Never said it was *perfect*. But you probably haven't a good (in CV terms at least) prorgrammer assigned to you but didn't know the difference between a TCP port and an IP protocol number. Or the difference between an Ethernet and an IP address.
For me at least (and I grant you that everyone's mileage may vary), it has been a lot easier to teach networkers to program than the other way around. I remember (not very fondly) the time when I was assigned to the team which was going to write a DNS provisioning system, which was going to be used by clients to get x.tld domains, and which had to periodically generate the zone. A team of programmers, fully into the maintainability, lifecycle, corporate IT thing was created. They didn't know what a DNS zone was, or a SOA record, or a CNAME record for that matter. The project failed before I could bring the matter of AAAA records up. Several tens of thousands of dollars were spent on a failed project that could have been saved by a different choice of programmers. The same problem was solved some two years later by a team composed mainly of network engineers with one or two corporate IT programmers who were in charge of ensuring lifecycle and integration with business systems. And a programming engineer (even if he/she is by default an electrical/network engineer) is a far cry from a script kiddie. Sorry to differ on that. cheers! Carlos On 3/2/12 8:35 PM, Randy Bush wrote: >> In my experience the path of least resistance is to get a junior >> network engineer and mentor he/she into improving his/hers programming >> skills than go the other way around. > and then the organization pays forever to maintain the crap code while > the kiddie learned to program. right. brilliant. > > Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a > violent psychopath who knows where you live. -- Martin Golding > > randy