Is Network Engineering a Viable Career?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm fresh out of high school and interested in getting a job in networking. One option is a degree in networking, the alternative I've considered is just getting certificates (CCNA/P, A+, MCSA). A large factor in my decision is which route is most likely to land a secure and well-paid full time job. I'm located in Melbourne, Australia and I don't have any local contacts in the industry who can advise me, and so was hoping some other Australian (or international) readers could share their knowledge and experience with these issues."

School

[wframe9109]

I'd recommend you go to school.

Whether you go for networking or psychology is up to you, but the people you meet in college and the opportunity to interact with the faculty is not an opportunity you should pass up... Assuming it's an option for you without too many negative consequences.

CS or CE

[Spazmania]

Get a degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, whichever you find more interesting. Then go do the job you want to do. I've never even heard of a degree in "network engineering," and the last you want on your resume is something that makes a prospective employer say, "What the heck is that?"

Or if you don't want a 4-year degree then go the certs route. But understand that by skipping the degree you're skipping a lot of non-computer knowledge that you'll suffer for and limiting your future job prospects. Guys with certs only get no respect. More often than not, its because they don't deserve it.

Get the degree

[chill]

Get the degree. The contacts you make in University alone will make it all worthwhile. There are lots of resume bots that will reject you out of hand if you can't tick off the "degree" square on their form.

Certificates will help, but not too much. The A+ don't mean squat. A CCNA/CCIE and CISSP are the good ones to have.

Remember, the people that invented things like TCP/IP, Sun, Cisco and Microsoft all met at University. While some dropped out, they still attended and made contacts there. They don't call it BSD for nothing.

  Charles
  Network Integration Engineer
 

Find 2 people ..

[QuantumRiff]

Go find someone with a Fortran Cert from the 80's that has never gotten a degree. Then go find someone with a CS degree in the 80's, that used Fortran heavily in their classes. Both have probably changed their skill sets drastically over 20 years, but I bet I know which one has the better job...

Re:CS or CE

[Spazmania]

Northern Virginia. Its not The Hub of the Internet any more (there are too many), but its still the largest hub.

Math is a tough degree to sell as qualfying you for a network engineering job. Don't get me wrong: its a fine degree. But its not an applied science and its not engineering. A BS in Math is generally a prelude to an MS in Math, not a career. The MS or PhD in Math then leads to all sorts of interesting careers in analysis.

Also, in all fairness it depends on where you want to get a job. Small companies want folks who are good at what they do and have a flexible mind so that the work gets done. Large companies, especially government contractors, want someone with the proper pedigree so that when it fails (as it will) its not their fault. :P

Re:Get the degree

[frinkacheese]

I didn't bother with a degree and am now in a pretty good network engineering job, I have worked on some of the largest IP networks and traveled the world. But it all starts to get a bit sucky after a while and it's when it gets sucky that a degree could help.

When you get bored of bashing configs into Junipers, solving ISIS convergence problems, faffing about with stupid peers who break your peering sessions and dealing with idiots who know little then you'll need the degree to look good and do something more interesting instead.

Me, I'm going to go get a Theology degree soon and go do something more worthwhile than helping the world surf porn and download awfull mp3s.

So yeah go get the degree, I wish I did.

Re:School

[toleraen]

10 to 20 years? The CCNP classes I took a 2 years ago aren't valid anymore! I looked into taking the last certification of the 4 for the CCNP before my other three certs expire, and the curriculum has changed completely!

After you get your first job, it's very unlikely that basic certs like the CCNA will help you much at all. Advanced certs like the CCIE or the CISSP can help out quite a bit, but having experience with a degree is better. I got hired on to a company with a lot of guys I graduated college with, and just about all of us have let our certs expire. Those that have their resume posted to monster/careerbuilder still get plenty of job offers.

sad but true

[Anonymous Coward]

Certs are mostly just a big scam, except for some of the higher end ones. When we do hiring we never require them. The only person in our org that I know of who has any certs is the biggest fucking flake on earth and has no clue what they are doing. Their ass is getting fired within the year. It's people like them who have so demeaned the value of certs that they are meaningless.

Re:School

[icedivr]

From my perspective, the benefit of going to school is all the things you learn that aren't directly tied to your intended career field. A bachelors degree proves a) you can see a large "project" through, end-to-end, b) you've learned to do research and tackle challenging problems, and c) your verbal and written communications skills have been honed. Without out this foundation, you'll be pigeon-holed as a technician with a very specific skillset. Your employer won't see you as someone who can easily reinvent themselves. If the technology you're skilled at becomes obsolete, you do too.

Re:School

[supabeast!]

School is definitely the best way to go. Best Buy tech support departments across America are packed with young men who graduated high school and expected to become a network engineer or sysadmin by taking night classes and passing some certification exams. Sure those things used to happen, but those days are over, and the people in IT remember what it was like to put up with a bunch of guys too young to drink who thought having a few certs made them professionals.

Re:School

[The PS3 Will Fail]

"You can do all this for a few hundred dollars worth of old equipment on eBay and a few hundred dollars worth of books as well. School is for chumps, or PhDs..."

If you think all that comes out of a classic CS degree is what you can pick up from internet faqs, then you don't understand what college is for. I am sorry that you are so short-sighted. I can recognized the value of both a college degree and the hands-on-experience gained from researching things yourself and/or being on the job. I would not hire you - not because you don't have a college degree - but because you are can't properly analyze the situation because you don't want to admit the definiciency in yourself.

Re:School

[anticypher]

I don't have a degree yet I make 6 digit income

You are not supposed to count the digits to the right of the decimal point, if you had a degree you would have known that :-)

Joking aside, for those who can no longer get a degree (too old, bad socio-economic situation, whatever), the advice part of your post is spot on. Grab the cert study guides for just their content, i.e. something to structure your studies around, but skip the actual certs. Get lots of used equipment, wire it up into something different every week, learn all the tools to manage it, and keep learning all the networking skills to get a job where you can actually work on production equipment. Get jobs where a company is upgrading from obsolete kit, and make them an offer for the old stuff. When obsolete kit really can't help you any more, eBay it. Make contacts through local networking groups, whore yourself out to experienced networking gurus, and realise you'll never be making the big bucks like them. If you can glean information from a guru, asking questions like "why did you use a /29 there but a /30 over here?" and "why is there 1.2dB/km loss with this fibre and 0.6dB/km loss with this other brand?" will go a long way to filling out knowledge. Cert courses, self study, and the like can only go so far in answering the "Why?" questions, which is not far enough to get a real job.

But if the OP has a chance to get a degree in the field (Network Engineering or Electrical Engineering), get that. Over the lifetime of a career, 40 years or so, certs will leave you behind but solid degrees are useful forever. Professors in Uni, industry apprenticeships, and the combined knowledge of fellow students is the best way to learn the "Why?" answers.

the AC

Re:Please contact me directly

[potat0man]

I personally don't believe it is for anyone here to tell someone what to do.

Hear hear. The problem with giving/getting advice like this is that everyone has different end goals in mind. Some people want to settle down with a family and a steady job. Some people will be single into their 50's and want to travel while they work. Other people just want to get out of the rat race by the time they're 30.

To tell somebody they 'have to go to school' to be succesful when that person's goal is to retire as a landlord by the time they're 26 so they can write all day is ridiculous. Or to tell someone who wants to be CEO one day that a college degree is worthless is equally ridiculous. People are cut out for different lifestyles. Some people want BMW's, some people want leisure, some people want kids.

As someone with a somewhat unorthodox lifestyle what makes me happy would likely make many people miserable and visa-versa.

The best advice you can give kids like this is to tell them to inform themselves about all the options and their consequences, don't listen to pat, clichéd answers without caution. And in the end do what you want to do. Not what you perceive as the safest route or the best route to attain some kind of homogeneous leave-it-to-beaver lifestyle.

Re:School

[bzipitidoo]

Ahh yes another argument over the usefulness of a college or university education. Can't fault you for not doing what you don't believe in, but I'd find your position more convincing if you had a degree. As it is, your sour grapes attitude shines through.

> the classes I did take were at least five to ten years out of date anyways

Well then you really missed the boat there. What is taught, or should be taught-- not all colleges can resist the pressure to teach "relevant" material-- are ideas that never go out of date. You took the wrong classes. I'm talking about the basics like the scientific method, philosophy, logic, math, and then the more in depth study of the particular area that appeals to the particular student, which might be the theories and techniques underpinning differential calculus, numerical methods, algorithms, or hundreds of other disciplines, but all of them ideas that do not have shelf lives. e=mc^2 is 100 years old, the Theory of Evolution is 150 years old, Plate Tectonics at about 50 years old is a relative youngster, the foundational theories of CS (Church and Turing's stuff) are about 70 years old, and Calculus, well, that originated with Newton some 400 years ago. None of that has gone or will go "stale". The basics should really be taught in high school, but they often aren't so colleges must. If you missed out on that, then you don't even know what you don't know.

>Some people need the time in college because they don't know how to learn.

And what have you learned about college? Not much, because you don't "understand what college is for". Are you so sure you know how to learn if that's all the better you have done on that question?