It’s not dead end but it’s morphed itself into cloud infra engineering. Kubernetes + AWS, Azure and GCP networking with a good bit of systems engineering knowledge is the new network engineering job. What you know is still relevant, but how you use it has changed.
Look at the pay to experience ratio If it is getting lower, then it means it's going to a dead end job. Do you see college kids who build apps making more than a network engineer with 10yoe? If so then network eng is dying.
Don’t take dead literally. Civil, Mechanical and Electrical engineering jobs are already commoditized. Meaning, they are able to find lot of them and hence pay is low.
@Google it all depends on the company... NetEng jobs still pay well but it is MUCH more competitive since there are fewer openings at top tech companies then SWE. My TC is the same as SWE and I'm a network engineer
Few years back none of the FANG level companies had networking openings except for admin roles. Now I observe all of them are involved in networking and have networking openings. So I would say network software development will always remain critical as it is a infrastructure part of any software company and they will continue to invest to stand out. product life cycle in networking is very long as compared to app based products.
It is network software development. Earlier network job was only done by HW / OEM vendors. Now that cloud has emerged, networking is done by SW + HW companies both. Their goals do differ.
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My TC is the same as SWE and I'm a network engineer
product life cycle in networking is very long as compared to app based products.