Network Operations at a datacenter.
That means that I'm a lot more of an Operations guy than a network person. I spend a lot of time managing our munchkins/interns, working on facility management (power/hvac/wiring/cabinets/etc) & coordination, managing my very own budget (not as fun as it sounds), and spend 15-20% of my time actually doing network engineering. I also poke at our very few internal servers occasionally, but do most of my heavy lifting on an aging POS bsd machine 😀 -- you cannot beat shell scripting!
I really like my job as it is normally ridiculously low stress. Projects plod along at the pace of A) the budget and B) the contractors, which means slow & slow. The very few customer complaints we get I normally handle as I am on the ground the most out of the management. I make a good amount of money for being 24, and the flexibility, vacation, benefits, time off, etc are all way overboard. I put in maybe 35 hours in a normal week, and travel and take days off/work from home regularly, just because I can.
The real stickler is when things go wrong. That is when the job turns into a nightmare - cannot leave until the problem is resolved. I really like being hands-on, and when things go wrong it is not uncommon at all to be at work for 3 days solid, then back the next morning at 8am. I am also on call very regularly, and as such handle an average of one off-hours issue a week - be it meeting a contractor for late-work, doing customer moves, late night facility maintenance, whatever. That really beats up my schedule, but it's part of the job.
So when things are bad, they are bad. When things are not bad, they are super-duper-awesome. And that is why I do what I do 🙂
