If you’ve worked in networking long enough, you’ve probably had this thought during a company all-hands:
“This isn’t for me. Bunch of Kool Aid. Just let me get back to doing my job.”
But that attitude WILL hurt your career. Not because leadership needs your applause, but because those meetings tell you what the business cares about right now. And if you can’t map your work, automation, networking, operations, data center, to their priorities, your best ideas die in the hallway.
In this episode, we uncover all of the ways in which engineering types can self-sabotage their careers.
Every company really has only two jobs
Michael Bushong said it plainly: inside most companies, you are either:
- Building something (product, platform, infrastructure), or
- Selling something (revenue, expansion, renewals, customer value)
If you’re not doing one of those two things, you’re helping someone who is.
Networking and operations people often get stuck in a third bucket in their heads: “keeping the lights on.” That’s where resentment shows up. Because “keeping the lights on” sounds like cost, not value.
So the mindset shift is this:
- If the network is part of the product (ISP, cloud, service provider, large DC fabrics, AI backends), then uptime, performance, and automation are revenue protection. Outage = money stops.
- If the network is an enabler (enterprise IT, internal apps), leadership will look for efficiency, reliability, and lower operational drag. Outage = productivity stops.
In both cases the work is important, but the business value is framed differently. If you don’t know which world you’re in, you can’t make a compelling case for your ideas.
Why corporate all-hands feel useless
The episode called out a big disconnect:
- Execs often reuse material meant for analysts and investors.
- That material is about stock performance, growth narratives, and market confidence.
- Employees, especially technical employees, don’t care about narrative, they care about: What do you want me to do differently?
So when leadership leads with “shareholder value,” engineers hear: “So… I’m supposed to care that you make more money?”
Mike’s fix was simple and usable: good corporate communication should tell people two things:
- What situation we are in (market slowing, AI exploding, cost pressure, new product push)
- Why we operate the way we do in that situation
If people understand the why and the conditions, they can make good, aligned decisions on their own, the same way athletes on the field react in sync without being told what to do.
That’s the real point of leadership communication: distributed, aligned autonomy. Not cheerleading.
Why engineers get stuck: wrong language, right idea
A theme in the episode:
“Most engineers have good ideas. They just don’t package them in the language that gets them funded.”
Here’s how this usually goes:
- Engineer: “We need to automate VLAN provisioning; it’s too slow.”
- Leadership hears: “Cool tech project, optional.”
- What leadership needed to hear: “Right now, app teams wait 6 weeks for a change. If we automate this, we can launch revenue-producing services in hours. That improves time-to-revenue and reduces rework.”
Same work. Different framing. Different outcome.
Mike’s line that’s worth repeating:
“Everyone is in sales. Some people just don’t know it.”
That doesn’t mean you become a political, manage-up, PowerPoint-only person. It means if you want your work to matter, you have to express it in the terms of the people who can say yes. Often that’s not even your boss, it’s your boss’s boss’s boss.
So… what is business value for networking?
From the conversation, business value for infrastructure and operations usually shows up as one or more of these:
- Faster time to delivery
- Lower operational cost
- Reduced risk / higher reliability
- Support for new growth areas
If you describe your work in those four buckets, you are speaking business.
Follow the money: AI networking is a durable wave
Toward the end, the conversation hit an important career point: AI is creating the first real networking “pull” we’ve seen in years.
Why?
- Training and inference clusters are distributed; the network matters again.
- Lossless Ethernet, RoCEv2, UEC, and new transport work are real, hard, and valuable.
- If a GPU cluster goes down, that’s not “productivity loss,” that’s “we just stopped a multi-million-dollar pipeline.”
Scott Robohn said it well: networking got invisible for a while, but “the people who care, really care.” AI is making more people care.
Translation for your career: Keep your automation and cloud skills, but start layering in AI data center networking, fabric reliability, and data engineering for AI. That’s where spend is going. That’s where exec attention is. That’s what will get funded.
What to do after listening
Here’s a simple, practical playbook pulled from the episode.
- Stop skipping internal updates Listen for signals: are we growing, cutting, entering AI, pushing customer experience, consolidating vendors? That tells you what to propose.
- Map your work to their words Take your current project and rewrite it in one of the four business value buckets above.
- Pitch at the right altitude Don’t just make it make sense to your manager. Make it make sense to the person who answers to the CFO.
- Show speed Execs love speed. If you can demo “3 hours to 30 seconds,” lead with that.
- Keep an eye on AI infrastructure If you want to future-proof your networking career, learn the networking side of AI now, not later.
Final thought
The whole episode was basically one big encouragement to technical people:
“Your work matters — but it won’t be rewarded if people can’t understand it.”
You don’t have to become a marketer. You don’t have to love corporate speak. But you do need to connect your technical excellence to business intent. That’s how you get budget, influence, and better work.
If you want to hear the full conversation with all the stories, the “million-dollar muffins” line, and the bit about why some exec talks fail before they start, listen to the episode on The Art of Network Engineering and then share it with the most cynical engineer on your team.
Listen to the full episode at https://podcast.artofnetworkengineering.com/2127872/episodes/18121701
Watch the episode at https://youtu.be/ldWbET6pE6s
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