Fyi, Today is my last day at TelstraClear, I'm moving down country to a less stressful life without pagers and multi-gigabit routers ( but plenty of tasty snapper ) . The primary TelstraClear wholesale network engineers will now be Tim Harman and Matt Camp in Auckland with Mark Seward and Sid Jones in wellington.
It's interesting infact that this is happenning more and more. Now that I am unemployed, and not having much luck with finding work I am personally thinking of enrolling in university to finally make something of myself (in the traditional sense) after dropping out of high school to be a geek. I know of at least one other engineer who is now attending university and one other that is thinking of leaving his job to finish his degree. I also know at least one person (other than Tony) who has moved "down country" for the better life style (and dare I say cheaper housing prices) offered by a rural setting. I think we might have what you would call "a trend" taking place here. Has the downturn finally affected the real geeks or is it simply the tie-wearing corpo-drones with cisco qualifications pushing us out of the industry that we created? Is it really that slow in the market? I'm interested your opinions.
In the 6 years I've been in the ISP/Telco industry I have seen the New Zealand Internet grow from 64k links and 14.4 modems to 2.5gigabit links and broadband. The reliability and professionalism has also taken a quantum leap, and I think it is important for everyone to stop occasionally and appreciate how far we ( as an industry ) really come.
Indeed. It seems like a lot has happenned since we had to manually
reset hundreds of external modems on shelves every morning.
I do have to say that I am really proud of the network engineers in this
country because even as the industry becomes more and more corporate
oriented the personalities on this list and their cohorts have created a
very real feeling of friendship and camaraderie that has made this a
great industry to work in.
--
James Tyson