I start as a level 1 Network Engineer on Monday. Is network engineering a dying field?

I start as a level 1 Network Engineer on Monday. Is network engineering a dying field?

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No because modern networks are such a mangled mess. We'll have more autonomous operations but only public clouds can afford this level of efficiency

Yes

it is an opposite of dying

networks have been replaced by the cloud, sorry

Sadly, networking jobs are nothing like packet tracer.

Damn. I actually kind of like fixing things in packet tracer. It’s at a defense contractor. Am I gonna hate my life user

I dropped out of my networking major because I legitimately wanted to put a gun in my mouth every second I was configuring devices

>I start as a level 1 Network Engineer on Monday.
enjoy helpdesk for the next 5 years

Cisco stuff, yes. It's a shrinking field and becoming extremely automated and can be done by entry level people through software. Very very few in house network architect type jobs, once they open up they rarely get filled but rather outsourced to Managed Services.

Most network engineers head over to cloud, security, linux or devops since there's just way more openings for them and their backend networking skills are desired.

Networking is mostly bureaucracy, sitting in on outage meetings for 10 hours and trying to blame the ISP for a bad fuse. Once a network is established getting anything changed is an absolute nightmare, you're viewed as just an expense.

The way they treated network engineers during covid in the great VPN migration made me want to move to another department. DAILY vpn meetings and 12 hour days, simply because a company is too cheap to buy something modern, even thought they're bleeding money, they don't want to change because 'it would make that c-level look incompetent'.

Bump
I want to become a network engineer when i grow up so thanks for this thread

If you're dead set on network engineering, try to get hired by a Managed Services, Datacenter or an ISP company where the networking skills are the meat and potatoes of the company that brings home the money. Never get hired as an expense.

Thanks, I will keep this in mind

Worked for a smallish ISP and large VAR great experience shit quality of life. Did some work with firewalls and ISE immediately got a Security job huge upgrade in quality of life would recommend.

To this day I am shocked by the complete lack of understanding most IT people have with basic networking. Automation SDN etc is great and all but I do not think it will remove the need for an understanding of networks, but it will continue to eat away at the mid range roles, So you will be left with Help Desk support and some engineers and architects.

I think knowing some networking will help you in other aspects of IT so make that your goal networking and Cloud, Security, or DevOps. I would avoid Wireless , Voip, low level implementation type work if you can.

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>It’s at a defense contractor.
congrats on your job for life

If the industry dies, it will be because networking went the way of COBAL and not because our skills fell out of favour.
I'm a network admin myself, and two of my friends are instructors at a technical college that teaches IT and networking. This is the biggest technical college in our province and a lot of IT professionals in our city are alumni of the school.
Every year their classes become older and older, the average age of this semester's cohort is probably early 30s.
Enterprise level IT is not a career field that is getting a lot of young blood, it started trending this way in the 2010s but now most IT noobs are older adults who wanted a career change. In their current graduating class of 70 students they have nobody who is going to be 20 at the time of graduation, the youngest person is 23.
From what we can remember the last graduation class that had more than 5 people who were 20 at the time of graduation was 2016.
I'm a senior network admin for a fairly large company, our youngest network admin has been our youngest network admin for 6 years now. He was born in 96' and was hired in 2017 and he might be the last U25 we hire for a network admin job in a long fucking time.
In the 2000s a curious and ambitious teenager could start working helpdesk and work their way up to a systems or network administrator with no formal education. I went to school myself but I know a lot of people from that generation who had similar stories. Those stories are things of the past now, and it's not because of increased requirements or anything, it's just due to a lack of interest from subsequent generations.

Also I don't believe our jobs will be fully automated. Yeah, we use automation all the time to make things easier for us, but very simplified SDWAN or managed solutions won't work for massive enterprises. You still need someone who is familiar with CLI to troubleshoot certain issues

dying hard. only megacorps have a dedicated NOC, anyone starting now is either developing with cloud or moving to it. Go into the cloud security meme.

>In the 2000s a curious and ambitious teenager could start working helpdesk and work their way up to a systems or network administrator with no formal education
I've heard from my cousin that you can apply for helpdesk (e.g. Microsoft helpdesk) and get payed a small amount while doing the job gaining experience.
Is there anywhere I can do this today?

Everything is moving to the application layer ex. SD WAN

helpdesk is a reddit meme, go to college and apply for internships. You will graduate with 100k+ starting if you actually put in the effort and give a shit.

usually networkers don't fucking do it all day, all you need to do is submit vlans a couple of times a day and install a phone for the next employee. the rest of the time you can sleep

I used to do networking and do not miss these days a bit. Before leaving that job we jumped on the SDWAN bandwagon, trashed most of our Cisco gear with replaced them with cloud-managed Fortinet, and for a little while there was finally joy in that job instead of battling against IPsec tunnels that didn't establish, stupid wifi clients that did what they wanted even with the most expensive APs, and the useless pajeets at Cisco TAC, but it was too late.

Some parts are fun and challenging, such as complex setups when routing protocols are involved, but for the most part, you'll be doing exactly the same every day. Ultimately I got burnt and switched to devops, which pays more. I don't know if network engineering is dying, but is certainly getting boring and automated.

you need get x4 CCIE and x4 JNCIE
also install fucking EVE-NG