Did I make a mistake accepting the wrong job?
The last four years I’ve been working for a SaaS web app company as a Tier 2 support rep. Mostly handling app-specific issues and Tier 1 escalations. Ultimately the company became a dead end and I started fearing that all the knowledge I built up was not transferable as it was basically just supporting our janky, tech-debt ridden software. So I decided I would start studying in my free time and try to skill up and add some actually transferable skills to my repertoire. I decided that networking and infrastructure was a good fit for me, so I studied and just recently got my CCNA. Notably, this has nearly no intersection with my current role in Tier 2 support, aside from some basic CNAME and A Record troubleshooting issues, as well as managing our janky API (which is only very tangentially related). My current salary is 65k.
So I started applying to positions that required a CCNA. I was hoping to be able to not take a huge pay cut, but ultimately all the entry level NOC roles I could find were in the 45-50k area and I can’t take a cut that big. Looking in my area, I couldn’t find any real junior sys admin roles or similar, and helpdesk seemed like way too much of a step backward, given I do have a lot of experience with troubleshooting, albeit in more bespoke systems.
Then I suddenly got two interviews and offers. One is with a major multinational company, Company A, and the role would be installing, managing, and troubleshooting patient monitoring equipment in various hospitals all over the state. It seemed IT-adjacent, but mostly field tech work. The job listing required CCNA certification, I believe due to FDA regulations. The day to day may or may not involve touching the actual hospital networks as I do deployments and troubleshoot outages for the devices, but the core of the job is managing the company devices. However this did come with a sizeable pay increase to 79k.
I was hesitant at first because I was unsure that this got me any closer to being able to get a Sysadmin role. Ultimately I figured that working with production networked systems in a regulated environment would be good enough to ultimately leverage into a dedicated Sys or Network admin role as my next goal, so I accepted it.
However now I’m wondering if I made a mistake, and that I’ve shoehorned myself more into the field tech pipeline. I certainly intend to continue skill-building in my free time to prove my more direct networking chops, but with this role being far more demanding of my time on that front, did I make a mistake? Especially considering I also got an offer from Company B…
Which I’ll just say is Amazon. Working as a data center technician. I know this also isn’t super on-path for network or system admin jobs, but it at least is much more network adjacent and does have the amazon name attached. The pay is also more of a sidestep of where I’m at now. A slight cut at worst. I’m just wondering what my current path looks like to those in the know, and if I’m veering off course for my goals.
I live in a M/HCOL area and have no college degree. I would ideally be aiming for a sys/network admin role in around a 2/3 year timeframe from now. Any thoughts on my thoughts would be much appreciated.