That's a fairly strong statement to make. Large telcos/ISPs tend to through "newbie" engineers into situations where a experienced or senior engineer belongs. Let's face facts - there are not enough IP engineers/technicians to fill all the needed positions. Companies need to either have more peer review or expect the "clueless" attitude toward customers. No one could expect a entry level engineer to handle complex ISP BGP issues when they barely understand VLSM/CIDR. The industry is much larger than previous years(obvious), thus more entry level engineers.
I think also that many of the large companies don't devote enough of their "newbies" time to actually learning. When I worked at GTE (way back when) as a grunt in a call center, the administators of the center (GTE/North TelOps Fort Wayne, for those who care) looked down on me because I was learning HOW the billing system interacted with the switches (to do disconnects and stuff), and wanted to understand those things. I was eager to learn and had no problem sticking around after hours reading manuals to learn stuff, but if I wanted to do that "on company time", I would get my ass kicked for it. Not that any of the Call Center administrators had any problem with coming over to ask me questions about topics they wouldn't pay me to learn, mind you.... Allowing the techs/engineers the time to learn is an investment that many large companies just don't see as beneficial. That's the problem. If a tech wants to take a month out to learn more about his job, all bean-counters and managers see is the money they lose from his work (and have to pay someone else to do while he's "off learning") and don't see that he can do MORE work at higher quality when he comes back. D