Re: eBay is looking for network heavies...

[William Waites <wwaites () tardis ed ac uk>]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2015 14:24:31 +0200, Ruairi Carroll <ruairi.carroll () gmail com> said:

    > What I found is that back in early-mid 00's, the industry was a
    > black box.  Unless you knew someone inside of the industry...

I suspect this is partly a result of the consolidation that went
on. In the mid 1990s when I started, there were tons of small mom and
pop ISPs with 28.8 modems stacked on Ikea shelving. The way that I got
my first job as a student was literally by hanging around one of them
and pestering them until they hired me part time. These small ISPs
grew and most were eventually were acquired and people who stuck
around through that -- especially the often quite complicated network
integration that happens after acquisitions -- learned quite a lot
about how the Internet operates at a variety of scales and saw a
variety of different architectures and technical strategies.

The scale and stability of today's Internet means that path is mostly
closed now I think, particularly if what you want to do is get a job
at a big company. But not entirely, there are still lots of rich
field-learning opportunities on the periphery, in places where large
carriers fear to tread...

-w

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