Networking is a great place for assholes to build empires and exert control. In 20 years of professional engagement with distributed and data center networks, most of these guys (and they are almost always guys) running network orgs are an impediment and spend more time helping out their vendor of choice than anything else.
I've run into awesome network guys in position of power only a few times, and they are 100x employees. The last major rollout of a service that I did was literally 3 months ahead of schedule solely because of the efforts of this awesome network dude snowman as recently put in charge.
We saw some good people, but they generally left because they didn't want to work in that environment.
Eventually replaced with someone helpful, it was amazing what we started to get done. Got lucky there we found the replacement and he stayed long enough to be there when needed.
Oh it was, but it was the situation we had to operate in.
And Amazon allowed to to achieve amazing things that never would have been possible and that's without the idea of things like Kinesis or Redshift that we couldn't have achieved easily/at all even without personnel problems. You simply could never get 3 new servers or drastically respec an existing one in under a day let alone minutes. We were a small shop so it's not like we had spare servers ready to go.
There are network engineers in the world who don't live in caves and gnaw at the bones of administrative assistants.