Excellent. My background is computer engineering who enrolled shit load of computer network classes, interned for a Cisco gold partner, but then switched to software development. At some points my network engineers friends (and hardware stuff engineers) turned into software development, mostly web development.
I'd like to add one more factor here. It's transferable knowledge AND cheap cost of building your own business. When I was an intern to install and config a bunch of switches, routers, firewalls, and realized a switch is so expensive that I wouldn't be able to build my own business like this. So I got into software development job. It's way easier and also able to do side software project. IaaS or PaaS is so cheap, no needs to mess with data center myself.
Work for X for a decade and open your own X business is not applicable to semiconductor job.
starting a networking company (except consulting) is extremely hard.
Building an ISP is even harder and requires insane amounts of money.
Most of my friends in the network engineering field either work at companies that are large/complex enough to have challenging environments with proper networking hardware, or work as a freelance consultant for said companies.
The problem with career growth in network engineering is that, to grow in technical skills, usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge. Not a lot of those companies exist.
Also, making a screw up in suchs an environment is far more detrimental than in a small network, because of the increased scale/complexity of the network.
> usually larger networks are require to get access to gear and systems that can pose a challenge
Exactly. Simulation program is not going to suffice. Sometimes one has to bring a firewall home to debug something. And there's going to be several vendors, not only Cisco. And it's going to need more certs, not just CCNP, CCIE.
I'd like to add one more factor here. It's transferable knowledge AND cheap cost of building your own business. When I was an intern to install and config a bunch of switches, routers, firewalls, and realized a switch is so expensive that I wouldn't be able to build my own business like this. So I got into software development job. It's way easier and also able to do side software project. IaaS or PaaS is so cheap, no needs to mess with data center myself.
Work for X for a decade and open your own X business is not applicable to semiconductor job.