nanog mailing list archives

Re: Programmers with network engineering skills


From: Tei <oscar.vives () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2012 13:06:44 +0100

On 27 February 2012 23:23, Jay Ashworth <jra () baylink com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Owen DeLong" <owen () delong com>

I think you're more likely to find a network engineer with (possibly
limited) programming skills.

That's certainly where I would categorize myself.

And you're the first I've seen suggest, or even imply, that going that
direction instead might be more fruitful; seemed to me that the skills
necessary to make a decent network engineer would support learning
programming better than the other way round -- though in fact I personally
did it the other way.

I agree.  And I am just a programmer.

Part of it, is that our job is to obscure implementation details to
these in higuer levels.  We think hard to build stuff, so other people
don't have to.  If theres a program that create a conexion, and that
conexion can break, we silently repeat the re-conexion part, so these
that use the program ignore these problems and can live happy.   A bad
programmer will show a message "Conexion break, please connect again".
 Having the human manually pressing the "connect" button again. I have
no words for how lame is that.
So we hide implementation details for us, and for others.  Programmers
that write compilers hide implementation details to others.  Designers
of CPU's microcode hide implementation details to mere assembler
programmers.

-- 
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ℱin del ℳensaje.


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