That first job hustle is painful. I definitely wouldn't be where I was today if I didn't spend a few years at a local studio, if only because it gave relevant work experience to what I wanted to do. Even if it was paying me half my current salary it was well worth the experience.
Funny how people assume that just because you’ve been at one of the tech giants, that it was either the only experience you have, or that it’s the only experience you valued, or speak from. The assumption is a category error, and seems to be mostly invoked dismissively.
Also, what was your role with regards to ISP infrastructure?
2. Well, over the course of the last few decades, I think probably most of them, having started out building dialup services in the '90s on shelves piled up with USR Sportsters, to principal engineer for a multinational service provider; developing various appliance products; developing global-scale provisioning & monitoring tools for transit and hosting services; helpdesk; operating a LIR; dating RIR staffers; standing up new IXPs; SRE; hiring; designing data centers; M&A due diligence; post-M&A systems convergence; webdev; postmaster. My concept of "full stack engineering" starts with racking the servers, or perhaps even before that: getting the business case approved and running the RFP. Never been a peering coordinator, though, I'm not demonic enough.
If instead the response is in any way affronted, then run the fuck away because that’s a clear early warning sign of toxic, bullying management; avoiding such environments is also on my list of good outcomes. The only exception context being, if you don’t currently have any income at all.