Our Primary Export: Pain
Well. . . I finally got a new job. Went to a couple of interviews this week, and this was the best, by far. (Also, the first one I went to.) I came in and had a "formal" interview with the two bosses. (I say "formal" very loosely, they told me to dress casual. I ended up wearing a t-shirt that reads "There's no place like 127.0.0.1", and it was a big hit. Laughs all around.) They had me stick around for the "second" interview, with the other network engineers. It ended up being mostly a "what do you like to do/what do you have experience with/how many cups of coffee have you had today?" sort of interview, very relaxed. When it was all over, the bosses came back in with an offical offer of employment.
I'm very happy with the starting pay, (in the area of $35,000 per year.) The benefits are pretty good, giving me medical and some perks like paying for my cellphone bill and about half of my cable internet bill. The reason they're going to ante up for the phone and broadband is because the network engineers have to rotate on a weekly schedule, providing back up phone support in case the call center gets too jammed up or the clients ask questions that are over the heads of the phone reps. As for what the company does, that's sort of a mixed bag. Some of it will be setting up servers and entire networks for a companies, to hosted servers and doing a LOT of different types of work. From what they tell me, I'm going to be "learning a lot of stuff I didn't even know I didn't want to know."
This, of course, brings me to why I'm posting this here. The company is very keen on having people on staff that like to learn, and they're big in getting certified. One of the bosses told me that they'd basically have me spend one day a week back in the server and router room, practicing and learning on the equipment. The network engineers laughed when I told them that I was planning on taking the CCNA, then finish up MCSE, within the next six to eight months. "Oh, with the amount of work you'll be doing, you'll be there LONG before that" was the general consensus. At this point, I don't know whether to be excited at the prospect of being trained up to be an "elite geek", or just very, very afraid. (Probably a little of both.)
Either way, I'm looking forward to this experience, and I'm hoping that I'll learn a lot more than I set out to. The original plan was to do CCNA, Linux+, finish up MCSE: Security, and then move on to Sun Certified Solaris Administrator (SCSA), and maybe think about doing something in the area of CCNP/CCIP/CCSP, later down the road. From the looks of this job, and the kind of training they want to give me, I might just be there long before I expected to be. All in all, it feels good to be moving towards this type of work, and I'm hoping I can save up some serious cash for when I go back to school, somewhere down the road.
