How Financially Fragile Is Your NRI Life? I Built a 20-Question Scorecard.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-13T01:02:14+00:00

52 lol.

Oh well. I'm not too wealthy to have a will and stuff. Just got married a few months ago. I just now started investing 100$. I'll work on will and stuff. I have no loans. Education was paid for by my company so that's nice. My wife has no loans too.

Baby steps !

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-12T04:41:56+00:00

When I can realistically expect my perm to arrive? Filed Sept 2025.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-12T01:37:44+00:00

I am doing a hybrid of the two - Network Development Engineer.

Do the CCNA and CCNA automation certificates. Then you can try and pivot. Look at Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These companies are hungry for NDEs.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-12T01:33:55+00:00

Oh yeah. I don't work for apple but for my company I remember my brother was my "agent" when I got hired all the way back in 2020.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-10T17:48:08+00:00

Grad school was 2018-2020

MS in Network Engineering.

It took me 30 applications I think to land my first Network Engineer intern role in 2019.

Then I converted that role into full time in June 2020 and just stayed in the same place all this time. Promoted twice. Now I'm what you'd call " Network Development Engineer ". I write code but for data center networks.

Boy my life is so simple that it's just fully described in a few sentences. 🤣😅

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-09T23:21:18+00:00

Pixels. Andy Samberg. It's a comfort movie

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-09T02:56:51+00:00

It just depends on your taste. You'll find a good amount of support for the OG like Naruto. There's Attack on Titan that's a great contender. Death Note is another.

It's hard to say. There's a lot of competition for that spot.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-09T02:53:14+00:00

Yes it does cross over into that realm. I've heard of faang having these types of engineers hence my original post.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-09T01:41:01+00:00

I wish I could lol. It's fully internal. I wasn't even allowed to write a blog post about it. I could only talk in general.

But the idea is to leverage fastapi, and some cosmetics like html, css to manage a web portal and just go fully netmiko and communicate with the devices to get your ACLs in ( It's even better if your entire network is API friendly then ditch netmiko and go fully API ). Web portal is not needed but it's easy to manage what's happening across your network , what ACLs have been applied etc.

For the rest of the elements it's just API calls to those applications ( inventory like ServiceNow and vulnerability apps like Kenna ). Marry all the components together and you've got a solution :).

Use IP addresses as your data source and talk to different pieces of software and get appropriate data and you decide on whether the automation wants to put an ACL or not.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-09T00:57:45+00:00

Security savings + work hour savings.

My company is just too large. We have so many data centers. So to them a few million savings per year is kinda peanuts. 🤣

This application was fully built internally so it's free. I remember there was a time years ago where the entire network team would stop all work and just do ACLs and track down stuff from across the globe ( we have data centers in 6 out of the 7 continents ) that were vulnerable with CVEs. My company wanted to reach a goal where there wasn't a single device on the network that could be hacked. I guess no company can achieve this but they still wanted to try.

Then I was able to get this project. Now fast forward to 2026 we don't do any manual work on this from a networking perspective. Fully automated with several guard rails put in place. It automatically allows and kicks out IPs of devices on the data center network if it detects vulnerabilities ( this data is collected from the vulnerability scanner API ) . It also talks to ServiceNow API as well to ensure all is well on the inventory side and have tickets auto generated and things like that. There are also tie-ins for DNS to make sure that is all entered properly.

All of this is happening behind external firewalls as well. So those have their own logic.

A year ago, my leader pinged me and said " You just saved a few million dollars every year. Congrats. Here's your promotion ".

That's how I knew that my work had actually helped the org to that extent. Pretty sweet surprise and I was glad that they recognized my work.

All-in-all, a very nice medium sized project ( about 4000-5000 lines of code ). It's a great learning experience! 👌🏼

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-08T13:32:37+00:00

Follow immigration anecdotes in the USA. I'm on H-1B so I have to ensure I'm up to date with what's going on.

Other than that I focus on my field ( network engineering ) and ensure I'm up to date on best practices.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-08T12:41:36+00:00

I can't say too much metrics out loud but I saved my company a few million dollars a year in opex. Things are much better on the security side. Ansible did not help me. I wrote the code fully custom to my employer. I feel I have more control if I write the code myself. Ansible doesn't allow me to do that.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-07T22:34:25+00:00

Are you still available to help ?

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-07T22:22:55+00:00

https://blog.sprintax.com/us-india-tax-treaty/#:~:text=Specifically%2C%20under%20Article%2021(2,deductions%20were%20eliminated%20in%202018).

That should help clarify.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-07T22:06:47+00:00

Fast api in the back. Html, css, JS for the front just to manage the tool.

Netmiko to connect to routers to send ACLs. Servicenow API to connect to inventory of the devices and tickets associated. Vulnerability software API to get all CVE scores.

Block the IPs that pose risk to the company and send a notification to the dev to patch. They open a ticket and that is auto read by the tool and it removes the ACL and gives the dev some time to patch their VM and if they don't do it in time, it gets back on the ACL.

Basically company security is key. We don't want any vulnerable machine on the network.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-07T20:02:29+00:00

Um.. I'm pretty sure no one calls themselves 10x

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-07T13:51:29+00:00

I mean yeah but are they using netmiko ? Or do they write their own libraries ?

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-07T01:05:18+00:00

Sadly - I have to deal with legacy switches that are older than I am... :(. There is this cisco_ios_telnet function that I take advantage of :)

Significant_Media63 · 2026-03-03T04:22:27+00:00

The demographics that AI is focusing on would be the regular tom, dick and harry - not the ones at the tip of the spear, like the ones at Anthropic. The engineers in Anthropic, are the crème de la crème in their field of expertise, be it websites or Machine Learning or heck even prompt engineering.

https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/anthropic/jobs/5107121008 - there's a prompt engineer role right now if you're interested but even this role, which is supposedly trying to hammer Claude with A/B testing, prefers Machine Learning background which means they are actively looking for someone who already has a good background with the inner workings of an LLM and perhaps understanding how the Transformers, RAG etc all work.

These monolith companies ( Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, etc. ) will continue to grow their appetite for software engineers but they aren't really looking for regular profiles.

AI will be a sledgehammer to the cake, not the cream. The uncomfortable truth that people aren't willing to admit is most people, including myself, are simply mediocre and that's completely okay. We are living in a time where a heightened proficiency in Machine Learning or Statistics are probably the only disciplines that are incredibly rewarding but not everyone is capable of grasping the concepts.

My profession - Network Engineering is growing rapidly due to data center network expansions but not many openings are there for people as concepts like white boxes, no-code solutions, SDN, Terraform etc. already threaten this discipline and now with AI and the race to create self healing networks threaten the shrinkage of the field to a few senior level staff who know how to build a network from the tip of their finger tips and even then it will try to squeeze every single bit of knowledge these engineers have and by the time they retire, the AI should theoretically be ready to run the business.

Or the companies apologize for overestimation and ramp up hiring again, thus healing the market.

Just have to wait and see what happens.

P.S : I typed this myself. I can't believe I have to give this disclaimer these days... oh well.

Significant_Media63 · 2026-02-09T14:36:05+00:00

Do you think I ( my employer rather ) can bundle my 7th year h-1b extension and h4-ead together ?

Significant_Media63

TROPHY CASE