At my company anyone here less than 10 years is a newbie. You're not an old timer until you reach 30 years, and a few grandees make it to 50.
It's a big old company though (one of the oldest in the field), and this is in broadcast engineering which is far more conservative. IME Peoppe in the Internet facing parts are far more flitty.
While some older engineers are happy to retreat into comfortably old technologies like cameras and microphones, there's plenty more who havve spent the time to learn about the trend towards IP. They are very valuable, in contrast to say a "generic" network engineer, because they understand the domain, they fundamentally know a 20ms outage on a network is catastrophic.
My father is a network engineer, and has more or less been working in the same company for over 30 years now. He started as a radio technician out of high school, and transitioned into internet networking in the early 90's.
Technically, he's worked for several different companies. For a while he was working for a different company, but doing exactly the same work, with the same people, in the same building.
I don't think it will be easy to replace network engineers like him, who have been doing the job literally as long as the consumer internet has existed.
It's a big old company though (one of the oldest in the field), and this is in broadcast engineering which is far more conservative. IME Peoppe in the Internet facing parts are far more flitty.
While some older engineers are happy to retreat into comfortably old technologies like cameras and microphones, there's plenty more who havve spent the time to learn about the trend towards IP. They are very valuable, in contrast to say a "generic" network engineer, because they understand the domain, they fundamentally know a 20ms outage on a network is catastrophic.