Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.

Holmes,David A dholmes at mwdh2o.com
Thu Dec 1 17:26:13 UTC 2011


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 at monmouth.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2011 7:53 AM
To: nanog at 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 at data102.com]
>> Sent: 01 December 2011 15:19
>> To: Bill Stewart
>> Cc: nanog at 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 at 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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