Join us for AppDev Field Day 2 November 12th and 13th on the Tech Field Day Website or LinkedIn Page, as well as on Techstrong TV. New episodes of the podcast post every Tuesday. Like the video and don't forget to subscribe. What are your thoughts on AI's improvements (or lack there of) to App Dev? Let us know. Follow along on X/Twitter, Bluesky, or Mastodon with the #ADFD2.

Ah, Tom, thank you for the Battletech reference. I knew I liked you.

Not gonna work. ARM is popular for reasons other than programming issues. This joint thing between AMD/Intel will probably do nothing but stave off the inevitable.

I totally DISAGREE with this podcast, if Network Engineering is dying then who is standing up the internet? So until the internet ceases to exist this fiels will always be high paying and in demand, theres arent any PURE network engineers any more- u need to learn a lil bit of automation, security, etc but network engineering is still alive and well- unplug a cable in ur data center, they are not calling a SOC analyst or a software engineer- u guys are old and having kept up with the market & think that its dying, and no moving stuff to the cloud doesnt take away network complexity- u guys need a under 35 net eng yall are very out of touch on panel

Edge computing is one of the areas where we see startup vendors offering innovative solutions, enabling applications to operate where the business operates rather than where the IT team sit. Where do you see Edge Computing going in the AI era? Where can it improve? What innovations would you like to see? This episode is now available on podcast applications and on KZbin.

thank you guys for this podcast, it is real motivation

I started with cybersecurity, but ended up walking into a networking career. Never knew life was gonna bring me here, but here I am. it's like I'm destined for this lol.

cybersecurity is high demand though

Nice job looking at QuantumAI issues an opportunities.

I have yet to find another channel that provides industry insight like this one. Please don't stop making content!

Great, great topic! I am an old school telco person. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A NEED FOR SOMEONE TO CONNECT SOMETHING. I'm training my son for his Network+ and a little telco (mpls, etc) at the moment so he can have a skill set he can build from. The problem I see is a lot of jobs are outsourced because it's cheaper. I worked at Lumen for a short time and most of their engineering jobs are in India. But there are jobs in telcos, cable providers, helpdesk and data centers that need network engineers. The job is not as sexy as it used to be, but it's still needed.

Infinera was purchased by Nokia. Im excited to see the best of both platforms merge jn the coming years.

Network engineering is far from a dying career. It feels like when I see videos like this, there’s an assumption that every organization can afford to fully migrate to the cloud or implement SDN with the latest hardware. The reality is, most organizations can’t. And on top of that, most still view IT as an expense rather than a core investment. I work for a decent-sized college with remote sites across the province, 3 data centers, 70+ network closets, and all Cisco equipment. Even if we went fully cloud-based and implemented SDN, we'd still need network engineers to manage everything. In fact, just in the last few months, some of the largest companies in our city were actively hiring network engineers. So, keep spreading this 'network engineering is dying' narrative-it'll only drive up demand in the future

I have been a network engineer for 27 years now. I have been hearing this argument for 20 of those years. This is the biggest false statement I have ever heard. All marketing. You can blame tictokers and "influencers". Selling people on the sexiness of these other fields you talk about. But as someone that builds the cloud. There is no cloud without the network. more than half of what I do on a physical network I do those same things in the cloud. You can properly secure something that you dont full know. Meaning you cant secure something if you dont know networking.

Well how did we land? Ethernet or Infiniband?

With the rise of RDMA networks , there will be a demand for highly skilled network engineers and network architects.

5:26 "Networking is such a complex topic". If anything, it has, and continues to become, much easier, because we *don't* need to deal with a ton archaic layers anymore. Our office building had 8P8C-style Ethernet in 1995. 802.11 framing and DHCP. Boom, done, easy!! It was infuriating to have to put up with V.8, V.92 for L1, HDLC or X.25 for L2, PPP for L2.5, before you could run IPv4. Thankfully, this "crap on top of crap on top of crap" went away over time, and now we're having DOCSIS or GPON as a physical base running... just Ethernet+DHCP, the same way as in the office 30 years ago already.

Without networking knowledge, you're gonna have a tough time troubleshooting in the cloud.

What a missed opportunity to leverage the full speed of an nvme...

Nice talk, if anything I think there are a lot of people who have become really good at networking. But like everyone in IT roles you have been expected to take more on and broaden as you touched on. I'm sure a network engineer title will not exist in name in 10 years, they've got to give us a cooler name surely! Maybe we will all be IT Astronauts working on space networking...

This is an awesome podcast. The conversation with MLCommons and the real-life questions from Stephen and Ace nail the queries of many storage professionals want to know as they position their data infrastructure solutions against AI workloads, notably AI training. The perspective of keeping the GPU utilized as compared to storage performance such as IOPS and throughput was indeed a great perspective, and also keep the bragging rights of the hero numbers to a minimum. Curtis is definitely the ideal tech leader to address the storage performance for AI training workloads. He has made his mark as an HPC guru. Thanks for a great podcast!

Do y’all think AMD will keep field operations like the techs out in the field

Why can't you train AI to use math and reasoning apps? I'm sure there's a simple answer ;)

If you've never issued "debug ip packet" on a core device, you're not a real network engineer. 🤣🤣🤣

19:07 "so what can we do to make network engineering more exciting to ppl so they actually wanna do it" Pay more, our salaries are not on the same scale of cyber, cloud or software engineers. I found that our salaries are always the lowest of the tech industry.

Is it true that network engineering is a dying career as this time of AI enters?

There are 4 rules in Life to Happiness: 1) Pay ya IRS taxes. 2) Mind ya own damn business. 3) Learn Networking (Routing & Switching). 4) Keep Will Smiths Wifes name out ya goddamn Mouth!!!

Here is my advice to those that want to get into Network Engineering. 1) Get your CCNA and if possible get your CCNP right after that. 2) Get good at routing protocols OSPF and BGP. 3) Become a Wireshark expert. No college degree is required The hardest part for me was to get my first job. I had to fight for it. The other hardest thing was learning subnetting. Looking back, it was easy. Just had to move forward and make it happen. You dont get something for nothing.

No one wants to hire or spend time teaching a rookie. Its that simple.

I loved being a network engineer so much I'm pivoting back after years in project management. The data centers, the military like need to be on call and the close contact with hardware, the being blamed for everything, but rarely responsible for troubles! I loved it. I'm serious. If you're looking for someone to fill an employment gap, get me cheap before I have all my certifications back in place!

its cause the pay sucks for most entry level networking jobs.

I don't do network engineering (although my wife does). But I think what you guys are discussing applies to a lot of tech roles right now (e.g. "X is a Dying Career Field". And that's because what's plaguing the networking career field is plaguing many others as well -- outsourcing, AI, etc. The tech field in general right now is kind of a bloodbath, it's so cutthroat and so many people are getting let go (I've luckily avoided it so far, but I know the writing is on the wall and my number will get called eventually). I don't know that many other industries are doing much better, but I graduated from college about 10 years go / have only been in a career setting that amount of time, but even in that time I've noticed things go downhill fairly drastically. It's sad and very unfortunate. There is a severe leadership shortage where we've had "leaders" that didn't look out for their people and just made the easy, short-term decisions to help the bottom line, and there's been a lot of long-term suffering and needless hardship that's been created as a result of many of those decisions.

The only thing Intel delivers on is disappointment.

I love the plumber metaphor, because its always going to be on point. I agree for the most part of what the panel talked about here. On the last topic, the only answer that I agree, is with Dakota, learning the fundamentals with a CCNA and getting your hands dirty with a lab, does give you enough experience to do two things; You'll know whether you want to pursue this as a career or move on and be successful in other trendy areas, either cloud or cybersec.

If network did't work , nothing else works!

If companies offered training they would have more candidates then they could handle. Checking in my area of VA the positions ask for 3+ years of experience and certs.

I agree. FIRST do the one thing you do WELL, make it exceptional and beyond. Some companies forget this. Then go do other stuff that strategically complement the core product, that solves problems (which made you enter the market in the first place). After that go experiment - show innovation and creativity, perhaps even those could be strategically connected to the core products, even using AI. So many are now scrambling around to become relevant because of AI hype, afraid to become irrelevant - forgetting their core values and problem focus. I don’t know. I just want them to succeed! 😅

Intel can only build large server x86 CPUs. Those are being replaced in the data center and they're not coming back.

From my experience, the skill level for network engineering is HIGH. High high. But a lot of environments don't call for thise high skillsets very often. Anyone can throw some merakis into a network, and that will get a lot of businesses 80% of the way there. Once you get out of SMB, the complexity of the environment can scale exponentially *but* outaide of large new deployments/upgrades (3-5 years give or take) the skill level needed to maintain the environment is relatively low. Its fairly irregular that the average company is setting up new DC-DC failover out to their 50 remote sites, or is deploying a new underlay/overlay fabric or pushing config changes to 1000 AP's. Since the need is irregular, that heavy lift and shift need gets filled by consultants, and unfortunately the new engineer that took an internal role isn't getting the exposure that would enable them to reach that high skill ceiling. It's a feedback loop that minimizes the contributions of internal staff, which minimizes the amount of budgeting that internal network headcount gets drawn from. Which pushes businesses to NAAS and consultants. So on and so forth.

Why the hell nobody talks about the PPA problems of the release. Am I the only one who faces with problems, I even tried it with my old laptops and still get the same errors so the problem is not mine. After installing 24.04 release I now decided to come back to 23.04 because of the problems with PPA.

Most network engineers are a bunch of do nothings unless you work for a fortune 500 with ancient tech.

Intel is finished: everyone else can make fast cpu. Future workload is for ai and cpu isn't going to be workhorse. Data center will be ruled by arm due to lower consumption. That means from all angles, Intel won't benefit. If they want to survive, Intel should sell to Nvidia so that all future GPU should be built on Intel foundry just stop the bleed.

I got my CCNA in high school and then my CCIE in 1995. I was 20 earning nearly six figures at that time. This is interesting work that pays well and this is foundational knowledge needed for more complex areas of IT.

Is network engineering a dying career field? Good question. I think it is evolving. In recent years I have observed a big push for network automation and software defined networking. I'm currently working on a project where I'm learning how to automate the deployment and configuration of network devices in a cloud environment. It's more challenging than learning cli commands, but interesting also. I do see network engineers having to expand their skillset to include other technologies such as virtualization, operating systems and applications, and scripting/coding. My personal opinion is there will always be network engineering opportunities, but probably in reduced numbers. And network engineering is just one of many skills you will need to have a viable IT career.

In my opinion, the fact that the best chips are made overseas in non-democratic nations is probably the biggest threat to the national security of the United States and other civilized democratic nations. Intel's foundries need to work.

Pat needs to go. Pat went for broke and is now having to mortgage his fabs and decimate his workforce just to stay afloat.

Hardware network engineering on the soft side, SDN (Software Defined Networking) is where it's at - on-prem level or cloud coupled with Software Defined Networking Security. I think these guys are from the old guard who hasn't kept up with the times.

Great show. Luv Gestalt. My employer is big on storage systems so this was informative. Thanks.

I'm not an Network Egnineer but have worked in IT for some years ( with networks & sys admin etc. etc.) The podcast is very informative, about network engineering profession, the IT industry, and the constant changes that never seems to slow down. I realized years back the IT field is not a long term profession, as most people that work in IT, will never be able to grow old in the field, to the point of reitirement. ( Sure there is a small percentage of the overall amount of IT folks, that are able to retire after a long career, but from the way I see it, the "IT machine" will chew up, and spit out may others, long before they even reach a 10-15 year mark in the IT career field.) The pace of change also causes many, to eventually be let go, because they dont keep up with dedicating enough time to the constant learning demands/IT changes. One always has to stay IT Marketable, as company layoffs come many times, not because you were bad at your job, but because the company may not have had a good product/service, or a good financial quater. Information tech is a high overhead career, you have to dedicate a lot of personal time, to constant learning. Technology overall, is to do MORE with less And that always means with less people. (AI) Artificial Intelligence will have long lasting effects of the industry overall, in the coming years. I would tell kids today, Yes work in the technology field, but always have a backup plan for your career. As everyone wants to be able to retire, and have enough money to retire to live comfortably, when they reach that age.

Stumble across this video and love the information. Been in help desk for about 2 1/2 uears now and I'm loooking to get into network. Cool to see the contrast reflection of society in the IT field Simlar to online "influencer"(like youtuber or now streamers). Everyone wants to do the cool, hot and sexy things.(Similar to someone owning that Lamborghini and has that 6 figure job) When in reality most thing in life is kinda boring and repetitive and takes times to do those fun thing. Cool video and looking forward to more videos.