[indigodaddy]

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.