Verbose IT industry complaint -
It's a daily concern for me as I march through my 40s that I may at anytime be reaching technological obsolescence. My job might be described as an Access Networks Architect. A large part of my job is that company X needs to deploy a new product. Lets say DirectTV wants to be deploy an 8Gb internet service package to customers. Lets say they have literally nothing to start with.
I'm the guy who designs all of it. What is the physical hardware we will deploy from the ethernet port of the customers home router>ONT>fiber>fiber plant>hub>Core>Demarc, that includes all layers 0-7, levels, protocols, routing application integration, provisioning, firmware, all of it. For instance I spent 6 months a year or two ago in a lab building exactly that and providing proof of concept and requirements, both internal and industry, itu's specs etc.
The problem is I have zero programing skills. Literally every company I know as always said "no problem, we have script kiddies for all that, we just need you to tell us how all the legos connect together". Like I don't use Linux at all. If you asked me to create root users or change permissions I can do it, but I'd need to google some cheats.
Recently, my boss wanted me to ..lets say rename every interface description in the network. Little more complicated than that, its not just modify its api calls that need to be used and scripted use criteria. I kinda bawked and said "I'm not your guy". What ultimately happened as usual is that they handed me a script guy. I gave him the criteria, the reqs and help him debug the api calls.
It's not a big deal, but I notice as time goes on that companies keep pressuring engineers to also be developers, to save costs. They want all the cake and to eat it all at once for $5.
I'm not this guy, but I can't do "everything".
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If you asked my boss the company would fall over immediately if I walked away because of my critical knowledge about how all technology works and fits together. a developer can't tell you why a software download is failing in a vacuum. I can dig around and go "your IP is wrong" or "ports closed" or "you have too much packet loss because you have shitty fidelity at the plant". I'm the guy who gives requirements and a design for the developers to make the thing go.
It's currently on my mind because I'm trying to build a vbs script for another engineer so that he can create cli backups without typing things manually in securecrt. However if I was a real developer I could just build a tool in git that wouldn't require him to login to securecrt at all. Just run the pipeline and do all the backups diffs etc.
I wish I had all those skills, but fuck I'm old, I'm busy and my brain can only hold some much...stuff. Occasionally the developers are like "Piscian you're as smart as us we can just teach you", but they don't understand the more I pack in the more I lose.
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/rant