You got much more into it than I did. I drifted away from coding into PCs, then into routing and switching networks.
I never had training for routing and switching networks. My first encounter was visiting the network room for our new test floor circa 1997. The guys were setting up multiple RAID redundancy, weeks worth of cable management. We had an in-house IT group that did 95% of the work in the office areas and a couple of guys in the test group tasked to manage the test floor IT, but we were still expected to be able to map drives and perform simpler IT tasks ourselves. The floor was filled with high powered test systems, some costing $3M-$5M each depending on options. Lots of huge programs and data flying everywhere.
I spent lots of nights in cold data centers pulling cable, racking hardware, configuring and testing network connections, and going crazy from the constant drone of all the fans.
:-)
I can imagine! I spent a lot of uncompensated evenings beating my head against the wall trying to debug test issues - product, hardware, tester or program problems. The test floor also had that familiar drone of a thousand muffin fans... and the work was so involved it was like being isolated in your own lonely world. I always did my best work alone.