20 lessons learned in my 10 years working as network security engineer. My job was to configure and manage firewalls for customers.
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1. Always have a backout plan. If you're going to be making changes to production equipment, expect it to go all wrong one day and you'll be ok if you have a plan for that. If not you'll be burned.
2. Sometimes your role is just a therapist. And people just need to be reassured or to be listened to when they need to get something off their chest. These are the easiest problems to fix because all you gotta do is listen.
3. The goal is to understand the technology enough that you find release notes of new versions interesting to read. For the first few years, release notes won't even be on your radar.
4. Establish a few escalation paths if you get stuck. Either have a Sr person to count on, or a vendor's phone number to call or even ask your manager for help because you're stumped on a problem. But don't overuse these options. Try to overcome the problem yourself first.
5. Make and print out a cheat sheet and tape it to your monitor for quick access to info. Such as the company's IP range, servers you use a lot, help desk's phone #, or info you use a lot. This way it's always an easy glance to find this info. Here's what mine looked like.
6. Have some sort of sandbox or lab to practice and experiment on. Ideally something just you use. For me I always liked having cheap Cisco equipment at home to practice with. This was like my secret weapon, as I was always logged into it testing commands and configs.
7. Go to a tech conference at least once a year. It'll replenish your excitement for tech and get you motivated to learn all kinds of new stuff and stay interested in what you do.
8. It helps to know a little bit more than where your area of knowledge should end. For example I was a network engineer but sometimes had to work with VMware system that wanted to load balance ethernet connections. Knowing a little about VMware went a long way.
9. If you ever get the chance to interact with your manager's manager or up when it's appropriate, go for it. Getting on their radar in a good way can sometimes work well in your favor.
10. Pick a technology that you can become the best at on your team. For me this was VPN configurations. Everyone hated it, I stuck with it until I liked it. This made me very valuable to my team and they appreciated me being clutch at fixing VPNs.
11. Take advantage of any free training the company offers to give you. If they don't offer, ask if there's a training budget to take courses on things related to your job.
12. Sometimes having a job with a good mentor is worth more than having higher paying job with no mentors. The trifecta for the best job is good pay, good coworkers, and work you like doing. If you can find that job, you've scored.
13. Find ways to make your job easier. This might mean better tools to use, building tools to help you, or reinventing a way to do something. The way we've always done it is not always the best way. For me I used a lot of AutoHotkey to automate a lot of my work.
14. Knowing the tech is great, but you need soft skills too. To be able to talk with customers, and vendors, and coworkers and to be persuasive and teach them and earn their trust is a very important skill.
15. A Jr person might know as much as a Sr person when it comes to tech skills. But a Sr person can see what needs to be done next much better than a Jr can. They have a better sense what the business needs are and can look further into the horizon to prepare for that.
16. Sometimes when you can't solve a problem it helps to explain the problem to someone else. Anyone else. Sometimes it helps to draw it out too. If you can draw any kind of diagram to describe it, that can reveal things you didn't consider.
17. Keep a notebook or notepad of valuable commands and notes for what they do and when to use them. Then make a blog to save all these commands in a place that's easy to find and for others to find too.
18. Whenever you get a window to do production configuration changes, make sure to ask for plenty of extra time in case something goes wrong, and it will go wrong eventually. And always get your changes peer reviewed and backup configs before and after the change.
19. It's ok if you don't know how to solve something. Learn to be comfortable with that feeling. There will be a lot of times when you don't know. Just stay calm, learn about the stuff you don't know, and combine it with what you do know. Dark will turn light. You'll get there.
20. It's weird how it never seems to get easier too. While you master one thing, you're just given more complex problems that will continually stump you. There's always bigger problems to solve. Aim high.
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