Comment by porknbeans00

for a few years I was an HP Server Automation SME.

I flew around the US basically automating stuff with a network automation and operations orchestration team. This is before amazon really was a thing. So we were going into big old school data centers where the largest leap in tech since the 80s was VMWare ESX ( the new hotness ).

every site we went into we were by and large putting a lot of people out of work. these old telecom giants and industrial giants basically had a lot of folks who were like... the guy who reboots switches. Or the guy who maintains a specific bash script to take backups.

the stuff we did made most of these folks instantly obsolete. especially the CCNAs.

Now for those that don't know... 2000 or so... high schools started getting kids CCNA certifications to be top of rack switch kids so they could get a 'good job'. And it was a GOOD JOB. It paid VERY well. Better than most kids with a liberal arts degree.

Fast forward an almost a decade and we were wiping that entire career path out FAST. Datacenters went from having an army of CCNAs to a couple CCIEs and a couple CCNAs to do the physical labor. A lot of people who had only ever done one thing in their career for ten years were losing their cushy upper medium income salary and finding out their career path ended. They were as you might imagine... angry, afraid, prepared to sabotage... etc.

I didn't like that side of the work at all. But it really was inevitable.

Fast forward 15 years. The highest paid people in tech are CCIEs that can code. I know guys making 700k a year cause they know python and BGP inside and out.

We ripped the middle out of networking and EVERYONE paid the price. It's amazing to me that we never learn from our past.