I went from server tech to NOC. Everyone told me it was a downgrade as server tech is considered higher ranked, that part may be true, but pay was the same and I enjoy the job much more. Been working NOC for 3-4 years now and love it. The shifts are very sporadic but basically there are 12h day, 12h night and 8h day. Typical schedule is 4x12 with 3-4 days off, then 8's scattered around. But you can end up with doing a full week of 8's as well. Shifts are from 7 to 7, so night is 7pm to 7am and day is 7am to 7pm. The day shifts are the hardest because of having to get up so early, but it's not all that much worse than a regular day shift that you'd do at any other job. I rather work 4 12's then 5 8's all the time.
I like to sometimes work like 6+ nights in a row then I end up with a bunch of time off. Because the schedules are very random it means they're flexible. If you need to make any kind of appointment or need a day off, just say so ahead of time and you are scheduled off that day.
As for the actual work, we monitor a handful of telecommunications stuff throughout our company and 2 sub companies (all part of the same big company). Environmental (power, temperature, doors etc), transport (fibre/radio etc), telephony switching such as DMS10, DMS100, DMS200, couple DMS1U's as well, along with lot of other misc equipment such as AFCs and so on... Also monitor CDMA cellular. We'd love to bring HSPA in, but probably wont happen as another NOC does that. We also monitor a handful of managed services customer equipment like servers, routers, switches, etc... For some sites we also monitor fire alarms. I'm probably missing stuff. We have 4 monitors filled with stuff to watch.
Overall it's a nice easy job and you can pretty much just surf the net between phone calls, but when shit hits the fan, we're on our toes and moving fast. When there are mass power outages or something major is down, we'll be very busy keeping track of battery voltages, dispatching techs, coordinating stuff etc. We also take after hours support data and 611 calls. There are lot of opportunities to do overtime too. You really have to be a jack of all trades and there's always something new to learn. The DMS alone is huge, there is only a handful of high end experts to be found these days.
Occasionally we also run jumpers on the main distribution frame. There is a dedicated frame person but if he's off or what not one of us does it for the day. I work inside the main CO, so on night or weekend shifts we'll usually walk around the building to make sure everything is ok. It's a pretty cool building.
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