Everyone talks about software developer role and it's progression as a Career. Any thoughts on Network Engineer professional? What's the career path like? I don't think people stays network engineer for entire career term.
You means software engineers with domain knowledge in networking?
No,network engineers that use Excel sheets to keep track of IP allocation on the network
Wait, there is such a job?
Career progression for network engineers will continuously diminish. Embrace software, unless you just want to coast. If you are working in the cloud, google, amazon, Microsoft, careers in network engineering are dead and gone already. In five years, extinct. Think software.
SDN, white box CPE, more virtualization on VMware, containers
How about System Engineer or Network Designer/computing architect ? Are these roles also getting reduced because of Software....I don't think so...
System Engineer, is a broad reference, but anyone designing and architecting, networks; topology, protocol selection, FPGA firmware, load balancing, fire walls, ddos mitigation, etc, understands software, and has written code...in the new world... Cisco, juniper, are bloated with capabilities, most of which you don’t want. We want inexpensive commodity hardware, running lean SDN solutions.
This post aged like spoiled milk. Now we have chatgpt, swe's shitting their pants and Network Arch and Engineering in high demand. https://whizstorm.com/blog/learn-about-how-network-engineers-are-the-most-wanted-professionals-in-the-us#:~:text=Network%20Engineers%20are%20in%20high%20demand%20across%20the%20globe%20and,especially%20in%20the%20United%20States.
Ex-Nokia, ALU, ipd here. Network engineering is simply becoming a subset of software engineering. The complex network engineering implementing complex protocols is dying. It's all implemented on higher layers. Networking is almost becoming hardware, pushing 100s gigs/sec on a dumb pipe. My advice would be to pivot into infrastructure projects that treat network as a software issue. Such as Kubernetes for example