Hey fellow network engineers. With everything moving into the cloud, what other the career options or skills are you guys exploring? Don’t see a need for enterprises to hire any more network engineers within the next 3-5years. Thoughts?
Why wouldn’t companies hire network engineers in 3-5 years? If anything take your skill set, pickup some security and or scripting/automation and move around.
Network engineer will be needed for way more than 3-5 years, but your recommendation is legit.
I'm a network engineer, what should I do?
Become a dev, lots of network operations work in all public cloud companies
How?
Learn to code?? Leetcode?
Learn cloud technologies, I'm a software development manager yet I've AWS certs, know GCP and how to setup k8s and I know how to run a Unix servers. The network and sysadmins were major bottlenecks, so I skipped them and started deploying to the cloud, company went from 5 sysadmins to 1 and 3 AWS guys. 3 network guys to 1. AWS ops stress taking too long which is why I'm on k8s. My goal is to remove sysadmins, network and cloud ops from my pipeline
Thanks for the response. Yes, this is the trend I’m seeing. As a hiring manager, What certifications on AWS/Azure would do you expect for a candidate to have when you hire someone?
Corporate infrastructure will still need network, plus remote access for the enterprise. In addition, I haven’t seen a lot of companies shift everything to the cloud. Additionally, do you think moving things to AWS makes things secure? If so, I’ve got a bridge to sell ya.
The change is real & its coming in the next few years. Everything including wifi/voip/vpn etc. can all be offered as IAAS. Companies don’t need a huge network engineering teams anymore.
MPLS and ENS, isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Next big thing is SDN SD-WAN, someone still needs to manage that.
You can just write a layer 7 program and TCP/IP works automatically with no planning and design... Right?
Wait, you need planning and design for that? I just connect bind listen recv send close.
Just to make myself clear, Network engineer jobs are not going away completely. Just that enterprises (NOT ISP’s/cloud providers) would not need as many engineers as they have today to manage day to day operations once applications migrate to cloud.
Agreed OP, some devs think that IaaS is going to kill the sysadmins and. Netadmins
Why can’t you be a network engineer for the cloud ? Its not like it works without TCP/IP
unless you work for a cloud service provider, there is not need for enterprises to host anything on premise nor have a datacenter
You say this as if the networking problem is abstracted away by using a cloud provider. If anything the networking components go up the stack a bit. In-depth understanding of networking is needed to deploy more cloud based networks, connect to on-premises and offices, subnet, tier and mesh with security. Also not every enterprise is going ‘all-in’ with public cloud. Nordstrom may have, I have no idea - but the networking need will always be there.