On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Christian Nielsen wrote:
Maybe not an appropriate topic for Nanog... but... it is becoming a sad fact that the clue level of 'internet engineers' is going down.
I think you mean that the clue density is getting sparser as the Internet grows.
Er, conventional wisdom has that the clue density is constant. The 'net grows. Appearence of clue is reduced.
The CAIDA series is really a good idea. Mentoring is a great idea. Potentially partnering w/ USENIX once a year would be of great benefit. ARIN et.al. are trying to get some WG's off the ground.
There, a few good ideas. Tech. transfer, Empirical (SOP) knowledge, Cross Disipline meetings. All waiting for someone to take charge and complete the task. Not sure that it can be in the current NANOG form thou. :(
--bill
I'd like to propose a panel at the October NANOG in which people talk about what skills they'd like new engineers to come with, what sorts of internal formal training they do, any mentoring/self-study guidelines, and the needs, if any, for formal external training. Ideally, this might include both providers and selected users, the latter dealing with relevant issues such as working to establish multihoming through less-than-clueful ISPs. The goal would be a first cut at a roadmap for imparting clue. Perhaps this might also work as a BOF similar to the one on facilities that Bill Norton led. Disclaimer: my firm does, among other things, do training services, including developing hopefully realistic exterior routing labs. Our major motivation, however, is that our healthcare networking customers often need high-availability connectivity, and we've been finding we need to educate some local ISPs on how to service our customers. Howard