Ask HN: How to become a network admin. at 19?

What article?

It's often possible to find work in tech without a degree. It doesn't always work out, but unlike many other industries, if you have the skills and can prove it, there's a good chance you'll get hired.

I started my first job as a network admin/engineer at age 17. I'm no longer doing anything network related, but this was a jumping-off point for the rest of my career.

The best advice I can give you: tinker on your own. A lot. Look for small companies that might be willing to give you a shot despite the lack of degree. Once you've established yourself at one place, the rest will follow.

This path doesn't work for everyone, and it's not always easy, but I'm one of many that have had great success despite the lack of that piece of paper.

Edit: Curious, why the downvotes?

It is very possible, the best way to do this is to purchase the latest CCNA and CCNP material from Cisco, a Cisco CCNA/CCNP lab kit from Amazon and apply for a Junior Network Administrator job at your nearest regular business or government contractor. I would recommend going for routing and switching as this will give you a good base foundation of networking in general. If you buy a lab kit insure that the routers and switching equipment you get have K9 which allows strong AES/3DES encryption (SSH for example).

https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywo...

As you move through the certification process you will move more towards being at the professional level (understanding BGP, GRE tunnels, advanced routing, etc. at the internet level) instead of just switching and routing for a datacenter or building.

The most important thing is to get hands on experience and actually understand how routing and switching works in detail. Nothing is more sad and embarrassing or worse than seeing someone with only book smarts and no practical knowledge due to no hands on real world experience. The longer you work at networking day to day on a job and at home using your home lab kit the better you will become.

I started off learning networking at 15, and it has given me a wonderful foundation for everything else, especially understanding TCP/IP UDP and many of the various protocols in depth when doing software development, systems engineering, and various in-depth security work. Plus if you like it and want to do it for a career there is a ton of high paying jobs waiting for you as you gain more experience.

I would think the biggest problem is convincing them that you're reliable enough to show up at work on time every day, respond to questions and problems professionally, etc.

Technical skills can be learned and demonstrated, but being 19 years old carries some doubts along with it. Maybe you would need to prove yourself by putting in some time at the IT help desk just to show that you are mature enough to handle responsibility.

Some of my peers have done this, I did this to a lesser degree as well.

For network admins specifically, I remember that my school provided optional course and accreditation for CCNA. If zou were leaving high school with equivalent of high-school diploma as well as CCNA, junior positions even in large firms were reasonably attainable.

Some of the larger firms have "college diploma in related field or at least 2 years of work-experience".

But usually you can get to those 2-years by working for friend-of-friends, i.e. I was maintaining server that run our churches web-site for a while.