Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.

Mon Nov 21 13:49:29 UTC 2011

On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:40:08 EST, Tyler Haske said:

> I'm looking for a mentor who can help me focus my career so eventually I
> wind up working at one of the Tier I ISPs as a senior tech. I want to
> handle the big pipes that hold everyone's data.

OK, so I'm not a mentor from a Tier-1, and I don't directly monkey with routers
as part of $DAYJOB.  But anyhow... :)

With great power comes great responsibility.  Be prepared for high stress
levels. ;)

Also, keep in mind that unless you're insanely brilliant, three things will happen
before you get experienced enough to be a senior tech at a Tier 1:

1) You will have grey hair (at least some).

2) The half life of technical know-how in this industry is about 5 years.
You'll have been through several half-lifes of what you'll know when you escape
from college. Develop the skills needed to learn the next 3 or 4 Next Big
Things quickly.

3) You'll have learned that handling a big pipe at a Tier 1 isn't all there is
to running a network - and in fact, quite often the Really Cool Toys are
elsewhere.  Sure, they may have the fastest line cards, but they're going to
tend to lag on feature sets just because you *don't* want to deploy
cutting-edge code if you're a Tier-1. As an example, AS1312 deployed IPv6 over
a decade before some of the Tier 1's could even *spell* it (find out why 6bone
existed - it's instructive history).  I'm sure that MPLS didn't make its first
appearance in TIer-1 core nets either.  And the list goes on.. (Hint - where
did the Tier 1's get the IPv6/MPLS/whatever experienced engineers to guide
their deployment? :)

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