Training network engineers to code, not vice versa

Did any of you read the Light Reading link in yesterday’s post about Google creating automated network operations services? If you haven’t, it’s well worth a read.

If you did, then you may’ve also noticed a reference to Finland’s Elisa selling its automation smarts to other telcos. This is another interesting business model disruption for the OSS market, although I’ll reserve judgement on how disruptive it will be until Elisa sells to a few more operators.

What did catch my eye in the Elisa article (again by Light Reading’s Iain Morris), is this paragraph:
Automation has not been hassle-free for Elisa. Instilling a software culture throughout the organization has been a challenge, acknowledges [Kirsi] Valtari. Rather than recruiting software expertise, Elisa concentrated on retraining the people it already had. During internal training courses, network engineers have been taught to code in Python, a popular programming language, and to write algorithms for a self-optimizing network (or SON). “The idea was to get engineers who were previously doing manual optimization to think about automating it,” says Valtari. “These people understand network problems and so it is a win-win outcome to go down this route.”.

It provides a really interesting perspective on this diagram below (from a 2014 post about the ideal skill-set for the future of networking)

There is an undoubted increase in the level of network / IT overlap (eg SDN). Most operators appear to be taking the path of hiring for IT and hoping they’ll grow to understand networks. Elisa is going the opposite way and training their network engineers to code.

With either path, if they then train their multi-talented engineers to understand the business (the red intersect), then they’ll have OSS experts on their hands right folks?? 😉

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