Programmers with network engineering skills

Mon Mar 5 20:40:26 UTC 2012

2012/3/5 Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com>

> Given my experience to date with the assumptions made by programers about
> networking in the following:
>
>        Apps (iOS apps, Droid apps, etc.)
>        Consumer Electronics
>        Microcontrollers
>        Home Routers
>
> I have to say that the strategy being used to date, whichever one it is,
> is not working. I will also note that the erroneous assumptions, incorrect
> behaviors, and other problems I have encountered with these items are
> indicative of coders that almost learned networking more than of networkers
> that almost learned software development.
>
>
I think it comes down to economics mostly.  Most development jobs either do
not require knowledge of networking or do not enforce the requirement.
There are plenty of jobs where developers do not need to know networking so
when it's a sticking point it just becomes harder to find someone that
fits.  This doesn't give the average developer much incentive to learn
networking, even if it leads to buggy or incorrectly written code.  On the
other hand a senior net-eng that can code is worth is weight in gold,
especially if he can spit out palatable webUI's for everything.