Adrian Chadd wrote:
Today's networking area is very very different from where I'm sitting. Networking can be learnt reasonably successful "from a book" and consultants are called in when things aren't quite working right or its time for an upgrade.
I have not met many consultants that I would trust with a login to our routers. I barely trust contract employees, and only after they have proven themselves are they given free reign with their login. And that free reign only goes so far.
You won't learn carrier type clue from a book but somehow people manage to get large-scale network management positions without needing to be a part of this tight knit community. I'm sure they've got different communities of their own. :)
The only way to learn "carrier type" is from others, and then only if you have the passion for learning it. From my experience, too many people are in the business because they thought it was easy money, but really don't care to learn about it. I've seen WAY too much of that. I'd still contend that there are only maybe a few thousand peeople that really have any sort of passion for networking AND practice it, rather than preaching it from academia.
But if you don't talk to your neighbors at all and you're still experiencing positive growth , why would you?
How do you know you aren't missing out on something? CxOs are vers concerned that their companies are not keeping pace with the other ones.
Or more importantly - how do you pitch something like NANOG in a light which makes the -business- people realise there is value again in sharing?
It's sort of hard. I am constantly asked to provide things like "industry common practices." Yeah, you might get some of that from trade rags, but most of that is heavily tainted by the equipment and software vendors that advertise in said publications. The only way to truly know what's going on in the industry is to talk at the peer level. This is the TRUE purpose of NANOG, in my opinion. The presentations give a START for the discussions, but are not the totality of it.
I've seen too many people attending NANOG meetings that seem to be taking the presentations as if they were written on the tablets brought back by Moses. I've also seem plenty of people in the presentation room that were not paying any attention at all. Neither group really gets the same thing out of NANOG that I was getting. I suppose that's ok, as everyone brings and takes away their own thing.
The real challenge it getting the companies to realize that the value of NANOG at $450 is 10 times greater than Cisco Networkers is, at $2000. But, the same people will expect that you bring back what you learned, and sometimes it's not about learing how to do something, but coming back with a fragment of a thought that you are going to build on. NANOG isn't training, even though one company I worked for made me sign a "training repayment agreement" before I could attend, in the event I quit.
I get a lot more out of NANOG from the 20 or 30 people that I might talk with in the halls than I really get out of the presentations. That's just me, though. There have been at least one presentation that I've been interested in at each NANOG I've been able to attend, though.
-Sean (Please respond via the list.)
