Also, it is a really difficult problem to solve. Most curriculums of universities and polytechnical schools only focus on the technical, theoretical aspects of network engineering, but getting hand-ons experience in actually running an ISP network is very, very difficult. The market for people who want to get into this line of work is also very small compared to software engineers, programmers and system administrators. The work is usually high risk, technically very complex and it can be very stressful. (It being vital infrastructure, and breaking something can result in catastrophe for your customers in some cases)

I sometimes wonder what will happen if we have no one left to maintain the systems so many layers of software and systems depend upon.