Network/Telecom Engineer least stressful job?
 

Oh Really!?!?

Least stressful jobs - Telecommunications Network Engineer (6) - Money Magazine
Apparently, I have a very low stress job.

Sure until your data center goes down for some unknown reason and you realize you've got tens of thousands of people who are looking for the services that just went down. or your VoIP project gets bumped up 6 months and suddenly you've got 1000 switches to reconfigure in the next 2 weeks. Not that I've ever exprienced that or anything, Ohh wait that was just this week

Its extremely stressful! Damn, I just knocked my coffee all over my desk with my foot!;)

It's mostly long periods of boredom with the rare occasional rip your hair out moments of panic.

I once spent a month at Western Digital's corp HQ at Irvine Center. We'd arrive in the morning and start the countdown for lunch. After lunch we'd start the countdown for quittin' time. It was horrible.

Honestly, if one of the desktop guys came in and said that someone had an IP address conflict and they needed us to track down the other MAC address, we'd fight over it and who ever lost would watch over the winner's shoulder. It was that boring. We'd often take 2 hour lunchs.

Fortunately, most of my jobs have been places that were constantly busy. I started by working at the Cisco TAC, so you never really see exactly the same thing twice. Then I spent a year travelling for Sprint, then after getting laid off in 2001 back to the TAC to learn security, NMS and VoIP. After that I went to a service provider that provided VOIP and Data over satellite (600-800ms ping times) all over the world (mostly the oil industry, but also Halliburton). Now I work for an energy company. We've had non-stop projects since I started. I worked for a year as an hourly contractor working 55-60hrs per week ($$$) and now I've been permanent for about 9 months, so I'm down to 45 or 50 hrs per week.

I actually have enjoyed it. It can be stressful, but not so much that I wonder when the heart attack is coming.

WTF? I was an network engineer for 12 years (still am I suppose). Yeah, there could be periods of relative calm, but there could also be times (many) of sheer panic. You've got e-mail/telephone/fax server/etc...down, and you turn around, and there is the president of the company and the entire sales staff looking at you through the glass of the sever room looking very unhappy. Yeah, no stress....pffffftttt!

Ohhh, how about having a natural gas fired generator backing up your UPS which is fed by local power company then feeds the entire worldwide HQ and central data centers clean regulated redundant power. You sleep really well until that morning that you get the call at 3 am that the building is dead.

Your just happy you're not the guy who left the UPS's modem line dangling next to the jack unplugged so when a couple of guys are in the room doing work in the ceiling and leave a ceiling tile covering the exhaust fan on the UPS causing it to overheat and frantically try to page someone which fails (see modem line issue) for so long that it shuts itself down before it burns out in turn killing everything in the building in one shot.

Yeah, least stressful my butt.

When well staffed, networks jobs can be comfortable but more often than not we're on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It's great.

Yeah right, I have yet to meet a network engineer that is not stressed at least one a day. It's always "prove it's not a network problem"....

I've been Consulting for 13 years, and worked in IT for 13 more before that and I have to say I don't get rattle too much (kids make me way more stressed). I was on a job once at a gas plant, and was told "for each hour over your change window it will cost us 1 million dollars per hour you know"; needless to say that was a little stressful.

Geez where does a Porn director rate.....? :D

Cisco TAC...hey you were the English speaking guy I spoke to ;)

Hahah, yeah, that's it. And even after you've proven it and they fixed it, they often still try to bring the network into it.

The first time I was on the TAC was before they opened Mexico, India and the Philippines. Still, in Houston, RTP and San Jose, there were lots of Asians and Pakistanis.

The second time I was on the TAC was when they opened Mexico, etc.... I was working one weekend. The initial phone people called us. Apparently a guy had gotten sent to Mexico and just couldn't understand them because of the accent so he called back asking for a native English speaker with no accent. They'd initially called San Jose, but the Paki guy that answered the phone said that they didn't have any native English speakers there, so they called us in Houston. The guy that we put him on the phone with had the last name Nguyen. His first name was just as Vietnamese as his last. I thought that was hilarious that the "native English speaker" that we had for the guy seemed far from it based on name and appearance. He didn't have an accent though so it worked out well. I was discussing it with him afterward and he said "it's no big deal, I'm a banana, yellow on the outside and white on the inside."

No way, I have three TAC's open right now, and I have to work 8-5 and 10-2 am most days. Stupid 3120's I own are being blamed for every outage that happens these days. I can't wait until we start the Nexus retrofit, and the UCS deployment next month, I'm guessing everything will be a "network related issue."

We just recently replaced a bunch of OLD 3500XL series switches at remote sites with new switches. We had one of the remote sites call in after about a week:

"the phones and PCs in location X and Y haven't worked since the guys came out and did some work!"

The funny thing is, we not only had photos of the equipment working before the guys left, but we had the equipment monitored, and we were able to show the guys at the remote that the equipment had worked fine for almost a week after our guys left the site, and it had gone down one morning. "So, what did you guys do?" was my question. I never got an answer to that, but they'd apparently screwed with the fiber connections. They'd somehow managed to plug the LC connectors in backwards. Funny how quiet they get when it's something that they did.

AH, fiber plugged in wrong - that means someone had to unplug it. Did you have UDLD and loopguard turned on? =-)

It's always the network and if there is a firewall in there within 1000 miles of the installation - it's probably the firewall's fault.

I've gotten so good at reading packet captures that I can make them say anything I want them to say.

Im on the electrical engineering side of telecom. I supply the power distribution to all the network stuff. When my stuff fails, EVERYTHING fails!

I'm not an engineer. Just an installer.

We had that on Wednesday. There really should be a large sign on the PDU breaker. "IF YOU THROW THIS SWITCH YOU WILL GET FIRED!!":(

Hah! So true, sadly, from time to time, they're right, and that 5% of the time reinforces it. :rolleyes:

It only takes once ever for it to be any network component ever and from that moment on - forever - it is always that.

'Well, last time we had this problem (10 years ago) it was the whosawhatzit so it must be that again.'

Sitting on a network outage right now.... Only the network is up.

When I decide enough is enough and its time to move on from this line of work I think I will just pull every card out of the front end of whatever switch I happen to be near. Then I will call it in and say "I think we are having an outage"

LOL

OK seriously, if It wouldn't land me in jail... I might.

When I did this work, I thought it was very stressful...

My recent hell:

http://www.fugly.com/media/IMAGES/Fu...ork_closet.jpg

Although not the actual "closet" I was working in, it was located in the only bathroom in a small real estate office. And...every 30 mins., one of the geezer agents decided they had to go and would blow out their morning coffee/donuts/bratwurst.

Took me forever to set everything up as I refused to re-enter until 30 mins. had passed after each bathroom break.

Hahahah, LMAO. Isn't that always the way.

We have server folks and application folks, and they open tickets with us all of the time. "Can't xxx to server" or "server xxx can't talk to server yyy"

You can ping the servers, and you can remote desktop into the servers and/or telnet to/from the servers. Or, the other half of the time it turns out some service on the servers stopped and they have to restart the server or bounce the box.

Or, my favorite, "the network is down, because we can't get to the 1 server in the network of 300 that are all sitting in the same room", or these days, on the same damn VMWare box. That's the one that I like, 10 servers all on one piece of hardware, 9 of the servers work fine, but the network is down because the one isn't talking.

Funny, they never check that crap before they open the ticket.

When I worked on the TAC, we would occasionally get cases where someone had gotten fired and erased a bunch of configs before they left. Of course, in the instances where someone who's been fired has the opportunity to do that, it's also the case where there are no config backups or documentation, so they are usually screwed.

One of my other favorites, a T1 to a remote site goes down. Some guy's got a server that gets real time data from the site. He calls up to say he can't get his data.

Me: They've got bad storms and flooding in the area, the circuit is down, I've opened a ticket with the telco to fix the circuit. They are sending a guy out to fix it.

Them: When will it be fixed?

Me: I don't know, whenever they get it fixed. Because of the storms in the area, all of the technicians are working on similar issues throughout the entire region. They may have to wait for flooding to subside. It could be 15 minutes or a day and a half. Unfortunately, I just don't know.

Them: So when do you think it might be fixed?

Me: I really couldn't say

Them: So do you think it'll be working again soon?

Me: It could be, or it could be tomorrow. They can't even tell me.

Them: But they'll probably get it fixed pretty fast, right?

Me: :eek: :confused: :mad: :(

My worst wasn't that bad, but it was pretty appalling. I went to a remote unmanned location in Ogden Utah. They had 10-15 Cisco AS5300s, a 5509, and a couple of smaller devices in a room that was about 10'x10'. When I opened the door, I was hit by air that must have been piped in from Arizona in Aug. I left the door open and went inside. There was one of those outdoor thermometers bolted to one of the racks. It was showing 130° in the room. There was an oscillating fan in the room swirling the hot air all around. I noticed that there was a drop ceiling, so I figured I'd pop a couple of the tiles out and let the heat up into the ceiling. I popped a tile out and discovered that there was a cement ceiling 6" above the drop ceiling. The room was completely sealed.

I was working for one of the local cable companies for a while and we were having some unusually significant rain (for LA).

One of the hubs was underground and a few days prior to the rain some roadwork had been done.

Apparently they damaged something in the roadwork right above the switch and the water poured down on it.

Needless to say the hub went completely down. It had been flooded by a couple of feet of water. Most of the hardware was mounted higher than that but the water came in right on top of the switch.

When they dried the place out I had to go in there and fix it. I powered on the switch AND IT CAME BACK UP!

I hated that hub.

Yea, that's a good one, 50 virtual guests on the same vswitch, 49 of them work fine. Oh yea, and this particular traffic isn't leaving the vswitch since it's between two hosts on the same damn vswitch. GENIUS!

Very stressful.
Outsourcing is huge in this industry and workload is increasing all the time. Doing more with less, and not sure your job will be eliminated is a constrant stress in telecom and even more in wireless.
You also have to keep up with engineering tools, and technologies so this is a never ending requirement to increase your skills.

Not like being a teacher of one subject in school: latin, english or algregra. This cannot be stressful since you are teaching the same thing year after year after year...
Now if you teach an ever changing subject, that must be demanding....

No kidding, take a look at my outsourcing thread. My company has been reviewing outsourcing their infrastructure groups over the last year. It was supposed to be either done or not in October but got pushed back for a board vote in November.

In the mean time, they pretty much aren't offering any retention packages to speak of. HR's response to that idea was 'if they think they can find a better job in this economy - maybe they should take it.' Now almost all of our DBAs have quit, a third of our systems engineering team has left and we're down to a couple of network engineers (myself included). The only reason I've stayed is because of some 'plans b' I have in the works. Those however are coming to a head and I'm going to have to make a choice in a couple of weeks I'm sure.