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Comment by indigodaddy | Hacker News Reader

You might look up this HN thread for ideas or inspiration.. lots of good stuff on that thread!

My recommendation? Get a NOC Technician job at a datacenter/hosting outfit or ISP. It’s pretty easy to get your foot in (at least somewhere). You won’t get paid much, but you WILL learn a helluva lot of actual real-world tech fundamentals, and most importantly, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot and move and act quickly.. just my 2 cents. It’s up to you how hard you want to work and where you go from there.

Even if you are already a skilled programmer say, and consider this path too entry level or whatever, believe me you’ll be glad you did it. You don’t want to be one of those programmers that know little about systems/networking/DNS/troubleshooting. You’ll be thankful for the sysadmin knowledge that you will gain and always have at your disposal down the line..

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24670746

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I would recommend against this.

I was a NOC Engineer at an ISP and later a MSP while getting my degree. My peers we're those with unskilled jobs previously who took a few college courses.

My resume was routinely sent over to the IT help desk manager whenever I applied for a software role.

I got past it by volunteering as a Bioinformatics SE at the local university.

You got past what exactly?

It’s about getting your foot in the door somewhere, gaining valuable fundamental tech skills and networking/nix/troubleshooting skills and experience, and then you leverage that experience those learned skills by moving on and up to a higher paying something_engineer role, most likely at a different and bigger/better org etc.

Obviously neither of our particular adhoc experiences can be used as a template for success, as of course it’s a combination of luck/right time right place/experience/competence/each person’s motivation/drive etc, but I’m not understanding how what you described was disadvantageous to your career.

Are you saying the skills you learned and experience you gained was not valuable? Do you believe that NOC Technician looked “bad” on your resume to potential employers? Because that is totally fine as a first or second tech job—- in fact in Engineering and Operations groups it’s almost assumed that this is the sort of first entry level job that many will have.

Any technical hiring manager is happy to see that type of experience, and knows that this sort of experience is miles better than “fill in cloud name” certs that everyone gets these days. You learn fundamentals with these jobs that you’ll never obtain from studying or labcramming for these cloud certs.

For skills-development, I totally agree. I have several strong devs/other tech roles on my team who came via this route.

For salary-development, you’d probably be better if you start SWE, even 6 months “late” and rotate through an SRE group at some point early in your career.

Salary development catches up pretty quickly though once you target and obtain desired roles down the line.

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