10 comments on “The value of a CCIE

  1. Pingback: Why should I get a CCIE?

  2. Hi Jeff, as someone who has had a very similar career path (CCIE and all lol) for the past 12 or so years I can say I really enjoyed your series of posts here. I am enjoying the insanity that is people saying the entire network engineer field will be displaced by a programmer(s) who likely cant subnet/ don’t understand the OSI model/underlying protocols (at no fault of their own) in the next 5/10/15 years due to SDN.

    do you post on reddit over in /r/ccie any or make it out to the DC/NoVA area? i’d love to buy you a beer and talk more about networking sometime.

  3. Hi Jeff, interesting article and definitively worth a read.

    I have a question for you though: what will be the role of a network engineer in a work moving towards cloud infrastructures, where datacenter will become way smaller? Even large organizations with many branches, when they start consuming more and more services from the cloud, will they require complex WAN technologies? (I’m not saying that networks will go away)

    Thanks

    B.

    • Good question. When I was at Juniper I helped to migrate us from 20 data centers down to one global data center, moving nearly all services to AWS or O365. There is no doubt that as more enterprises do this, network engineers will be managing fewer data centers. This doesn’t mean that data centers network engineering will go away–just that call for DC experience will diminish. That said, there are still many enterprises that are unable or unwilling to make the cloud move, and they will continue to require DC-focused engineers. Also, DC guys will be needed at the cloud providers themselves. Although these latter will be dealing with a different set of problems than conventional network engineers, since they will be handling massive scale data centers with complex automation. Still, network engineers are required for campus and branch networks, and, as you say, the WAN. I don’t know that WAN technologies are more complex with cloud infrastructure. In a way, they become simpler. An Internet connection is all you need to connect to Amazon. It can become somewhat more complex if you are looking at a direct-connect model with the cloud provider, but not much. This is something good engineers/architects need to be aware of and ready for. As it is, I don’t think the changes in the industry will make us obsolete…yet. But I am glad I don’t handle data center any more at Cisco. Thanks for stopping by!

  4. Pingback: Worth it to pursue CCIE ?

  5. Hi Jeff,

    I’m only just reading this post and could agree more with your sentiments having been on that journey with you for a while. I just renewed my emeritus status and recalled we both passed our R&S coming up on 16 years ago now.

    How networking has changed since the days of frame relay and Cisco 7200 VXRs.

    Michael P.

    • Hey Mike, thanks for stopping by! You’re referred to as “my sushi-eating friend” in this series, BTW.

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