[latchkey]

> In my experience, this leads to two types of network engineers, separated by their understanding of these underlying realities.

What's wrong with that? Certainly, someone with a complete picture is "better", but it is effectively two different types of problems. Do they need to be combined?

[myself248]

When everything's happy and packets are flowing as they should, there's absolutely nothing wrong with living at whatever layer of abstraction you wish.

But when something is broken, troubleshooting is a different animal. When people make assumptions based on their abstractions, they can waste a lot of time chasing a problem that can't exist, because the abstraction hides several more layers of complexity. Their mental model of the problem relies on a fantasy which they may not even realize is a fantasy.

It's unlikely for someone to accurately diagnose a fault that's several layers below where they're operating. Understanding that their abstractions are abstractions, and knowing when to hand things off to another layer of engineer, is critically important.

I mention it here because people aren't generally tracerouting things unless they suspect breakage somewhere. It's a troubleshooting tool. But people whose mental model of the network _only_ goes as low as the IP layer, are unlikely to do anything useful with traceroute unless the fault also happens to be at the IP layer.

[archgoon]

Sounds like fun :)

You should write up a blog post where you had to debug some weird gnarly issues. A lot of us higher up the tech stack are pretty far removed from the signals level issues you're talking about but would love to hear about a low level debug session!

[codethief]

I would love to read such a blog post as well!

[latchkey]

Thanks for the clarity in your response. I think we are pretty well aligned.

It is human stacking of the OSI model. The person in the ditch repairing the line probably doesn't care about traceroute, but the person with traceroute probably should care about what happens in the ditch.

[aftbit]

I think you're reading the connotation into this. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with being a higher level engineer. There's plenty of work "above the fold" so to speak.

For example, I think it behooves every software engineer to have a general grasp of how CPUs work, what speculative execution is, how CPU caching and invalidation works, etc, but the average webdev doesn't really need to know this, and might run into some abstraction breaking implications only a few times in their career, while debugging a tricky bug or performance regression.

I imagine something similar is true for network engineers. Likely many can work for years at a time without worrying about fiber signal repeaters, other than that one weird packet loss issue that ends up getting traced back to a marginal optic in a cable vault somewhere.

Of course, none of this applies to the compiler engineers or the people who build the physical network layer. They are in the "second type" of engineer that actually needs to understand this stuff in depth in order to do their jobs on a day to day basis.

[latchkey]

> I think you're reading the connotation into this.

I am reading the connotation into this and asking about it. 4 paragraphs of talking only about tech and then it diverged into a personal statement at the end.

[aftbit]

What I meant by that statement is that whatever you're asking about is actually coming from you. I don't think the simple statement in the comment actually contains any connotation. Just like the old programmer joke - there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who do not. We just like dividing people into classes because it helps us understand the world.

I guess to engage with this a bit more, one reason you might find a negative connotation towards engineers who are ignorant of the underlying details is that it is the larger set. After all, most engineers do not need to understand the physical layer in depth, so there are fewer who do. People love to feel like they're part of a smaller "higher" class, for complex social reasons. This sometimes comes with a bit of a distaste towards those who are part of the "regular" class.

But overall, I think you're taking this further than it really needs to be taken. The GP was just saying that not all network engineers are wizards in the technical details of lower layers, just like not all software engineers can write a compiler. Does that make them "worse" in some way? Well it makes them a worse fit for that few specific jobs that require that extra knowledge, but in general, I don't think so, and I doubt most people do either.

That's why we have abstractions.