[AusNOG] Work experience in networking/telecoms/DCs? Getting my foot in the door?

Mon Dec 22 09:35:37 EST 2014

So so true Cam, this is VERY solid advise!

Kindest Regards,
Nathan Brookfield

Chief Executive Officer
Simtronic Technologies Pty Ltd

Web: http://simtronic.com.au
Phone: 1300 592 330
Fax: (02) 4749 4950

On 22 Dec 2014, at 09:32, Cameron Ferdinands <cameron at jferdinands.com<mailto:cameron at jferdinands.com>> wrote:

+1 to Macca.

I'll share my experience as someone getting started in this industry.
Since I think we have a lot in common.

I originally started in the PIPE NOC, and was extremely lucky to be
hired and reported to some great people (Chris Pollock & Alex West).
Customer service is what will get you into the industry, and a
willingness to learn and extreme paranoia for making mistakes on the
network will keep you in a job (causing outages is not a great way to
get started).

Make sure to meet as many people as possible, as you will work with
these people for years and years to come (It's a small industry).
Attitude is infectious.

My biggest piece of advice? Self-learning and a motivation will do
more then a TAFE/Uni degree will ever do. The smartest people I've met
in Networking have all been self taught. Make sure you remember that
when you go for your first interview.

<plug>

Amazon.com<http://Amazon.com> is hiring for Network Engineers in Sydney! If you are
interested in working on one of the biggest networks in the world
please let me know!
http://www.amazon.jobs/jobs/269255/-amazon-web-services-network-engineer

</plug>

We promise not to ask you questions like "What you would do if you
were stuck in a blender, underwater, with square-man hole covers made
of pennies and if you were the size of the empire state building. How
would you escape?"

On 21 December 2014 at 18:13, McDonald Richards
<mcdonald.richards at gmail.com<mailto:mcdonald.richards at gmail.com>> wrote:
Customer service skills will get you further in the networking industry than
you can imagine. Don't be ashamed to work on the front lines even though you
have a piece of paper. It is an invaluable experience that will pay off
exponentially in your later career as well. If you're in customer service
somewhere that grows talent from within and you have the aptitude, you will
be noticed. This period of your career is not forever.

Aim to use your combined customer service and technical skills to land a job
in a NOC. One where you are empowered to do as much as you can to fix
something. Ask everyone everything and learn as much as you can. The people
you start work with have seen and fixed a lot more things than you even if
you think you are smarter. Take advantage of their experience. If you can't
figure something out and someone else fixes it, ask them how they did it.
Try to understand what you missed.

Read all the things. Then read some more.

Good luck.

Macca

On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 10:10 AM, <r_jones at netspace.net.au<mailto:r_jones at netspace.net.au>> wrote:

Hi guys. I've been perusing the list on and off for a fair few months now,
and this is my first time posting here (or to any mailing list at all!
Forums have spoiled us kids it seems), so please forgive me if my posting
technique/etiquette is not quite right, or even if this question is not
quite the scope of the list, and I'll try not to prattle on too much, but
here goes...

I'm 21, fresh out of a 12 month TAFE Networking Diploma that... could have
ended better than it did, if I'm honest. Have had a few personal issues and
some rather nasty illness this year, and budget and equipment cuts to my
campus towards the end of the year only made things worse. I simply ran out
of time.

Anyway, I'm also studying a CCNA which I am about halfway through and am
plugging away at at home, however my resume is quite still bare, having
never had a job anywhere in I.T. before, and I'm trying to get my foot in
the door. It has been suggested by a few people, some of them rather
respectable in their fields, that I look at work experience or volunteering
just so I can fill my resume up with *something*, and so I can gain some
experience as well since it seems that even entry level mop pushing jobs
require 6 months of mop pushing experience. Where do you start?

But that seems to be the question wherever I turn - where do I start? How
do I get my foot in the door? How do I know if that's the door I should be
putting my foot into? Where is the door? Etc, etc.

So I figure, based on previous advice, that I should look at work
experience or volunteering my time to gain some experience. But this still
presents that pesky question for me - where do I start? And another
standout, what companies would allow work experience kids? I realize very
well that not everyone is thrilled with the idea of a kid waltzing into
their company for a couple of weeks, finding out how everything works in the
pursuit of eventual employment somewhere, and this I accept, but hey, we all
have to start somewhere, I guess.

If you're still with me (I apologize for the length of this post), I think
now is the time to explain the fields I'm most interested in and why.

In three (or nine) words: I love networks. I love infrastructure. I love
datacenters.

To be a bit more verbose, I love the very concept of it. How the internet
itself functions at a basic level, how complex and intricate network and
telecommunications infrastructure can be, is always something that has
fascinated me. I want to be at the heart of it, and yet I'm also one for
details. From the NOCs to the last mile, I love it all. Perhaps I'm
idealizing too much, but if you were to ask me what I see myself doing in 5
or 10 years, this paragraph is pretty much it. I love helping to set up LAN
parties when I get the opportunity to do so (the infrastructure is actually
quite impressive to my untrained eyes. 10Gb trunks to edge switches and 40Gb
stacks between core switches - a lot of data gets shuffled around at LANs!)

To be honest, I'm not even quite sure what the job description of what I
eventually want to do is. But, as you can probably tell, I like big things.
But I like to pay attention to the small things, too. I love the idea of
overseeing the operation of datacenters or enterprise networks or
telecommunications infrastructure, but also analysing and troubleshooting
when things go wrong. Finding out what went wrong, why it went wrong,
devising the most elegant way to fix the problem, and making sure it doesn't
go wrong again. Call it morbid, but I love analysing outages (as much as I
can with publicly available information) and knowing what went wrong, why,
what was done to correct the problem and perhaps even what (if any)
preventative measures were employed to prevent it from happening again.

I think you get the idea at this point!

I think I've droned on quite enough, but I would love to hear any and all
of your suggestions as to how/where I could get my foot in the door of the
networking scene, because while I would be interested in roles like
sysadmin, networking seems to be where my heart is set, and always has been,
really.

If pertinent, I'm more than happy to link my current resume, as bare as it
may be, but I did notice that the AusNOG charter said no attachments, so I'm
not totally sure how the best way to go about this would be.

Thanks for your considerable time! I look forward to hearing what you guys
have to say! It's been a pleasure to read this mailing list when I can, I
just hope my babbling doesn't impact on the pleasure of other readers too
much. :)

Thanks again,

Rory.

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