From the Field

Michael Morris

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Routing and Switching is Easy.....come on!

By michaeljmorris on Mon, 07/16/07 - 9:04pm.

I was reading an article the other day about "The Skills that Reap Pay Premiums". As a good engineer, I always want to know how much I should be making. ;-)

I was shocked by this quote:

Zeus Kerravala, vice president and global practice leader at Yankee Group, describes this as supply and demand, Internet-style. "Things hard to do before, like setting up a switching and routing network, are easy today and don't command so high a salary as things that are new today and harder to do," he says.

Is Mr. Kerravala serious? Cisco may want us to believe routing and switching is getting easier, but that is far from the truth. A few years ago you may have had a network running a single routing protocol with a simple layer-2 data center. Today, you have MPLS, BGP (both internally and with carriers), dual-home servers, virtualization, load balancing, security devices and QoS everywhere. Routing and Switching is constantly getting more complex, requiring more qualified and experienced engineers.

Now, I will admit, the market is trying to take care of this problem. Thousands are getting into networking and there have been 6700 more CCIEs since I passed 4 years ago (not all, but most R&S). So supply is definitely rising, but so is demand. Experience is becoming more and more important. That's just proof that R&S is not getting easier, but harder. If it was easier it would be a quantity issue. Today, do you want quantity or quality?

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About From the Field

Michael Morris is a communications engineering manager at a $3-billion high-tech company. His background is in enterprise WANs working with telcos and developing large-scale routing designs. He has worked on networks at government and corporate organizations, including networks at two Fortune 10 companies. In his current role, he leads a team of 10 engineers responsible for large-scale IT networking projects and architectural standards for data networks, storage area networks, IP telephony, contact centers, and security. Michael is CCIE #11733 and recently became one of the first three Cisco Certified Design Experts (CCDE) ever (#20080002). He has 11 years experience in networking and communications, including four years as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army. He has a bachelor's degree in MIS from the University at Buffalo and is working on his MBA from NC State University. In 2008, he was awarded the Network Professional Association (NPA) Professional Excellence and Innovation Award for his work on network architecture, templates and enterprise MPLS design.

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