i'm sure i'll be told by one of the nanog.police that this isn't appropriate but
i think it might be relevant. i don't think the clue level of engineers is
going down, i think what's happening is that more and more talent is needed as
large emerging carriers (qwest, l3, williams, etc) spring up and the core
high-level talent pool hasn't matched the growth. i think there are a lot of
young, capable people out there that could learn if only they had a jedi master
to teach them. if the newer engineers don't happen to land at one of the
companies where the jedi's currently work, they don't get the benefit of
learning from them.
having said that (just my personal opinion), i wanted to point out an effort
caida is leading with an organization called Internet Engineering Curriculum
(IEC). this group is trying to help educators at universities build curriculum
that revolve around current internet technologies and current best practices. i
just attended the first one last week in san diego.
they had 3 different "tracks" which were essentially "routing, tcp/ip",
"NS2/VINT, or the network simulator package", and "traffic analysis". you can
see the details at www.caida.org/iec. i thought it was a good start but the
most alarming thing is the low numbers of universities that are actually focused
on something other than tradition CS courses. a few have extensive
"internet-like" classes and curriculum but many are just getting started. and
there are ones like kansas state university, where i graduated, that have maybe
two classes that even relate to tcp, routing, internet, etc.
anyway, that's my plug so if you're interested, or want your universities to get
more involved, have a look at the url or direct university folks to the url. i
think this could go a long way in the long run to raising the *number* of people
with a higher clue factor which is what i think we're lacking.
-brett
Christian Nielsen <cnielsen@nielsen.net> on 08/20/99 09:38:44 AM