It’s because practical experience with technologies like BGP is difficult to acquire without sufficient capital to run a network. You can of course purchase a /24 and dabble (search HN for blog posts describing exactly that). And you can experiment with large deployments in simulators. But network optimization is inherently more of a practical pursuit than a theoretical one, so most broad and consistent learning opportunities are siloed to large organizations where you can accrue daily experience with the stack.

This is really unfortunate, and I mostly blame Cisco and Juniper. They suffocated an entire academic discipline with obfuscated terminology driven more by their business models than anything resembling the OSI model or open standards. That’s why WireGuard feels like such a breath of fresh air after 20 years of L2TP/IPSec.

I applaud companies like Cloudflare and Fly.io for their openness in sharing techniques and open sourcing so much of their code. It goes a long way toward lowering the barriers to self-teaching and experimenting with the latest networking software. And I’m sure HR is happy about the increasingly large applicant pool of qualified networking engineers – even if some hires do eventually leave by advertising their resume to anyone who sends them an IPv6 trace-route :)