On Fri, Aug 20, 1999 at 10:52:33AM -0400, Mohamed Hirse wrote:

I'm sorry your service needs were not met. In the future please feel free to escalate your problems to senior engineers within Qwest IP Operations. Though I understand your frustration, I do not believe NANOG is the appropriate form for this topic. You can contact me via email at mhirse@qwestip.net or mo@qwest.com. I would like to talk off line.

Even though nanog is not a consumer advice forum, if complaints on a public list get the attention of management where asking engineers for that attention doesn't - then fine by me. -- Peter Galbavy Knowledge Matters Ltd http://www.knowledge.com/

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Mohamed Hirse wrote:

I'm sorry your service needs were not met. In the future please feel free to escalate your problems to senior engineers within Qwest IP Operations. Though I understand your frustration, I do not believe NANOG is the appropriate form for this topic. You can contact me via email at

Maybe not an appropriate topic for Nanog... but... it is becoming a sad fact that the clue level of 'internet engineers' is going down. Christian

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. This is because clueful Internet engineers are often clueless when it comes to things like mentoring which would cause a more even clue distribution. And management does not put enough emphasis on knowledge transfer because they don't seem to have a clue about where Internet engineers come from. Since the thrice yearly NANOG meetings are a major source of clue transfer in the industry, I think that this is quite appropriate to discuss on the list. Should the NANOG meetings include a longer tutorial component prior to the two-day meeting? If NANOG offered weeklong courses prior to the meetings would your management sent engineers for training? Would your management allow clueful engineers to teach such courses? -- Michael Dillon - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com

On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 01:35:46AM -0400, Walter L wrote:

What about saying that clueful internet engineers are getting greedy, and are afraid to teach junior engineers in an attempt to save their jobs and not loose there high salaries. For example...

I have not found this to be the case at my place of employ. Aye, the gurus are often too busy for immediate clue transfer, no doubt due to the workload caused by clueful geeks being so scarce, but I have never had a reasonable question ignored. YMMV, of course, but I am young and foolish enough to believe in a moderate degree of altruism among geeks. If there were enough to go around, then what you suggest might be the case, especially if there were a surplus. OTOH, such is not the case, and it is quite plausible to believe that the scarcity of clued net-geeks has left them in the position that they will gladly educate youngsters (like myself) if only to offload some work, which has piled upon their desks because there aren't enough of them to get it all done. For the other part of it, I cannot overemphasize that I did not obtain what little clue I have by continuously pestering the Oracles of all things IP with whom I have the good fortune to have 24x7 access to through virtue of common employment. I have read countless RFC's (some even authored by those aforementioned Oracles), thick dry texts (Stevens, Comer, Halabi, Hunt, Liu, etc), and numerous scattered references on the WWW (yes, Virginia, there really is useful content on the WWW). Not to undervalue the clued geeks, but responsibility for the education of would-be clueful engineers is at least 90% student, at most 10% mentor. As I gain clue, it becomes increasingly more apparent to me which people asking me difficult questions have put forth the effort to find the answer, and need only the right subtle hint to find it on their own, and which are just looking for a clue handout and have not prepared themselves with sufficient background knowledge for the answer. I have become increasingly patient with the former, and increasingly intolerant of the latter. Perhaps it is this phenomenon that makes the clueful few appear to outsiders as pompous, arrogant elitists, but it is also this phenomenon that ensures that those following in their footsteps will indeed be of par quality. I've also learned that the long, slow, hard way *is* the fast, easy way. If someone wants the big-$$$ geek jobs, they can have it, but they have to be willing to invest in themselves, my $Ye+3 bookshelf is a testament to that. I am not out to prove myself, I am out to improve myself. party on, Sam Thomas Guru-in-training if you do not find this message to be of operational value, please press the key (click on the button, recite the incantation, etc) to delete it.

What about saying that clueful internet engineers are getting greedy, and are afraid to teach junior engineers in an attempt to save their jobs and not loose there high salaries. For example...

Teach Mike all he knows or Teach Mike enough to keep him silent and still make sure that Mike is below th clue level of Joe. What does Joe do ? I dont know.

Although it may often be perceived this way, I don't think that it's always true. My biggest problem with training is the time involved. Management often feels that another body gives instant results, so even more work is thrown at the group. So now there's more work *and* training to deal with. I'm not meaning to imply that I'm "clueful", but when I've been in this type of situation I usually expect the trainee to self-teach themselves. Toss a project in their direction, answer their questions, and hope that you were right in assuming that they have initiative when you hired them. But to make this (remotely) on topic...

...

Since the thrice yearly NANOG meetings are a major source of clue transfer in the industry, I think that this is quite appropriate to discuss on the list. Should the NANOG meetings include a longer tutorial component prior to the two-day meeting? If NANOG offered weeklong courses prior to the meetings would your management sent engineers for training? Would your management allow clueful engineers to teach such courses?

Yes, maybe, yes. Personally, I'm in favor of anything that increases clue levels and requires less time on my part. :) But I also have to confess that my work isn't as much in NANOG's realm as I would like, so it probably wouldn't benefit me too much. Chris

...

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

At 01:04 PM 8/20/99 -0400, Majdi Abbas wrote:

That said, I'm not questioning your motives -- I do believe that you genuinely wish to straight this out; just that if someone spends hours on the phone attempting to get somewhere with your employees and gives up in frustration, it may well become fair game for nanog discussion.

... as evidenced by the MCI/WorldCom thread. Do things right and you will be praised. Screw it up and you can bet we'll be talking about it for weeks, and not care one bit how "embarassed" a company feels by it. :) D