I feel this, especially since I’m more into networking, but my work is more generalist.

I open my mouth about networking and people’s eyes glaze over. Even very experienced senior people can’t really understand what I’m talking about when it comes to some of the more intermediary networking concepts. Meanwhile I tune into a podcast that’s networking focused and they’re basically speaking Latin for me.

There’s so much that I don’t know. I get the broad strokes of things but I’m hopelessly lost on so many of the more nuanced bits of networking.

I really want to break away from generalist work and get into a network focused position, but after 10 years as a generalist in various MSP companies, most places won’t take me seriously as a networker and won’t even sit down for an interview.

I’m good at other stuff, damn near expert level with some things, but my passion is networks and the workplaces I’ve been at just don’t care to help me learn any of it. My current place barely has any networking more complex than a profile based L2L VPN… Switches are basically ignored, and VLANs are rare.

I facepalm every time I discover that the guest network is just bridged into the same subnet as the LAN. I’ve raised the issue a few times and never been given the green light to fix it, often because the network isn’t able to be managed remotely.