You know like “ahh don’t call the messaging endpoint more than 800 mega-milli-times per mega-nano-second or it will cost you three bazillion CPU credits, but only on three and a half cores which will starve all your instances, issue an invoice and proceed to melt your credit card.”

I don't know how the situation is in the US, but in my country network engineering is actually quite a popular field of study. (we have college level education in network engineering).

The one thing that stands out though is that it's mostly done by youngsters who have either sysadmin experience, or worked in IT before that. Almost everyone who comes from high school goes into Software Engineering.

I think this is mainly because networking is quite an invisible field so to speak. Many people don't even know your job exists, and many young people only see the shiny hip side of it. (being Software Engineering).

Being good at network engineering is hard, especially once you get past entry level work and actually start being responsible for designing large-scale networks. Mainly because building a network is a major financial investment where garuanteeing performance is hard without either a ton of experience, or a shitton of lab time.

this kind of work pays very, very well though.

Building networks and understanding protocols is something machines can do TODAY. The entire internet was built to survive a nuclear war. It can reshape itself, and it most definitely understand network protocols. By definition, protocols are the language of machines over the network. And it's been like this for a few decades.

The only reason knowing low level network protocols in a world where machines can code anything (which makes them better analytical thinkers than humans) is to beg the machines for mercy in their ancient tongue.

It really, really can't! That quote about the Internet interpreting censorship as damage and routing around it? Or the one about information "wanting" to be free? Taken wildly out of context.

So, what do network engineers do? Classically, Set up and troubleshoot those systems. Currently, transforming from manual work to building systems to deploy, monitor, and remediate routers and such. In other words, the same stuff sysadmins->(SRE|PE) folks do and undergoing a similar transition.

SRE methods are quite applicable to neteng: https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/eliminating-toi...

Don't forget BGP. I don't think they do what you think they do, at least, not to the extent you think they do them. There is a hell of a lot of manual work in running any sizeable network even within a single organisation.

> There is a hell of a lot of manual work in running any sizeable network even within a single organisation.

I'm not trying to say they do everything, and no manual work is required. I'm trying to say machines are already doing part of it. OP believes that give a world where machines can code, they can't design or maintain networks, which I find truly ridiculous, since machines are pretty far from doing any kind of "coding" today, but they do networking and network protocols pretty well.

The first attempt at a system to turn plain English that even managers could write into executable code was 1959 - COBOL. So you're right in a sense, even 59 years later - but also wrong if you think networks are any more advanced than this. The Internet really cannot "reshape itself" and probably never will be able to.

They're still just tools wielded by humans, even at a distance. Even today.

This isn't a field that is done inventing. Not even remotely close.