Programming vs Networking (just in terms of difficulty)?
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i have been around programming a little while and i think its a little bit too hard for me! and sometimes extremely boring.
i have no networking background so, i thought it would be a good idea to ask people who've been into both programming and networking. basically i just wanna know which field is harder to get on with and master ?If you want to go for something easy I would avoid IT altogether - networking gets incredibly complex. Some of the brightest people I know, work in the area of computer networks.
Member 10744531 wrote:
basically i just wanna know which field is harder to get on with and master ?
The only way to answer that question, grasshopper, is to say that mastering anything will, at times, require sitting and staying with what is difficult and what may seem to be extremely boring.
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens
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Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise network is more difficult than software development.
PIEBALDconsult wrote:
Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise network is more difficult than software development.
So companies who have hundreds of developers and manage with say 5-10 IT professionals are doing it wrong then? Per what you said it would be more reasonable if there where hundreds of IT professionals and only 10 software developers.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise network is more difficult than software development.
So companies who have hundreds of developers and manage with say 5-10 IT professionals are doing it wrong then? Per what you said it would be more reasonable if there where hundreds of IT professionals and only 10 software developers.
Not necessarily; too many cooks spoil the infrastructure.
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i have been around programming a little while and i think its a little bit too hard for me! and sometimes extremely boring.
i have no networking background so, i thought it would be a good idea to ask people who've been into both programming and networking. basically i just wanna know which field is harder to get on with and master ?This is oddly similar to a question I answered on Quora. Marc
Automating Semantic Mapping of a Document With Natural Language Processing
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i have been around programming a little while and i think its a little bit too hard for me! and sometimes extremely boring.
i have no networking background so, i thought it would be a good idea to ask people who've been into both programming and networking. basically i just wanna know which field is harder to get on with and master ?This is a question that you should answer for yourself after obtaining a bit of background in both areas. I encourage you to get involved in both areas. After a while, you will get to understand which of the two is a good fit for you. The answer that you come up with will be specific to you and to no one else. Different people have different backgrounds and consider different things to be interesting or boring, difficult or hard. So go ahead and get involved in the areas that you think might interest you and might be a good fit for you. After a while you will know if an area is a good match for you or not. But be careful. The answers you find may be useful only to you. Other people may come up with completely different answers for themselves.
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Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise network is more difficult than software development.
Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise application is more difficult than networking.
Fixed it for you :) All things are relative.
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise network is more difficult than software development.
So companies who have hundreds of developers and manage with say 5-10 IT professionals are doing it wrong then? Per what you said it would be more reasonable if there where hundreds of IT professionals and only 10 software developers.
Amount of effort needed and difficulty are not really correlated at all. Software development companies hire lots of developers because they are producing the item that is being sold at the end, whereas network administration is an overhead that is to be minimised.
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i have been around programming a little while and i think its a little bit too hard for me! and sometimes extremely boring.
i have no networking background so, i thought it would be a good idea to ask people who've been into both programming and networking. basically i just wanna know which field is harder to get on with and master ?It sounds like you want a good-paying job that is easy to do and fun all the time. Don't we all. Networking requires less expertise in the academic sense, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. Networking changes very fast and requires you to constantly work to keep up with new technologies and products, even more so than with programming. There's also a lot of responsibility that comes with networking, because you are on the front lines of security. But you can forget about any sort of professional career until you learn how to write. I don't mean that as an insult, but serious advice. A resume written that way will get you nowhere, and writing an email like that on the job in a professional setting would make you look incompetent. So really, forget about programming and networking for now, work on writing.
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Amount of effort needed and difficulty are not really correlated at all. Software development companies hire lots of developers because they are producing the item that is being sold at the end, whereas network administration is an overhead that is to be minimised.
Finding errors in existing code is easier than finding errors in an existing network. Defining a standard is easy for both, but enforcing, detecting, and correcting non-compliant parts of the network is difficult.
BobJanova wrote:
Amount of effort needed ... hire lots of developers
I agree that throwing more bodies at the problem won't help, will probably make it worse, and may have been the initial cause. But the question says "just in terms of difficulty". In fact, hiring more developers doesn't make the job easier either, at best it can only make meeting deadlines easier.
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Setting up, configuring, securing, and maintaniing a large enterprise application is more difficult than networking.
Fixed it for you :) All things are relative.
You must be doing it wrong. You've probably never worked on a large enterprise network -- where the number of servers, switches, routers, load balancers, etc. approaches a half million spread across a dozen data centers world-wide. The size and complexity of which is the culmination of mergers among several large enterprise networks with differing standards. My job for the last two years has involved using the available tools to gather, correlate, and aggregate whatever data we can get (and there's not nearly enough) to detect and predict potential problems. Fortunately I never have to enter a data center and actually trace cables. :shudder: Software is easy, but all the applications are at the mercy of the hardware.
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You must be doing it wrong. You've probably never worked on a large enterprise network -- where the number of servers, switches, routers, load balancers, etc. approaches a half million spread across a dozen data centers world-wide. The size and complexity of which is the culmination of mergers among several large enterprise networks with differing standards. My job for the last two years has involved using the available tools to gather, correlate, and aggregate whatever data we can get (and there's not nearly enough) to detect and predict potential problems. Fortunately I never have to enter a data center and actually trace cables. :shudder: Software is easy, but all the applications are at the mercy of the hardware.
I'm just going to point out that, as I find it highly unlikely that you're configuring the network devices using bits, you are relying on soundly developed software to configure the network. Solarwinds, server OS, firewalls, VPNs, ASAs, crypto, switch OS, router OS; whatever you're touching is basically a chunk of silicon without effective software. That being said, my apples are better than your oranges. Mainly because they're mine. I would like to point out, though, that if you find software design and development to be easy, most likely you _are_ doing it wrong.
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I'm just going to point out that, as I find it highly unlikely that you're configuring the network devices using bits, you are relying on soundly developed software to configure the network. Solarwinds, server OS, firewalls, VPNs, ASAs, crypto, switch OS, router OS; whatever you're touching is basically a chunk of silicon without effective software. That being said, my apples are better than your oranges. Mainly because they're mine. I would like to point out, though, that if you find software design and development to be easy, most likely you _are_ doing it wrong.
The software tools are good, the hardware tools are good, it's the wetware tools that are a mite problematic.