My frustrations as a network engineer

[Zargon]

I got a rejection email for a job that I didn't want, that someone I used to work with told me about.

I've never been to a place that was so cocky about their phone system and network. I actually do the exact same thing that they want to do, except I get to work on a network that is huge compared to theirs. I got to the end of the interview and they said something about how they were going to interview a few other candidates, I told them good luck with that. My company has had several job openings this past year, and no one with VOIP experience ever applies. I left the interview thinking that they did a crappy job at selling me on the idea of coming to work for them.

At the end of the interview they said something about "Describe yourself in two words", I said, "I'm boring". I told a co-worker about the question, they said I should have said "Irish Goodbye" and hung up. Looking back that would have been pretty awesome. Ironically I have that listed as a skill on my Linkedin account.

haha nice.

I interviewed for a job I didn't want, because a friend is the hiring manager and needed more resumes submitted so they could close the search and do interviews

a security/unix admin job, not my wheelhouse at all, not my interest area either.

oh man.

worst interview I have ever given.

it was painful. When my friend dropped in to 'give me the bad news' all I could do was laugh

sadly, I hope to have a interview with the same place for another position in a month, I hope I don't have the same HR person on it D:


oh yeah, I am not technically a network engineer anymore

data center manager. for now. I took the move(at the same place) because it seems like a good move, more responsibility, a lot to add to the resume, and I really find the facility aspects of it fascinating.

but I miss routing packets sometimes....

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Problem: not enough LAN ports for new hosts
Solution: add another identical switch to existing vmware cluster
Goal: Configure new switch.

Step 1: Copy port configurations from working switch (for trunks to vm hosts).
Step 2: Get confused when it doesn't work.
Step 3: Spend two days double checking everything.
Step 4: Delete switch configuration and do what VMWare says to do in the manual, which is completely different than how the first switch is configured.
Step 5: Magic!

Step 6-10: Why is the first switch working?

Ugh.

 

[Zargon]

LOL ouch man that sucks



we poc'd the new Cisco Firepower for our exit security device last week. I don't have the final verdict yet, but on Wednesday it was adding 100ms latency to all our test traffic, so it was NOT going very well for them

 

[Cable God]

This thread has been a great one for several years now. I've gotten out of my "Jack Of All Trades" job for 15 years "running the show" and finally left into the Storage consulting field for one of the top 3 SAN vendors. Basically now, I receive the signed SOW, design the storage to meet the customer's needs, and fly out to implement it and hand it off to the customer. Much lower stress job, pays way better, and I get to work from home 95% of the time. It doesn't hurt getting onsite with the largest and most complicated environments in the world. Best decision I ever made.

Spidey, where have you disappeared to?

 

[go-2guy]

I work on the MSP side of things. Every environment we have is very unique and presents a challenge to say the least. I'm fully certified in Avaya's SME market for telephony, BCNP, shoretel etc.

All the way up to 100 users, the comlexity of the networks in these environments is pretty minimal. Few static routes, some open ports, maybe a vpn config and some static routes account for 90% of what's out there for small businesses. Honestly, a cheapo SG from Cisco and some Meraki or Aruba AP's will handle the lot of them.

Without having to login to a switch or implement QoS or any form of traffic shaping on a regular basis, it can be difficult to "stay current" on advanced network configurations. We are all learning as this is a fast paced industry- if you don't like troubleshooting with clients, maybe a NOC position would be better suited to you.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Spent a couple hours today double-checking every last detail of an SSSD config on an RHEL (which we don't normally use) system that refused to resolve group memberships. (All of our CentOS and Ubuntu systems do it fine.)

So, you'd type "id dave_the_nerd" and get back primary GIDs with no names, and no secondary group memberships at all.

Turns out there's something goofy about the version of sssd (or one of its dependencies). 1.13.0 failed miserably, but downgrading to 1.12.4 worked immediately. Dunno if 1.13.0 is the latest or not, but it's the latest one in our corporate RHEL repo.

*grumble* spinning up a crapton of custom environments *grumble* so software developers can validate that all their code works *grumble* on all the linux distros marketing says we need to support *grumble*

Oh well, keeps me employed, and if it works, it works - no specific sssd version was in the requirements.

 

[happycamper843]

I'm an IP/MPLS engineer working for an ISP. I configure and troubleshoot MPLS services (L2 - L3) for business customers. My customers are sometimes very small networks (just a few sites) to pretty big (hundreds of sites).

As everyone noticed who works in this business there has been an explosion of services running over the WAN. Everything from cloudstuff, thin clients (citrix, ...), voip, "insert buzzword of the week here"

What I noticed even more that with these added complexity, the knowledge and networking troubleshooting skills on the customer side are pretty poor. More then 50% of time I'm basically troubleshooting stuff on the LAN of the customers (not my job but well, if something is not working, it's the network taht is always blamed first). I pretty much do everything from getting their routers connected (they choose to have unmanaged), troubleshooting voip (consumes most of my time nowadays), performance (99% of the people I deal with have no idea how to optimize tcp for LFN and just complain that the network is slow), the concepts of qos (I probably explained 1 zillion times that qos is something that kicks in when there is congestion in a network). Iperf and wireshark are unknown to lots of "engineers" I deal with. And it's not only the customers ICT, it is also their integrators (don't get me started about that).

Sometimes I wish I was a barista at starbucks

end-of-rant

I am a NOC technician. Since our company is kind of small only about 60,000 subs the NOC takes all of the incoming business data calls. People have no concept of what bandwidth is. Including people that work in sales at the company. They sell business customers 10/1 circuits then they call in and complain that their cloud server isnt working correctly. It is definately a lesson in paitence.

 

[Harrod]

I am a NOC technician. Since our company is kind of small only about 60,000 subs the NOC takes all of the incoming business data calls. People have no concept of what bandwidth is. Including people that work in sales at the company. They sell business customers 10/1 circuits then they call in and complain that their cloud server isnt working correctly. It is definately a lesson in paitence.

I work in a NOC as well, I've seen this before, once a salesperson sold 2 t1's to a customer that had 12 mb DSL. Then for about a week, we would get calls that the internet was slow, we would then run ehealth reports and send them to the sales person to show that they were over utilizing their circuits.

Then this sales person would call in screaming at us to a point that my co-worker called her boss and told him to get his employee to stop acting so unprofessional. Somehow she convinced and told her customer that it would be way faster and they apparently equated paying more per month to higher speeds. What they should have done is a couple of bonded pairs though a hatterous and delivered 24 mb service.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

One of our customer's guys insisted that 768k DSL was more than adequate to install in every franchise of a large sports bar franchises' 600 locations. Sales, in an interest to get that money, signed off on that. What a disaster that was when every time a user in a store would try to get on YouTube, or when there were more than 10 people in the restaurant, the internet would come to a screeching halt. I believe that guy eventually got fired, and we're still working to get higher tier connections to many of the stores.

 

[FullBoat]

I work for an ISP as well. I'm in the same boat as the OP. Customers just have no clue. Here's a good example. Customer is yelling and screaming that they're getting latency on their connection. It's a T1 that they used for VoIP. Well, after 3 dispatches, and a couple of modem replacements, they FINALLY said in one of their emails that they moved their Guest WiFi over to it. Ummmm... duh. It's only 1.5/1.5, have more than 2 people streaming, and your maxed out on data. They still don't get it.

Or pizza places that think they can use a 1.5m/768k for their online orders/CC's/Web/Camera's. And, wonder why they're having issues.

Or the customer that has 1 site that doesn't have a connection, and starts yelling about suing us because they're not back up in an hour. "We're losing thousands of dollars.. I need it up NOW NOWNOW!!1!"..... Then get a backup.

If I ever win the lotto, I'm going to start telling these people how it really is.

 

[Genx87]

I work for an ISP as well. I'm in the same boat as the OP. Customers just have no clue. Here's a good example. Customer is yelling and screaming that they're getting latency on their connection. It's a T1 that they used for VoIP. Well, after 3 dispatches, and a couple of modem replacements, they FINALLY said in one of their emails that they moved their Guest WiFi over to it. Ummmm... duh. It's only 1.5/1.5, have more than 2 people streaming, and your maxed out on data. They still don't get it.

Or pizza places that think they can use a 1.5m/768k for their online orders/CC's/Web/Camera's. And, wonder why they're having issues.

Or the customer that has 1 site that doesn't have a connection, and starts yelling about suing us because they're not back up in an hour. "We're losing thousands of dollars.. I need it up NOW NOWNOW!!1!"..... Then get a backup.

If I ever win the lotto, I'm going to start telling these people how it really is.

That is called the eff you fund.

 

[vesinhduytuan]

I am also experiencing the same problem as you, having the same plight

 

[leonman]

Wow, that's great! I've got a lot from your sharing. Thanks!

 

[Sony joseph]

My favorite is when I go into a customer to deploy a PBX and find their internal network is non-RFC1918. I've seen 100.10.10.0/24, 172.168.10.0/24, and more. I once had a Mitel network tech propose using 172.168.x.0/24 as their voice vlans.

Damn.. he

 

[Sony joseph]

Damn..he does not know the difference between a private/public class B IP address

 

[Sony joseph]

He does not know the difference between a private/ public class B network address

 

[MtnMan]

He does not know the difference between a private/ public class B network address

But if the internal network is behind NAT, then it really doesn't matter as any valid IP will be translated to a public addresses provided by the ISP.

 

[Pheran]

But if the internal network is behind NAT, then it really doesn't matter as any valid IP will be translated to a public addresses provided by the ISP.

It will matter a whole lot as soon as you try to access a site over the Internet that is legitimately using that IP range.

 

[MtnMan]

It will matter a whole lot as soon as you try to access a site over the Internet that is legitimately using that IP range.

Nope, NAT translates it from what ever your side of the NAT is configured for to the legitimate public address provided by your ISP.

 

[Pheran]

Nope, NAT translates it from what ever your side of the NAT is configured for to the legitimate public address provided by your ISP.

Not if you are sitting on a subnet that has hijacked routable IP space. If you attempt access to an Internet site that overlaps the subnet you are on, your machine will just ARP for that IP and fail miserably, the traffic will never make it to your NAT router. Of course the other 99.9% of the Internet will still work fine, but hijacking allocated space for a private subnet is an extremely stupid thing to do and it can definitely lead to problems.

 

[dctech9]

I'm an IP/MPLS engineer working for an ISP. I configure and troubleshoot MPLS services (L2 - L3) for business customers. My customers are sometimes very small networks (just a few sites) to pretty big (hundreds of sites).

As everyone noticed who works in this business there has been an explosion of services running over the WAN. Everything from cloudstuff, thin clients (citrix, ...), voip, "insert buzzword of the week here"

What I noticed even more that with these added complexity, the knowledge and networking troubleshooting skills on the customer side are pretty poor. More then 50% of time I'm basically troubleshooting stuff on the LAN of the customers (not my job but well, if something is not working, it's the network taht is always blamed first). I pretty much do everything from getting their routers connected (they choose to have unmanaged), troubleshooting voip (consumes most of my time nowadays), performance (99% of the people I deal with have no idea how to optimize tcp for LFN and just complain that the network is slow), the concepts of qos (I probably explained 1 zillion times that qos is something that kicks in when there is congestion in a network). Iperf and wireshark are unknown to lots of "engineers" I deal with. And it's not only the customers ICT, it is also their integrators (don't get me started about that).

Sometimes I wish I was a barista at starbucks

end-of-rant

I feel your pain...hope things get better!