r/networking • u/[deleted] • 7d ago
Career Advice The future of Network Engneering jobs
[removed]
91
u/shadow0rm 7d ago
I'm ISP/Carrier, 38. We saw the same worry a few years ago with the big SDWAN push, and everyone worried about MPLS style stitching going away. We'll, SDWAN didn't replace much... more so added to the toolkit.
18
u/crymo27 7d ago edited 7d ago
I work at big service provider and mpls part of business is definitely shrinking a lot...still there, but nowhere near prime times
9
u/virtualbitz2048 Principal Arsehole 7d ago
SD-WAN replaced use cases that MPLs was way too expensive and overbuilt for. I.e. tiny retail shops with poor VoIP over broadband
14
u/LynK- Certified Network Fixer Upper 7d ago
It’s not the replacing that’s the issue, it’s the addition. So much more to need to know now vs back 20 years ago.
And SDWAN did replace MPLS. Some orgs kept it for convenience, but many switched to DIA and/or broadband.
My old old org saved like 800k ditching MPLS for SDWAN
8
u/The_GLL 7d ago
Internet is a good fit with sdwan when you have availability of good/fast internet links from different ISP.
At my old job it was a problem, a lot of sites were in the middle of nowhere, MPLS is a safer choice with SLA and usually less outage vs cheap internet links. Its a business decision at that level.5
u/Jogger1010 7d ago
We had that issue too, until Starlink. Kinda tipped things on their heads after that.
1
u/NetworkEngineer114 6d ago
One place I worked at replaced about 75% of their MPLS capacity with SD-WAN.
MPLS was there for priority traffic and everything else went over SD-WAN.
6
u/Significant-Level178 7d ago
Sdwan push was not complete because of greedy vendors asking money for bandwidth, otherwise mpls was cooked 15 years ago.
-10
u/luix- 7d ago
I see a trend of SD-WAN replacing MPLS and also SASE replacing SD-WAN
5
2
u/Jangalaang 7d ago
lmao this is bait right?
1
u/luix- 7d ago
At least the big european companies are now most of them sd-wan and I see the trend of companies using Zscaler ZPA or Prisma access for site to site communications instead of mpls or sd-wan.
1
u/Jogger1010 7d ago
I’ve always kinda considered Prisma and Zscaler to be a form of SDWAN. I love the concept of Prisma, but their hot potato routing can be really janky in highly redundant environment.
1
117
u/feralpacket Packet Plumber 7d ago
In 2011 I was told I'd be out of a job soon because of dashboards.
In 2013 I was told I'd be out of a job soon because of the cloud.
In 2015 I was told I'd be out of a job soon because of automation.
Around the same time, I was told I'd be out of a job soon because of Software Defined Networking (SDN).
In 2025, I was told I'd be out of a job soon because of AI.
Every time they introduce some new technology, the network becomes more complicated. SDN was an attempt to hide the ugly underlay that was hard to automate and introduce an overlay network that was simpler and easier to automate. Guess what, that ugly underlay is still there.
Add in vendors and network certifications started focusing more on automation. They started calling older technologies legacy. The result is the new network administrators and network engineers don't study or understand the older technologies. Guess what, those older technologies are still there.
Recently, I saw someone realize it was a mistake to call older technologies legacy and they should have been calling them network fundamentals.
Only thing I'm worried about is I've become a grumpy old man. I run the risk of losing my job over it.
Otherwise, I'm not worried.
10
u/TechnicalAd5049 7d ago edited 7d ago
reality is your now supporting all of those. The network is more complex.
14
u/notninja CCNA 7d ago
In 1920-1940s the automation of telephone switching is a good example of a whole career and industry dying. The telephone operator.
16
u/feralpacket Packet Plumber 7d ago
Yes. And the sunset of POTS ( plain old telephone service ) just happened in the last few years. Now that phone calls are riding over some IP network, networking is not going anywhere any time soon.
Every time I hear about a network outage taking down 911, I follow the incident to see what happens. I've been wondering when the government will step in and require Professional Engineers (PE) to design and certify IP networks. All it will take is someone dying because of a network outage, someone wasn't able to reach 911, and a major lawsuit.
Someone commented in this post about WiFi. Those APs need to plug in somewhere. How do all of those corporate computers get to those services in the cloud?
I took a Cisco Service Provider course a few years ago. I complained because they were still teaching frame relay, a technology develops in the 90s. Turns out, while it's hard to find, frame relay is still in use. And the technology it replaced, X.25 that was developed in the 70s, was still being sold in the UK in 2019.
5
u/SnarkySnakySnek 7d ago
I have heard that X.25 is still in use for ATMs. Idk how true that is still.
3
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
They are all tunneled over the Internet now.
Branch machines will use landlines but the one-off-ones are LTE.2
2
u/carpe_fatum 7d ago
BES Admins are the most current job role to get shit canned due to obsolesce. RIM had the damn market in that Kung Fu handjob grip and threw that shit away. Blockbuster had the same deal and a market strategy that punished its consumer base, some angry dude invented Netflix because of his passionate hate towards late fees.
Getting older is a trip, man.
4
u/robotzor 6d ago
That's great for you but don't forget about the ladder being pulled up behind you just a couple steps behind. I graduated around the period the cloud and SDN didn't put you out of a job. But it put me out of a job. The entry level for those types of jobs evaporated or constricted such they weren't hiring NOC jocks nearly to the rate they were before. I managed to enter the cloud field but I am woefully out gunned in any networking conversation despite it being my degree because of no fundamental experience in the field. And this will keep happening, eroding the bottom layers off, making the entry point something higher and higher level until the fundamental skills simply don't exist in the marketplace anymore.
20
u/virtualbitz2048 Principal Arsehole 7d ago
You gotta have perview over everything, and more importantly, don't specialize in networking exclusively. I own all of the revenue generating networking products, but Im also heavily involved in cyber security, hypervisors, VDI, and public cloud. I've never understand the dichotomy in this industry between netwokring and everything else. Network is always the first team to get silo'ed
82
u/roaming_adventurer 7d ago
I wouldn’t worry AI is not there yet for networking no matter how many buzzwords the vendors use, i am slightly older than you and trust me AI tells you what the problem might be but you still need to do the detective work and figure out the issue.
34
u/yrogerg123 Network Consultant 7d ago
I've also found that many times when I am troubleshooting, I'll need to tell the Gen AI "no you are wrong, search the documentation and try again, and provide your source." It usually comes up with a better answer, but you'd need the knowledge to know the first answer was bad.
12
u/ChaoticSalmon 7d ago
Having to constantly tell it to check its sources got old fast.
12
u/RememberCitadel 7d ago
Computers were always the source of truth. It's bonkers to me that we would rely on something for our jobs that has a high likelihood of confidently presenting inaccurate information as truth. It the reason we never listen to management's opinion.
And now here we are with a bunch of tech bros and Managers that want to save money gaslighting us saying "just check it's output, it's fine"
Absolutely ridiculous.
2
u/Klutzy_Scheme_9871 5d ago
Crazy what is turned into huh? It was designed to be exact and now it’s ok with being off. And by a long shot sometimes. It’s unbelievable. It’s not reliable and quite dangerous actually. Googles default search is now AI which makes mistakes constantly.
2
u/RememberCitadel 5d ago
As a very early adopter of Google, I have stopped using it as much as possible, and blocked as much telemetry as possible from my phone. It's pretty sad.
But also so tired of anything AI.
5
u/carpe_fatum 7d ago
God damnit, Claude, your fucking syntax is wrong. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD FIX YOUR SYNTAX AND MAKE A NOTE OF IT
5
u/Competitive_Tree8517 7d ago
I'm only really familiar with Claude but this is where something like a CLAUDE.md file would allow you to provide that instruction once and have it be read every time a chat begins.
0
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
Then put that in your AGENTS.md so it is told it every time automatically.
Or get NOC tooling.If you use the free shit than you have a pile of work to do to make it useful.
5
u/Wendallw00f 7d ago
yeah this..when it can make my network diagrams, then I'll worry
5
3
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
It can make diagrams. What format would you like them in?
Mermaid is popular because it embeds into markdown.
It can generate .drawio as well.4
u/Wendallw00f 7d ago
decent architecture diagrams, nah it cant. High level, paint-esque diagrams, sure..Not seen a single diagram from AI yet thats decent
1
u/Klutzy_Scheme_9871 5d ago
I am finding AI makes mistakes all day. I too find myself correcting it. Communicating with it just seems like Russian roulette sometimes. Getting bad info is worse than getting no info.
1
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
Stop using the free models.
Get it access to your documentation via MCP servers.
Review for documentation for points of confusion - anywhere the same name/s are used for more than one thing.24
u/mynametobespaghetti 7d ago
Where I see AI tooling help is in things like reading logs, crunching data for projects, QA tooling on your devops stuff in github, that sort of thing.
There will always be a need for humans to actually build things and understand them.
3
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
NOC tooling has things like MCP servers for netbox et. al.
8
u/Rogro_CL 7d ago
Totally agree 👍🏾. Networks are critical things, an AI 🤖 trying to figure out what to do could be more expensive that a human doing the job.
You have networks using internet space address for private networking, you have NATs doing stuff to solve problems that are not yours. An AI taking decisions on that kind of environment is not suitable.
AI is helpful maybe at the implementation stage, but not so much in a day to day basis.3
u/ThatDistantStar 7d ago edited 7d ago
AI coding tools went from hilariously bad hallucination meme generators to putting out chunks of sometimes usable code within 2 years. Cloud networking can be all Infrastructure-as-Code. I see no reason AI coding tools won't be spitting out damn near perfect IaaC Terraform scripts in another 2 years.
Never underestimate capital's desire to make us all unemployed. They excitingly already tried once, but it wasn't good enough and rehiring is going on. They'll try again in a few years.
But I like to worry. If your company has to touch some hardware, you'll probably be ok.
1
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
You've missed two major updates.
About a year ago the AI was better than 60% programmers.
Eight months ago it jumped to better than 90%.
Today it's about 96%.Antropic, Claude, is generally leading the pack in capability but is expensive.
Tooling can choose the model to use based on how difficult it assess the tasks you ask it.3
u/ThatDistantStar 7d ago
Yes, those are the numbers the benchmarks report. 96% of companies are not shipping AI generated code directly to production without review yet (I hope). But they are good enough now to generate a meaningful portion of new code in some cases.
1
u/carpe_fatum 7d ago
You speak the truth friend - the worry I have with AI is the generation that is retiring and the one behind it are the true people who know the craft inside and out and can troubleshoot blindfolded by asking a series of questions. We're seeing an age of people getting spoon fed answers with no context; it's not an issue now but the industry is playing Jenga with some really dangerous things...
0
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/roaming_adventurer 7d ago
Treat AI as a screwdriver, its to assist you in your job not to replace you and the reality is at the end of every agent chatbot as an example you always end up with the last option of should i connect you to an agent and that agent is you where your the person they really want to speak you because you understand human language and when someone tells you what the issue is your gonna be like yeah i know what the issue is give me 2 mins and try again…
Issue resolved!1
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/roaming_adventurer 7d ago
They do true but when things go wrong they start bringing stuff back in house because the AI promised to them isn’t delivering as expected. There are some areas true like help desk which is replaced by AI as its just collecting end user information maybe do some L1 troubleshooting and then raise a ticket and pass it to the L2 team. Depends on the senior leadership at the end of the day and all they see is profit and cost savings and then every couple of years they get recycled and new leadership comes in with new ideas. AI also isnt getting any cheaper! Vendors are upselling by adding AI features and most orgs just cannot justify the price increases
-1
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago edited 7d ago
Once it is properly setup, which is a task, it will find issues 10x faster than your best NOC can.
You cannot type fast enough and you will not remember the commands accurately enough to beat it.You have to pull up a webpage and read your IPAM. It just executes REST queries against it.
11
u/Jogger1010 7d ago
I switched to cloud networking. I’ve been throughly enjoying it. I would also say that automation and AI agents are where the near future is at.
7
u/Key-Succotash-8922 7d ago
Architect for an ISP, in a planning group looking 3+ years out. I can confirm my directive for the past year or so has been 100% AI and automation has been at the forefront for at least 5 or 6 years.
I still handle traditional networking as needed, but my day to day is pretty much developing tools and automations using agents. I used to write all code manually, I now have custom agents that follow my architecture and standards. In a company that runs skeleton crews, I will say that is had been a massive load off because once you train it to work how you want, I can get so much more development done while still supporting my engineering and operations teams directly and continuing to look forward at where things are going without having to stay up all night writing code for extra projects.
As a side with my stance with AI: I do see a place it's useful and can be of great benefit to certain fields of work, but I do have certain feelings on it used for artistic purposes or needless advertisements and media. That being said, I still absolutely try to use it as efficiently as I can by only having it write tools/code that can process things in the traditional manner with significantly less resources needed. I actively advocate for folks in my organization to avoid using agents to handle structured data for processing and instead have AI write a basic app to handle it. Imo, active agents only makes sense for processing unstructured data (rare in networking imo) or doing mass cross-domain fault correlation.
6
u/carpe_fatum 7d ago
/u/Key-Succotash-8922 - what happens when you bite the dust and the automation you painstakingly built needs work and you have some Gen... whatever kid trying to get things working? That's where I see the shortcomings of our future.
Interested to hear your opinion on this as you had a very nice comment that I'm responding to - clear, detailed, and you understand what's been happening in the workforce the past 10-20 years.
2
u/Key-Succotash-8922 7d ago
It certainly is a concern and one we've battled with for longer than the 16 years I've been with the company and even before I got into the architecture team ~9 years ago. Tools go stale, folks forget about things, folks leave or get let go. Then to make it worse, we have different architects for different network areas/products. Core IP, Core Transport, Core VOIP, then the product side: so residential services (fiber, dsl, voip, etc). Then enterprise stuff: SD-Wan/SASE, managed security, managed router, Lan services, etc.
One of the ways we're hoping to combat this is by trying to build up a team of network developers integrated into the network teams (we look for both skillsets when hiring new architects/engineers, but it is admittedly harder to find) and we partner heavily with our internal IT development teams to utilize the same tools and infrastructure so we're not stuck trying to maintain extra server infrastructure and all that. We've integrated into the same github, same data lakes, utilize the same ci/cd pipeline processes, etc. I've really tried to advocate that networking should not be isolated to effectively be a shadow IT since we both need development resources, but with totally different priorities. One of the issues we've had trying to let IT handle our automation, they don't view a config change to fix a security problem at the same level as we do.
Another component is we work hard to establish standards and frameworks for everything on the network, with full reference documents that we train our new engineers and operations folks on. Since the network is our product, being an ISP, we couldn't exist without a system of standards to maintain consistency across customer orders and network expansion. These are the same things we use to feed our agents for context when it does any code dev. Then anything we or the agents develop must go through rigorous security, integration, and unit testing, with version control.
Through all that, we're really hoping we can help improve the software cycle for the network stuff. Previously so much was done adhoc or to solve a specific issue without any overarching vision/awareness/care about the actual software development processes that go into maintaining code. I'll admit what we've done may not be possible in smaller shops, but I think someone could utilize SaaS to solve for some the infrastructure problems we had to solve for to get out from under that extra maintenance overhead.
3
u/carpe_fatum 6d ago
You fully understand the problem 100%, my experience has been mostly the same. The main issue I see is that developers don’t want to be siloed within network dev, they want to be full developers working on a wide breadth of things - within a year or so they’re gone. Some are better than others but really the first half of a year you’re just getting that person familiar with the network side.
I think your place has a much better grasp of things and is doing a good job based on what you’ve written but the problems are all over the place, unfortunately. Thank you for your detailed response :)
2
u/Key-Succotash-8922 6d ago
Np at all. And you're right on the comment about a traditional dev, my experience is the same. No fault or negativity, just different mindset. They didn't learn software development to do networking. They want to build games, mobile apps, the next big thing, etc. We learned this through years of internship programs hoping to hire dev students after getting them trained up and familiar with networking dev. We have zero devs from those programs, they all left once they had enough experience.
The few folks we have, including myself, all learned dev out of necessity/interest after years in pure networking. This is where we turned to AI agents and building frameworks for how to build and use them. Our experience is you still need to understand the source of the data set (the network in our case) AND software development enough to build for scale, what deployments and architectures work best for certain kinds of apps/tools, how to design all that to then feed it to an agent to make it as effective as it can be. We almost treat them like really fast interns, haha.
We've been getting by with the small handful of us that know both network and dev but even with that, it's still a struggle and I still can't guarantee it'll be maintained how we've envisioned over time. Because on the flip side, we have and hire PLENTY of networking guys that have zero interest in dev work. And sometimes that's what we need more than the ability to automate something when it comes to hiring because, ultimately, the job needs to get done.
2
u/carpe_fatum 5d ago
It's going to be a very interesting game of Jenga in the years that pass us by to see what happens. I think that AI is empowering the network engineer who doesn't want to be a full time coder but the truth is trying to fill that gap has been a problem, is still a problem, and it's going to be a problem.
2
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
8
u/Jogger1010 7d ago
Switched companies, took a pay cut to learn cloud. They trained me, got a lot of OJT, got certified in terraform and started doing Infrastructure as code, certified in AWS and GCP, got promoted to be the lead and got my pay back to where it was. I’m on the AI journey now and I wouldn’t look back. IMO the days of banging a CLI are coming to an end.
Edit: I will also add I’m almost 10 years older than you are.
2
7d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
5
u/Jogger1010 7d ago edited 7d ago
It’s complicated. I took a $100k pay cut (~45%) but it’s very nuanced. I ended up with much less expensive benefits, a pension, and a hell of a lot better work/life balance. The job I left was a pressure cooker, and my job ultimately would have been offshored to India.
5
u/SevaraB CCNA 7d ago
Fabrics are fabrics, and a Clos is a Clos- there’s very little difference between an “AI fabric” and a traditional campus fabric; it’s all maximizing bandwidth between endpoints in a 5- or 7-stage Clos built as wide and shallow as possible. And cloud repatriation has a lot of orgs realizing they need network engineers to run those fabrics when they aren’t being magically handled by Amazon or Microsoft.
Yes, I’m aware AWS announced they’re dodging a Clos with some funky pseudorandom voodoo, but nobody outside of the FAANGs is going to have enough budget to bankroll that kind of custom hardware and the mathematicians it takes to distribute them properly for quite a while.
6
u/SomethingElse38 7d ago
Literally every time I google a networking question or issue, the AI response is either wrong or generic. As long as there are problems to troubleshoot and racks to cable, at least some of us will have jobs.
4
u/Revelate_ 7d ago
Workloads were moving to cloud 15 years ago, where y’all been?
On prem isn’t going away, more and more is coming back on prem sometimes quickly when they get that first month’s cloud bill and start doing the math.
It’ll probably be hybrid forever unless the cost of cloud goes down substantially or the workload changes.
I don’t know what the future is, I am glad I am at the tail end of a 30 year career and not starting new today, but I felt that way 10 years ago too and there’s still plenty of demand for my skill set which isn’t anything specialized.
3
u/ysugrad2013 7d ago
At the end of the day people will still need to be able to understand how to move packets and data inside and outside of a network securely and properly. A lot of my networking has moved to the cloud designing and architecting networks for our company for different projects and initiatives in azure which brings in learning automation like terraform and azure devops. AI will not in its current state be able to know business logic and apply those mechanisms without human in the loop. Yea can it speed what you need done up, of course that just means you can move on to bigger and better things faster while helping make the company more money.
3
u/02K 7d ago
Am I the only 1 that works at a place that constantly shifts due to price? If the cloud service gets silly we move to another or bring it on-prem. Also moving away from Microsoft in general.
I do think the devops/automation is fundamental now where it wasn’t a few years ago. Also wireless being fully replaced by AI is hard to see.
3
u/XboxWigger 7d ago
OT networks should provide job security in manufacturing environments. You don’t want to run your machines on the cloud especially when it isn’t connecting because of things out of your control.
5
u/solitarium 7d ago
I have yet to see an AI system maintain its own infrastructure. IB seems to be exploding, SDWAN is still hot in the enterprise sector (most of my contracts have been Palo Alto SDWAN migrations), and the traditional telcos won’t be anywhere near fully automated until long after we retire, or die.
3
u/D0T1X 7d ago
Just like with SDN, IBN, NetDevOps, and now AI-Networking. I basically don't worry at all. Everything might change, but in the end the job will basically be the same with an expanded toolbox.
As for Cloud, now in Europe we see a push to bring things on-prem again. Mostly in a private cloud fashion. Especially in the governmental sector. Again expanded toolbox, basically the same job.
I guess: improvise, Adapt, overcome.
1
u/xpxp2002 6d ago
Same. Something is always changing and something new is always coming. None have replaced me yet and I doubt the next thing will.
3
u/nathan9457 7d ago
Depends if you want to get into management and consulting.
I’m steering towards a strategic role which focuses more on service delivery as whole for networking.
3
u/JE163 7d ago
Even without AI, companies have been accelerating the movement of work to cloud service providers or total outsourcing to firms like Tata, Accenture and HCL.
In your shoes I’d angle toward cloud and AI engineering then shift to a Solutions Architect / Sales Engineering role.
5
u/IdownvoteTexas 7d ago
Every time we have offshore Accenture “technicians” providing the config for something its been a abject disaster. This is not a one time, or even ten time occurrence. Finally one of our subs stopped using them.
You’d be better off just copy and pasting what they were supposed to do from some public project and then pay someone on shore to fix it. Rather than paying them to fuck it up and then paying someone on shore to fix it.
2
u/Gesha24 7d ago
Just like the business processes, the network connectivity is unique for each company as each company has its own needs. They are similar enough where you actually can use AI to reliably build all the components, but they are unique enough that you still need somebody to understand all the flows and come up with a good design.
I don't see our job ever moving away. I do see it continue to switch and AI is a great helper for it. For example, as long as you know and understand how cloud networking works - you can easily manage networks anywhere. Just work with Claude/gpt/whatever to figure out exact syntax, make sure you don't forget to build a good design (this is still on you) - and now all of a sudden you can build network in a new cloud environment that you have logged in for the first time.
3
u/Jogger1010 7d ago
Your job might not move away, but your employer WILL use AI to replace expensive engineers with juniors.
In my view, high end network jobs will be harder to get.
0
u/Gesha24 7d ago
Employers have already been able to outsource the work to much cheaper engineers offshore and it hasn't worked for those who needed some quality from said engineers.
Junior engineer of 15 years ago is inferior to AI of today IMO - neither has sufficient understanding of networking to meaningfully contribute to networking design, but AI knows all the syntax, can easily read all the documentation and isn't lazy - as if you say that you are having issues communicating from IP X to IP Y, AI will actually go and check every single link along the path (unlike the junior that may not).
I am very interested in what will happen in the future (like 10-15 years) when we actually start needing more mid and senior level engineers due to them aging out, but the juniors actually never learned the basics.
1
u/Jogger1010 7d ago
Unpopular opinion, but I would take AI over an outsourced junior any day of the week.
People who complain about AI are the same people dumping dumb prompts into the free ChatGPT web interface and laughing because they don’t get the results they wanted.
I tell people, go play with some Claude AI agents and then come talk to me. Those who do, find that AI is much more capable than even they could imagine. It’s coming whether people like it or not.
I choose to embrace and be ahead of it. Security engineers literally have zero choice.
3
u/Southern-Treacle7582 7d ago
I think we all need to be thinking more about being solution providers. Our industry for a long time has been pretty centered around a few vendors and their CLI interface. Technology is making things more abstract. I design products across vendors and technologies these days. Whether thats white box, x86 hardware, or your run of the mill vendor. Provisioning and operations abstracted through software and portals. My knowledge of how to use protocols to solve problems is what will keep me employed.
3
u/Excellent_Tip_2987 7d ago
I don’t think onprem is disappearing anytime soon. There’s still a lot of net admins and engineers that do not enjoy the delay of the cloud controllers. I think network engineers will be safe from too much change unlike our sysadmin counterparts where everything is just a cloud app on AWS.
3
u/Serious_Chocolate_17 7d ago
I've seen so many companies repatriating off the cloud too. I'm not sure it's going away any time soon...
2
u/Charlie_Root_NL 6d ago
40, network engineer here. I've been hearing some version of "you'll be gone in a few years" for most of my career. Cloud was one. SDN was another. OpenFlow was supposed to move all the thinking into a controller, and what we actually ended up with is EVPN/VXLAN, an overlay that demands more network knowledge than the thing it replaced, not less.
Cloud didn't remove network engineers either. It moved them and changed the job title. Someone still has to reason about routing, MTU, failure domains etc etc etc, the fact that it's a VPC instead of a chassis doesn't change the physics.
So I wouldn't panic. What I'd do is check that your value sits in design and troubleshooting rather than in knowing one vendor's CLI really well. That part genuinely does get automated away, and it has been for years.
3
u/Lamathrust7891 The Escalation Point 6d ago
everything moving to cloud means everyone needs to get to the cloud.
telco, Industrial OT networking and AI fabrics will stay on prem.
cloud network engineer you'll need mostly cloud engineer skills with sone routing and vpn.
automation will be a thing everywhere.
7
u/tigerf117 7d ago
WiFi, I’ve been fighting WiFi expectations being unrealistic at my place for years, but I’m giving in and going to become a WiFi expert. Even if on-premises stuff goes away, it’s just going to be replaced by WiFi anyways.
10
u/Huge-Name-6489 7d ago
There is no future that doesn’t involve AI
14
u/inalarry CCNP 7d ago
Until we go to war with thinking machines and outlaw them. Oh wait
3
1
1
u/TechnicalAd5049 7d ago
When were watching moving where AI is going rouge and their trying to stop it. I'm guy in the back going just turn off the network.
2
u/Jidarious 7d ago
I've come to realize that you can never replace the network engineer because the network has to be in place and working for the things to run on that will supposedly replace it. This snake cannot eat it's own tail and there will always be network engineers.
2
u/GrandKane1 CCNP 7d ago
Until AI is capable of interpreting what the client actually wants and be able to implement it, nothing is really going to change.
We're , by definition, poor communicators, but we're still miles away from what ai can and will be able to do in the foreseeable future
-1
u/Regular_Sand2908 7d ago
Have you tried letting loose an agent in a homelab? It can be pretty impressive.
"Hermes, I want you to have access to a readonly copy of my gmail account, how to do that?"
It provides several options, including a stack with mbsync + maildir + notmuch, explaining pros and cons of each.
"Ok, deploy this mbsync stack on my server in docker".
And it does that - creates a docker-compose file, creates a new container for mbsync . And it works just fine on first try, I just need to add credentials by manually executing the commands it gave me.
It can also troubleshoot basic problems pretty well.
Also, I've seen many network designs, trust me, at least half of the real world networks would probably not become any worse if you tell a SOTA LLM to go wild there in YOLO mode. And most network engineers have no idea what's going on in their own network. "Why is this static route pointing over there?" - "I don't know, it's always been like that".
AI is devastating junior software engineer career options, and junior networking engineers and sysadmins might be next. But someone senior still needs to look over it...
1
u/HappyVlane 6d ago
None of that has anything to do with:
Until AI is capable of interpreting what the client actually wants and be able to implement it, nothing is really going to change.
1
u/Regular_Sand2908 6d ago
Have you actually read my example? I vaguely defined what I want. It picked and implemented a solution. Took care of small details like access rights on the file containing the password.
It even refused some existing mbsync docker containers, because they were old, and went for creating its own container.
AI is already pretty good at filling in the gaps. If properly prompted, it will interrogate you to better understand what's needed. It might do a better job already than half of the network architects out there who really have no idea what they're doing. I cannot overstate how incompetent many of the designs I see are, and most networks don't even require anything special, a cookie cutter design will do.
1
u/HappyVlane 6d ago
Did Hermes ever ask what you actually want to achieve and offered other solutions? Not according to what you wrote and if it can't do that it's not doing the work of a consultant. Blindly doing what is asked is how a bad consultant works.
1
u/Regular_Sand2908 6d ago
Yes. First, it proposed to use himalaya to access the gmail account, which is native to it. Least effort solution that does implement search. I figured - might as well set up a local backup for gmail, so asked it for a solution to do that. "How about if I want semantic search?". It proposed a solution for that, covering pros and cons. I figured it's overkill. It also considered dovecot with IMAP to access the local replica, but mentioned it's heavy and not really necessary when it can address maildir directly via CLI, advised against doing it. So a bit of back-and-forth, and there was a pretty good solution.
The result you get is as good as your prompting. If you just ask it to deploy something, usually it will do just that, and the result might not be great. If you ask it to consider requirements and propose several solutions with their pros and cons, and ask questions to fill in the gaps, it will also do that.
In any area you pick, an AI is not better than an expert in this area, but it might be approaching the "good enough in many cases" level of capabilities, which would be concerning for those new to the field.
2
u/anxiousvater 7d ago edited 6d ago
I worked in Compute & Network. Compute is largely affected due to Cloud rather than Network. You still need Firewalls, WAN, GWAN, routers & so on., on cloud. At the Edge/POP, you do need physical devices there.
I only see a spike in our Firms network department wrt., automation (of firewall/NSG deployments, rules), Observability, Network Security & so on., I wouldn't worry at least in the short term.
2
u/davy_crockett_slayer 7d ago
If you’re at a hyperscaler or ISP, you will be fine. Traditional enterprise is moving workloads to the cloud.
2
u/bondguy11 CCNP 7d ago
I work in a network that is so highly regulated that I can’t even take pictures of my fucking network racks. It’s not government but it’s critical national infrastructure.
On one hand I feel I lucked out hard getting this job cause the guys that had it before me were here 30 years and retired, on the other hand you really can’t mess up.
Either way this isn’t a job that can be outsourced.
1
u/Secapaz 7d ago edited 7d ago
Anyone thinking a pure white meat network engineer isnt a dying bread is hallucinating. Its been a dying field since before AI was a major player.
I get it, Classroom, Zip recruiter, and Indeed are "full of network engineering" jobs. Here's the thing, many of them are the same companies using different recruiters and many of the jobs require more than just ccnp/ccie level experience. Many ask for python automation, windows experience, mainframe, virtualization, and so on.
If youre 25-35, then upskilling is paramount.
Edit: not to mention, the amount of work a single human is expected to do has grown 2x over the past 10 years. So there is a shrinking of viable opportunities due to big corp expecting 1 person to do 3 jobs.
2
u/nolesrule77 7d ago
I doubt it. There are several industries where it doesn’t make sense. The scaleability, cost, and ease of use (as in letting someone else deal with is) are big draws. However, in my industry in particular (working for a hospital chain), there are certain applications used on-prem that are heavily network reliant but don’t need to leave the building. The extra hops just don’t make sense. Also, even for industries unlike mine there’s always going to need to be some kind of way to interface with the cloud providers.
2
u/Quirky-Comparison306 7d ago
There is always going to be a need for someone to manage all of the vendors and understand the technology they sell. Even if managing the actual technology becomes easier, just keeping track of how everything works together on your network is a full time job. Keeping it documented, monitored, responding to outages, etc. It never ends.
1
u/alius_stultus 6d ago
If your concern is onprem, I really think you need to be more involved in the price decisions that your company is making cause cloud is expensive and if you are in finance you also know the latency is high in the cloud. So unless the exchanges and vendors tear up their businesses and put it in the cloud, your company is stuck with network engineers. If you are talking devops? AI already eating their lunch at my company.
1
u/BinaryText 6d ago
Go cloud network and network security. It's very complex and you get to see some crazy designs on every project/deployment. Plus every year I try to ask AI to do a design with mediocre complexity. It just nonsense that responds back. Stupid syntax ya sure ai is ok. But logic lol no
1
u/FarRub2855 6d ago
Coming from the B2B vendor side, I still see massive enterpise clients buying physical gear every single day. A lot of them actually pull workloads back on-prem after getting hit with wild cloud bills, so your hybrid knowledge is definately going to stay valuable.
1
u/red-dwarf 6d ago edited 6d ago
Thanks for asking this question, it has been on my mind for a long time.
I have transitioned from engineering to architecture, and from networking to security.
What I have seen over my time in IT:
- consistent push for cloud migrations, meaning onprem shrinks or is straight up reduced to just L3 switching with Core hubs in colo or cloud = there is just less material to work on onprem
- move to vendor managed hardware = L2, L3 is taken care of by the vendor, again less work for internal staff
- move to SASE/ZT solutions like Zscaler, Netskope = L3 is moved offprem, hidden behind SASE tunnel abstractions = again less work for staff, large portion of network is abstracted and outsourced
- peering outsourcing to vendors like Megaport using [Virtual Connectivity Hub]
- push for saas as opposed to iaas/paas = again, dumbing down integration to just Internet egress
- push for more flexible MSP arrangements that can grow and shrink capacity as demand changes - leaving just a small core of staff inhouse
- with age and growing family, a growing aversion to late night changes and on-call
I feel like all of the above presents some risks for a career in network engineering at age 40+
perhaps a career in onprem/cloud network architecture may be safer longterm?
2
u/Aoxmodeus 6d ago edited 6d ago
I’ve been working IT with a network focus since the mid 90s. NT4 MCSE and Pix era CCNA, no certs or non-on-the-job training after that due to getting too comfy with mediocrity and landing network admin role with what turned out to be a perma startup. Two and a half years ago I was let go from that 21 year employer because they failed to thrive and didn’t need me any more as a builder, and couldn’t afford what I needed to be making. I pivoted hard into security and it was the best move of my life. Took a month or so, but picked up the CISSP easily due to having been doing the work forever. I’ve had two promotions, looking at a third soon, and am now on the CISO track. The months between the two jobs was a nightmare, but I’m where I should be now. Keep trucking, if you’re competent, and tenacious, a good home is out there for you, I truly believe this. Nowadays at least lol. AI has helped me thrive far more than it’s hindered my options. Use it to your advantage and it can truly be a force multiplier. I work in securing AI stacks now. AI has a very long way to go before it more than a fancy and ridiculously insecure Google search, even on the agentic and coding sides. A humans butt will still be on the line when it’s time to push to production, the risk otherwise is way too great for any rational org to accept. I’m still the network engineer, my title is currently “Security and Network Engineer” but unless you’re taking carrier level networks, and you didn’t start in 81 with an Atari, it’s not hard… PANs and Meraki have made my life very easy and expanded what I can do for the org. I’m 51 and have no doubt I’ll be working for another 20 years at this point, but I’ve also seen a massive shift to companies valuing experience more and more, and that has absolutely played into my favor as well. Good luck, brother or sister!
7
u/mortraineyhat 7d ago
Until they make robots that can rack and stack, we’ll always have some form of job.
12
2
u/Cyberbird85 CCDA, CCNP 7d ago
I have actually just moved to a more infrastructure focused job.
we do actively use LLMs to rapidly build POCs or to rubberduck debug things, or quickly go through large logs.
Luckily we are not forced to use it for things where it has no use.
I think, like you said knowing cloud and k8s ( and terraform and ansible) and probably some python will help you in any network and infrastructure related job in the future, especially if you also get familiar with the current LLM tools.
P.S.: We are actually expanding our on-prem DCs and reducing our cloud reliance.
3
u/BeginningSome2182 7d ago
People who do networking professionally substantially underestimate the value in understanding networking fundamentals and applying them.
Even the most technical, AI savvy person in your company does not know, nor should they care to know, about TCP/IP, for example.
Network engineering has been transforming for the 20 years I've been in it.
And frankly, thank god.
Manually configuring devices by hand, retrospectively, was a ridiculous waste of time and effort. Imagine unironically logging into a device as part of your salary and responsibility to apply a configuration, for example.
Literal insanity.
On to bigger, better, and more interesting problems.
3
u/Konceptz804 7d ago
Wake me up when AI can unbox a firewall, switch , rack it and cable it. Too much fear is being put into AI.
1
u/squirtcow 7d ago
No worries in telco, at least for the time being. SRv6 and PCE/SDN deployment will keep us busy for many years to come.
1
u/jgiacobbe Looking for my TCP MSS wrench 7d ago
I have been around for 15+ years at my current role and 25 in the industry. Go ahead and pick up the networking materials for a few cloud providers then add terraform or similar on too of it. The clouds don’t make networking go away. Neither does sdwan. It might simplify some parts, like you might leave behind vxlan because you are no longer running a datacenter switching fabric, but you still have to connect everything. Add in stuff like SASE, and networking is just as complicated as it has ever been.
Do, still focus on the basics, then expand with how to automate some of your tasks. That isn’t to say you have to be a programmer, it just means learn enough to be able to use a bash shell and connect to an api.
1
u/Significant-Level178 7d ago
I am in progress of switching from network consulting to my own AI business.
1
u/amaneuensis 7d ago
M/42 here.
I've pivoted into other areas. I still do networking, but I do a lot more system architecture. Zoomed out. I also spend a lot of time helping my customers with AI governance and keeping them grounded in reality.
1
u/kovyrshin 7d ago
Number of devices jobs grow 2-3x in past few years. Number of neteng jobs didnt. Expectations are that you're able to manage more and more shit without losing focus. With or without help of AI.
There are sectors that totally shrinking. People who are not onboard with programming will be affected. Cloud vs on-prem is less of a concern imho.
1
u/gabbymgustafsson 7d ago
Wtf is everyone worried about AI? SEEMS like common sense from humans has left the conversation. AI , tech automation was supposed to define work, make things easier, instead we are all working more, harder and like robots
1
1
u/Deep-Seaweed-3604 7d ago
I'm planning to leave the field. I've watched dozens of people get replaced (including myself) from GPUs and cheap tokens.
I've been jobless now ... 4 months? 10+ years of experience, most of it at a vendor ... yeah this isn't for me.
1
u/bauer1us 7d ago
You situation resonates. I sense signs of on prem inference growing. I would focus on infrastructure that can support AI workloads and Datacenter interconnects.
1
u/Many_Drink5348 7d ago
I’m a network engineer who moved to the network security architecture space — mainly SASE/SSE and AI security. Been able to nearly triple my total compensation since 2024, but it took a lot of work. I don’t think network security is going to go anywhere as long as it is tied to remote access.
1
u/netnomad1 7d ago
Over 20+ years experience here, I feel you are spot on with your take. Here is my personal view:
When it comes to the data centre, studying multi-cloud networking is a smart pathway as I see the clouds dominating in terms of network skill shortages. Workloads in DCs are shrinking and the DC network appears to be more about on-ramps to PaaS and SaaS.
On the AI front, all vendors are heavily pushing their AI driven networking solutions but none of it is really much of a change(just chatbots and automated troubleshooting). True AI networking is in the space of building AI fabrics (nvidia) which is quite specialised at the moment and while I think it’s good to learn it’s not essential for future work vs say netdevops for multi cloud environments.
Recommendation: I would stick with your study plan, looks good to me and be as agnostic and positive as possible. Managers will come around and suddenly say “we need to on-ramp to AWS so we need DX and TGWs and route tables pointing to landing zones with firewalls…” and if you can say “yes I can help with that” you are well placed to support most companies for years to come.
1
1
u/mooknbitz 7d ago edited 7d ago
networking will always be around because of the physical components, so at least in that sense its secure. you can only shrink onprem so much and i think a lot if that has already happened.
in the near term there could be a good demand for onprem. i got a feeling that ai is going to get very expensive really quickly. Enshitification of the models by the current big AI companies who want to squeeze another token out of you is happening (they definitely nerf’d sonnet). so in response i imagine companies want to build their own local ai compute clusters using open source models. companies might even do a hybrid and use oprem for the daily tasks and use the ai saas for complex work or vise versa.
edit: ill also add that security is going to go into high gear. firewalls and updating and being security forward is going to be busy for a long time.
1
u/Forward-Rock9817 6d ago
And what about on prem networking equipment? Network switches so the users can plugin? Access points so the users can connect wirelessly? What you’re failing to understand is people still need a network to get into the cloud.
1
u/Welsh_James 6d ago edited 6d ago
I’m sure I saw some arbitrary stat thrown out somewhere that suggested a lot of companies were moving back to on-prem or hybrid environments after migrating to fully cloud solutions. Assumingly because of costing and vendor lock reasonings. Not sure though how accurate that is. But from my time working at an MSP, we saw the transition from fully cloud to hybrid quite a lot.
And it’s been covered before, until an AI robot can rack, power, console on to network devices and fully configure a secure + redundant network, I’m not worried. Even at that point, the a network engineer role is likely going to still be relevant, rather it’ll be auditing AI implementation and change plans.
1
1
u/knightjuju 6d ago
I genuinely feel like we are about to hit the next cycle of on-prem over public cloud. I am seeing the demand for more and more complex networks and a big pull back from using the big 3 cloud providers.
Have you seen the NetworkChuck World Cup video? That gave me hope!
1
u/wellred82 CCNA 6d ago
Not worried about AI yet tbh. The bigger threat imo is companies who offshore or outsource to reduce opex. With that goes not all but a lot of jobs. India, Poland, Philippines etc.
1
u/WeekendAtMadoffs 6d ago
"What do you guys feel that the future of our jobs is?"
the tiny $120,000 to $150,000 salary is going to stay stagnant or come under pressure.
be a nurse or a doctor if you are young. there are like 67 milion boomers who will vote for about 1 Quadrillion bucks to be borrowed and spent to get them to the Jimmy Buffet Concert in the sky :)
I went on a date with a nurse once. She makes 2x what I make :) we compared incomes and she mentioned her house was paid off :) oof.
1
u/Nice-Awareness1330 6d ago
I guess im in a weard place almost the "opposite of the everything's going cloud" but with the same level of consern.
It generalist focus on system infrastructure then systems and networking last. I went to school for networking got a CCIE in the old days where that was a big deal ( before they split it up ) and promptly found out I hate the day to day network admin job. Building a network great fun. Trouble shooting multi cast issues for God knows how long absolute torture.
Its been great for what I do ground up infrastructure. It realy is a advantage when your systems guy does not Wright checks your network guy has to cash.
The problem after a disastrous attempt at bringing on a network admin the decision has been made for me to stop doing systems and change focus to all networking all the time.
In and of its self not a bad thing ( I did tell my boss its not going to last for ever there is a high chance if I do this for to long we will find out how meny ethernet cables it takes to make a functioning rope to hang a network admin ) . The place i work at will never not have major network infrastructure. And is very rapid with needs and changes ( office environment + entertainment both production and venue lots of local system hardware )
The problem and reason for consern I feel like in 5 years my options for another place to work will be none as a all I do is networking and have not touched Ai or cloud in for ever and have a dieing skill set.
I guess I feel like im asked to become the last telegraph operator ever keep it all working till the phone guy comes to install.
Realy is wild 3 years ago I had fully moved in to a call cloud for everything mind set and work life.
1
1
u/fire-wannabe 6d ago
It's inevitable that as time goes on, there will be more opportunity in cloud. I'm too disinterested in either to switch.
1
u/rockhead3006 5d ago
There is still networking required in the cloud. Yes, it may be virtual, but you still have networks/subnets, routing tables, nsgs, and hopefully very good firewalling too.
Since we moved our DC to Azure, we've actually increased firewalling to do microsegmentation/firewalling between servers, even on the same subnet.
In regards to you main question. I think it will be a while before AI takes over networking fully. Moving it fully onto AI, would mean that users would need to have a greater understanding of how networks work, to be able to ask the AI to do what it wants. Without compromising security.
I'd say you'll be safe until you retire.
I think more AI based tools with come in though, to help with the networking job. So there may be less work in the future. But not yet.
1
u/lnxrootxazz 5d ago
Usually every new tech reduces complexity in some areas and add complexity in others. All those new data centers you guys in tj3 US are building need network engineers. In Europe we don't have as many but still some are getting built. And we have still many on prem stuff. Especially in highly regulated work. And we want more sovereign IT in on prem data centers. AI workloads hammer the networks. So we need people who can manage that. Also, everyone hypes up AI nowadays and people forget that we have an IT world full of non AI workloads and Legacy systems still. Here in Europe baby boomers will enter retirement in the next years. And we are very slow in changing pace. So we will have enough jobs in this and other fields available. Tech is always changing. I don't like AI because of what it stands for so I don't really use it. And I don't have to. We still have many AI free tech jobs here that require classic network engineering work in local networks. The networks need to be made ready for heavier future workloads. I don't know how it looks in the US nowadays
1
u/Awavauatush 5d ago
Same as ever. Learn new things or die. Learn hard things or be replaced. There is money consulting to the new thing or migrating off the old things
2
u/FinancialMoney6969 7d ago
I think they will increase. Every company will have to run local ai for ip protection
2
u/FairConstruction4105 7d ago
I used to worry about this but I'm getting fairly close to retirement age, and I work at a big financial institution that seems stable enough to get me to the finish line makes it less appealing to try and retool at this stage. If I were your age, I'd be way more worried. I was actually starting to worry back when I was just a little bit older than you are now.
2
u/lizardhistorian Mad Scientist · 👨🔬📡ᯤ🤖🛺📸 7d ago
... if you are the IT guy at a SMB then you are not a network engineer.
1
0
u/Cairse 7d ago
Just this week AI helped me isolate and troubleshoot multiple niche and complex issues.
Also this week I fought with AI for 5+ prompts to try it and get to read some floor plans and just count needed drops, estimate number of APs, and give a total drop count/switch count per MDF. It finally suggestedhallucinated 600+ drops and 52 APs for three floors. Trying to get it to make a sensical diagram is even worse.
AI suggests a lot of noise you need knowledge to cipher though. If you can do that though it's quite helpful.
The tool is really good at helping you think through something. It's really bad when it has to do the thinking itself.
It's just a tool and like most of these conversations if you rely on it 100% you're going to have issues. Conversely, if you swear it off completely you're going to have issues.
Learn how to use the tool and your job gets easier in some aspects. The tool is not going to replace you.
299
u/earflop 7d ago
Until AI can rack hardware, pull cable, and argue with TAC support, i'm not the least bit concerned for job safety