or something has changed.

There's a new big thing that came out, or I didn't keep up with that vendor's product announcement. I didn't hear about it or whatever. It just didn't cross my, my radar.

And then now it's sometimes I feel like I'm like, oh my God, I I know nothing anymore because missed the boat because I missed that boat. Or like, I mean, on some of the things it's like, man, can I even contribute? Can I even learn this stuff now that everybody else seems to know everything else so much better than I do?

Um, but in reality it's, I'm trying to compare myself not to one other person. It's to 50 other people that I'm seeing them all do cool things. Right?

Exactly. And I'm comparing myself to 50 other people. That's such an impossibility to, to really go after.

And that's sort of where I see I have to catch myself and stop and think like, no, no, no, you're doing something. It is interesting what you're doing. Um, and it may not be the, the most cutting edge stuff that I'm doing at times.

Like that's just the reality is of having a job is that companies don't, they're not like, Hey, this is the new thing this week. Do it now. Right.

That doesn't always happen. Sometimes it does, but not always. So let me ask this, because I think we kind of, we've, we've jumped ahead to something kind of, you know, obviously important, but we missed a step.

What, what does a network engineer do? Like I, because in order to have an identity crisis, you must first have an identity. And I, you're already leaving the YouTube comment.

I know, I understand. It's totally okay. But there are a lot of things that network engineers do that they probably shouldn't do.

There are some organizations that treats network engineering, like advanced network operations, or you guys are the, the troubleshooters the firefighters. But is that what everybody should be? Is there a template for a network engineer?

Because as soon as you say, well, I'm, I'm not doing the same things that other people are doing, or other people are doing cool stuff, and I don't, that to me says that there isn't one standard definition of a network engineer. I think That's precisely It. Yeah.

I think, yeah, I think that that touches on something which is that, um, you know, one simple way to look at evolution is a path towards specialization, right? Um, the way that evolution works in biology is that things become specialized for a niche. It doesn't mean necessarily better or worse than anything else.

There's just more adapted to survive in this little niche, right? And they get, they get specialized into that for whatever reason. And, you know, to kind of, to your point, um, you look at, you know, a network engineer who's working for an ad tech firm versus a network engineer who's working at a hospital versus a network engineer who's working, um, you know, at, at a retailer, the very, very different structure of what they're doing, right?

Within the same kind of realm. And then even within that, you mentioned like always an engineer operator. Well, then you look at that right, too.

And if you move from network operations to network engineering to network architecture, that can cause an identity crisis as well. Like, oh, you know, if you're doing architecture, sometimes you're talking about how to integrate systems with each other versus how to actually configure this on one device. And so just moving or moving into management, right?

We're network engineer moving into management that can create another identity crisis. So I, I think these things are fairly natural. Um, and, and I think it is hard to de define what a network engineer does, especially if you look at that stratification, right?

What, you know, is a person working at the tier one help desk at an ISP, are they a network engineer or not? Or is it only the person who's actually, you know, building methods of procedure for an enterprise? Or, you know, what does that mean?

That's a really good question. What, what is the identity of network engineer? Yeah.

Yeah. That as I'm, as I'm think like chewing on that, I'm thinking of like earlier in my career, we, we, we joke that some of the people that worked at this one place only knew networking from this company's perspective. Mm-hmm.

They didn't know this company's network from a networking perspective, but that didn't make them any less of a, of a network engineer. They were supporting the network. We, and it was split into like an ops and an engineering team where we had day-to-day operations, but we also had project engineers doing projects, but they were, they were only familiar with the way that it was done here.

So yeah, that, that definition is, is definitely gonna vary. I mean, we, we constantly say, when, when we have customers come to us and they're, they're asking, you know, which, what is the right answer to this particular thing? As much as they hate hearing it depends.

That's almost always the answer. It depends. Like it's, there is not a one size, one solution fits all.

As much as we wanna standardize on stuff, follow best practices, there isn't going to be a, a deployment that's exactly the same from one to another. We'd love to get some standardization within an enterprise where there's repeatable tasks and stuff. But yeah, I think, I think defining what that is, it, it's a really interesting take on it.

Yeah. Because if you, sorry, if, if you're, We are constantly evolving, right? There is something you can't stop learning at at any point, or you, you will become obsolete in one, in one way or another.

Um, and, and I think part of my crisis right now is that I've, I mean, I'm, I'm not kidding. I have eight books stacked up on my desk right now of things where I'm like, oh, I really need to learn that. Oh, I really need to learn that.

Oh. And now there's like so much stuff, I'm like, man, which one do I even open up first? Or how do I, and it's all kind of like, okay, I feel like I need to know this stuff because if I, if I don't, I'm gonna be behind.

But kind of like what Ryan is saying is like, man, maybe I am comparing myself to 50 people that are really amazing at something. And I, I don't need to read all nine of those books and understand 'em completely if I'm going to, if I'm still gonna be relevant in the, in the career field. So I'll also say that, um, you know, I, I started in networking right out of high school, you know, I got my CCNA at like 19, I think.

Um, and you know, in, uh, the 15 years that's passed, um, you know, I was a network engineer then. I'm still a network engineer now, but those two roles are so wildly different. Yeah.

That like, it really begs the question of whether or not, uh, was was I a network engineer there or am I still now, like, what is, how do you define that? It's such a vague term. Yeah.

You could probably like put a more, uh, specific role on or or title on any of the number of jobs I've had in those years, or, um, you know, and like, yeah, technically you were this at that time and this or whatever. Maybe you weren't a network engineer at 19, um, which is maybe a fair, fair point. But, um, who knows?

I mean, I'm not gonna say one way or the other. Um, but, uh, you know, I guess the question is like, is it an identity crisis when you're like really putting it a, in a vague thing and then your job or role changes? Well, Let, let me phrase it this way because maybe this will kind of help.

I'm gonna give you an example of two other professions where people are considered to be highly skilled doctors and lawyers. I'm sure everyone out there on the internet will agree that all three of those professions, network engineering doctors and lawyers see change. But I think one of them sees more change than the other because a doctor is gonna learn new healing methods, they're gonna use new technology, but the human body doesn't change that much.

I mean, it will eventually over time, but the human body 50 years ago is pretty much the same human body that we have now 300,000 years ago. Yeah. Lawyers have to memorize a lot of information, and there are ways to interpret the information that they have, but by and large, the law is a very slow moving thing.

Even when you're making new law. It's a very, um, slow process because we have to debate, we have to discuss network engineers who started out doing this 15 years ago, probably know things like ISDN, route maps, um, a whole bunch of technology that by and large doesn't exist anymore. Hmm.

Network engineers started doing this five years ago, probably have a very, uh, unique skillset that is not immediately applicable to everything that we do today. I mean, think about the number of people who specialized in SD wan. Are they still needed as much as they were when SD WAN was the thing that everybody wanted to deploy?

I would argue that one of the reasons that we have an identity crisis in the network engineering roles is because the technology that we want to specialize in, in our evolutionary roles gets discarded so fast that we almost have to be generalists. We have to be general practitioner doctors and order to not be put out to pasture more quickly. That's a really interesting way to look at it.

And I, and I think one of the reasons is 'cause that, that forces us to zoom out, right? And if, if you zoom out and look at it that way, where you, if you lump doctors together and you lump lawyers together, then you almost have to lump technologists together, right? And right.

If you're looking at that kind of societal level, we, you know, because within doctors, there are all kinds of doctors, there are neurosurgeons, there are general practice doctors, there are er doctors. Um, and then you, like, I think all of, like the nursing professions probably get wrapped up in there somehow too, as well, right? And lawyers, there's trial lawyers, there's contract lawyers, there's civil lawyers, and there's criminal lawyers, and there's defense versus, you know, prosecution.

So I think network engineers is actually a subset of this bigger bucket of technologists. And so if you look at it from that realm, it, it gets really interesting as like, where, where do you hang that identity? And why are you hanging it on the network?

Um, and maybe it's because the amount of skill required, like you can't be a completely full well-rounded technologist. I dunno if that's true or not. You know, can you, can, you know, can you actually be a, you know, a technologist in the way that you can be a lawyer?

Um, and maybe that sounds just as silly to a lawyer as it sounds to us. Well, I mean, it does sound silly because we have a term for that. It's called a full stack engineer Unicorn.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I've also, you also hear the term the, the jack of all trades and master of none. You know, like that's, if, if we are working towards specialization, like we, but we can't ignore all the other things outside of our specialization or, or we're, like you said, we're at risk of being put out to pasture. If that was that one thing that our entire existence dependent on what happens when that one thing goes away.

Telecom engineers. Let me ask you, uh, so I see this question pop up on Reddit, um, a Lot. Shout out all of our Reddit list.

Yeah. Uh, that, uh, people will go, am I a senior engineer? I'm like, I don't know.

What Does your business card say? Yeah, Really? Like what did it say on your offer letter Look?

Yeah. Like, it's a title, but it's also kind of like something people identify as and Like Absolutely. I'm more senior than that person.

And I've gone, you know, in my, my roles, I've gone to a lot of different companies and like, I've met people that are just, they call themselves network engineer, no senior on it. And they're, they're rock stars. But then I've talked to other people that have senior engineer in their title, and it's like, nah, dude, they, they've only got called senior 'cause they've been doing it for two years.

Exactly. They, they themselves are senior. Right?

Right. And, and that is an important point to bring up is because there's often a situation, and we talked about this on the podcast previously, if you wanna check out the episode that we recorded back in February about technical management roles, sometimes people end up as technical management because there's literally nowhere else for them to go. And senior engineers, senior architects kind of fall into that same problem.

You've been here for 10 years, but you're a hands-on person and you don't wanna be management. So what are we gonna do? We're gonna make you a senior.

Is it really that case though? And I think that the difference between the two is very easy. Who do you go to to ask questions of?

And who goes to you to get their questions answered? If the answer to the first one is not very many people, and the answer to the second one is almost everybody, by definition, you are the senior person. Hmm.

You know, it's, it's like being the top sergeant in a military unit. Your job is to solve everybody else's problems. And that helps the identity problem, right?

Because one of the things that we see quite often is we are so busy trying to keep our skills up that we might miss something unless it's staring us in the face. Maybe it's a new methodology for deploying a network. Maybe it's a new technology that a vendor has told us about.

Or maybe it's just the fact that we missed the boat on automation because we were so busy with our heads down typing that we kind of forgot that there's a better, faster way to do this, that we should have been learning all along. And it takes someone who's not as skilled as us asking the questions that make us stop and say, wait a minute, maybe there is a better way. So could it be that one of the reasons that we're having an identity crisis, going back to what Ryan said is we do have that fear of missing out, and because of that fear, we really are missing out on things.

It's interesting. And, and also to me, it draws into, it's a little bit, a little bit different, but this idea of kind of specialization versus generalists, right? Than Nate, you were talking about kind of that, you know, jack of all trades, master of none.

I think there's also a lot of value in that. Um, and there's, um, there's a group, um, of academics in, in Santa Fe, New Mexico called the Santa Fe Institute, and they study what they call complexity science. And a big part of what they talked about is like, Hey, the academic world, scientists have gotten so specialized.

They're like, you now, like get a PhD in, you know, the, you know, the, the a specific medical condition that happens to a specific flea that lives on a specific bird that lives in a specific area. Right? And that's, and that's what this person knows all about.

And they know everything about that, but they don't know anything else. And these folks at the, uh, Santa Fe Institute are talking about this idea of complexity, which basically just means interconnectedness. And they say, okay, well actually, like biologists can learn from physicists.

There's no reason why we can't apply the logical tools that biologists are using in physical sciences or in chemistry and this kind of cross pollination, which then, you know, kind of forces this idea of generalism, which I think to Tom's point, injects these new ideas, right? If I'm, if I'm only focused on configuring Cisco Catalyst switches, then sure, I'm gonna miss some stuff. Now, one, you may, that person is very valuable, uh, at least as long as those switches are around, because they, they know that thing really, really deeply.

But there's another piece of value, which is the person who can say, okay, actually though, this is how BGP works, no matter what you're using. Mm-hmm. Uh, and there's another person who can look at it and say, actually what matters is getting the packets from that server to that person.

And we don't care about BG P, it could be anything in there. We just wanna make sure that connection happens. In Fact, you're going back to your argument of becoming more specialized, but having the not princes of mind to step back and not be as specialized to understand the greater goals that need to be accomplished.

You talked about like the T-shaped engineer, right? Where you have your depth of specialty in one area. Mm-hmm.

And then you've got this broad thing on the top. Yeah. Um, when I was working at Cable Labs, our, our CEO there, who came in, who was, uh, big guy in innovation, Phil McKinney, and he talked about, well, you need to, you actually, the TS shape engineer is not enough.

You need to be a pitchfork engineer. You need to have several parts of depth. And some of them are not as deep as others.

And then this broad piece on top that kind of connects it all. So you can see this big vision, you can dive into the areas that are, that are needed. Uh, and some of this just ties back to what are you doing right now?

Mm-hmm. Right? To your point, Nate, about, you know, am I gonna miss out?

Which books do I need to read? That kind of thing. Well, if you're working on a network and it works in this way with these tools and you get really good at that stuff, you're probably doing all right.

It doesn't, you don't necessarily need to know what the guys over the fence are doing now at the same time, knowing what they're doing may help you improve what's going on here. So it's, it's a really vague area. It's really hard to pin down like what's the right path.

And I don't know that there is one. So again, I, I go back to what you should identify as is a learning, growing human being. And in that case, like it's really hard to have an identity crisis whether you have to learn Python or not.

True. Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

That's, I really like that the, the pitchfork analogy there. 'cause that, it made me think about something, one of the areas that I was highly specialized in. It wasn't a like one area.

It was, it was more like a, like a three-pronged stool where if you didn't know all three of those things, you really couldn't consider to yourself a, a specialist in this area. So it was getting deep enough in these three where I could, I could build the whole stool, but if it got something where it was over my head in one of the areas, like, like I'm, and I'm referring to like campus fabrics, where you have, you have a wireless component, you have a route switch component, you have a security component with your, with your NAC solution. And if, if you're not well versed in all three of those, it's gonna be a struggle for you to keep up with any of them.

But if there is like a, like a sure enough wireless issue that needs to be addressed, I'm not the guy that's gonna do that. I, I can get your APS online, I can get your endpoint identified, that sort of thing. So I, I, yeah, I like that.

This, this has helped me out a lot, really, like just sitting here at this table and talking through my, I've gotten a better, less insecurities. I, I, I would say, because it, it's something that may, okay, the three of us sitting here are not gonna have the exact same identity in, in the roles that we're at and the, and the point that we're in our life. So is that, is that necessarily a crisis or is it really just figuring out your definition?

Like what, what it means to you to be a network? You, I remember earlier, like the first time I gotta put that on my signature or my email title, I was like, I mean, it was, I think I've used a bigger font in my network engineer thing just because I was like, I all caps, I am it, I finally made it. And now it's like, yeah, what does, what does that mean?

But it doesn't, it doesn't have to be a data center engineer or a a a network automation engineer. It could be a combination. It could be something in between, but it's something that, that holds value.

I mean, we're, I think if, if, if anything people have something I'm hearing fairly common is, you know, is the network engineer going away? No, it's not possible. Is the network going away?

No. So the network engineer is not going away either, but it's gonna, it's gonna change and evolve and Yeah, absolutely. I was gonna say, um, the, the management of networks, you know, 15 years ago, you know, the early, uh, 2010s right?

Was still very much at just about every company. Uh, you logged in via SSH to a, to a switcher, a router, and you made a change, right? Very quickly.

It was then, okay, now we're, you know, you've got some script or, or whatever. Um, and then, you know, then there's, or NMS yeah, you got, you got some other tool now that's doing things on a, on a mass change basis type of thing. But I mean, like that's changed.

But like, it doesn't also change the fact that I still need to go back onto a CLI sometimes I still need to have all that base knowledge of how everything works. Like I can't automate something that I don't know how, how it works. Like you gotta understand it to automate it.

Yeah, understand. So has that fundamentally changed like my knowledge or my ability to do my job because I can't, you know, just 'cause I don't do it some way doesn't mean I just don't understand it. I would argue that maybe the problem isn't that we're having an identity crisis as network engineers.

I think the problem is, is that everything around us is changing so rapidly that we're just trying to keep up and to the point that a lot of these gentlemen made today, you can't stick your head in the sand and hope for the best. We've said the quote jack of all trades, master of none. But I think the complete quote is just as important.

Jack of all trades, master of none, but off times better than a master of one. Hmm. So you have to make sure that you're being aware of everything that's going on.

Even if you don't have a full t or pitch shaped fork, uh, pitchfork shaped, uh, knowledge depth on it, you still have to be aware of it so that you're not caught off guard. Because one of the things that we've learned in network engineering is that all of those ideas come back around eventually, and that's when it's time to figure out how to use them. That'll just about do it for this episode of the Tech Fuel Day podcast.

I wanna thank each and every one of you for listening. Don't forget, you can subscribe to our podcast on our YouTube channel, on the tech Field Day plus YouTube channel. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast application of choice.

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We'll be back next week with another great episode. Until then, stay tuned and thanks for listening.