Greetings programs!

I believe it’s a safe assumption that the current crop of budding network engineers are being indoctrinated with the notion that if they don’t 100% automate all the things, their jobs and careers will be at risk. My friend Daniel Dibb deserves ample credit for repeatedly asking the question “What happens when we subsequently end up with a generation of automation engineers who don’t understand networking?”.

Yesterday morning I was drinking coffee, scrolling through my Twitter feed, when I came across a thread where Marko Milivojević posted a link to a youtube video of American Airlines Captain Warren Van Der Burgh, delivering a talk in 1997 called Children of the Magenta Line. The context is lessons learned from a rash of airline crashes caused by flight crews becoming too dependent on automation.

If you are an infrastructure engineer, or you manage infrastructure engineers, this video is worth 25 minutes of your time.

There are two quotes that stand out from this Video:

• We are Pilots and Captains, not Automation Managers
• You’ve got to pick the appropriate level of automation for the task at hand

In googling the name of the video, I came across this article which had a quote from William Langewiesche which also illustrates a fundamental problem with over reliance on automation:

“We appear to be locked into a cycle in which automation begets the erosion of skills or the lack of skills in the first place and this then begets more automation.”

Let’s learn from the Airline industry and not repeat their mistakes.

Have a good one, and I’ll see you around.

-s