I can attest that my greatest periods of personal growth came during times of greatest discomfort. My first job out of college was at a small IT consulting comp

I can attest that my greatest periods of personal growth came during times of greatest discomfort. My first job out of college was at a small IT consulting company where I managed the data center. This gave me complete access to the VMware cluster, the SAN storage array, every Cisco switch, router, and firewall, and root access to every VM running. I could create a LUN on the storage array, a VLAN on the switches, a subinterface on the router or firewall, a VM portgroup on VCenter, and a VM using all of them. It was incredibly stressful at first but I learned a ridiculous amount.