Tech jobs are now white-collar trades that need apprentices, not a career crawl

The networking industry should address its perennial staff shortage by giving early-career techies the kind of hands-on training delivered during apprenticeships for trainee carpenters or electricians. That's the opinion of Alexis Bertholf, a 28-year-old Megaport technology evangelist whose networking-centric videos and other …

[abend0c4]

Giving early-career techies ... hands-on training

Training used to be a feature of IT companies in the past - and indeed most companies. Now it seems that they just dump one set of employees and hire another lot when they need different skills. This is not a good use of people in the long term and has adverse consequences in terms of pushing up the cost of "in-demand" skills as well as the loss of retained company knowledge. But "the long term" is also a feature of the past and I don't get the impression it's about to make a comeback.

[john.jones.name]

dont worry they cant configure DNS

they do not configure DNS correctly - its always DNS

https://internet.nl/site/www.megaport.com/3172853/

all you have to do is sign it they use godaddy for registration and AWS for a DNS server so its one click... brilliant...

be better maybe also have a security reporting schema

regards

John Jones

[Bebu sa Ware]

senior network engineers did their job too well.

senior network engineers did their job too well. Networks permeate everyday life but are also all-but-invisible.

A problem shared with any role whose success is preventing the shit and fan from meeting and when the unfortunate is unavoidable remedying the situation with a planned, rational process.

When the world's greatest fuckwit† required of those government employees to report to what they had done in the previous week I thought that "the processes that I and my team have created over the last five years meant the thousands of servers didn't crash or were infested with ransomware etc" wasn't going to cut it.

_{† I know. Extremely difficult to choose from so many talented candidates but like Camelot, Space Karen for one brief shining moment was known as the greatest.}

[JohnSheeran]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

I've posted this sentiment before but the WGF is par for the course for corporate America. Anyone that has ever worked for an American large corporation has gone through this at one time or many in their careers. Every time costs need to be cut or something needs to change, it comes down to the "prove your reason for existence". It's not new. It's just that it's a shock that we elected Corporate America to the Whitehouse (not really surprising but that's a harder, stickier conversation).

Agreed that they did their jobs too well. They continue to do so. The problem we're really seeing is that we decided about 10 years ago that we only needed developers and the rest of infrastructure could be done by them as a side job. It turns out that they don't want to do and cannot do that part of the job. Now, as the population grows, infrastructure professionals haven't grown at the same rate. You couple that with all of the "it just works" technologies (thanks Apple, et al) then you end up with a lot of up and coming people having no interest in learning any of this stuff because, well, "it just works". Since we only seem to learn when it doesn't just work then that's one bite out of this particular pickle.

There are no easy answers to this problem and those items are just a few of the sources of the problem. (We won't bother talking about the dumbing down of the population of America or anywhere else because that would really ruffle feathers)

[MachDiamond]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

"We won't bother talking about the dumbing down of the population of America or anywhere else because that would really ruffle feathers"

Data on that is sparse. I've run into many cases where engineers are hamstrung by edicts from the MBA's at the top that didn't know what a wiring closet was so redlined it to save money. It's not the population, but the lizards. People hate the lizards. They keep voting for them so the wrong lizard doesn't get in. In a company, one lizard gets in and hires nothing but more lizards for management.

[Martin Gregorie]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

IME, giving an MBA a difficult task or any responsible management position (i.e. any task where screw-ups have bad consequences) is just asking for trouble.

[jospanner]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

The marriage of corporation and state? They should invent a term for that. /s

[MachDiamond]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

"the processes that I and my team have created over the last five years meant the thousands of servers didn't crash or were infested with ransomware etc"

I'm expecting the stories about that sort of thing happening are going to accelerate across government agencies in the US. The Doggie web site has been a fav to 'improve' lately.

I just read today that the weather guessers are being gutted. I just wonder if they get to keep the pallets of ammunition they had been ordering.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

“the processes that I and my team have created over the last five years meant the thousands of servers didn't crash or were infested with ransomware etc"

One of our teams allocated to run a customers network ended up never going to the weekly what’s gone wrong now meetings, because they’d already spotted the problem and fixed it. Musk might consider these people not providing useful service, but just wait until they aren’t there.

I learned networking hands on and was mostly self taught on the equipment we used. The most instructional times were when I messed something up (eg remotely misconfiguring a node a couple hours drive away) and had to work the problem out.

The article hits the nail on the head. Because you can buy broadband routers off Amazon, most people seem to assume networking is easy. I can assure you it isn’t, especially something for more demanding customers. I have oh so many stories….

[herman]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

The trouble in gov paradise runs so deep that they do not know who is dead or alive, never mind actually working and doing something useful. The email 5 bullet points request helped tremendously in reducing the number of people to investigate by half.

[martinusher]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

All the F-i-C is doing is applying the same worth ethos to government jobs that's used in the private sector.

Government jobs are seen as privileged and coddled these days, especially by our propaganda departments. In reality its not that government workers are particularly favored, its more that everyone else has gradually lost benefits, protections etc. so those who now labor in contemporary "produce or die" Satanic mills they just appear so. Its a consequence of, among other things, government having to obey employment law. So its beneficial for everyone to get a reality check about just how bad things have got -- uncomfortable, but beneficial.

[MachDiamond]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

"The trouble in gov paradise runs so deep that they do not know who is dead or alive"

They also didn't know that the maintenance guy they fired at Yosemite was the only locksmith they had on staff. At another park, they fired all of the staff that book the holiday cabins so chances are that those won't be available and anybody with reservations might not be having them honored.

[martinusher]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

Back in the Good Old Days I figured that you had the development group sorted when all you had to do all day was sit in your office with your feet up reading the paper.*

(*I did say it was a long time ago, didn't I?)(Also, the reality is that the "manager" gets to roll up their sleeves and muck in with everyone else. The upside -- extra productivity. The downside -- you're not really managing if you're working, are you?)

[MachDiamond]

Re: senior network engineers did their job too well.

"you're not really managing if you're working, are you?"

The best engineering manager I worked under would muck in to keep the schedule on track. He wasn't doing the meat of what I did (Avionics), but there's always other things such as following up on orders that anybody can do if they know some engineering and maybe even if they don't. In bigger companies there can be a senior engineer that can bounce from thing to thing in a utility role rather than hiring a new person for a role where most of the time they really wouldn't be needed. In high school, we had a "campus supervisor" that was also a qualified teacher so he could substitute, help in the office and wander about keeping an eye on the campus as necessary. He was also really cool and the leader for the ski club. When my friends and I wanted to ditch mid-week to take advantage of cheap lift tickets, we'd take him along as cover. I had dispensation from mom to go if my grades were being maintained, but currying favor with somebody that could haul us into the office by the ear for some infraction is not a bad thing.

[Wang Cores]

Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

Fresh from The Economist: https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/25/why-you-should-never-retire

[Dan 55]

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

I've got an idea... Someone who really wants to carry on keeping Larry in yachts can do that, so long as they give their pension they're not receiving to someone else who wouldn't mind leaving this clown show early (e.g. me). Win-win, right?

[Diogenes8080]

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

I believe the good people of Birmingham (West Mids, not AL) are hard at work on that mission right now...

[imanidiot]

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

Ahh yes, one of those great statements that can only ever get written by someone who doesn't actually do a real job and/or has had more than enough income to not ever have to be serious about keeping a job anyway. Like "pleasure cruises and tracing the family tree" are normal activities for every single retired person.

[doublelayer]

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

I'm not sure that's true. To me, the article reads as the much more boring statement "You might find that you like working or get bored when not working, so you'll keep doing it". Which, for some people, is true, but they will be able to figure that out for themselves and hopefully will be able to do whatever thing they find most enjoyable in their older years. I have a lot of time to go before I can consider that, but I expect that I would get bored if not doing some of the things that my job acts as an outlet for. Maybe that will make me stay in the workforce longer even if I could be financially independent, but maybe it means I'll spend more time doing that kind of thing as a volunteer for charities, something I already enjoy doing sometimes, and maybe I'll find that it gets old after a while and I'd be happier not doing it after all. That probably doesn't apply to plenty of people, who continue working for financial reasons and would be happier doing something else.

[Andrew Scott]

Re: Please keep us in Brooks Brothers and yachts. Pleasssseee

sure, die in the harness like black beauty.

[An_Old_Dog]

Communication "Preferences"

By using the phrase, "communication preferences", Ms. Bertholf implies all communications methods are equally-functional, and that the primary selection criteria of communication method should be the whim ("preference") of the recipient.

Wrong on both counts.

How many technical questions have been repeatedly asked on instant messaging platforms dejour (IRC, ICQ, Microsoft Instant Messenger, Discord, Mastodon, etc.)?

How many of those could have been answered by the questioner reading a FAQ?

How many potential Q&As which could have gone into FAQs have not because they were lost to the winds, having been asked and answered on ephemeral IM channels?

Most people can read orders-of-magnitude more-quickly than they can listen to someone talking in a video or podcast.

Why should I use inferior* communication tools simply because someone(s) else "prefers" them?

*For some purposes, IMs, phone/video calls, or videos are appropriate. But for every good tech video I've seen, I've seen (the start of, then quit watching) eight or nine badly-organised, junk-filled ones. "It's just raining to beat the band here in Bluntville ..."

[Dan 55]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

How many technical questions have been repeatedly asked on instant messaging platforms dejour

Please add Teams. Once the answer is more than a few screens from the bottom of the chat then it might as well be gone forever, the search option is just a cruel trick.

[CountCadaver]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Different strokes for different folks

What is simple and obvious for one person can easily be opaque and impenetrable for another - with the rise in awareness of neurodiversities like ADHD and Autistic Spectrum Disorder then people need to understand that there is no one correct way of communicating information.

One persons jargon is someone else's gibberish as someone once told me

Tailor your approach to your audience is another valuable life lesson

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

@CountCadaver:

It's instructive that your post has received two downvotes already, highlighting the perspective of many Register readers that there is, Larry Wall's assertion aside, only one right way to do it.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

@Count Cadaver:

Channel != Content.

Tailor my content, yes. Use an inferior tool, no.

[Filippo]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

I don't think that's the point.

Communication is always a two-people job. That remains true even when the transfer of information has a clear direction. Both participants should make an effort. I'm okay with tailoring my approach to the other person, and that remains absolutely true if they're neurodiverse. That makes the process more efficient.

I'm not okay with making the process less efficient because the other person expects me to expend 200% more energy so they can save 10% of theirs. Being blind is a disability. "Oh, I don't read email" is not.

[CountCadaver]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Not being willing to read email is a different bag to "I struggle to retain the information from textual information due to my neurodiversity and the attendant involuntary limited amount of focus" which others interpret as "you are just stupid/lazy/idle" etc which is not only wrong but close minded.

The point of training someone should be to imbue knowledge in the most effective way which is frequently not the most efficient way - which is a cousin to the productivity trap where there will never be enough hours in the day or days in the week to keep trying to squeeze more in....it's why the world is such a miserable and joyless place.

[ecofeco]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

The problem is never that simple.

Some people try hard and need and deserve extra help. Most people are selfish and stupid and DO NOT read even the simplest instructions. RTFM? To self important. Can't be arsed.

But that's a two way street. Technical things that are of piss poor quality to begin with are often the root of everyone having trouble.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Not being willing to read email is a different bag to "I struggle to retain the information from textual information due to my neurodiversity and the attendant involuntary limited amount of focus" which others interpret as "you are just stupid/lazy/idle" etc which is not only wrong but close minded.

I think that's one of the big problems with neurodiversity. If someone struggles to retain text information and has limited focus, ie ADHD, then network or software engineering might not be the best choice. I'd say I'm kind of the opposite. I'm an information junkie, I read a lot and can be extremely focused. This is a good thing given the work I do, but sometimes that focus can be a bit dangerous, ie I want to get the job done or problem solved and can forget to do things like sleep, eat.

Which I've also seen in other staff, especially programmers. So I had a very good developer, but they could also be very focused and it got to the point where we had to lock them out of the systems and hired a counsellor to try and get them to see that sleep is good, and necessary. I've burned out and crashed before, and didn't want them to go through that same experience. This is also why a think businesses who run a constant 'crunch' are bad. Sure, it might increase productivity, but eventually it becomes counter-productive because employees will eventually crash & burn, or just make mistakes because they're overworked. Plus I think it's a sign of bad management and planning.

Sometimes though it can be unavoidable, ie the network or system goes down at 10am on a Monday, or 2200. Pager or phone goes off, and you have to get the problem fixed or the business can be pretty much dead in the water. That might mean pulling an all nighter to get problems fixed, but that's IT.. And why I think downsizing is dangerous. A business needs resourcing to cope with those eventualities, which might mean staff are 'idle' part of the time, but are there when TSHTF.. Which it will.

I've always viewed it much the same way as capacity planning. Design a network with diverse connectivity so links run at <50% utilisation, so if a link fails, there's still capacity. Run both links at 75%+ and sure, you're sweating the asset, but if when a link fails, you'll have problems. So when I ran a support business, I treated that much the same way so I always had 'fresh brains' to deal with problems. Customers loved that because we were responsive, but that's only because in MBA terms, we were 'overstaffed'.

[myhandler]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

You and I can read much faster but many people prefer a video.

I've recently been documenting a porject and have written a 36 page PDF with plentiful screen grabs.

I've now had to do videos for the damn thing.. and you know what.. they do show a lot of steps in much better ways - the watcher can follow the pointer and see exactly what happens.

But I don't make stupid jokes, play silly jingles or put up images that are meant to elicit laughs. There's no sponsor, no begging to subscribe and I keep them as short as possible.

Text for the bright ones, videos for everyone else (lol)

[Andrew Scott]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

don't know about bright, but i really hate videos. rather have good readable documentation that i can read, take notes, bookmart, markup and take places that don't require network connectivity. a few pages of pdf printouts weight a lot less and can be folded.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

"Text for the bright ones, videos for everyone else"

If you need to communicate something to many people that you don't know, that requires a certain approach that will be different if the audience is skilled in the subject matter. This would be different than when you are creating something for a particular person. To need to create something that accommodates potential people with cognitive issues, that's an entirely different matter. I've had plenty of experience creating documentation for aerospace systems and I had to assume that readers would have enough relevant knowledge to understand the documents. If I had to create documents that somebody with cognitive limitations could understand, like executives, I'd need to take some courses on cartooning. I'm not sure how I would write about a power source switching circuit for a rocket lander to somebody that couldn't open their car's hood and point at the battery.

One thing I like about explained videos is that it's easier to go step by step without leaving out things one might be assuming the other person knows. I find that a problem in plenty of YT videos where an action is unclear and there is no narration, it's in a language I don't understand or the presenter is just really bad at knowing their audience. When I create something, it's easier for me to verbally explain a step I'm assuming somebody knows than to shoot the visuals to be crystal clear to somebody that lacks the basics.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

I much prefer documentation that can be condensed to a single page along the lines of:

Site address:

Site code:

Old SN:

New SN:

Log on as Engineer Admin

Install S:\Apps\blah\fubar\thing

Install S:\Apps\blah\thing\wotsit

Install S:\Apps\blah\driver\timmy

Test:

[ ] Sheet Printer [ ] Label Printer [ ] Scanner

Log off

Shutdown -> Restart -> Confirm boot screen

30 pages of document with screenshots filling every page, or even worse VIDEOS - HTF are you supposed to follow them when trying to actually get the actual job done? I usually spend the first week of any job making copious notes and trying to work out what on earth the existing socumentation is actually supposed to mean, and rewriting them properly.

[Giles C]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Single page of documentation for a task.

I’d be very lucky

Configuring a wireless network on a Cisco 9800 they are 65 (I think the laptop if so) different options just on the wlan, so to document that requires a page just for the option list and then the instructions of how to do this.

Even the change record for the port configuration is 200 lines long and that is just the port code changes, no explanations mainly because I wrote the change and will be doing it myself (any competent network admin can follow the instructions)

But that is the type of system that I work on all day, fortunately I don’t have to deal with ACI which requires writing code changes to update as that is other people’s job.

[ecofeco]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

This is indeed the root of most of the problems. Useless complexity with no real utility nor accompanying tools even when the complexity is needed.

Computers only reason, ONLY REASON, for existence is do the actual heavy lifting. Can I move files between directories with a command line? Sure. Did it for years and years. Is a GUI file sorter better? How is that even a question. Unless of course I want to sift huge numbers of files in a batch. Then we're back to command line, but now as a script or some kind of code, so that once again, the computer does the heavy lifting.

But what we see these days is so much regression and failure from makers that everyone's job becomes more difficult.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Why do you need all 65 options in your setup documentation? Just document the options you need to select.

I'm installing some payment pinpads currently. There are about 30 options that can be configured. But, all I need is:

Menu -> APPADS -> POS Parameters -> POS COM -> Protocol 9 -> USB -> 115,200 -> Yes -> Stop

[doublelayer]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

In the product documentation, you need to document the options so that there's enough information that you can make that shorter page. True, that documentation and the checklist you're making are probably not written by the same person, but it is still important to have them both. I can't count the number of configuration pages where there is an option that I can configure but I have no clue what it does because it just has "TRS, default setting 0", and doesn't expand TRS or explain what it does. The more professional the equipment, the more likely there's a manual which explains it somewhere, but there is a lot out there without such a thing.

If I'm supposed to be a human computer, simply setting anything the way that my knowledgeable colleague said, this is not a problem. In that situation, there is no need to train any other engineers either, since we just need to have existing engineers write up some one-page processes and hand them to people who need to have no skills or interest in gaining them. There are quite a few people I know who don't know or want to know about computers but can be trusted to complete a completely rigid set of instructions about where to click and which box to put which value in. That is not what network engineering requires. The reason we need people with knowledge is that these things are complicated, and having the skills doesn't help unless they have enough information about what the systems do that they can figure out when the defaults or the things written on the previous configuration need to be changed, how to test that their changes worked, how to test that their changes didn't break something else, how to reverse them if they did fail, and how to diagnose a new problem that they haven't seen before. At most only one of them, number 2 on that list, can be in the one-page checklist, and in most of the ones I've seen, that one isn't on it either.

[doublelayer]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

The one page of notes works fine once you've done it several times. The longer documentation is necessary for every other situation, such as the first time you're doing it or the time you ask someone else to do it. You need it, for instance, when Install S:\Apps\blah\driver\timmy asks a question, emits an error code, or doesn't work because this is a Windows on ARM machine. Most of those won't happen, and the ones that do you've seen before, but the documentation is there to handle that kind of case.

It's the same problem that we often get in software documentation. Man pages, for example, are famous for using lines like "-D: detail mode". Great, I know how to turn that on. Or maybe that's on by default and this is for a different case. What does it do? What is the alternative? And that in programs that often have twenty different default configurations, such as that detail mode is enabled by default, goes into extra detail mode if you specify it twice, disabled if piping to a file, disabled if the number of targets is high enough, and on and on. This holds for other types of documentation as well. People leave out things that seem obvious, and when you give it to someone else, they can't do the task properly until they've figured it out, or worse, they still can't but it isn't sufficiently unclear that they know it, so they do what the documentation says and seem confused when the computer fails because nobody thought to update the documentation that you don't install wotsit by executing wotsit_setup.exe, even though that will offer to install wotsit. You run the batch file in there which does some configuring and calls the installer with some command line parameters. Everyone has installed wotsit, so we don't need to update that, the line just reminds you that's the next step. When the trainee messes up, we'll blame them instead of the doc they were following.

[Giles C]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Do a job every day and one page of notes is fine. Do a job once every 3 months or less frequently and try to remember what the steps are.

The world is complex and what network engineers do is a huge amount that when it works nobody notices, but if it goes wrong all hell breaks loose.

The well known phrase “go ahead blame the network” applies all too often.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

Yes, I was off for a month over Christmas, and back at work my mind had gone completely blank how to "get into" the asset database, and my notes made no sense. Because I'd omitted the cruicial step: Edge -> Favourites -> Asset system. :p

[MachDiamond]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

"I much prefer documentation that can be condensed to a single page along the lines of:"

Simple is good, but I'd add what the expected response is after each instruction. If you do "Install S:\Apps\blah\fubar\thing, it's good to know that you should see "successful" and if you don't, something didn't go right. That shouldn't take 30 pages of screenshots. A screenshot of the bootscreen you are supposed to confirm would be nice.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Communication "Preferences"

One of the problems with audio recodings and videos is that while they can (slowly) convey linear procedures, they're damn-near-impossible to use to convey hierarchical things, in that with (proper) text, you can have a table of contents, chapterisation, and (with HTML) jump-links.

Videos don't have tables-of-contents, they don't tell you you have to jump to timepoint 33:40.16 for the section on, say, "VM External Hard Drive Linkages".

Further, I haven't yet seen ONE video player which lets you punch in a timecode. Instead, you have to guess, and try to slide an incredibly-over-sensitive location slider to the desired spot.

[Helcat]

When a CIO says they don't need a wiring cabinet: Are they planning on using 5G connections to the cloud? Or is the place already covered by WiFi and the wiring cabinet exists but the CIO doesn't know about it?

It does seem, from that one example, that there are people being hired into positions who do not understand the underlying infrastructure to make things actually work.

Then again, have had one too many encounters with 'IT professionals' who don't understand the most basic aspects of tech. Far too 'head in the cloud' to remember they need to have good foundations, too.

[that one in the corner]

Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

All on your own dollar, of course.

Oh, and make sure that your home lab is "relevant": if you weren't using the latest generation Cisco managed kit between a few hundred nodes then don't bother telling us about it.

[Dan 55]

Re: Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

You too can network up the shared rental accommodation that is your home. Your landlord and your house/flatmates will be equally thrilled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

Plug in a bunch of wifi APs you mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

All these vendor certs like CISCO, AWS, Azure, etc.. do nothing good for IT. All they do is promote vendor lock-in and force your existing employees to promote one vendors tech cause otherwise their jobs are on the line or it doesn't suit their career path if they want to switch employers they won't have the skills.

If the tech stacks of organisations were based on just understanding the networking fundamentals, open source, open standards like samba, WEBdav, ssh, FTP, etc.. and basic VMs in shared/dedicated servers we wouldn't need half the dubious proprietary vendor-specific cloud junk and IT would be cheaper and more resilient if something goes wrong with one vendor. Maybe it doesn't have to be complicated.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

We never had vendor certs back in the days of mainframes. As far as I can see certs from Micro$oft, Cisco etc. are all just money making sidelines for the vendors and don't actually guarantee any actual skills.

I've lost count of the number of CCNA[*]/CCNP 'expert' types that manglement introduce as the best thing since sliced bread, who then go on to make basic mistakes and take out entire production networks.

*I started doing a CCNA as I was told I had to. I didn't bother with it after I got to the stage where it considered knowing the colour of a LED on a specific model of switch which we didn't use was ultra important to pass.

[willyslick]

Re: Experimenting with a home lab or acquiring vendor certifications

One can learn plenty using virtualised switching/routing infrastructure which can simulate real networks - no need to run up the electricity bill too much.

[CountCadaver]

Skills shortages are bemoaned by employers but they have happened as they refused to train anyone, failed to retain talent, resorted to poaching staff from others, set unrealistic recruitment qualifiers - must have 10 years commercial experience in...a 1 year old product (or just as bad for a product thats niche but pickupable with a little time), setup shell companies in India etc to do intracompany transfers to bring in Indian staff on Indian wages to save money or just outsourced the work.

Result staff pool shrinks due to various forms of attrition, no one has bothered to restock the pond with new spawn and now the pond is rapidly becoming devoid of fish (needed to help both teach new spawn and protect them from threats) and it's "woe is us, why has this happened" and the only answer they have come up with is to blame the fish for vanishing....

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the management and "recruitment specialists" responsible for all that simply change company / retire and potentially move on from IT management / recruitment to management / recruitment in other fields before it becomes an issue. Making it someone else's problem.

[Ken Hagan]

"must have 10 years commercial experience in"

Means: the person we've just lost had this experience and we'd like a drop-in replacement, please.

[doublelayer]

I am a programmer, and most of the job descriptions are very vague on what they want people to do and what experience is actually useful. I did recently see a job description that went so far the other way, asking for someone who had worked in a very specific area. Essentially, they wanted someone who had already written exactly the program that they wanted and could, I guess, just come over there and write it again from memory. Points to the job description for making it very clear what they wanted, but they should probably have considered that their task was something that quite a few embedded Linux people could manage and they might not have as much success trying to find someone who had already done exactly the same thing.

[J.G.Harston]

You're a programmer? Ah, that's "IT". We've got this IT job here, unloading computers from lorries and putting them on desks. Waddaya mean? It's COMPUTERS! That's IT!

[MachDiamond]

"Skills shortages are bemoaned by employers but they have happened as they refused to train anyone, failed to retain talent, resorted to poaching staff from others, set unrealistic recruitment qualifiers "

Beat me to it. There are plenty of things I could pick up within a week and often do when I'm working on a development project for a customer. If I were having employees again, I would look for somebody with a certain amount of relevant experience and know from that they could pick up the next skill quickly enough. There should always be an expectation that a certain amount of on the job training is going to take place. Every company does things a bit different and it might be better if somebody didn't need to un-learn something they did a certain way at another job.

Retaining talent is also huge. Somebody with lots of experience probably has seen many of the ways that something doesn't work which is a massive savings to a company to not go down those blind alleys. Get rid of that person and install a fresh-out with dreams and new ideas and they'll be off exploring those alleys at company expense, again, since nobody is left that remembered it didn't work the last time. New blood is not a bad thing, but not at the expense of losing the previous generation with no hand over.

[Giles C]

Maybe it is different in the uk

When working at one company we got fed up with the quality of people applying for network roles - one memorable candidate was given a competency test which started of the the basics (what is an a valid ip address, up to a troubleshooting scenario) spent 5 minutes looking at it then walked out the room and said it wasn’t for him and left.

So we required a few people from the call centre and trained them up, a couple were a bit iffy, but one proved to be a good network engineer (he is still at that company) and another went into a different support team.

So it does work.

Where I work at the moment there is a graduate training scheme where we get the people in and train them up.

Also we work on recruiting contractors and then taking them on full time. Out of the network engineers in the office I work at, 8 of us (including me) are ex contractors, 1 came when the company took over the people he worked for, and one is a graduate. And we have a couple of contractors at the moment….

But we are also keen on promoting within to encourage people to stay with the company.

[Decay]

Any CIO that didn't know they needed network closets should not be a CIO in the first place. But yet many organizations promote people sideways or diagonally into CIO/CTO roles who have limited understanding. If they are lucky and clever they have competent staff and listen to them. That's rare. More often they have some PM skills, good budget skills, possibly good people skills and chase the ball around the pitch firefighting and concentrating on the latest shiny thing the org wants. And forget or don't know about the basics, wouldn't know ITIL if it bit them on the ass and completely miss "safe, secure and reliable" as the first and most important part of technology.

[Denarius]

so true. Having worked under utterly clueless manglers I concur wholeheartedly. Seems the aristocrats attitude of many civilisations that the hands on skills of trades is beneath them and can be denigrated and ignored. After all, peasants are cheap and disposable etc. This attitude is so prevalent one wonders if the mangerial ranks have selection biases that attract sociopaths more than mere competence.

[Ken Hagan]

"one wonders if the mangerial ranks have selection biases that attract sociopaths more than mere competence."

If I were an incompotent sociopath, I'd probably be reluctant to hire or promote anyone who might bring compotence or social graces to the management team.

So, yeah, possibly a selection bias there.

[ecofeco]

You can bet on it. I've seen it far too many times. Got the scars, t-shirt and coffee mug. Literally.

[Fred Daggy]

Fair to say ...

Fair to say that the CIO/CTO is either jealously guarded as a second paycheque by the CFO, or is the "seat on the board" by some nepo-baby. The most recent one I have had to deal with is the nephew of the CEO. Couldn't even communicate in English ... which is the business language. (Spanish being his first language).

Either way, incompetent mouth-breathing wastes of space, all of them.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Fair to say ...

"Either way, incompetent mouth-breathing wastes of space, all of them."

There's no shortage of that. The thing is that you need to decide if you can deal with it or you'd be better finding something better/different for you mental health and well being. If it's bad, you don't want to snap at some point and get dismissed over being able to bide your time until you find that better position someplace else. I've been there and the person I had issue with managed to cram both feet in their mouth during an all-hands meeting that led to their leaving shortly after (invited is my guess). In the mean time, I was circulating my resume and talking to people. With the problem child gone, I stuck around for longer and left when they brought in another poor choice and told me I'd be working under them. I wasn't going to stay for the second reel of the same movie.

[imanidiot]

The amount of clueless nitwits with only an MBA or some other semi-useless business or economics related piece of paper in positions that should be primarily technical in nature (Like CTO or CIO) is... astounding. It's nowadays extremely rare for someone to work their way up through engineering functions into upper management unless they work through an MBA program and work through all sorts of useless middle management positions.

[ecofeco]

Yeah, this will end well... not

Despite the wonderful taste of the kool aid that everyone drinks, the entire system is actually one big mechanical turk and it literally takes a million people working 24/7 to keep it running.

Without knowledgeable people at all levels to keep the wheels turning and the plates in the air, it will come crashing down, hard. The current state of everyday massive breaches is just one symptom of the ongoing degradation of talent and pay.

The tech douche bros think the digital godhead will save them. They are mortally wrong.

[IGotOut]

Give me one solid reason...

...why I should encourage my kids into IT?

Oh because....

So you won't lay them off when the massive profits aren't quite massive enough? Or outsource their job to another cheaper country? Or expect them to 80 hour weeks because others have left and you don't want to replace them? Or you believe the AI bullshit generators and lay them off because...AI?

[Denarius]

Re: Give me one solid reason...

Yes, encouraged grandchildren and nephews into any field except IT. And no, nieces already had other ideas. Grandsons doing well in trades

[Ken Hagan]

Re: Give me one solid reason...

It sounds like avoiding big companies is a good idea. Management there seems to be mostly by professional managers and that's always a risk. With SMEs, you're much more likely to have a boss who either understands your job or understands the /need/ for your job (and that's why they hired you).

[doublelayer]

Re: Give me one solid reason...

You should probably encourage them into whatever career seems to match their skills and interests, and IT isn't a terrible one. A lot of stupid managers are going to fire people and outsource them or try to replace them with AI. A lot of managers are going to hire more to deal with the disaster caused by the first one. I'm not sure there are many or any jobs where you can avoid things like that that don't come with equally strong negatives. Unless you know of a career where job security is universal and easy, I'd still recommend IT to someone who was good at it and enjoyed it.

[EricB123]

American Tech has No One to Blame But Themselves

The transfer from stakeholders to solely shareholders, at least in America, is largely to blame. I mean, who wants to take out a huge student loan to go into one of the emerging tech fields (assuming they can be accepted into universities that aren't exclusively reserved for rich white folk who choose their parents carefully) with the distinct possibility a job won't be waiting

in the wings to pay off the massive student loan debt?

But no need to worry. China and other nearby Asian countries have many talented and educated young people to fill those shoes. This is coming from an American engineer who lives in Asia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Busineses generally seem to opt out of sucession planning.

The idea of having seasoned pro with a short chain of less experienced workers coming behind them serving an informal apprenticship is long gone.

If you're doing the job usually you have no junior backup, no understudy. Also compounded by businesses habit of seeing every departure as a cost saving. So the senior guy goes and their work gets dumped on one or more other people in vaguely related areas.

As for the helpdesk being the basic step for new IT workers well that was true, and it wasn't a bad idea; but you do know that the helpdesk is primary target for replacement by AI? So that first step is being taken away.

Cloud has been sold to manager for years as a reason not to have networking pros as 'the network' will disappear, and AI will be sold as some network engineer as a service after it's replaced all your helpdesk guys.

It's a race top the bottom really. Not sure where it will end but nowhere good I suspect.

[MacGuffin]

First

When I hear "First" declared by anyone, I run. "Cloud first", "America first", "Family First"....

I know any conversation or discussion are useless.

The other side's mind is made up. End of discussion.

To me "first" is a signal that an opposing opinion or potential conflict will be immediately ignored

Cos.. "First!"

[mpi]

> Bertholf thinks senior networkers have a responsibility

I respectfully disagree.

Many engineers have told management for YEARS that this would be an issue at some point. What did they get as responses (if any)?

- "Why would we need networking, we are cloud based"

- "This will easily be outsourced"

- "AI will do it"

etc. etc.

So no, I don't think engineers have any responsibility here. The decisions, inluding things such as how career progression works, were not theirs to make ... that's the job that managers get paid really well to do. The job of engineering is to provide all necessary technical information so that management can make informed decisions. If management choses to ignore this information and thinks they know better, that's not on the engineers.

If and when corporations inevitably come to the conclusion that, surprise surprise, computers meant to do anything useful in the 21st century do, in fact, need networks, and those networks, no matter how well designed, do, in fact, need someone knowledgeable to maintain them, there will be 2 types of companies:

Those that listened to the advice of people who tried to tell them, and those who didn't. The former will be fine, and the latter can't say they weren't told.

[Smartypantz]

Digital natives

It turns out that the "Digital natives" know jack-shit about the way things like the Internet works.

So "AI" are going to save the Internet from falling apart when the old guard takes a rest and the replacements thinks that the Internet is the same as SOME?

*BOOM*

Best regards

Boomer-techie

[J.G.Harston]

The thing is, those IT jobs *are* "white collar trade jobs". Installing networking cable is in and of the same as installing electrical wiring, installing plumbing, painting, tiling, laying carpets. It's trade work, and should be entered as trade work. Most definitely people should not be getting 30 grand in debt getting a degree to get a job dragging cables. As with other "IT" jobs, which are fundamentally office admin. You DO. NOT. need a degree to reset passwords and change toner cartidges, and the people telling youngsters that they do are engaging in a cruel form of fraud. These are the sorts of jobs people should be going into straight from school. And yes, via apprenticeships. Start by being the young lad with the small hands that can get under the floorboards and pull the other end of the cable. I started electrical work with my Dad at about 8 years old doing just that.

A lot of this is fundamentally down to the outright fraudulent misinformation of job descriptions. Several times I've seen a job advert for a "networking engineer". I've spent a couple of hours putting together and describing code I've written where I've translated packets from one network system to another, background drivers "fire and forget" broadcasters, broadcast query and target response, transaction sequencing to prevent lost packets generating duplicate actions, code libraries to encapsulate easily....

....and then upon starting the online application find it's actually a *****ing CABLE INSTALLATION job. That's *NOT* "network engineering". That's CABLE. FITTER.

This needs to be made completely clear that it is FRAUD. I've come to the conclusion that the only way to stop is it to make it a capital offense. Unfortunately, the legislators are also of those that completely misunderstand what they are talking about. They are one with the cry "we need IT skills, we need kids doing degrees..." No, we need *IT* *SKILLS*. The 21st century equivalent of dragging a pen across a sheet of paper. How to type. How to coordinate chunks of numbers to get answers.

Imagine 100 years ago: "there's this new invention call "the car", so everybody needs to be trained to be an automotive engineer". No. People need to learn HOW. TO. DRIVE. "Everybody needs to be trained to be electrical engineers!" No. People need to learn how to operate a light switch.

I'm a software developer, I've been writing code since I was about 12. But, the only job I can get is delivering parcels. The parcels happen to contain computers that I unbox and put on a desk, so according to recrutiers, employers, politicians, the public in general, it's IT. "What are you complaining about, you're working with computers". Imagine you're cleaning toilets in a school "what are you complaining about, you said you want to work in education, you're WORKING IN A SCHOOL!!!!"

But I can't afford to refuse to work and starve. So I continue delivering parcels. And people continue to refuse to offer me actual computing work because my current job is delivering parcels.

[Jellied Eel]

A lot of this is fundamentally down to the outright fraudulent misinformation of job descriptions. Several times I've seen a job advert for a "networking engineer". I've spent a couple of hours putting together and describing code I've written where I've translated packets from one network system to another, background drivers "fire and forget" broadcasters, broadcast query and target response, transaction sequencing to prevent lost packets generating duplicate actions, code libraries to encapsulate easily....

....and then upon starting the online application find it's actually a *****ing CABLE INSTALLATION job. That's *NOT* "network engineering". That's CABLE. FITTER.

Not always, but that's mostly down to recruitment agencies or employers writing bad requirements. You sound like a network developer, which I'd regard as a subset of sofware development. Network engineering covers a multitude of sins, both software and hardware, and at times would be expected to get their hands dirty. Like in one case, touring sewers and utilidors under cities and writing reports about whether or not that's a good environment for us to install critical services.

Or in planning/design stages, studying maps, evaluating potential routes, having a basic understanding of civil engineeriing, planning, permitting, fibre characteristics and understanding why assuming you can dig a trench to lay ducts across a bridge might be a bad assumption. Or just explaining to sales that the job is going to take considerably more than the 28 days the customer has been quoted. And then being able to install and commission the kit, trouble shoot it and might be the only network engineer around and have both customers and account managers screaming at you to fix it.

Which can be part of the FUN!, so back in the good'ol days when the Internet started, and network engineers were pretty much all making it up as we went along, and learning as we went along. I was lucky having worked on large IBM SNA and DEC networks prior to being thrust into the world of TCP/IP. Some concepts were the same, some raather different. Like one of my first major outages was discovering the Internet had moved to Florida. The AS7007 outage, which is still burned into my brain. Many BGP issues later, and I got pretty good at spotting those and avoiding them.

But being one of those people the article talks about, I'm rather happy I've mostly retired. Networks are critical to most businesses, yet network engineers can be underappreciated and undervalued. They're often seen as an expensive luxury that can be made redundant, or outsourced. If the network works, why keep them? Of course when the network stops working, then.. there's a bit of a problem. Which is also an issue with the idea of taking on apprentices and training them up.. Like if there aren't any network engineers on staff to do that, that won't be possible.

Same with the idea of having to support different 'learning styles'. The thing about network engineering is closing the gap between theory and practice, which can require a mind that's good at retaining information, problem solving and working under pressure. Plus building a toolbox that can be carried with you, because the network is down so you can't watch a video, query Cisco or Juniper's knowledge base etc.. And your phone can't be relied on either.

[Jeff Smith]

Get yourself an apprentice

Our management decided to get an apprentice in recently and I was a bit miffed after being informed that I'd be mentoring.

I needn't have worried though, she's absolutely brilliant. Confident in all the right ways, super keen to learn, loves a puzzle, knows when to ask questions and only needs to be told something once. Fantastic. Maybe we got lucky, but I'm very impressed. It's already clear she'll go on to become a key member of the team, assuming she hangs about of course.

After just a few months I already trust her more than another employee who supposedly has 8 years experience with a multinational. This guy is arrogant, inflexible, a poor team worker, can't deal with adversity and is terrible at actually getting things done. Highly adept at IT business speak though, so hey ho.

If I was asked to choose between those 2 today it would be a no brainer.