Developing our Engineers

At Opticore, we pride ourselves on working with the best network engineers in the business, and we work hard to ensure that they are always learning and growing. One element of this is our monthly Tech Updates, where staff are invited to join us in sharing knowledge, learning about new technology and catching up with people.

Our May 2023 Tech Update involved challenging our engineers with some core networking problems, and seeing if they could work together to fix them.

The Challenge

Over the last few years, the network world has been changing, with software-defined networking, network automation and cloud becoming more and more prevalent and starting to become the norm.

While Opticore’s skills and expertise in these areas are well established, we always remember that core networking is the foundation on which all of these technologies are built.

A lack of understanding of core networking makes understanding next-generation network tech much harder. And if you can’t get your head around it, it’s really difficult to deploy and troubleshoot it.

Ensuring our engineers continue to foster their core networking skills means that they can not only deliver the new networking technologies, but also maintain a key understanding of the protocols on which they are built.

The Task

During this Tech Update our engineers spent some time honing and developing their troubleshooting skills by fixing the network. Working in small teams, the engineers collaborated to resolve several physical, layer-2, layer-3 and routing issues to get the network working as designed.

Under the watchful eye of a couple of our Technical Assurance engineers, there to provide guidance and advice where needed, the teams vied to be the first to solve all the issues.

Although our Technical Assurance lead had great fun putting the labs together, what he really enjoyed watching the teams come together to work through the problems and see them solve some of the more fiendish issues. It was fantastic to see more senior engineers guiding and supporting the others, not only around the tech itself but also in being methodical in their troubleshooting approach. This is invaluable when troubleshooting any kind of issue for real.

Final Thoughts

New technology is here to stay, but making sure we continue to have a strong understanding of the core networking technologies is vital to our ability to deliver outstanding service to our customers.

And what’s more fun for an engineer than getting together with a bunch of like-minded people to see who can fix things the fastest?