The Future of Networking and the Network Engineer - Jason Edelman's Blog

The Future of Networking and the Network Engineer - Jason Edelman's Blog



What really gets me is this paragraph:



This was just a glimpse of what McKeown spoke about and is one of the industries that he thinks will significantly increase as SDN adoption begins to gain wheels.  Unfortunately, this isn’t good news for me and who I will call “traditional” network folks.  When asked by a participant if this type of automation for testing, development, and debugging will “wack” us, you heard a light chuckle from the audience, but believe me, everyone wanted to know Nick McKeown’s thoughts.  He answered honestly saying he sees an overall increase in jobs in the network industry, BUT, there will be less admins/engineers needed to maintain and operate networks.  

The large surplus of jobs will be in software and application development for network systems.  This is of no surprise for those who have been following these trends.  It will be interesting though to see how it plays over the coming years (don’t worry, it’s not weeks or months!).  The network engineer of yesterday could very well become the PBX phone guy of the late 90s early 2000s.  These network guys will adapt new skills such as programming and system administration or find the company that won’t adopt new technologies to try and stay in their comfort zone.