From IT support to a 95k security engineer offer in two years

Two years ago I left the military with a bit of IT experience and basically no civilian tech resume to speak of. I started at the bottom doing tier-one IT support: password resets, ticket queues, the whole thing. It was humbling, but I kept my head down and paid attention to how the infrastructure around me actually worked. After about eight months I moved into a network operations role, which gave me real exposure to traffic analysis, firewall rules, and incident escalations. That was when I saw where I wanted to go. Security engineering. From there I spent my evenings and weekends on training. I mean late nights after full shifts, working through courses on platforms I paid for out of pocket, grinding through labs, building a home setup so I could practice hands-on. I picked up certifications along the way and kept a running list of projects I could point to. Not because they were impressive, but because they were evidence I was moving in a clear direction. I found the job posting on a job board while I was still in the network operations role, and I almost talked myself out of applying. The requirements listed experience I didn't fully have yet. I applied anyway. The interview process ran three rounds. The first was a general ↓