Silicon Valley isn't for tech professionals with little experience

[Nell Plotts]

Interesting analysis.

[kyle242]

Originally Posted by Nell Plotts

Interesting analysis.

Thanks.

Another difficult thing is in interviews, employers are typically interested only in direct relevant past experience.

Take my situation for example. Over 3 years of experience in handling incidents and service requests from customers or other internal groups within large company that apply as transferrable soft set of skills.
I applied for a role as network engineer yet at this time I am only data center technician that has handled servers and network devices. Most of this just involved physical aspect like cabling and racking, troubleshooting link (physical) layer connectivity problems. I did not do more complex tasks like configuring routing protocols because those are hand offed to admins with remote access which is the way it is set up. To close the skills gap I am taking network classes at community college and preparing for ccna. I already have network+, have knolwedge of tcp/ip and protocols. Manager said she was "impressed" during the interview when I told her why I am trying to leave my current role and continually expanding my skills on my own time outside work. At the end it didi not really matter, because the manager looked for a "slightly different set of experience".

So yeah at the end, rather than hire and put a hardworking person at some associate role first who could handle easier tickets first, they rather prefer to poach an experienced veteran at higher salary from another company at the training cost of another company.

[muscless]

I'd have to agree with most everything stated already.

I graduated in 2013 with a BS in IT with a focus in networking. I picked up CCNA shortly after thinking i would land a Network Engineer role easily.

Reality set in quick when i could not get a single interview searching for 3 months. Not a single call back from any application i submitted. However, I was getting several calls from recruiters for low wage desktop support jobs.

I finally broke down taking a role assembling PCs for $11 and no benefits. This was not what i envisioned after 4 years of college but I was desperate for experience and any kind of salary.

After a few short term contracts as desktop support making anywhere between $12-15/hour, i finally landed a permanent position for $20 an hour at Barracuda Networks. I was ecstatic. I was a techsupport rep helping customers with their POS Barracuda firewall.

6 months later, i took the risk of leaving my permanent position for another contract gig for Cisco as CSE for $25. It was a scary decision but you cant get ahead without taking any risks. Barracuda did not want me to leave and offerred to beat $25. Fortunately, i passed up on their offer.

Fastforward to present day, i am now a blue badge permanent employee of Cisco making 6 figures. While this still isnt my ideal job (Customer Support) i am very thankful and lucky to be here. Cisco has the CCIE program for employees where the costs of written test and lab comes out to $50. On top of that, you get 12kbonus for getting CCIE. 2-3 more years here with CCIE R&S, maybe, just maybe I will start getting interviews for Network Engineer.

All i can say is, keep pushing forward and never stop learning.