I've always heard HFTs pay extremely well, but the places are extremely toxic.
I would appreciate some perspectives from people who have or currently work there on how true this is.
How much they pay? What makes the environments toxic?
What's the largest switch stack you ran into in the wild? How was it cabled up and managed?
I came across this interesting Arista article claiming to support up to 48 switches in a stacked topology (ring or spine leaf)
https://blogs.arista.com/blog/swag
Now, every vendor has their own approach to handling the control plane, I get it, but I dont understand in what scenario where combining all these switches into one logical management plane across multiple IDFs would make sense.
I've dug deep into my soul to try and find an answer, and the only thing I can think of is some very large customer wrote them a very large check and they made it happen or they just got sick of losing to Cisco, HPE, and Juniper on every campus stacking deal.
This whole single IP argument seems kinda flimsy too. If I'm getting charged per IP for my monitoring solution, and the consolidation of a few IPs is going to be material, I'm looking at new monitoring stack.
AI is great at writing bespoke tools and helping network engineers get stuff done, but the amount of "look at me and this cool tool I built" syndrome on LinkedIn is just cringe.
You have network engineers who previously didn't know the first thing about coding now acting like everyone can be a full stack developer.
I use AI web apps to help me get stuff done, but I'm not sitting here pumping my chest and flaunting some shitty application that I prompted into existence just for some fake internet points.
Wish the AI hype would just die already.
I'm seriously considering quitting technology all together or at least taking a break/technology adjacent job until the hype dies down for the next couple of years. I've been through several different hype cycles, but this has been the worst by far.
I work for a large networking vendor and I have to constantly hear about how I have to be on the look out for AI deals. I don't live in silicon valley where everyone is stamping out data centers every other day. Combine that with the non stop AI fear mongering and this shit just gets exhausting even if you drown out the noise.
Most customers (or places) don't have an AI use case that justifies building out dedicated AI infrastructure or have the staffing with the technical know how to even manage this infrastructure.