The Opener
This week I posted a video asking who owns the internet. Short answer: nobody.
It started as government projects. ARPANET got so busy that the National Science Foundation built a bigger backbone, NSFNET, and everything hung off it. ARPANET was retired, and in April 1995, NSFNET was shut off too. What replaced it was thousands of private companies, each running its own network, agreeing to hand traffic to each other at exchange points and over direct links.
One commenter put it better than I did: getting competitors to voluntarily connect to each other, using open protocols, is an amazing business achievement. Honestly, it’s kind of amazing it works at all.
Here’s the part I want you to sit with. Every one of those thousands of networks has people running it. ISPs, cloud providers, universities, hospitals, the company down the street. None of them run themselves.
Which brings me to the question I promised to answer last issue: is networking headed where software jobs went?
The Deep Dive: Is networking headed where software went?
A viewer asked whether this field is as bleak as software engineering feels right now. I don’t have a course to sell you, so I have no reason to tell you it’s great or that it’s doomed. Here are the numbers, then what I think they mean.
What happened to software
Software developer postings on Indeed were still about 26% below their February 2020 level as of mid-August, according to Indeed Hiring Lab. They bottomed out in May 2025 and have been climbing since. So the bleak feeling was real. It’s just not the whole story anymore.
What the numbers say about networking
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for 2025 to 2035 split networking in two:
Network and systems administrators: down 4%. The reasons BLS gives: DevOps teams are absorbing some of the work, companies are buying networks as a service, and admins are automating routine tasks. There are still about 13,400 openings a year, all from people retiring or leaving the field.
Network architects: up 8%, about 9,600 openings a year, median pay $134,050. The reason: companies keep building networks, and the ones adopting AI need their infrastructure upgraded.
For comparison, software developers are projected to grow 10%. So no, networking isn’t a magic safe zone. Software is actually projected to grow faster.
The short-term picture is better than the vibe. CompTIA’s October numbers put tech unemployment at 2.8%, against 4.1% overall, with active tech job postings up 18.5% from a year ago.
What I think it means for you
Look at why the admin number is shrinking. It isn’t because networks are going away. It’s because the repetitive part of the job, adding the VLAN and resetting the port by hand, is getting automated or handed to a provider. The part that’s growing is the part where someone has to understand the whole system and own the outcome: design, troubleshooting across layers, security, and building new infrastructure.
The bottom rung is still the hard part, in every corner of IT. Help desk is still the door in, and it’s crowded. That hasn’t changed.
But if you’re studying to be the person who knows why the network is built the way it is, and not just the person who types the commands, the numbers are on your side.
The takeaway: this week, pull up five real network job postings near you: an admin role, an engineer role, and a data center role if there are any. Write down every skill that shows up in at least three of them. That’s your study list. Not mine, not a course’s. The market’s.
The Week in Networking
Outlook went down for users worldwide on Thursday and stayed down for more than 12 hours, with Teams and Copilot also disrupted. Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack and pointed to “an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade.”
Why it matters: Even one of the most automated networks on the planet gets bitten by a change. Change management is a skill, and it’s one people get hired for.
CISA added a flaw in Cisco BroadWorks, a calling platform phone carriers run, to its list of actively exploited vulnerabilities this week. According to Malbear Labs, a Chinese-speaking group used an autonomous AI hacking tool to go after a European telecom provider and its customers with it.
Why it matters: The fix had been out for almost three months. Attackers using AI move faster, which makes the gap between “patch released” and “patch installed” the dangerous part.
Tech unemployment fell to 2.8%, new tech job postings were up 22% from last October, and infrastructure architects were one of the roles with double-digit gains.
Why it matters: It’s one month of data, not a trend you can bank on. But it lines up with what the Deep Dive found: infrastructure work is getting hired for.
Reader Question
“Can AI replace a network engineer? Give me an honest answer.”
From a YouTube comment on my day in the life video.
Honest answer: it can replace some of the tasks. It can’t replace the job.
AI is already useful for a first draft of a config, explaining output you don’t understand, and digging through a pile of logs. A viewer on my data center video made a great point: networks generate more logs than any human has time to read, and AI can watch them for patterns. They also said they want AI to report and suggest, not make changes on its own. I agree.
Here’s what it can’t do. It can’t be accountable. Remember the trunk command from last issue, where one missing word took down three VLANs? An AI can hand you a command that looks just as right and is just as wrong. Someone has to know the network well enough to catch it before they hit Enter, and someone has to own it at 2 a.m. when it breaks anyway.
And look at this week’s news. Attackers are already using AI against networks. That doesn’t mean fewer people defending them.
So use it. Get good at it. Just don’t let it be the only one in the room who understands what the network is doing.
The Close
Next week: a viewer asked which cert actually matters after the CCNA if you want to work in data centers. I’ll walk through what those jobs actually ask for.
If you do the five-postings exercise, bring what you found to The Network Node, my free Discord. Still no course, still nothing to sell.
Short versions all week on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Got a question for next week’s Reader Question? Hit reply.
The Weekly Packet by Kevin Nanns
Enterprise network architect. Content creator. adjacentnode.com