RE: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.

["Holmes,David A" <dholmes () mwdh2o com>]

Personally, I have worked in places where I have performed all of the skills below 
(router/switch/Unix/Linux/AD/firewall/proxy/web admin/sendmail admin, etc.), and also in places where just 
router/switch/architect layer 1-3 skills were the primary focus. I prefer the latter, and find this to be a personal 
choice as to what makes for a meaningful and fulfilling job. The fact that so few network engineers are to be found 
with all of these skills, I think, speaks for itself in that many network engineers have made the choice, and that 
choice is to be focused on layers 1-3, which, with DWDM through BGP, offers many challenging, different, and varied 
technology complexities the mastery of which makes work meaningful and rewarding.

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Stevens [mailto:manager () monmouth com]
Sent: Thursday, December 01, 2011 7:53 AM
To: nanog () nanog org
Subject: Re: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.

It takes me years to find such people and when I do, I try very hard to
keep them! I have 3 key people that fit the "soft" attribute criteria
Randal mentioned, but with a premium skill set in their specific
function. Good luck with your task Leigh!

Mark Stevens


On 12/1/2011 10:21 AM, Leigh Porter wrote:
> I am looking for just such a person now. Good Juniper, some Cisco and Sysadmin experience with an ISP background..
>
> I expect it will be immensely difficult to find somebody. What makes it even more frustrating is that just such a 
> person was not all that long ago made redundant!
>
> So if anybody is looking for something to do around London...
>
> --
> Leigh
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: randal k [mailto:nanog () data102 com]
> > Sent: 01 December 2011 15:19
> > To: Bill Stewart
> > Cc: nanog () nanog org
> > Subject: Re: Looking for a Tier 1 ISP Mentor for career advice.
> >
> > This is a huge point. We've had a LOT of trouble finding good network
> > engineers who have all of the previously mentioned "soft" attributes -
> > attitude, team player, can write, can speak, can run a small project -
> > and
> > are more than just Cisco pimps. I cannot explain how frustrating it is
> > to
> > meet a newly minted CCNP who has zero Linux experience, can't script
> > anything, can't setup a syslog server, doesn't understand AD much less
> > LDAP, etc. Imagine, an employee who can help themselves 90% of the time
> > ...
> >
> > Finding the diamond that has strong niche skill, networking, with a
> > broad&
> > just-deep-enough sysadmin background has been very, very hard. I cannot
> > emphasize enough the importance of cross-training. Immensely valuable.
> >
> > Randal
> >
> > On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Bill Stewart<nonobvious () gmail com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >   And yeah, sometimes it means that you need to go
> > > learn technologies like Active Directory
> >   [snip]
> >
> > > In addition to learning scripting languages
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