[jeroenhd]

People familiar with networking underestimate how complicated networking actually is. A huge segment of programmers will learn about the existence of routing and BGP and end up in a career where HTTPS and maybe DNS is all they need to worry about.

I'm 100% sure the only reason so many programmers know how NAT works is because NAT breaks video games.

[tetha]

EDIT: Re-Reading. I think I am some degree of a networker underestimating network complexity. I'll stand by that. Please make fun of me for only speaking in IPs and Ports.

Yeh. There is a very achievable level of knowledge about networking that's enough to make a lot of practical problems solvable.

Like, my practically acquired patchwork of knowledge about subnets, routing, some DNS, some VPN tech, maybe some ideas of masquerading and NAT'ing is easily enough to run a multi-site production environment across a number of networking stacks. And I wouldn't really call these things hard. I don't like people who are like "I don't know networking" once you say "routing table". The hardest part there is to understand how things are often a very large amount of very local decisions and a bunch of crossed fingers to get a packet from A to B. Oh an no one thinks about return paths until they run a site to site VPN.

But just a few steps beyond that is a cliff dropping into a terrifying abyss of complexity. LIke I know acronyms like BGP, CGNAT, ideas like Anycast DNS and kinda what they do, but it turns into very dark and different magik rather quickly. I say if we need that, we need a networker.

[mschuster91]

> I'm 100% sure the only reason so many programmers know how NAT works is because NAT breaks video games.

... and filesharing, from the days when bittorrent was huuuuge.

[neom]

I once interviewed the manage who built MSN messenger - and when I asked her what the most important thing to the growth was, she said it needed to be able to punch through NATs so kids could use it at high school and uni, because that was the segment they were trying to get it to take off in. (and from what I recall, that strategy indeed worked quite well)