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A network engineer in search of greener pastures

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Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#51

Post by dgfitz »

Ilasky wrote: post #45

> AI is probably losing you a lot of good candidates. It can be easily gamed, and then you'll end up with someone who watched a TikTok video on "how to fool any ChatGPT in ten seconds". I also fail to understand how I can have multiple years of experience in a job as well as active certifications, and somehow still get filtered. My resume isn't that bad...what on earth is your AI doing? Do you know? While the ol’ pro…

Nah, tailoring resumes doesn’t work either. This isn’t my glib take, it just doesn’t work.

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#52

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

mlinhares wrote: post #12
pflenker wrote: post #7

Not to step on the authors toes, but it’s not the job searching that is broken - it’s the market that has shifted to favor companies and to put applicants at a disadvantage, something that hasn’t happened in the IT field for a long time. People reject candidates without a college degree because they can afford to - they still have plenty of applicants to pick from after filtering out the rest. There is no need for th…

There's that but there's also this: > However, after heading over to Y Combinator to check out startup jobs, I was again frustrated by the findings. YC Jobs has a category for Engineering, but it's all software. There's a category for Operations, but it's all CEO, CTO, management positions. After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/enginee…

The two places I've worked with dedicated networking people have both been relatively small non-tech businesses. In one case a third-party logistics company and in the other a manufacturer. Roughly a few hundred people in both cases.

Just pointing out that these places exist but openings are rare and often not paying competitive salaries. I agree that a career pivot to "devops" or "site-reliability engineer" would probably be the way to go for a networking person of yesterday to make a competitive salary today while retaining the relevance of their expertise. (Of course, if the salary is less important, there you go!)

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#53

Post by shortrounddev2 »

alephnerd wrote: post #44
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer my career goes on, the less a lot of these cloud services make sense to me. I know why we have AWS deploy our production instances, but why are all of our staging and dev instances running on EC2? Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that? Sure it might be slow, but it's not meant to handle 100k QPS, it's just for QA

> Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.

I think if you had a whole server rack, you might have to hire someone for that, but if you're just running one or two servers with containers to run your dev builds, you could get that set up on K8s and manage your deployments the way you would with AWS. I don't think it would require hiring new people, an existing devops guy should be able to do that

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#55

Post by mlinhares »

alephnerd wrote: post #44
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer my career goes on, the less a lot of these cloud services make sense to me. I know why we have AWS deploy our production instances, but why are all of our staging and dev instances running on EC2? Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that? Sure it might be slow, but it's not meant to handle 100k QPS, it's just for QA

> Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.

Why would you have your QA environment unlike you prod environment? Even the infra setup should be as close as possible, so you can test infra changes in QA before promoting them to prod.

I can't see how it would make sense to deploy in two completely different environments that are not alike at all.

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#56

Post by tguvot »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #39
tguvot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those "operational" jobs exists today. just not in the small startups, that still didn't figure out, that despite running in the cloud you need networking and cybersecurity people

The longer my career goes on, the less a lot of these cloud services make sense to me. I know why we have AWS deploy our production instances, but why are all of our staging and dev instances running on EC2? Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that? Sure it might be slow, but it's not meant to handle 100k QPS, it's just for QA

in higher management there is aversion to any spend on physical stuff. where i work, we as everywhere look to cut costs. one of ways allowed to save ~$1.5M on aws costs over 5 years, by one time investment of $150k into physical equipment. It fell through.

The other aspect it's that somebody needs to manage old PC. usually there needs to be a team managing this infra and it creates friction between developers and infra team. so devs run into cloud and try to manage everything on cloud themselves. but at some point arrives consolidation and new team dedicated to managing same infra in aws.

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#57

Post by alephnerd »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #53
alephnerd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.

I think if you had a whole server rack, you might have to hire someone for that, but if you're just running one or two servers with containers to run your dev builds, you could get that set up on K8s and manage your deployments the way you would with AWS. I don't think it would require hiring new people, an existing devops guy should be able to do that

It's still additional operational overhead for marginal RoI.

If you're an organization that already has a SRE or Infra Eng hired, there's no point supporting a niche setup when every other team is using a prebuilt and troubleshooted environment.

Edit: Can't reply to OP atm, but he makes a good point. For a higher margins and less commodified segment like ML Compute, on-prem computing still makes financial sense.

That said, that's still managed by actual SWEs not a generic Sysadmin, due to intricacies of GPU Architecture and Model Development, and OP is extremely underskilled for this role.

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#58

Post by benreesman »

pflenker wrote: post #7

Not to step on the authors toes, but it’s not the job searching that is broken - it’s the market that has shifted to favor companies and to put applicants at a disadvantage, something that hasn’t happened in the IT field for a long time. People reject candidates without a college degree because they can afford to - they still have plenty of applicants to pick from after filtering out the rest. There is no need for th…

The software business has been trying to break the back of its workforce for decades. There was a huge anti-trust lawsuit about it in like 2011 and there will likely be another about the mass coordinated layoffs and hiring freezes in 2023 (complete with tacky EPS beat on tacky EPS beat).

This isn’t unique to software of course, the attack on working people is broad spectrum in 2024, but it’s probably the last white collar profession to go down in terms of labor pricing power. Even five or ten years ago it was a seller’s market.

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#59

Post by omg_ketchup »

I just started to fill out a job application from the HN "Who's Hiring" thread, and it required a Loom video of me describing why I'd be a good fit for that specific position. The fuck? Abandoned the application process at this step. I'll do an interview, but creating a video just to get rejected for each job? That's a bit much.

Re: A network engineer in search of greener pastures

#60

Post by hn_version_0023 »

mlinhares wrote: post #12
pflenker wrote: post #7

Not to step on the authors toes, but it’s not the job searching that is broken - it’s the market that has shifted to favor companies and to put applicants at a disadvantage, something that hasn’t happened in the IT field for a long time. People reject candidates without a college degree because they can afford to - they still have plenty of applicants to pick from after filtering out the rest. There is no need for th…

There's that but there's also this: > However, after heading over to Y Combinator to check out startup jobs, I was again frustrated by the findings. YC Jobs has a category for Engineering, but it's all software. There's a category for Operations, but it's all CEO, CTO, management positions. After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/enginee…

“the people that used to cable and connect servers are not as important anymore”

What an arrogant take. As someone who does this, and is also a self-taught, no-degree-having troglodyte, I am forced to completely disagree.

Your cloud servers are built by people. That you don’t value those people says WAY more about you than anything else. I understand the abstraction— but that isn’t gonna matter when the PDUs are offline or the fibers get cut.

Tinkerers still exist and still get hired. Just not at FAANG. There is an entire world outside FAANG.

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