Thousands of dollars for switches

Not only this, but a lot of Cisco equipment only really works with other Cisco equipment, so if you wanted to replace one particular device on a network you might end up needing to rebuild the network entirely.

Because of 30 year old boomer's who heard it was the best in their CCNA class

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Wow, now thats what I call fucking gay

Wait really? I thought networking equipment would be interoperable since they rely on standard networking protocols? How did Cisco manage to pull that bullshit off?

IBM does the same thing with mainframes, you can order a fully stacked Z14 but you pay for what you use (i.e. might come with all of the CPUs installed but you can only use half of them due to licencing).

Juniper master race reporting in.

Take EIGRP for instance.

they've got the gold standard of network certification. everyone does the ccna, which means there's a LOT of available workforce (and therefore cheap) to work your devices. you're gonna find a kid with cisco cli knowledge faster than some guy familiar with arista.
cisco is also present in every niche, from wifi to SD-WAN to data center to ISP to voice, and they're continuously buying other small vendors. You'll find juniper mainly on the ISP side, arista in the DC, ubiquiti for wifi. a new hire from another branch of networking might not know about the snowflake vendor you're using, but they'll definitely know cisco.

then there's a LOT of information and free support via forum and mailing lists on the internet, and cisco's support isn't great, but not at the infamous level of juniper yet.

their sales guys are also really aggressive. meaning, if you mention you're looking at juniper, they'll match juniper's price. mention you're going with HP, they'll go further down. suddenly, price is not an argument anymore, and it usually isn't the technicians who get to work on the gear (and might prefer a sane cli, like juniper) who get to decide what to buy, and those guys who do decide might only have heard of cisco or maybe worked on cisco themselves 20 years ago when the main competitors today didn't exist yet.

don't forget all their proprietary protocols.
cdp isn't so bad, but pvst+ is a bitch to integrate with other *STPs because it kinda does interoperate with standardized *STPs but will explode into a hilarious firework of undefined behaviour at the worst possible time.
and both of these are enabled out-of-the-box.

tbc

there's also eigrp, but it doesn't really matter, it is really a fine routing protocol with lots of cool knobs but once your network is big enough to deploy routing protocols chances are your (consulting) network engineers are experienced enough to not buy into vendor-lockin, therefore nobody uses eigrp. and if you've got eigrp, it's not the end of the world - just redistribute it into your ospf.

but if you've got a fully ciscofied network, with all that stuff enabled out of box, and you're expanding and need more/better gear and more enginieers probably too, you're gonna think twice about breaking that up, and most networks are not greenfield deployments.

juniper really is nice, until you get introduced to the literal monkeys at JTAC. and nobody really knows what they're doing with the EX series.
i'm still a juniper fan though.

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>all this whining
stay mad while my fathers team sells billions to DoD

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a lot of the cisco proprietary protocols came earlier than their standardized counterparts, the standards even were often modelled after the cisco proprietary ones. so the proprietary stuff still exists of course because they'll still be running in all the dino networks and cisco will have to support them into eternity (at least pagp has been deprecated)

pagp (early 90s, acquired by cisco 1994) came before lacp (2000)

eigrps predecessor igrp (mid 80s) came before ospf (1991) and eigrp came right afterwards (1993) and was already fit for vlsm because of its protocol-independent design (ospf2 came in 1997)

can't find info on cdp but it probably came before lldp (2004)

So you mean you can get a top pay in network fields without Cisco exp/certs?

you won't get past entry level without cisco certs and you can't just skip to top pay senior architect positions

this field is about (inter)networking, which means at some point your gear will likely connect to cisco gear of another service provider or customer or else because they ARE present in every branch of networking, and a little bit of cisco knowledge will help with troubleshooting and common lingo with other engineers.

childishly refusing to learn cisco would be akin to shooting yourself in the foot.
ccna isn't that bad of a cert either, you'll learn a lot about networking itself and as added bonus practical stuff on cisco - and you gotta pick a vendor for practical stuff.

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everything except the final test that gives you certification is available for everyone

It was merely a rhetorical question to display the depth of the stupidity of Jow Forums nonconformist kiddies.

As an engineer that has gone to the darkside of business let me illustrate you. That is price discrimination and allows you to lower the price for people that don't need the full speed.
Actually even allows them to upgrade to the full speed later on as they evolve without having to buy different hardware (aka cheaper upgrade path).

If you know you are a full speed user just assume the the total cost as the cost of the superior product.

fooled me. i've seen this question too often ...

No love for Nokia? They have the only end to end portfolio. Why buy your network from multiple vendors with stuff that won’t work well together?

That's scratching the surface of what we know on a technical level. In my experience, a lot of times equipment like Brocade switches just "don't play nice" with Cisco switches for reasons I can't explain. Maybe Cisco switches just have different clocks or ways of handling traffic internally? I have no idea.

Anyways I've seen networks with a mix of Cisco equipment and whatever else just run into STP anomalies and sometimes experience slight latency or bandwidth limitations out of nowhere for no discernable reason.

Cisco certs are the best in the world. G faggots are just mad because it comes from a company you have to send a check to to use their shit. I'll grant Cisco does have some gaynnews particularly for mixed equipment networks. I'm in systems admin and it's way easier to mix HP with other stuff, but the HP MSR CLI sucks so fucking much. Cisco CLI is great even though bits of it are counter intuitive

Gayness*

>people still use switches
>when WLAN exists
Pathetic

>2 digit IQ: The post

Same reason people used IBM forever.
"Nobody got fired for buying Cisco".

It works, is popular, and has large support in the form of TAC and community support with many users. Companies and organizations with money to burn (i.e. DoD) will continue to buy Cisco because of the support contracts available.

That said, if you're doing IT for a smaller business, or organization, it's probably not the best idea to go with Cisco.
I helped my old school district implement a full tech refresh of their network infrastructure. They switched from Cisco to AT/Lucent, because doing the refresh with Cisco gear would have literally cost 3x+ what the Cisco solution would have been.

I have some older ones lying around my dads house because he worked there since they were a tiny little company. Are they worth fiddling with to learn cisco shit?

Because muh CCNA/CCNP

Basically, the certs create life long sales men. Even though the product(s) are inferior garbage.

troll or just stupid?

Cisco's sluggishness on proper IPv6 support for things like ASAs, UCS (their ESXi cluster in a box), WAPs, and Meraki is singlehandedly responsible for the poor uptake of IPv6 on enterprise networks.

Also its certs are usefull to get job.

If you think there is a market for "Network Engineer" lol.

>open indeed
>type in "Network Engineer"
>500 matches

I feel like you'd be able to find employment.

> I feel like you'd be able to find employment.

> not a network engineer
> probably has never turned on "enterprise hardware"
> doesnt realize "cloud" has basically killed this type of hardware off unless you're a moderately big co
> doesnt realize the pay for network engineer is actually shit in tech (50-75k; this is shit compared to other roles).
> doesnt realize this job doesnt do any engineering

They're lying. A lot of network protocols such as eigrp, cdp etc came before free protocols such as ldp, ospf etc. Cisco supports both protocols on their equipment so that it will work with any vendor.

>Having to pay for a license to use 10Gbps ports at full speed
Proof? Have a Cisco switch that I bought from a random person and I can use 10Gbps just fine without any "license".

He's not lying. You have to buy the hardware and then pay for a license to use it. It's one of the reasons why the co I worked at abandoned Cisco hardware.

Depends how old. I think your dad got the pre 90s stuff, which is very outdated. If you have anything between 2003-2008, go for it.

Boi I work on Nexus 7ks and ASRs for a living.

I agree that the job probably doesn't deserve the title of "Engineer", but with titles like "Customer Experience Engineer", "Security Engineer", and "Technical Support Engineer" becoming more and more common, it's probably here to stay.

Most network engineer type roles have moved into MSPs, since there is no need to have a network guy on staff full-time unless you're a decently sized company.

The pay is fine, in line with most other non-dev tech jobs. $70k is the average in St. Louis, where the median *household* income is $60k. "Senior Network Engineer" is pushing around $100k, but like most jobs, that's probably more of a management/director role, which is fine because there's no reason you should be a run of the mill network guy after 20 years.

Aside from software development, what are these $85k+ jobs (not in SF/NYC-tier cities)?

It gets called "engineer" because if the "network engineer" doesnt suck they actually make diagrams and plan out the network, then implement it. Yes, "engineer" is becoming more toxic in the industry.

I have 10 years tech experience:
> inb4 t boomer
I have yet to work with a semi intelligent network engineer. They always implement architectures that fail (SPOF, split-brain, etc). Then I check out their pay and qualifications and that explains it.

As an SRE I do what network engineers do but through automation (yes even the hardware). I make double what the "traditional" network engineer makes.

>6500
We were still running one of those until a few months ago.

A lot of the "net engineers" I've met are basically just network admins, just responsible for the operation and maintenance. The title usually gets handed to guys who actually know what they're doing, but I'm in the military so the average skill level is quite low.

What exactly do you do as a SRE? I've got a few years before my contract is up in the military, but I want to start honing my skills for a career once I get out. Don't really have a desire to stay in and die for Israel.

I know network guys working for federal contracts with security clearance can easily make $80k+, but I'd imagine the jobs that require working brains along with clearance would pay even more.

I'm referring to pure "network engineers" not ones that also work in an OS like Linux/Windows server. The pure network engineers I've ran into are bottom of the barrel pieces of shit.

The ones I've worked with that actually know a server OS (Linux/Solar for ex) tend to be pretty intelligent.

> What exactly do you do as a SRE
Site Reliability Engineer. It's basically "sr sr sr admin". I automate everything, build tools for the infra, and ensure that shit is running nicely. Google calls this role "system administration from a developers perspective"; which is true. The team I'm on though has a lot of freedom, no one is wedged into a single role or job; if you find something that smells fishy you can tackle it.

I've worked with some ex-military guys; no offense but most of them I noticed are very... uhh how do I put this "set in their ways". Like, for ex, we once hired a Jr Network Admin who was very much "thats not my job"; we fired him. Most have a very very hard time going from public to private sector.

I dont have security clearance; but have been offered jobs where I would need to get it. From what I gathered it takes about a year to get it. I'm just not that interested in it, and frankly would probably end up pulling a Snowden. One of the places that I had an interview at was very very much "patriotic"; and I just dont care about that. If thats for you, then by all means; but not for me and I cant speak to it.

By Network Admins I meant only switches/routers, in the Air Force we divide it by Systems and Network guys.
A lot of those guys refuse to learn anything about servers, there is very much that "not my job" mentality because leadership can't really hold a failure against you if they tell you to do something you weren't officially trained to do.

That sounds like a really neat job, I've been trying to get into automating my job but that will have to wait as I'm getting transferred to an airbase in the UK, so I'll have a whole new environment to learn.
Security clearance jobs usually pay more because the company doesn't have to sponsor you for one. A contracting firm would have to pay the US Gov something like $45k just to have you investigated, and then you might not even pass.

>I've worked with some ex-military guys; no offense but most of them I noticed are very... uhh how do I put this "set in their ways"
Oh yeah, in my shop of about 20 people, there are 3 of us willing to go out and actually learn the whole process to fix things. Everyone else just wants a manual telling you exactly what to type.

>What gives? Why do people keep using Cisco?
Not anymore, most enterprises are switching to Juniper and Fortinet gear precisely because of the greedy cisco licensing model. Cisco is no longer king.

> just wants a manual telling you exactly what to type.
Is this normal? I'm wrapping up my BS and there a lot of people in from the GI bill and they will not do work unless it's step-by-step.

It's real bad too; like they refuse to google, do basic research, etc. Really pisses me off because this industry does not have hand holding; and these guys are getting pushed into a field they are utterly unprepared for.

>SRE
FAANGnigger pls

Dont and refuse to work for any of those co's

>Is this normal?
Oh yeah, 3/4 of my shop is absolutely useless when it comes to something that's not a run-of-the-mill router/switch task.

For example, we were having DHCP problems. The DHCP server belongs to the Windows admins, and the brainlets had no idea how to look at the DHCP service to determine there was a problem.
One of our useless guys was standing there watching what the windows guy was doing, and told me "well, uh, it looks like there are spare addresses".
I RDP into the server and pull up DHCP to see myself, and people in my shop are asking "dude how do you know how to do this shit", literally referring to logging into a Windows server and pulling up the DHCP service.

I tell them to just pull of the Microsoft docs and read for themselves, but it's like there's this learned helplessness. "Oh where do I find those", "oh how do I know what to look for", etc.

That attitude serves you well in the military though as an enlisted, because as long as you pass your PT test, don't get in trouble, and don't break anything, you're golden. Going above and beyond means doing more work, and potentially opening yourself to risk.

Why I dont work in a windows environment

I mean yeah having a bug in something simple like DHCP is pretty poor.
Shit quit purging addresses and had to be totally restarted and the hot-fail over rebuilt.

They're not. Vendors like Cumulus and the whitebox manufacturers accompanying them are killing Cisco.

Well, Catalyst 9000 switches (Including 3850 and 4500x) Are all right to use, you can literally change the license level with one command and a reload....

So, that kind of guys just focus to do exactly manual said and never try to change or search how to solve. Right? BRAINLETS

>Because their community college teacher told them Cisco was good.

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>For example, we were having DHCP problems. The DHCP server belongs to the Windows admins, and the brainlets had no idea how to look at the DHCP service to determine there was a problem.

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That's why Micro$hit give away Office365 to universities and other center of education.

Its all about support IMO

Yeah.
The problem is they enlist random people off the street and stick them in this job.
They learn just enough to not get fired, and it's very hard to kick someone out of the military for being stupid.

He was literally looking at the leases and thought anything without a description meant the IP was free.
:)

but pvst+ is a bitch to integrate with other *STPs because it kinda does interoperate with standardized *

MST and thats it

>He was literally looking at the leases and thought anything without a description meant the IP was free.
So, I'll be honest for once
I'm a designer and I have had to work with tier1/2 people before

Honestly it humbles me, its like remembering when you first started out and how dumb you must have been at that time

Whats odd is i still see some people never advanced. they're okay with pointing and clicking on a gui but cant do shit with CLI

Anyway, I'm a designer and I had to "troubleshoot" something for an engineer at another company, it was a Cisco only shop for a major "medical industry" you guys want to know what he disagreed with me on? and i was right btw and his mistake cost me hours and wasted my time

This guy is supposed to be my peer, we're essentially tier 3/responsible for WAN of every Air Force base.
I think some people really just were never taught to think critically, and if the steps aren't laid out for them, then they don't know what to do.

> you guys want to know what he disagreed with me on?
Probably an interface being plugged in or some shit. Can't tell you how many calls we've gotten where the bases have a network down, and it turns out some brainlet pulled the WAN cable.

because it's a monopoly market just like Intel

>I think some people really just were never taught to think critically
a majority of the population actively tries to avoid thinking critically, or learning how to do so.

>I think some people really just were never taught to think critically, and if the steps aren't laid out for them, then they don't know what to do.
Sorry, did I mention I'm a designer? I write the documentation and steps people have to follow

NOBODY can read anymore, step by step, just follow it

>Probably an interface being plugged in or some shit. Can't tell you how many calls we've gotten where the bases have a network down, and it turns out some brainlet pulled the WAN cable.
Medical company network engineers
They need to connect to us and there is a routing issue, I'm explaining to them their routes are wrong and not working. they disagree with me for like a week, I get pissed, Tell our PM i need a call with every engineer from that company who is on this project to review their configurations

they cant find anything, i join webex, i look at their configs, we dont manage their "cisco routers, firewalls, switches, but i need this shit to work for our piece"

Stupid fucks cant even add a static route properly and they basically set a static route back into another switch to drop all traffic and they disagreed with me
I told them just put the config in place and I know it will work...

>Guess who solved an issue on the customers equipment
They should have paid me for that shit, also they dont know anything about EIGRP or OSPF

>They're network engineers

I work at a newly built manufacturing facility, and we use all Cisco networking. They actually have 4G LTE routers, and apparently Cisco decided to make it so you can only use Verizon with them. Fantastic.

Cisco TAC R&S guy here, this is pretty much our everyday job, most of cases are about horrible network planning/design or bad practices. There are people out there that still have issues with the 3way handshake but have a "Senior Network Engineer" title under their signatures, quite hilarious.

Do you think the CCNP is worth it?

>Proof? Have a Cisco switch that I bought from a random person and I can use 10Gbps just fine without any "license".
Because they already applied the license to the hardware when you bought it. Here's your proof: cdw.com/product/cisco-upgrade-from-5-gbps-to-10gbps-license/3602596

Their brains just can't handle it in many cases. If I go into too much technical detail with our helpdesk manager his brain goes into vapor lock exactly like the old BOFH stories.
>BZZT
>echo "concussed wildebeest" > /sys/class/face/expression
>DUMMY MODE ENGAGE

But I try not to do that because he's a really nice guy and good at what he does. He's just not capable of going much further.

Now some of his pimply minions, on the other hand, totally have it coming.

For job hunting purposes, it is quite useful.

To actually learn something useful, not that much nowadays, SWITCH test is full of "did you know that the maximum buffer size for the DAI logging is 1024?" and ROUTE is still using Frame Relay as reference for all the NBMA scenarios, DMVPN should be definitely more present. Multicast is no longer a requirement and holy shit people know nothing about multicast nowadays.

Customers that don't listen are literally the worst.
That is the one thing of being in the military, I can shit down on people who give us issues.

I think the larger problem is that the "training" they send IT troops through is useless. We basically just get a blank military guy, not someone trained up on how switching and routing works.

We had a congestion issue with one of our dataceneters, queue some GS-13 (high up) pajeet "Network Engineer" spamming the conference call with nonsensical shit and basically suggesting that we just start blocking traffic to fix the congestion.

>Muh market segmentation

Fuck off shill.

Meanwhile whitebox 10G switches are steadily dropping in price, and Linux based OSes for them are free. Linux and FreeBSD can saturate 2x10Gbps for routing, NAT, firewall, etc. on regular old x86. The only market segment still dominated by the ASIC shops is core routing.

is the intro stuff for Juniper basically network+ stuff?
already got cisco training and experience with it, its god awful and we have several switches that just bricked on us simply because of firmware updates or being turned off never to return

kinda hoping I can get into a place sometime in the future where I can avoid cisco but I dont know how realistic that is

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Have you tried using the alternatives?
The only one that is decent is Juniper
We just replaced almost everything where I work with Aruba garbage and had 2 of our 5 Network engineers quit within a month
Aruba is pain

>Cumulus doesn’t have a cheap licensing option for home lab use. Fuck that VX shit
>REEEEEEEE

Is there a software company that doesn't give shit to students for greatly reduced price?

MATLAB will curse engineering forever because every school uses it, even though Mathematica, and hell, free python tools are way better.

just move to ubiquiti

only lockin is on their security cameras/software

tfw 19 year old zoomer who only got ccna because i need a decent paying job in tech asap and it only takes like 6months

> 6 months
> not two days with a test dump.

>boomers
God, I wish you kids would get off the internet. Go outside and play

seriously dont care how long it took others to get, i knew most of the shit by week3 but didnt have enough money to keep repeating the test so i just got help from my prof and studied not to fail

im also i imagine a nobody with no education who just got it randomly is less likely to be hired then a person who studied it with a advanced diploma/bachelors and has his professor who can give a good refference for his punctuality and skill

What is Juniper networks?

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It doesn't say anything about boomers in OPs post.

>tfw i have to memorize cisco, allied telesis, hpe, d-link and huawei commands in order to be able to do things at work
I really wish we had a single vendor network.

>Don't really have a desire to stay in and die for Israel.
>not commiting the ultimate sacrifice for your overlords
are you even real american?

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When you're in the military they literally tell you in which intervals you have to press to get your turd out. Why do you think somebody who was drilled into that routine choses to research by himself?

Fucking Allies Telesis.
When my college build their new computer block they sold out to AT hard. For the final year networking paper some guy from AT came in and they were saying how if we passed the paper we would get some certificate drom AT as well, never fucking did.

So is "network engineer" still a good career choice, or should I go for different fields?

still good, but the networking field is evolving and you need to evolve with it. don't learn just how packets move from A to B, grab some python skills to go along with it and use those APIs.

also from what i see almost every IT discipline is oversaturated in the US because of the silicon valley meme, networking included.
i'm in europe and we're starved for network engineers, especially network security (just configuring firewalls for customers in our case).

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Extreme Networks. We use their equipment and it's pretty nice.