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As a keen observer of the network engineering world for the last twenty… okay, maybe longer, but I don’t want to sound like an old man telling stories quite yet… years, there’s one thing I’ve always found kind-of strange. We have a strong tendency towards hero worship.
I don’t really know why this might be, but I’ve seen it in Cisco TAC—the almost hushed tones around a senior engineer who “is brilliant.” I’ve seen it while sitting in a meeting in the middle of an argument over some technical point in a particular RFC. Someone says, “we should just ask the author…” Which is almost always followed by something like: “Really? You know them?”
To some degree, this is understandable—network engineering is difficult, and we should truly honor those in our world who have made a huge impact. In many other ways, it’s unhelpful, and even unhealthy. Why?
First, it tends to create an “us versus them,” atmosphere in our world. There are engineers who work on “normal” networks, and then there are those who work on, well, you know, special ones. Not everyone needs those “special skills,” so we end up creating a vast pool of people Continue reading