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# Why "People Connector" Is the Ultimate Superpower in Tech
- URL: https://www.bitsinflight.com/people-connector-next-gen-network-heroes/
- Published: 2026-04-01T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-16T16:01:02.000Z
- Description: Bob Slevin asked what my superpower is. The answer is connecting people. We covered the USNUA, why certs still matter early on, the retailer who built their own router for 1,600 stores, and the punk-rock skate-rat path from a movie theater to network engineering.
- Author: Jason Gintert
- Tags: media, podcast, video, Selector, usnua, career, AI

*Next-Gen Network Heroes, sponsored by Selector. Published 1 April 2026\. Host: Bob Slevin. Also released as a podcast.*

Bob and I met at the New York City NUG on the top floor of Spotify's headquarters, and he opens every episode with the same question: what is your superpower? Mine does not sound very heroic. I am a people connector. Whether it is Bits in Flight helping an organization find the right vendor or the right kind of consultant, helping someone find their next role, or the USNUA getting engineers out from behind their screens, that is what I think I am for.

## Where to start learning

Bob asked where he would send someone brand new who wanted to understand RAG or MCP tomorrow. YouTube, with a good filter. LinkedIn, if you follow the right people. The Packet Pushers shows and The Art of Network Engineering. And the communities behind them: the AONE Discord, the Packet Pushers Slack, the USNUA Slack. The only stupid question is the one you do not ask, and those are the rooms to ask it in.

## What a NUG looks like

A brewery, a presenter, a panel of people who have been there, and plenty of time to mingle. The presentations range from deep protocol talks to a debate on layer 2 versus layer 3 leaf-spine to the Philadelphia lightning talks on how to make more money in this career. Every event opens by asking who in the room is hiring; in Toledo, four companies raised a hand. And each of the 33 groups has its own local flavour. Bob's Michigan chapter will be automotive and industrial. Cleveland had the local power company explain why automation is the only way to run a grid's worth of devices, and a retailer describe building their own open-source router on hardened x86 boxes and migrating 1,600 locations off a commercial vendor in under two years.

## What excites me

The boring answer, which is the true one: AI in operations. I use it every day and it makes me something like ten times more efficient. The community projects are where it gets interesting, agent frameworks like OpenClaw and the networking-specific NetClaw branch, and people writing LLMs that speak BGP natively. Do your homework on securing that stuff before you hand it your credentials. Bob's version from the Selector side was alert distillation: eighty sites' worth of alarms reduced to "someone changed a router config at 2am and that is why BGP flapped."

## Certs, layers, and moving up the stack

Early in your career, use certifications to learn the fundamentals, and do the work rather than the brain dump. Everything you learn later is built on subnetting and how routing protocols behave, and I have watched people who skipped that cause outages. Later on they matter less; I do not hold any now, though I have been Cisco, Arista, Fortinet and Aruba certified along the way. Layers one and two have mostly become plug-and-play, and the general practitioner is moving up the stack, into application awareness, security functions arriving on the switch, APIs and scripting. AI has democratised the last part. You no longer need the syntax, you need to know what good software looks like.

## The winding road

I did not envision any of this. I never went to college. I was a punk-rock skate rat working at the Landmark Centrum theater in Coventry when a manager left for an ISP and offered me dial-up tech support for a dollar an hour more. When that company was acquired and our jobs moved to Chicago, they told us to sit tight, and seven months of sitting tight turned into an ad hoc network engineering study group that got me into the DSL engineering team. Service provider roles, sales engineering, product management, and in 2016 my own company. If you are early in your career: there are seasons, the path is not linear, and I would not change it. This phase is about giving back, which is why the USNUA is a labour of love.

For the record, Bob also got the non-work answer: live music at the Grog Shop, drums in a band called Roué that I have been playing with for over twenty years, and a skateboard when it is not snowing.

[Watch on YouTube →](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlvY3QkQBlw&ref=bitsinflight.com) · [Listen to the podcast →](https://nextgennetworkheroes.com/episodes/why-people-connector-is-the-ultimate-superpower-in-tech-with-jason-gintert?ref=bitsinflight.com)