Hacker News Reader

When it works, it's great. When you have to 'prove' a problem isn't yours, and you send tcpdump files to the developer and partner company's networking team showing how the remote firewall is rejecting the packets, and neither of the recipients knows how a packet syn-ack sequence should work, or what this Wireshark tool is, it's sad.

View on HN

That knowledge is becoming increasingly low level though as we build further abstractions over it. If you're working on a network you probably aught to know how TCP works, or at least know how to use Wireshark and a reference. If you're trying to spin up a simple webapp on AWS, you can pretty much stop thinking about firewalls and networking once you set up security groups/NACLs/policies/etc and confirm you can hit whatever is behind them. With new trends like immutable infrastructure coming into vogue, I'd even argue that system administration altogether is becoming a more niche skillset.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com