Talked to a co-worker of mine who use to be a senior network engineer but switched to the automation team. He tried to tell me that I should waste less time on pursuing networking certifications and more time into coding for automation. He believes the role will be redefined to the point where we wont't be logging in via command line anymore. That being said until i can see someone run code that can diagnose an issue and fix it without human intervention besides just clicking a button I would highly disagree with his statement. The reason is simple you still need the knowledge of the technologies in today's age in order to automate it. Some people are under the assumption where a automation engineer can come in and code ridiculous scripts that can diagnose and fix BGP issues itself. My rebuttal to that was that how can someone who has no routing experience tell a script where to look for the root cause of a BGP issue and fix it with the click of a button? While I do think automation will make greater changes in our industry, the people who will be doing that work is us (Network Engineers). If anything, automation will redefine the role and be an added skill set needed, but will not take our jobs away from us. You can even make the argument that more jobs will be created because of it. Whose going to fix that script when it breaks? I've been an engineer since I was 19 and I am now 21 and although automation has made my job duties easier, I still get calls to investigate MPLS, routing issues, implementations, etc. What are you guys' thoughts for our role going forward for the next 10 years? Do you think high end certifications like CCIEs, JNCIEs, etc will be a thing in the past/useless?
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