Personally, I have worked in places where I have performed all of the skills below (router/switch/Unix/Linux/AD/firewall/proxy/web admin/sendmail admin, etc.), and also in places where just router/switch/architect layer 1-3 skills were the primary focus. I prefer the latter, and find this to be a personal choice as to what makes for a meaningful and fulfilling job. The fact that so few network engineers are to be found with all of these skills, I think, speaks for itself in that many network engineers have made the choice, and that choice is to be focused on layers 1-3, which, with DWDM through BGP, offers many challenging, different, and varied technology complexities the mastery of which makes work meaningful and rewarding. -----Original Message----- From: Mark Stevens [mailto:manager@monmouth.com] Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2011 7:53 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice. It takes me years to find such people and when I do, I try very hard to keep them! I have 3 key people that fit the "soft" attribute criteria Randal mentioned, but with a premium skill set in their specific function. Good luck with your task Leigh! Mark Stevens On 12/1/2011 10:21 AM, Leigh Porter wrote:
I am looking for just such a person now. Good Juniper, some Cisco and Sysadmin experience with an ISP background..
I expect it will be immensely difficult to find somebody. What makes it even more frustrating is that just such a person was not all that long ago made redundant!
So if anybody is looking for something to do around London...
-- Leigh
-----Original Message----- From: randal k [mailto:nanog@data102.com] Sent: 01 December 2011 15:19 To: Bill Stewart Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.
This is a huge point. We've had a LOT of trouble finding good network engineers who have all of the previously mentioned "soft" attributes - attitude, team player, can write, can speak, can run a small project - and are more than just Cisco pimps. I cannot explain how frustrating it is to meet a newly minted CCNP who has zero Linux experience, can't script anything, can't setup a syslog server, doesn't understand AD much less LDAP, etc. Imagine, an employee who can help themselves 90% of the time ...
Finding the diamond that has strong niche skill, networking, with a broad& just-deep-enough sysadmin background has been very, very hard. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of cross-training. Immensely valuable.
Randal
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Bill Stewart<nonobvious@gmail.com> wrote:
And yeah, sometimes it means that you need to go learn technologies like Active Directory
[snip]
In addition to learning scripting languages
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