What the job actually looks like
Every company runs on a network, and someone has to build it. That's this job.
A normal week: bringing a new branch office online, working out why one floor's calls keep dropping while everyone else is fine, planning the IP addressing for a building that doesn't exist yet, replacing a core switch during a 2am maintenance window and watching everything come back up clean.
The part people underestimate is what happens when something breaks and nobody knows why. It doesn't stop at the helpdesk and it isn't the developer's problem. It lands on you, because you're the one who can read what the traffic is actually doing and say where it went wrong. That's the whole value of the role, and it's why it pays what it does.
