One job offer suddenly turned into two. Curious to get some insight

OfWolfAndMan

So I just got an offer letter yesterday for a position I hadn't heard back from for several weeks. I was very excited as there some cool stuff to get my hands on. However, yesterday, I had also interviewed for another position that I was interested as well, and I didn't expect them to get back to me so promptly. Apparently I was a top candidate and there was also my flexibility I believe steered their decision (In moving from Cisco to Avaya), but I am at a decision I find to be difficult at the moment. Both positions are for a Network Engineer. Here are the jobs:

Industry: IT (It's a website that provides SEO/Dynamic DNS/SSL Certificate and website design for smaller companies)
Team: 1 on days, 1 on nights, and they'd add me
Hours: Most likely will work overtime
Position Type: Permanent 80K per year w/ 10% bonus
Equipment I would work with: Cisco R&S environment, F5 BIG-IP, various firewalls including ASA, Fortigate, Checkpoint, Nexus (Doesn't sound like a lot of Nexus work though), DDoS monitoring tools, MPLS, site-to-site VPN, additional SNMP and monitoring tools.
Size of operation: I'd say medium, depending how you look at it. However, this is not the hub of the whole operation. Not sure how much remote work I'd be doing

This is the one I'm more inclined towards mainly because of the array of equipment I'd be working with. I haven't had my hands in F5 or major firewall work yet, so that'd be fun. There'd be plenty of project work going on here as well, so I'd stay busy (I prefer the busy work environment).

Industry: Healthcare (Non-profit org for a large national hospital)
Team: 2-4 guys (If I were added)
Hours: Most likely overtime, however this is a contract to hire
Position type: Contract to hire 40/hr. Potential for hire is very high.
Equipment I'd work with: Multivendor environment (Cisco and Avaya), Cisco Wireless (Said they're moving to Aruba soon), Fortigate Firewalls, surprisingly no load balancers, Metro ethernet for WAN, Nexus (Bigger number of devices), VPN, plenty of monitoring, etc.
Size of Operation: Large. About a 15000+ port network

Obviously, yes, the pay is less (Pay is not my #1), and even though my potential boss said the possibility of hire is 98%, I know I should take that with a grain of salt. This is the situation: The company is moving from Cisco to Avaya, and their engineers want to stay Cisco (One is apparently going for his IE), so they are leaving and want to bring on two new guys with a good amount of experience. They will be migrating to Avaya primarily for cost effectiveness. In turn, we will be provided two tiers of the Avaya training (It's like CCNA and CCNP for Avaya. There is three total) in order to do this job. They are running EIGRP right now, but are moving to OSPF with the Avaya. However, one of the sites will retain its Cisco equipment (The one with the Nexus setup) for 4-5 years until it becomes legacy enough to upgrade, so it wouldn't be all Avaya. I don't really mind going Avaya, but at the same time, I don't feel they have created a large amount of reputation with their R&S line, more so their UC platform. This, by the way, was the much more technical interview (Anything from Data Center to network basics to routing protocols, L2 protocols, stateful firewalls, etc). Looking to hear all of your feedback!

H3||scr3am

Well myself, I'd take the IT job, with the salary + bonuses, and you stated that OT would likely be a requirement of each position, just make sure you're paid for it. Both environments will expose you to new technologies, and the IT one has more (Fortinet, Big-IP, Checkpoint, and Nexus) which you can get certifications in as well.

A non-profit, although appealing, has half the starting salary, and would likely increase at a slower rate compared to the IT company. And as a non-profit they may end up not hiring you past the contract due to budget constraints, or not fund raising enough. Avaya like you said is not generally the equipment corporations are running, and it is not as well recognized as Cisco gear. I'd stick with Cisco, work towards a CCIE and branch out into the Checkpoint, Big-IP, and Fortinet gear, and get certifications towards them too.

Fortinet NSE (Network Security Expert) Fortinet Network Security Expert (NSE) Certification | Fortinet
Checkpoint Certs Certification - Check Point Software Technologies
F5 Certs https://f5.com/education/certification

If you like keeping busy, I believe a CCIE and some of the other certifications listed above plus your schooling and busy project based work environment will keep you busy and challenged compared to the network migration at the non-profit.

mjnk77

First job is $80k per year
Second job is $40/hr. $40/hr, 40 hrs per week, say 50 weeks is $80k.

The money is pretty much the same, not counting the bonuses or OT.

Russell77

I think it depends on how much voice you have in your background and what you like to do. Voice can be a world unto it's self. If you are going to learn from the ground up it can be a daunting task if there is no one else in the department that you can learn from. If you become the voice guy for a group that large it will be probably be all you do. The fact that it is health care makes the voice part tougher because all problems are twice as urgent. Very attractive project if you are thinking about going that route.

H3||scr3am

@=mjnk77

You're right, I read that wrong I read it as 40K/Yr. (makes sense for a non-profit), but I'd still go with #1 for the project paced atmosphere instead of a single contracted network migration from cisco to Avaya. (I'd just feel that after the migration was done they'd see no purpose in keeping you around)

mjnk77

REMOVED UNNECESSARY QUOTED REPLY FROM PREVIOUS POST
I agree. Once the migration is complete, they may look to scale back. When that happens, last in first out.

OfWolfAndMan

I'm most likely going to go with the first one. The thing is though you don't find many Avaya engineers around here. Or a lot of places for that matter. I'd be confident they'd hire me on, but obviously things can happen. Worst case scenario. If I could convince them to turn it into a perm, I might take it, even for lower pay. Industry can be a big decision. Healthcare is a large industry as well. They have robots speaking TCP/IP in the hospitals these days.

The biggest reason I put it in question was because, based off of my observation, the scope of my support would've been fairly larger, but who knows.

Nemowolf

First red flag ... Non-Profit. I just interviewed a gentleman who currently was outsourced from a non-profit and he made it clear that they are, well, cheap. Free tools are prefered over anything that costs money. This means that you may have a hard time getting approval for any overtime and they will evaluate you once your contract is done and let you go unless they can magically get money in to pay you. Expect that this is not a sure thing in the least.

IIIMaster

Yeah I agree go for the job security unless you want the migration on your resume. It also kind of bothers me they are dumping Cisco despite pleas from their engineers. Then you said they are trying to save a bucks. Yeah after you sit up their network and train some lower tier engineers to take your job they will once again save money.

Zartanasaurus

If I never work for a healthcare organization again, it will be too soon.

First job looks to have more fun tools and challenges. You're going to have to learn to love layer 7 though and that's not really my cup of tea. Recently turned down a job working for a social networking company, partly for that reason.

OfWolfAndMan

Nemowolf wrote: »

First red flag ... Non-Profit. I just interviewed a gentleman who currently was outsourced from a non-profit and he made it clear that they are, well, cheap.

Of course they're cheap, their primary source of income is charity. However, all the money goes back into the organization. Non-profit is not a red flag to me. I've seen nonprofit run plenty of cool tech. Cheaper isn't always worse, but I think support may be lacking. It's like buying Ralph Lauren over an average line of clothing. You're buying it for the name. Sometimes it's just for the name. Sometimes the lower line just sucks. There's always more than one definition of "cheap" in the retail world.

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

First job looks to have more fun tools and challenges. You're going to have to learn to love layer 7 though and that's not really my cup of tea. Recently turned down a job working for a social networking company, partly for that reason.

What is the difficulty with dealing with application-based inspection? Aside from the increased costs? I'm guessing it has to do with increased granularity in configuration and learning curve?

Also, I took the IT job. Excited to get my hands into this next week.

xenodamus

I see a lot of incorrect assumptions that non-profit = cheap. Remember that non-profit is a tax status....not a business model.

I work for a non-profit hospital and we spend more on technology than any comparably sized facility in the area. We stay on the edge and generally implement new data center technologies several years before many of our competitors.

It's all about the organizational leadership and their vision. Don't miss out on a great opportunity because of the non-profit label (directed at everyone).