Who needs a network engineer?

A post and subsequent comments over on GigaOM is debating the merits of having a network engineer on the staff of a Web 2.0 company. The post’s author, Allan Leinwand, says a Web 2.0er recently told him that connecting to the Internet was like connecting to the electrical grid – you don’t need a electrical engineering degree for the latter and you don’t need a network engineer for the former. Um, not so fast. Here at NW, the servers that you’re reading this blog post on are at a co-location facility. Had we just allowed the third-party to manage our systems, we may not have discovered a peering issue that was causing a decrease in site performance. Maybe these Web 2.0ers need to think a little more deeply about the plumbing side of the Web instead of just trying to impress their peers with the latest AJAX script.