The first time the network chooses you, I remember noticing my shoelace was untied, one of those dumb details your brain clings to so you don't get swallowed by everything else happening around you. the air already tastes faintly of ozone and warm circuitry, and somewhere beyond the racks a tired transformer exhales like a machine trying to remember it's alive. There’s no ceremony, no senior engineer placing a hand on your shoulder, no tribal welcome into the underworld. There’s just a moment - brief, private, easily mistaken for something else - when you realize the machinery is looking back.
Maybe you're twenty-five, standing in a refrigerated maze of racks where cold vapor curls low along the floor and the air hums with the restless breath of overworked transformers, fingers numb from brushing too many cold metal edges. Maybe the lights overhead buzz with that faint, electric whining that only seems to emerge at 2 a.m. when the air is dry and the stakes are high. Maybe you’re holding a console cable the way a diver holds a rope before slipping underwater. And through all of this, something in your chest shifts.
Not fear. Not awe. Something stranger - recognition.
And honestly, my back hurt. It always hurt in those rooms - cold floors don’t care about poetic moments.
Most people turn away from that feeling.
Somewhere around here is where every network engineer eventually learns the first cruel joke of our world. Not the kind you tell, the kind you endure. The one whispered across decades of outages and root-cause writeups.
"It's DNS. It's always DNS."
The words echo like folklore - part warning, part prophecy. Even when it isn't DNS, some part of you suspects it might become DNS if you stare at it wrong. It's the old ghost in the wires that refuses to retire, the punchline etched deeper into our bones than any RFC. And it always surfaces in moments like this, when the air feels charged and the network feels alive enough to toy with you.. They decide the world makes more sense in clean abstractions and warm offices, where things behave because someone promised they would. They dive into software, where systems collapse politely and restarts fix more than they break. They find roles where diagrams remain diagrams instead of becoming omens.
But some of us… we lean in.
Because the network has a gravity to it, a pull, the way deep water has a pull. It doesn’t want everyone. It only wants the ones who feel in their bones and don’t flinch.
And maybe that’s why the divide between us and the software tribe feels so wide - like two civilizations evolving on different timelines under the same flickering lights. They think we’re half-mad for living this close to the metal, for trusting instinct over abstraction, for believing physics over frameworks.
Software deploys twice and calls it iteration, then shrugs like that's normal. We deploy once and pray our children will forgive us. We think they’re half-mad for deploying on Fridays, for building towers on sand and swearing the sand is load-bearing, for treating production like a canvas instead of a minefield.
Two tribes staring across a narrow chasm, each quietly convinced the other is a little unhinged… and each quietly correct.
And none of us ever admit it out loud, but some days I think they might be right about us - and other days, I think they’re the dangerous ones.
I met one of them once, before the network had claimed him. A kid, really - bright‑eyed, unscarred, and still convinced the world obeyed its diagrams. He held a console cable the way someone holds a question they’re afraid to ask, turning it over in his hands like a key that might unlock something he wasn’t sure he wanted to see. I told him he was lucky - not because the moment was easy, but because he was confronting the truth early. Lucky to feel the weight of it now, before the network set its teeth in him. Lucky to stand at the threshold with enough clarity left to choose another life if he wanted it. He still had youth, time to choose another past.
He laughed, thinking I was being dramatic. I didn’t laugh.
I almost told him more, but the words jammed up - too many memories trying to speak at once, none of them polite. The network doesn’t do drama. It does revelation.
That’s when you decide, or rather, when the decision reveals itself. Most escape. A few stay. And the ones who stay learn quickly that this life is not about balance, or clarity, or gentle arcs of career progression. It’s about surrendering to a world that does not care about your timelines or your sleep or your attempts to civilize it.
I once sat in a room of engineers and managers - people who had aged in outage years, not calendar years and listened to them discuss work–life balance like explorers reading reports of mythical lands they would never visit. They spoke about boundaries in the same tone archaeologists use when describing ancient ruins: beautiful, admirable, irrelevant to the living.
When they asked for my thoughts, I told them the truth as plainly as I could: there is no balance here, not in the way outsiders mean the word. Because the network is a creature, and creatures do not obey policy. They wake when they wake. They break when they break. They drag you into the deep whether you are ready or not.
The room understood. They always do.
What outsiders never see is that we do not do this alone. The tribe forms itself - invisible, instinctive - the way wolves recognize each other in the dark. You learn quickly who you can trust when the metrics fall off a cliff at 2:13 a.m. and the war room gathers like a séance. You know the voices that bring clarity. You know the ones that bring noise. You learn who steadies the team just by breathing, and who hides behind silence or blame.
No trust ritual, no corporate bullshit exercise - honestly, no one even pretending otherwise, no team-building weekend has ever forged loyalty the way an outage does especially when the air goes thick with the heat of overworked hardware, fans shrieking with mechanical desperation, and the fluorescent lights above flickering like they’re bracing for whatever comes next. Shared trauma binds engineers faster than friendship ever could. Survive enough war rooms together and even your ghosts learn each other’s names. Catastrophe is our crucible. The room glows with cold screens and restless cursor blinks, Every war room eventually smells like stale coffee, fear-sweat, and the collective regret of people who thought they’d chosen stable careers. Morrison told the truth years ago: no one here gets out alive.
And through the hum of tension, something pure emerges.
Or maybe “pure” isn’t the right word - but something real does. The ones who stay, who fight, who keep their hands steady even as adrenaline shakes the edges of their vision those become your people. Your tribe. Your lineage.
And lineage matters, because networks are not systems, they are history. Living, layered archaeology. You never start from zero. You inherit decisions made by people long gone, written in the strange, half-poetic language of configurations assembled under duress. You inherit ghosts - benevolent ones, for the most part, who whisper warnings through legacy commands and forgotten static routes.
I've made decisions at 3 a.m. that should void both my engineer title and my passport. The ghosts from those nights still follow me around, just to see if I’ve learned anything. They linger in odd behaviors and undocumented exceptions, reminding you that every fix has a shadow and every shadow has a story.
And if you say you’ve never broken something trying to fix something else, you’re lying - or you haven’t been here long enough.
A junior once asked me why we didn’t just wipe it all clean, rebuild from scratch, purge the ghosts. I told him you can’t erase a network any more than you can erase a coastline. It accretes. It remembers. Even if you rewrite it, the memory remains in the hands of the engineers who survived the last collapse.
The unspoken hierarchy emerges from that memory, though no one names it out loud - and honestly, if anyone tried to write it down, half the tribe would argue about it and the other half would laugh. You can see it in the way people move through the work. The initiates crawling floors with headlamps, tracing cables through cold silence, lerning humility one mislabeled port at a time. The switch whisperers who speak spanning tree the way monks once spoke prayers. The router priests who recite BGP policy like scripture, each command a ritual against chaos. The backbone shamans who can predict convergence by sensing the way a packet takes a breath before dying. The elders who carry calm like a gravitational field, who have seen enough to know when to wait, when to move, and when to run.
And then there are those of us, the network truly loves - the scarred veterans who stand in neon-lit war rooms with terminals glowing like ritual altars - the ones it tries to break, then rebuilds stronger. The ones scarred by a thousand near-misses, but who still show up, steady and relentless, because we know the truth buried under every outage and every sleepless night: the world keeps its shape because we keep ours.
Pain here grows in a straight line. Complexity expands like the birth of a universe. In truth, both scale to infinity - just in different directions, and never at the same speed. Every prefix, every peer, every device, every last-minute architecture choice made during a crisis deepens the labyrinth. And yet, when the chaos bends back into order, when the packets flow clean and quiet through the veins of the world, when the green lights return to their unremarkable, sacred calm - something inside you exhales.
There is no recognition.
No applause.
No closing ceremony.
Just the silence after the storm, and the faint warmth of knowing the world still stands because you refused to let it fall.
That’s the secret no one tells the twenty-five-year-old holding the console cable for the first time. The network may break you. It may take years from you. It may fill your life with ghosts.
But it also gives you something back - something rare in this industry of abstractions and illusions.
It gives you purpose.
It gives you tribe.
It gives you a place in the long, strange lineage of people who keep the internet from devouring itself.
Not that any of us planned it that way. Some days it feels like the lineage found us by mistake.
And when you’re older, and your hands know the commands by instinct, and you watch a new engineer step nervously into their first war room, you’ll feel the ghosts gathering behind you - not to haunt, but to witness.
Because this is how the lineage continues.
This is how the tribe survives.
This is how you know the network chose well.
And tomorrow, when it stirs again through a haze of static and neon bleed at 2:13 a.m., you’ll answer.
Because you always do.
Because you’re one of us.
Because that quiet ghost in the machine still whispers through the circuitry - metallic, electric, and just sentient enough to feel like home.