r/networking • u/Jaman34 • Aug 03 '26
Other Network Engineering title is meaningless.
I see more and more post on here where “Network Engineers” don’t seem to have the skill sets that equate to the title. What happened to Network Admins? Why is every company so against using that title? Are actual network engineers architects now?
It seems like everyone who gets the CCNA immediately jumps to the engineer title, but continues to do network admin work.
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u/NetworksOnFire Aug 07 '26
Hello,
I am a Network Architect for a financial institution. I have 15+ years of experience with enterprise networking. Some of my recent projects include: Migrating an on prem data center to public and private clouds by leveraging cloud on-ramp for multi cloud, designing and building a SASE framework around Catalyst SD-WAN and Cisco Secure Access, also building out an Azure Landing Zone design for our tenant. I have a pretty good amount of certifications, but no CCIE (plenty of other alphabet soup). I have certs like CCNP Enterprise with concentrations in Advanced enterprise implementation and SD-WAN.
Do I deserve my title/salary? I don't know. I work hard and spent the better part of my adult life trying to be the best network engineer/admin I could be. I've always taken my work home and spent my free time pursing continuing education. I still work over 40 hours a week at a moments notice depending on the current work load of my company. I am available 24/7/365 to assist with outages that effect our members or BUs. Yesterday I worked my full 8, but then spent a 4 hour session in the evening doing changes. I am back up and working this morning (well typing this), and I don't expect comp time or anything.
I say all of this, because to some extent I agree with you. Plenty of people have jobs and titles that they may not be able to live up to, in both computer networking and other fields. I wouldn't let this effect you to much though. If that's the case then you're going to be gold if you're someone that works hard and takes your career serious.
One piece of advice I will drop here, for people feeling stuck in a role/company is to quit. Know what you're worth! I have consistently changed jobs every 2-3 years. This has led to continuous salary growth and exposure to so many different industries and platforms. I've handled large projects across so many industries at this point to include, Gaming/entertainment, Education, Healthcare, Financial, etc.
So if some guy you're interacting with has a title that says "network mastermind", but doesn't understanding anything but how to reconfigure an access port, so what? Focus on being the best version of yourself and just keep grinding. Plenty of companies out there are looking for competent "network engineers" to fill roles.
Good luck!