Programmers with network engineering skills

Brandt, Ralph ralph.brandt at pateam.com
Mon Feb 27 20:02:13 UTC 2012


Generalists are hard to come by these days. They are people who learn
less and less about more and more till they know nothing about
everything. People today are specializing in the left and right halves
of the bytes....  They learn more and more about less and less till they
know everything about nothing.  And BTW, they are worthless unless you
have five of them working on a problem because none of them know enough
to fix it.  Worse, you can replace the word five with fifty and it may
be still true. 

I know of three of these, all gainfully employed at this time and could
each find at least a couple jobs if they wanted.  I am one, my son is
two and a guy we worked with is the third. 

At one time (40 years ago) the mantra in IS was train for expertise, now
it is hire for it.  Somewhere there has to be a happy medium.  I suggest
this, find a good coder, not a mediocre who writes shit code but a good
one who can think and learn and when you talk about branching out with
his skill set he or she lights up.  His first thing on site is take the
A+ networking course.  

No, I do not sell the courses.  But I have seen this kind of approach
work when nothing else was.




Ralph Brandt
Communications Engineer
HP Enterprise Services
Telephone +1 717.506.0802
FAX +1 717.506.4358
Email Ralph.Brandt at pateam.com
5095 Ritter Rd
Mechanicsburg PA 17055

-----Original Message-----
From: A. Pishdadi [mailto:apishdadi at gmail.com] 
Sent: Sunday, February 26, 2012 8:27 PM
To: NANOG
Subject: Programmers with network engineering skills

Hello All,

i have been looking for quite some time now a descent coder (c,php) who
has
a descent amount of system admin / netadmin experience. Doesn't
necessarily
need to be an expert at network engineering but being acclimated in
understanding the basic fundamentals of networking. Understanding basic
routing concepts, how to diagnose using tcpdump / pcap, understanding
subnetting and how bgp works (not necessarily setting up bgp). I've
posted
job listings on the likes of dice and monster and have not found any
good
canidates, most of them ASP / Java guys.

If anyone can point me to a site they might recommend for job postings
or
know of any consulting firms that might provide these services that
would
be greatly appreciated.




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