UNDERSTANDING FUNDAMENTALS IS THE TRUE SKILL IN NETWORK ENGINEERING
In our field, it is very easy to become comfortable with a single vendor. Many engineers grow confident with one specific CLI and begin to associate their knowledge with that vendor’s syntax. They can navigate Juniper, Cisco, Arista or even Mikrotik with ease, yet at the same time they often skip the effort of truly understanding how a protocol behaves or why an architecture works the way it does.
The moment an engineer steps into a multivendor environment, everything changes. They can no longer rely on muscle memory or vendor specific shortcuts. They need to understand the core ideas behind routing, switching and transport. They begin to focus on fundamentals such as how a protocol forms adjacencies, how a control plane converges or how an encapsulation behaves in a certain topology. This deeper understanding allows them to work confidently on any platform because they finally see the technology rather than the commands.
At ITcare we invest a great deal of time in teaching exactly these fundamentals. Our philosophy is simple. When you truly understand the basics, troubleshooting becomes easier, design choices become clearer and the CLI becomes nothing more than the way you express what you already know. Any engineer can learn a syntax by using the question mark. Only a good engineer understands what happens behind it.
To all network engineers reading this, take time to master the foundations before you dive into advanced technologies. Going deep into EVPN, VxLAN or MPLS without strong fundamentals creates gaps that eventually slow you down. Strong basics will always carry you further than any vendor specific command.
At ITcare we see this every day, and we are proud to build a team that thinks in protocols, architectures and design principles, not in CLIs.
