I accepted an interview for Network Engineer position that was a quite a reach, and somehow managed to nail it. What was supposed to be a 1-hour interview turned into a 4-hour interview and they made me an offer the next week. I expressed hesitancy, so they came back with a second offer that was 30% higher than their first offer, doubled the PTO, and slapped a "Senior" in front of the title. I accepted it because even their baseline offer was more than I thought I was worth, and their second offer was just too bonkers to turn down.
But now I'm a couple months in here and I'm getting overwhelmed really really fast. The few outages and major problems that came my way I was only able to resolve only through dumb luck and guessing, and most of my day is now spent trying to hide how little I actually know from my boss. I get tasked with something, cheerfully say "Okay sure, no problem!" and then spend the next two days frantically googling and digging through Cisco's config docs to try and figure out how to pull this off.
So I'm trying my best to be less terrible at my job to justify this idiotic salary but fuck there's just so much. I've started studying for my CCNP Switch exam and that's it's own deluge of info to try and absorb, but I also keep reading that being a CLI monkey is a dead end these days so in the evenings I'm slowly plowing through Learning Python the Hard Way.
But on top of the nuts-and-bolts networking I've also got to start figuring out this never ending stream of ancillary services, like I'm using SolarWinds for the first time and trying to understand why most of our alerts aren't sending emails even though it looks like they're being triggered, while I'm also living inside our Palo Alto firewalls for four hours a day trying to un-fuck the prior (now fired) outside security consultant's half-aborted attempt to implement segmentation with the firewalls at the network core, oh and also they paid a bunch of money for a Splunk server at some point which has it's own unique programming language that I need to sort (Hey Splunk, when your "cheat sheet" is a dozen pages long, it's not a cheat sheet) out so management can get the pretty graphs that drives their world, but I also need to learn how Microsoft's NPS/RADIUS server because that's the only thing we have for network access control and the policys are convoluted and completely undocumented and I'm terrified to touch it at all because it's a house of cards that will probably fall over the instant the wind blows the wrong way, and I'm keeping up with the daily VoIP management stuff on this expensive cloud provider they have (which is actually a small blessing because it's pretty straightforward compared to the CUCM clusters I'm accustomed to), oh and I'm sorting out Meraki for the first time too which has their own quirks (how the heck to you limit an SSID just to a specified Access Point?!).
And on top of this they're considering a company expansion in the next few months which would necessitate a near-complete re-architecture of the network with new Core/Distro switches to actually get 10gig fiber to all the access layer stacks, and new firewalls with much greater filtering capacity, and I've nodded and taken polite notes through meetings about these things and after I did some scary math and talked to VARs and finally went back to management and was like "Guys, this is going to cost like half a million dollars" and they all nodded and said "Okay, that sounds about right, lets start seeing some high-level designs" and I nod and smile while in my head I'm screaming WHAT THE FUCK I BARELY GOT MY CCNA WHY AM I HERE.
How the hell do you guys put up with this long term? How can you possibly handle this never-ending firehose of stuff you're supposed to know, and be competent in? How do you come in every day knowing that you're just one unplanned outage away from everyone knowing just how bad you are at this job?
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