Going to be quitting Computer Networking

[NETWizz]

Well folks, I made a decision in life... a BIG decision.

Basically, I just had a birthday and am not too many years away from 40 and have decided to make some big changes. I do NOT want to denigrate anyone or say anything disparaging about my career, but it has gotten to be stagnant with little room for growth. You see, I am a true expert in my field and things that most people in IT will not even touch I find easy. Nothing networking is a challenge unless it is something intermittent or some silly IOS bug (have seen enough of those). My frustrations are really anything I am working on if I have to spend more than about 10 to 15 minutes to make a change or configure/replace a switch. Long story short, it is no longer fun but rather I am beginning to dislike it for the same reason I am not a programmer... I am tired of being super detail oriented taking like 16 1Gbps connections with copper and having to delete nine unlabeled VLANS just to clean them up, label the remaining ones, half the time trace cable when a link is not active because say a firewall is in active/passive for an HA pair... then consolidate everything onto faster (fiber) trunks, etc. The only challenge at this point is keeping like 16 things straight at a time and cleaning up the mess folks before me made. It is honestly not any more fun than it would be cleaning up programming code where parts of a program are no longer used and nobody ever told the developer that half the variables and routines are no longer used etc... but you are given the task of replacing and upgrading it. I will continue for a couple more years, but no thank you long term. You see, I don't intend to be "replacing a switch" when I get to be 60; instead, I would rather let a younger lad who can learn do it.

The truth is I work in Government for a couple of Directors whos jobs I can not only do but regularly do for them. Their jobs are easier than mine because quite frankly anyone intelligent can write some paragraphs and manage a project using tools like DevOps, Planner, etc. While I do make six figures, they earn 33% more for half the work, a quarter of the understanding, etc. When I do a great job on a huge project I manage end-to-end, I get maybe a $1,200 bonus as a thank you... They get maybe $3,600. The only real perk I have ironically is I report up to the top of my Agency, and at this point they respect me tremendously. If I want to spend $150,000 tomorrow, they will sign off on anything I want to buy within reason provided I justify it. My major projects are a datacenter network replacement, a DR location with failover, Electronic Health Records implementation, and network edge security. I am given broad latitude to choose things like Cisco ISE vs Aruba Clearpass. I have come to realize when the people you report to know nothing, they just get paid more to rubber-stamp.

What bothers me is that in my organization is that there would be room for me to move up into one of those positions if only I did not have the skills and knowledge I have. Simply put, they need me where I am because if I leave they need to hire three (3) individuals to replace me, so there is no room for a promotion. While I did diagram the entire network for the datacenter, it will take a seasoned Network Engineer who understand Multi VRF routing, BGP, MPLS, DMVPN, IPSec, Xconnect /w L2TPv3, Netscalers, Big IP F5 load balancers, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Juniper, Certes, Load Balancing, OSPF with multiple areas and summarization, EIGRP, HSRP, Spanning-Tree, LACP, and Chassis Virtualization. For many it is almost mind blowing that you can do an ether-channel from two different switch chassis for redundancy and they do not even need to be in the same building. It really tweaks a lot of network administrators minds when they log into a switch and half its ports are in one building and the other half of its ports are 250 miles away...

What also bothers me is that I started at the very bottom doing End-Use support almost two decades ago, and the arrogance and rudeness of management to that level is astonishing. The worst ones are the folks who think they are IT know-it-all managers so far above them they are rude and treat them like garbage, and it irritates me. You see, we have a staff of a few hundred IT folks, and most are simply average folks eeking out a living through hard-work. While I got to work from home and was included in key meetings with management, they worked hard to do things like deploy iPads and Laptops in a pandemic and for what? $40,000/year? I wouldn't even get out of bed for $20/hour... but what bothers me the most is the same mentality I faced and that is the environment does NOT afford them any opportunities to better themselves and learn because there is such a separation of duties doctrine alive and well.

When I travel on location and see these folks, I do manage to get respect because they know I once did their job, and they share things like studying for the Network+ or being interested in learning new things etc. I find a couple things that really bother me. First, they need a college degree to get hired at the level I am at, yet it is a huge gamble at $40,000 to spend $25,000 on a degree with no guarantee of getting a better job. Second, their employer will NEVER let them touch a simple network switch. What I generally end up doing is is occasionally seeing a younger 23 year old version of myself or a 33 year old whom I assume is 23 but who aspires to learn but never gets to touch the equipment is when I do a network refresh, I literally will wipe the equipment and leave a couple of console cables marking on inventory that I am leaving it at their depot area for surplus when in reality I am leaving the equipment, so they have something to configure and play with. Lately, I have been leaving fiber, transceivers, and all sorts of stuff that is the mythical stuff in books and classes to them until they have the opportunity to play with it. I will generally force Cisco to give us learning credits when we buy equipment and sign them up for a Routing/Switching class etc. I am actually trying to on select individuals whom I see future value bring them along. The problem is I am lateral to the folks with the power to make changes. They look at it as a chicken vs the egg problem. i.e. We need someone with 7 years of experience in networking if they want to be a jr. level switch replacer. Basically, you cannot get a job doing it unless you already have a job doing it. I am kind of the opposite being able to see that some folks just need opportunity and to be given a chance because they want to run with the torch. I am getting to the point I am going to be ready to hand over the baton to someone else and tap out changing careers. When I do, I have a few End-User-Support folks I am going to take under my wing and promote them to server administration or computer networking to get them out of deploying computers and fielding user calls.

Basically, my plan is to move into IT Project and Process management and let others do all of the work, BUT to make damned sure I support them every step of the way even if it means boots on the ground. If something breaks or they are troubleshooting a very complicated issue, I don't mind sharing my experience and expertise. One thing I will never do is let vendors run the show. Having real experience at all levels except database and GIS is going to make me the best leader ever, BUT I know that when a project involves databases or GIS that I need to know what I don't know and listen to my experts whom I will have on the calls or in the meetings with me. I think this and letting people work will make me very good.

Thoughts?

 

[HCHTech]

You kinda buried the lead there - I read the whole thing expecting to find out you were going to open a bar on the beach somewhere. I'm relieved to find out that's not the case. It appears this is the right direction for you to take. I can't imagine there isn't a spot for you somewhere in the private sector at double your G-whatever salary.

 

[Blues]

I made a similar move but more because I was stuck at the bottom of an IT ladder where I saw newer people going ahead of me and expansion bringing in new heads and management who were clueless and/or grossly overpaid. I moved into a position where I serve as the IT liaison and communications point with our software vendor(s). I have found my work less stressful more rewarding and while growth is limited I feel more confident about the limited growth.

 

[britechguy]

Essentially, regardless of the individual or the specifics of the situation, once you know that "going into the office" (whether literal or metaphorical) is something you just dread doing every single day the time has come to move on. In fact, the time has passed to move on, which I learned the hard way by not doing so two times early in my career and then resolving never to do again.

And if you're in a situation where you really can't or don't want to leave, the thing to do is to find and develop outside interests that "feed your soul" and consider your work just that: work. You can still do it well, you can still be bored with it, but it need not define your life.

Personally, if the option exists to actually move on then I'd absolutely say that's what you should do. And it doesn't matter whether what you intend "makes sense" to anyone else. If you can do it and it's not likely to have catastrophic consequences then just do it. Very few people regret what they have done, including some mistakes, compared to what they haven't and always wonder about. You can always find another job in networking at a later date should you find it necessary or just decide you want to go back to it for whatever reason.

 

[britechguy]

Basically, you cannot get a job doing it unless you already have a job doing it. I am kind of the opposite being able to see that some folks just need opportunity and to be given a chance because they want to run with the torch.

Thoughts?

Just some on the quoted observation: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose [The more things change, the more they remain the same.]

I don't know of a single industry or discipline where what's wanted isn't always someone with extensive experience in precisely the same job as is being advertised. This, of course, makes absolute sense from the employer's perspective. But, it's also well known that it's a very rare occasion where applicants are a "perfect fit" for the laundry list of skills and experience specified. It's way more common that there are a number of gaps.

This is why I have never failed to apply for a position I wanted whether my resume came close to perfectly matching the desired skills or not. And on more than one occasion, I was the person who got the position because I was one of those with a great track record in what I had been doing, glowing references (and let's not get into how difficult it is to actually get those today), and was clearly interested in learning something new.

You do not want to work for an employer who will only give you a job that you are already 100% qualified to do. And those who routinely accept that sort of situation are often what get's called "dead wood" that would be content to coast along, unnoticed, until they reach retirement age. And it's amazing how many actually do that, and how happy many employers are with employees whose best performance merely "meets requirements" and never, every exceeds them. What's even worse, is that this very sharp and accurate observation, made in the 1980s, remains absolutely true today:

. . . American business has yet to learn how to measure the productivity and effectiveness of professional and technical employees. As a result, employees who get little done, but spend a lot of time doing it, are often rewarded more than those who fulfill or exceed job requirements while keeping reasonable hours.

A job that routinely requires 60 to 80 hours per week is mismanaged, understaffed, or staffed with the wrong person.

A badly managed firm isn't a good place for men or women, parents or not.
~ Sophie M. Korczyk

 

[NETWizz]

It is very interesting what all of you said. Truth be told, I have a dream job probably envied by the vast majority of our IT folks many of whom are 20+ years older than I am making half the salary. I am given HUGE autonomy; in fact, I can literally decide if I go into the office tomorrow or work from home. I could get up at 7 am or 10 am (depending upon my calendar and commitments). If I meet my deliverables (85% are self set), I am good to go. At this point much of what I do is of my own direction, and NOBODY else out of 100's of IT folks has been given the autonomy, respect, or purchase ability I have. I actually love going to work, but I do not see it a sustainable model for 20 more years.

I love computer networking, but it sucks the life out of me to see others who do not understand it disparage it because somehow they think it is a glorified mesh of cables plugged in with blinking lights having zero idea what it is we do. Just today I had a change management meeting with about 20 key managers on a committee, and I put in my changes for the week many of which I scheduled for 7 pm on Friday to move a couple of VLANs to cross a trunk between a firewall rack switch stack and a core switch stack before being passed to another datacenter. I assigned this change to myself. One new Director (of end-user support) who is a manager who I do NOT report to and has NEVER fixed a computer and could not even do his own manager's workers' jobs, interrupts and says, "can you do it later 7 pm? I do not think 7 pm is late enough." Me: "7pm was fine before." Him: "I think 9 pm might be better what if someone uses Pulse VPN?" Me: "It is just the authentication traffic and shouldn't kick an established session. It will merely have authentication down for probably 10 minutes where people cannot sign in. It should be fine." Him: "I would rather you do it at 9 pm." Me: "Well then I am not going to do the change at all and enjoy my weekend instead." Him: "Other people would be willing to work at 9pm." Me (knowing nobody knows anything about that network nor has even rudimentary knowledge of networking): "Okay then who do you have in mind?" Him: "It cannot be that hard to do the change. I took a networking course at WGU and know pretty much everything." Me: "Excellent, then what time are you going to be making the change?" Him: "Well, I don't have access to the equipment and need a configuration cable." Me: "No problem, I will grant you access and provide you a console cable. You have got this right?" *silence*

Everybody else over voted him and I got my 6 pm window.


I don't mean to disparage anyone who wants to do better for themselves by taking educational courses, but taking a course on say networking or computer repair is a LOT different than actually doing the work. This kid is 32 years old with a high-school diploma and an ITILv4 certificate. He managed a helpdesk for 5 years and before that was a manager at a fast food restaurant. I am sure he dazzled the folks who hired him by being a keyword interviewer throwing around terms like, "A VLAN is a Virtual Local Area Network." To an Chief or business management person, that sounds like someone knowledgeable. With a little knowledge it is easy to fool someone who knows less. I don't' know what they saw in him to hire him let alone into a management role. He has certainly already been hired beyond his level of competence. That said everywhere I ever worked had a knack for screwing things up by hiring the wrong people consistently.

I once worked in private industry, and they would take their very best salespeople who LOVED doing sales, talking to people, and getting the numbers. They would pull the carpet right out from under them and promote them to management where they no longer did what they are good at doing and had no idea how to manage people. Consistently, those who were good got moved into something they were not good at doing.

 

[britechguy]

Uh, @NETWizz, have you never heard of The Peter Principle? Volumes have been written about it, both from a humorous perspective and dead serious scholarly work, too.

Not that you're wrong, but this is not "new news."

 

[callthatgirl]

Interesting post, I got kinda lost as it sounds like you're leaving this job and then you are not leaving the job? I'm glad you're staying on to mentor the younger techs, teaching is so fulfilling.

 

[brandonkick]

Interesting post, I got kinda lost as it sounds like you're leaving this job and then you are not leaving the job? I'm glad you're staying on to mentor the younger techs, teaching is so fulfilling.

I got kinda lost too.... quitting but not quitting? I think... he's talking about maybe doing something in a principal staff role at another company?

I can understand what your going through though basically. Especially when it comes to pay. I love everything about the company I work for, expect the very slow pay raises and promotions. My critical mistake was starting at too low a salary. In the world of "tech", your biggest pay raises are often when you change jobs. Be it in IT, software development... whatever. I don't want to change jobs. I just want to even "close" to the money I'd get if I did so.


Started as a junior engineer about 8 years ago, grew past that quite quickly, and was working fairly independently on items which weren't simple little things on a proprietary .NET 2.0 API that this company wrote, of which many of the folks who designed and used that API were long since gone. Knowledge was "there", but certainly some gaps and things a bit hard to understand. You couldn't just google "how to do X in Y tech" like you can with so many off the shelf tech stacks.

Fast forward and my first promotion to Engineer 1 didn't come until almost 2 years later. Bump in pay from low 30's to mid 50's. Stayed at a level 1 engineer for 3.5 years more, although within another year and a half I was basically the tech / dev lead on the main web app I spent most of my time on. Took me 6 years to get to software engineer 2 and a salary over 65K a year. I had friends in college who were promoted to senior level within 3 years. By my second year, I worked with senior engineers who got less work done than I did. In 2019 I did some moon lighting in which they recognized me, and paid me as, a senior engineer. A significant bump up in terms of pay I might add.

It's frustrating that I basically function as a senior engineer, but I do not get recognized or paid as one. As I'm one of the only engineers left on staff from the time frame when I was hired, I'm often the go to resource for expertise about the projects I work on... as a mid level engineer, working with a bunch of senior engineers who (aside from architecture type stuff) don't really do anything beyond what I do. I'm sure they do get a significantly bigger paycheck though.

I am holding out hope though that I'll soon be promoted and get something in the realm of what I think is fair in terms of a pay raise. So I think we are in similar positions, save mine may be a tiny bit more about the money than yours is.

 

[britechguy]

In the world of "tech", your biggest pay raises are often when you change jobs. Be it in IT, software development... whatever. I don't want to change jobs. I just want to even "close" to the money I'd get if I did so.

It ain't just tech. And good luck with that. (Neither of which is meant as personally aimed snark, but it is snarky).

Once a company knows it has you, and can keep you, at a lower salary that's what it's going to do. The main reason people change jobs is to get out of that particular trap. That, or they get an offer that they are willing to accept, and ask their current employer to match or exceed if they want to keep them on.

I don't think that's ever going to change, either.

 

[Markverhyden]

The truth is I work in Government

That's all I needed to read.

For several years I did support work at DCAA. Rotating through various branches at major DoD vendors like Electric Boat, Raytheon, etc. doing desktop support as well some networking work for the Regional IT. No shortage of "it's beyond my pay grade" stories. In fact that's how I came to learn the term and its meaning. My daughter, who works in real estate management, was all excited when she was offered a position at Freddie Mac. I warned her about what she'd be running into, but she was excited about the pay and easy working conditions. Sure enough, within two years she was looking for a position in the private sector.

It's the nature of the beast. Kind of like lawyers. Or dogs. Individually most are really nice but get a whole bunch together and things change rapidly, usually for the worse.

The good new is, @NETWizz, that there should be plenty of private sector opportunities for someone with you experience. The bad news is they might want you to work on government contracts which means, in a fashion, you'd kind of be back to where you were trying to leave.

 

[britechguy]

@Markverhyden

I have worked, and for over a decade each, in both the public and private sectors (E-Systems, long ago acquired by Raytheon, being my first job in the mid-1980s) and I can say, without any hesitation, that my opinion is neither is better than the other as soon as large bureaucracies are involved.

AT&T and Unify (a now defunct, and much smaller, database company) were absolutely no different than E-Systems (which is still private sector, if you want to split hairs, but it was defense contracting) and the Commonwealth of Virginia were as far as what goes with bureaucracy.

If you stay in "small and nimble" private sector concerns, those are different, but those are generally so small that pay and benefits are less and stock options are used as the lure. I knew some of my former AT&T coworkers who were lured to AOL during its salad days and who left at the peak very rich individuals, and who promptly cashed out their AOL stock and diversified. I also had one acquaintance who was an AOL employee who retired in his mid-30s, but refused to divest and diversify. He lost virtually everything, including his ability to stay retired, because of that blunder. When it comes to long term investing, keeping all (or even most) of one's eggs in a single basket has proven, time and again, to be a spectacularly bad idea. There are rare occasions when it would be stellar, but the risk of the opposite just isn't worth it.

 

[Markverhyden]

@britechguy, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And the same goes with employment. My comment is just pointing out a well known, in general, shortcoming with government jobs. In fact if there's ever been an ecosystem where the Peter Principle reigned supreme its government, Federal, State and Local.

I never said that private sector never had problems. Private sector is full of companies whose existence, due to lousy products and/or service, defies logic and explanation. Fortunately most do go away, as in fail or bought out. Spent many years at one - CompUSA.

 

[britechguy]

@Markverhyden

We'll have to agree to agree and to disagree, both.

What you say is definitely true, except for government being an ecosystem where the Peter Principle reigns supreme. My time in both public and private sectors over decades suggests to me it's about equal.

You are right, though, that in the private sector it's more likely that a Peter Principle heavy organization will either go under or be taken over and at least substantial house cleaning will occur (after which the process begins anew).

 

[lack10]

I to work for the Government IT, but this is rare I find someone in your position that seems to be able to do what they want and not be happy. I always say it's always just a J.O.B......just over broke.

 

[NETWizz]

I to work for the Government IT, but this is rare I find someone in your position that seems to be able to do what they want and not be happy. I always say it's always just a J.O.B......just over broke.

I get board every 3 to 7 years with any job I have. Also, any job I have had since Collage has given me a ton of freedom to do what I want eventually.

 

[britechguy]

Also, any job I have had since Collage has given me a ton of freedom to do what I want eventually.

In that regard, specifically, in the immortal words of the Beatles, "You don't know how lucky you are, boy!" [Yeah, I know I took the S off of boys.]

I can't honestly say that I got bored with any of the jobs I've had during my adult life, but I definitely got to the point with all of them that I found the working conditions intolerable for one or more reasons. Lack of agency to do as I saw fit in my own work was always a big part of it.

 

[NETWizz]

In that regard, specifically, in the immortal words of the Beatles, "You don't know how lucky you are, boy!" [Yeah, I know I took the S off of boys.]

I can't honestly say that I got bored with any of the jobs I've had during my adult life, but I definitely got to the point with all of them that I found the working conditions intolerable for one or more reasons. Lack of agency to do as I saw fit in my own work was always a big part of it.

Yeah, well it did take a while to earn trust you see ALL of the jobs I had were salary based, so the metric for pay was not how many hours I was at my desk. What this meant was that the analytics were deliverables and success factors. If I am replacing a datacenter, does everything work? How long is the downtime? These are the real drivers in a professional career forward progress of projects is what folks like to see. If someone is effective at his or her job, no need to micromanage them.

 

[britechguy]

If someone is effective at his or her job, no need to micromanage them.

Conversely, and all too often, people are far less effective than they would be if left to their own devices because someone insists on micromanaging them.

 

[NETWizz]

It is scary that I am still doing it... same job. I guess it is paying the bills, so there is not much to say.