Anson Kochi joined Matrix Networks in 2006 as a part-time hire on an overnight guest wireless help desk. He barely knew what a switch did. Today he is our Director of Engineering, running the engineering and support teams behind Matrix’s managed network clients.
Two things made that possible, and neither one was a certification.
We asked him about the distance between those two jobs, because almost none of it was planned, and because both halves of the story are useful: one half to anyone building a technical team, the other to anyone trying to get into one.
If you hire technicians: the screen that matters is not what a candidate already knows. It is whether they are worth bringing along.
If you are starting out: your first job is proximity, not title. Get in the building where the work happens.
Both of those come from his experience, not from our advice. Here is where they come from.
The first job rarely looks like the career
In 2006, Matrix Networks was a telecom business with some networking work on the hospitality side. The company was recruiting from local colleges to staff a call center supporting guest wireless for hotel clients. Anson was one of those hires. He took classes during the day, covered the night shift on the phones, and ran on two or three hours of sleep most of the time.
He is direct about what the job was.
“It was only supposed to be a stepping stone.”
Expertise gets built on the job, not brought to it
“I barely knew anything about computers and networking.”
The gear he learned on made that starting point less unusual than it sounds. Access points and switches that counted as high end in 2006 moved a fraction of what current entry-level equipment does, and site planning was mostly manual.
“Back then, it was kind of guessing on where and how things are going to be installed.”
Tooling has changed the shape of the learning curve since.
“Now we have portals, platforms that encompass everything as a whole, able to pinpoint a lot quicker.”
A broadcast storm that once meant walking a stack port by port now shows up as correlated symptoms in a monitoring platform, and switch-side protections like BPDU guard and loop detection can shut the offending port before anyone gets paged.
Someone entering the field today starts with better instruments than Anson had. What separates a new technician from him is reps more than raw aptitude.
Mentorship in this field is rarely formal
Asked where his knowledge came from, Anson does not name a certification.
“A lot of what I know today has been because of working with other senior technicians like Jeremy Ness and Jon Shier.”
Jeremy Ness is now Matrix’s CTO. Jon Shier is a senior network engineer and systems administrator who just celebrated 30 years here at Matrix. Both started as entry level employees and neither arrangement had a curriculum.
“Jeremy really took me under his wing, doing a lot of the installations together. All the fun stuff that he didn’t want to do, I got to do. It wasn’t uncommon for him to, you know… leave me up in attics and then forget about me.”
While Anson said this with a smile along with one of his legendary laughs, that is what technical mentorship usually looks like in practice. Someone senior brings a junior along, lets them carry equipment, answers questions between tasks, and occasionally leaves them somewhere uncomfortable. It is unglamorous, but it usually transfers more knowledge than any classroom or certification process.
It also runs on the junior being worth the trouble: useful, curious, and not selective about which parts of the job they will touch.
If you hire technicians: Anson’s path points at one screen. Ask a candidate about the least interesting task they have taken on and what they got out of it. The answer tells you whether a senior engineer will want them in the van.
If you are starting out: volunteer for the ride-along. The attic, the ladder, the cable pull. Nobody teaches the good parts to someone who only wants the good parts.
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Everyone in the field is relearning it
The gap between a new technician and an engineer twenty years in is narrower than it looks, because the ground moves under both.
Asked what caught him off guard, Anson did not reach back to 2006.
“Lately, honestly, the biggest thing is AI. The whole AI trend, knew it was coming, and then smacked us in the face.”
Senior engineers are relearning parts of their own discipline right now. That is the job, not a rough patch. His advice to anyone entering the industry was one sentence he did not have to think about.
“Never stop learning. If you think you know it all, stop thinking that.”
He extends it past working hours, and not as a productivity argument.
“There is always something to learn, even if it is outside of work, just as a side hobby. A lot of us on the ops side, we have side hobbies that are in the field, that we like to bounce ideas off each other.”
Home labs count. So does breaking things where the stakes are low.
Asked what he would tell his 2006 self, his first answer was a joke. “Don’t get old.” The real one was less comfortable.
“It is going to be rough. There are a lot of things that you’ll be learning that are going to be really heavy on you. But it is definitely about the journey.”
Early work in managed networking involves being wrong in front of colleagues, escalating problems that felt solvable alone, and absorbing more than anyone can hold at once. That stretch is part of the apprenticeship, not evidence of a bad fit. Most senior engineers went through some version of it. Few describe it as pleasant.
Twenty years in one place, when the place keeps moving
Two decades at a single company runs against most current career advice, which makes the mechanism worth understanding.
Matrix changed underneath him. The company moved out of a telecom-only identity into networking, and the scope of the engineering work expanded with it.
“Now it is not a simple, oh, you only manage the switch or the network piece. We have to figure out how we are going to integrate on the system admin side, work with a whole team of engineers to really get one piece going, and they have ten other things waiting to integrate.”
That produced the variety most people change employers to find, without resetting relationships every few years.
“When we made the shift to networking, that really solidified it. I am going to be here for a while. I want to be here for a while.”
Longevity of that kind only pays off somewhere the work keeps changing.
“We are never stagnant. It is constantly moving. That has been one of the biggest plus about working here at Matrix.”
The other half was never technical. Twenty years on, the relationships are still the first thing he names.
“The relationships that we built, the camaraderie. It is something a lot of people do not get to find in workplaces.”
What this suggests
If you are building an IT team: aptitude is table stakes and the market already prices it. Retention is the harder variable, and it tracks with two things that never appear in a job description: whether the work keeps changing, and whether your senior people are willing to bring juniors along. Both are things you decide to fund.
If you are building a career in IT: the compounding asset is reps in an environment that keeps moving. Twenty years in one place worked for Anson because the place did not sit still. Judge an employer on that rather than on the title in the offer.
Anson marked twenty years at Matrix Networks this month. He started on the night shift with almost no experience, and he now leads the teams that keep our clients’ networks running.
Congratulations, Anson.
