It always amazes me in-depth HN gets on pretty much any subject, yet the most basic cursory network page gets massive response
Is there simply a total lack of understanding of how networks work in the tech community?
Is there simply a total lack of understanding of how networks work in the tech community?
A couple years ago I was bringing a Java programmer up to speed on some C code just to learn they had no idea what a call stack was or how it worked. They were familiar with the stack as a data structure, but had no idea how a CPU worked or that it has a stack pointer register.
As long as the abstractions don't leak, I guess everything is fine. I mean, I can't really tell you at a physics level exactly how semiconductors work. At best I can hand wave an explanation.
That said, the lack of even hand waving knowledge about how the internet works among professionals who use it every day continues to surprise me.
You can do a lot without knowing anything about routing, and very little about protocols. And all those network people always seem grumpy, why learn about it if you don't want to be grumpy. ;p
Edit to add: how networking works in reality and how networking works in books and coursework tends to be quite different as well. GeoDNS and Anycast IP are a big conceptual jump for people who only understood networks from coursework. There's also a common assumption that routing protocols favor least distance routing which is certainly not the case. I may be obsessed with path MTU problems, but that's a real hard concept to explain to experienced tech people with slim networking knowledge. Also, a lot of people seem to believe the OSI model is fact and not a model of the world; it's not unuseful, but there's lots of hardware and software that operates at more than one OSI layer simultaneously and people stuck on a rigid model can have an incorrect view of the world which impedes their problem solving.
Why would it be any different if you're developing a CRUD application with a bunch of SREs / datacenter engineers on the line? They are very good at abstracting networking away from software engineers.
The difference between networking and programming is when you call a function it will actually do what you say, every time. In a network you can waste hours and get absolutely nowhere.
I've been in IT and software for 25 years at various levels both as a job and a hobby, and I can confidently say that networking is the biggest waste of time, most frustrating, and least rewarding aspect of working with computers. No matter what I try to set up, it never, I mean never works the way I want it to. And I've done plenty of projects to get a healthy sampling, some of them include NFS/CIFS, RDP, DHCPD+PXE, VPN, IPFW, BIND, iptables, SMTP/IMAP. Working with anything networking is absolute hell. Every single time. Guaranteed.
The hardest part of configuring the services you list is not the networking, but all the non-networking topics you need to be familiar with: zone file syntax; cipher suite selection; OS-specific security policy and permissions models; PKI administration; PXE ROM peculiarities, etc.
Once you're confident with arp, addressing/subnetting, routing tables, and a few other tools like netstat and `dig` you can quickly eliminate the network as the cause of the issue and focus on grokking the application itself.
When I went back to big tech it really helped me out just knowing basic things about networking. For example, my manager joked that people should have to take an intro to DNS as part of their on-boarding to big tech.
I don't fault people for not knowing either, it was just never really a priority and the point was you shouldn't have to care. You should become an expert in your business domain and spend time solving business problems. Whether or not that was the right approach is up for debate though.