It was probably long time ago when you were at the beginning of your career and things worked differently that time. Nowadays companies expect you to know things that you don't use day by day or yet, so you have to practice a lot and the best way to practice buy real devices into your homelab and learn things at home. That's how I learnt how to interoperate different brand devices, setting up embedded service service engine and many other things. At the office I neither have time nor allowance to play with customer devices.
I work for a big multinational company and we provide support to our customers not Cisco as most of the companies use many different brand together in their network and we are cheaper than the separate supports from the manufacturers. So buying TAC is not as common as you expect it.
For my home network I bought a Cisco Refresh "new" wireless router which web gui obviously doesn't work properly. Cisco still seems having problems to manufacture a working web gui for its devices
As this SG200 doesn't have CLI I have to declare it being a nonworking brick.
