Worked in IT for 17~ years (Sometimes feels like 50 years!)... Started as an application analyst in 2007, cut my teeth and progressed into operations / site support for an engineering consultancy, moved into an infrastructure engineer role on the server & storage side, dabbled in data centre management and migrations / consolidations, trigged by a company acquisition and eventual outsourcing of global IT to IBM .
I jumped into another infrastructure role, in the heavy manufacturing sector... Started off interesting, soon realised the aged environment was running on a shoe-string budget and a toxic culture in the IT leadership team - yay. I resigned after 8 months!
In early 2018 an aerospace company announced they were building a new manufacturing facility, local'ish to me - Advertising for an infrastructure engineer to support building and implementing IT systems for the facility. I got the role and immediately 'hit the ground running', the next 18 months where the busiest and most enjoyable of my career - Did a lot, learnt a lot!!
After the place was built and functional, early 2020 I was offered a role working with OT (Operational Technology) integration, essentially securely networking manufacturing equipment to collect OEE data (performance metrics, efficiency, quality) - Another great learning experience.
2022; I was promoted into a senior engineer role, managing ESXI environments across multiple manufacturing facilities (Also following the VMware buy-out mentioned in this thread!!)... End of 2023 I was offered a Product Manager role, in the same team - some trepidation, as my career path has been always technical, but enjoying it so far, still keeping 'hands on', with some strategy / success definition and more meetings thrown in!
I didn't plan to write all that, but there you go!