Proof Beats Permission

You need experience to get the job. You need the job to get experience.

Everyone who breaks into this field stands in that confusing place. Stuck. Invalidated. Looking in from the outside, sure that those inside hold some secret key to the kingdom.

I know that place. Not long ago I spent a year in that desert, out of work, telling myself a story about why I couldn't get back in after a layoff. The story I believed was the problem. It usually is. So I changed that story, built proof, and became impossible to ignore. 

The engineers who broke into tech did the same thing. They stopped waiting for permission. They built proof, and made themselves impossible to ignore.

In routing, the shortest path isn't about distance. It's about cost. The protocol doesn't care how many hops a route takes or how many miles the fiber runs. It cares which path moves traffic in the most reliable, efficient way. Two routes can look identical from a certain perspective, but one is better.

Careers can have similarly contradicting appearances. What we perceive from our particular perspective may not be the objective truth. "I'm not smart enough." "I can't code." "I'll never get experience until I get the job."

The stories we tell ourselves shape belief, belief drives behavior, and behavior creates outcome. That's why The Shortest Path newsletter exists. One path per issue, pulled from real IT practitioners who shared their stories of struggle and triumph with The Art of Network Engineering podcast. Folks who overcame seemingly insurmountable odds, created a better life for themselves, and shared their story on AONE.

It is our hope that these stories inspire you when you struggle, remind you that you belong, and keep you going on the harder days of your journey. We’re sharing these stories in AONE’s The Shortest Path newsletter as weekly reminders that you can do this, it's worth the struggle, and whatever you do, don't give up on yourself before the miracle happens.

Teneyia Wilson got rejected over and over. Water districts. Big companies. Same line every time. "We like you. We just need someone with experience."

At one interview, she stopped playing along. "I'm really sick of begging for a chance. I can do this job."

Then she proved it. A home lab. Ten physical devices. A standing invitation to anyone who wanted to try to break her network so badly that she couldn't fix it. Nobody could. That wasn't a candidate asking for permission. That was an engineer proving her capabilities.

Teneyia didn't wait for someone to hand her a title. She proved she could run networks on real gear, in her own lab.

Jeff Clark bombed an interview but landed a security role there three months later. How? He took the interviewer's feedback, built a lab out of spare hardware, and took a lower-level role to get security experience. A year or so later he re-interviewed at that company and landed his dream gig. He sought the experience he needed to grow his career, and it paid off.

William Collins helped several people break in, and his playbook barely changes. A CCNA. Something you made that proves you can communicate. A home lab. He says a home lab is proof. Proof you'll do the work when nobody is paying you to.

Sometimes the shortest path is just being in the right place at the right time, taking on extra work. David Alicea got his start by being useful to the network team, before he was a network engineer. Running cable. Swapping blades out of a 6500. Changing VLANs. None of it glamorous. All of it real. When a seat opened, the team knew he could do the job, because he provided proof. He got the job.

Build something. Break it. Fix it. That's where deep learning lives, and how you build experience before your title says so.

Then, when someone asks if you can do the job, you're not hoping. You know. You've done it.

You learn by doing. Trial by fire. There's no shortcut around doing. But there is a shortest path, and it starts before anyone gives you permission. Study hard. Lab every day. Build muscle memory. And when someone tries to disqualify you because you "don't have production experience," tell them about the gear humming in your closet, the network you built, broke and fixed by hand. Then dare them to break it, and prove you can restore services. 

And while you grind, hold on to something. When our cofounder AJ Murray was studying the old CCNP, route, switch, and t-shoot, he posted his failures out loud. After one of them, a network engineer named Kevin Myers replied: “You always hope for the pass, but in the end it’s about the journey.” It hit so hard we named our Discord community after it.

Your career is not a destination It's the road itself. The labs at midnight. The failures you learn more from than any win. The small wins that build confidence. So put in the work, but don't grind so hard you forget to look around. The journey is the best part.

I spent 20 years believing a story about what I couldn't do. It almost cost me my technical career. Don't do what I did. No one is coming to save you. Doors don't swing open on their own.

Sometimes, you have to kick them down.

See you next week,

Andy

The Shortest Path engine

🎧 This week's episode: EP 43, "You Get 5 Seconds", Teneyia Wilson's full story.

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