Interesting conversation here. I am in a different kind of boat.
I knew back in school that I really like to work with pcs, but more so with networks. My dad however didn't believe in certifications and would only pay for University but not the usual certifications. So I ended up doing a B.IS degree (3 years only). Starting out wasn't easy, but I got a call center job at a small ISP in CT, completely by mistake that it is in CT since my whole life I've been in Pretoria.
To make the story short, some stuff happened 2 months into working here, and a bunch of Linux Admins left and I ended up with a lucky break into that. Got bored with it real quick sadly, but I did fix A LOT of things a long the way, so much so that I didn't need to look after it anymore. I also trained up a few people so they took over all that work completely. Now in the last couple of months I managed to work myself into the Network department, and I use the word "department" very loosely because they don't really have a proper functional department. It consists of a manager, who well manage, and 2 guys, 1 me and the other 1 that well just sits on his arse doing nothing but cost the company money.
Soon they will make my official title "Standard Network Engineer". So luckily I am skipping most of the junior crap, but what I really want is the "Senior" title. Considering they don't have a Senior guy I don't see the problem, except they expect one to have a CCIE. I don't even have a CCNA, yet I work with BGP, OSPF, all kinds of load balancing, min-maxing used capacity on all links everywhere (shaping, QoS, multiple routes, peering ect) and soon we will have to add MPLS traffic engineering on top of that to have a shot at unequal cost load balancing to make use of routes over difference sized links (eg. STM1 vs STM4) and make use of them at the same time. Basically I have now 2 years of experience, not working on basic switches but high end switches (actually routers but hey that is what Cisco call them), I am also highly technical.
In the evenings when I get home, I am so tired that I don't even bother doing anything work/study related. I don't have a problem feeling like that, I love working with Ciscos (working on 6500(sup720)/3500s mostly) and is what I see myself doing in the short foreseeable future (next 5-10 years at least). It is just that requirement to have CCIE to move to the next level where for obvious reasons I will be able to get a even higher salary ect. Worse, to even get my CCIE I would have to go via the CCNA then CCNP ect route.
Out of interest sake, we have very little downtime, almost never while doing configuration changes on our network. The only outages we ever have is when upstream providers make mistakes or have redundancy failures ect. Luckily this will improve in the future once we can take that into our own hands, but I do believe one can do perfect work with the right planning and having a fall-back plan in case things go wrong. This does mean however that at times I work for an hour after midnight or early weekend mornings.
A tiny bit of a dilemma, but hey I guess I have a okish paying job that I like doing.
