really? systems engineering and network engineering?

itdaddy

HI guys, I hate to sound like a whiner but I am going to. Are there any jobs out there that are not network administration? Just network engineering. I am trying to get away from Network administration. I see so many jobs that say network engineering but when you read them they want CCNP level but they want you to take care of their vmware, active directory, sans etc.....am I deceived into thinking I can completely leave systems engineering.When i was at fiserv i only did network engineering. i see most jobs today just deal with blended skills that can be very exchausting maybe i am a wimp but i have been in jobs like that you are all over the place? are there any pure network engineering jobs out there?

aftereffector

Quite a few in my own limited experience. What types of companies are you looking at? My organization has a networking team and a data systems team, each with maybe 50-70 employees, and there is zero crossover between them (they are actually manned by different contracts). The networking guys mostly do lifecycle upgrades with a little bit of design and engineering, but they definitely don't touch storage, identity, or anything domain-related.

Mow

Try looking for work in a VAR

Danielh22185

It really depends on the company. From my experience the "jack of all trades" positions are generally for smaller companies needing someone who can do both but not particularly be an expert of either. My company for example a fortune 100 company has major silos in place for all flavors of IT. My team is exclusively network ops, while we have other network design teams, and many other network focused / oriented positions throughout the company.

At a particular point the two worlds will always collide though, especially from a design perspective just because one side needs to work one way and visa versa. There will need to be a collaborative effort to get things operational. Now I don't think that means you need to fully be great or even good with the other world but having some inside knowledge never hurt anything.

Iristheangel

I think part of it also depends on the size of the company and what kind of company. Depending on the company or size of the budget, they don't have enough money for siloed teams and there's a general shift away from that in general in the industry with devops getting hotter and hotter. You might still find a 100% siloed environment in bigger environments or, like Mow said, VARs or Partners - since PS work tends to be more specialized and it's great experience to have.

kohr-ah

I have experienced the same as others.

MSPs and Smaller Companies have more of an overall role. Primary might be Networking but they will ask you to pickup on other roles. The company I just left was this way. They started asking me to do Windows, VMWare, etc work. I don't mind helping out but I didn't want to be doing it permanently.

VARs, Fortune 500s and above seems to have more of just networking guy roles where 90% of their role will seem that way. Some even to the point where the role is extremely Silo'd and you can't branch out of networking to do more things. You are JUST the networking guy.

joelsfood

Put me in as another vote for larger == more siloed. I've worked for everything from 6 person MSPs to Fortune 100s, and without fail, the larger the company, the more siloed and separated the job functions.

That being said, even in the most siloed companies, having knowledge of other domains will help you do YOUR job better, and managers tend to see this, so don't let the knowledge of other sections of work to completely atrophy. You may not be doing the system work, but in cases of new large deployments, troubleshooting outages, etc, that knowledge will help you do a better job, and that will help your long term employability.