I’m sure I’m an outlier, but I did this once for a particular network equipment vendor. It’s a smaller vendor that aims at a low price point and skimps on thing

I’m sure I’m an outlier, but I did this once for a particular network equipment vendor. It’s a smaller vendor that aims at a low price point and skimps on things like support, but their software had a particular feature that was going to be very important for my employer. To get good at troubleshooting their gear fast - we were going to deploy the equipment for scenarios where mean-time-to-resolution was going to matter a lot - I camped on their forums and helped everyone I came across as practice matters a lot for that. After about year I’d achieved that and stopped, but I maxed out their karma rankings in the process. They didn’t have training material or certification programs and the equipment didn’t break much for us in production so this was the only way I could think of for getting the hours in.