nanog mailing list archives

Re: Programmers with network engineering skills


From: Keegan Holley <keegan.holley () sungard com>
Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 15:40:26 -0500

2012/3/5 Owen DeLong <owen () 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.


Current thread: