[150566] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Programmers with network engineering skills
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Doug Barton)
Mon Feb 27 17:32:13 2012
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:31:13 -0800
From: Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us>
To: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
In-Reply-To: <6088002.1109.1330381386271.JavaMail.root@benjamin.baylink.com>
Cc: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 2/27/2012 2:23 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com>
>
>> I think you're more likely to find a network engineer with (possibly
>> limited) programming skills.
>>
>> That's certainly where I would categorize myself.
>
> And you're the first I've seen suggest, or even imply, that going that
> direction instead might be more fruitful; seemed to me that the skills
> necessary to make a decent network engineer would support learning
> programming better than the other way round -- though in fact I personally
> did it the other way.
I think it depends on what level of "coding" you're talking about. If
you want someone that can whip up a few scripts to easily manage routine
tasks, then sure, network guy -> "coder" is usually a safe and easy path.
OTOH, if you're talking professional application developer working on a
project with more than one moving part, and/or more than one person on
the team, you really need someone who thinks like a developer, and can
be trained to understand network concepts.
.... and yes, the latter is the path that I've taken, so I have a
built-in bias.
Doug
--
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