nanog mailing list archives
RE: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again...
From: Nathan Eisenberg <nathan () atlasnetworks us>
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:18:04 +0000
Given what you know now, if you were 21 and just starting into networking / communications industry which areas of study or specialty would you prioritize?But in all seriousness, networking like I suppose most professions are not about knowing one thing and stopping. It's evolving rather rapidly so most thing you know now are irrelevant in decade or two. What you should learn is how to learn, how to attack problems and learn to love doing both.
Totally agree. IMHO, the truly challenging (and most important) skills aren't technical in nature. They're things like the ability to work in, or especially lead, a team of people. Things like building functional business processes that account for all the little details of operations, or professionally handling customers with utterly disparate cultural values (timeliness, the honoring of contractual obligations, etc). So, I would put a strong initial emphasis on logic and critical thinking, as well as intercultural competence and basic business leadership/process engineering. I'd also snap up any courses I could find on learning effectively or on using research tools. Once you can learn effectively in a short period of time, and you know how to find the information you need to absorb, it becomes fairly trivial to acquire new technical (or otherwise) capacities. In fact, the limiting factor starts to become your imagination - "what do you think you want to learn?", and the best way to combat this is to have a balanced life with a healthy dose of social interaction (read: women - later, family). I've not yet met the person who won't burn out if they aren't distracted by non-virtual concerns on a regular basis. Nathan Eisenberg
Current thread:
- Re: Spam?, (continued)
- OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Larry Stites (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Jeroen Massar (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Saku Ytti (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Scott Berkman (Jul 13)
- RE: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Mark Gauvin (Jul 13)
- RE: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Nathan Eisenberg (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Jason Baugher (Jul 14)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Chris Adams (Jul 14)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Richard Irving (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... -Hammer- (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Jay Ashworth (Jul 13)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Don Gould (Jul 13)
- RE: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Leigh Porter (Jul 14)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Daniƫl W . Crompton (Jul 14)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Joel Maslak (Jul 14)
- Re: OT: Given what you know now, if you were 21 again... Florian Weimer (Jul 17)