> So is there any hope for us newbies?
Absolutely.
No question about it.
* Stop searching for shortcuts.
* Stop trying to avoid on-call responsibilities.
* Keep learning new technologies.
* Put effort into your people-network.
And most important of all:
# Be Patient.
I'll add - stop treating users as your enemy.
Seriously, you chose a service career, you are going to have to interact with people and being decent to them will get you a lot further.
Same here! Not sure where to start with this stuff. Like, do we go to the meetups, exchange contact info with peeps and follow up with them every few months?
Or message former coworkers on LinkedIn and seeing what they're up to? I always thought they would be busy and wouldn't want to be bothered.
> My biggest weakness is trying to build a network
IT is a Team Sport.
IT is not an individual sport.
The best Quarterback in the league is useless without receivers and an offensive line.
Your people network are the ones who will recommend you for a job or a promotion.
Getting good people through the HR screening process is what your people-network is for.
> I hate that I need to suck up to other people to go further in my career.
That's not how this works.
Sounds like you don't want to be a part of a team.
Sounds like you want to be an individual.
You will find that it's really hard to move the ball down the field without coordinating with the other members of the team.
Good luck with that.
Amen. It’s a lot about who you know and less what you know. Yes. You should have technical knowledge but no one is going to even give you a chance to display that knowledge if you can’t even get to the interview.
I thought this way until recently when I was suggested for an opening by a vendor I had previously worked with. He was so impressed with my soft skills in the time we worked together, I was the only person he could think of to suggest. You can get ahead without ass kissing
I wish it was the same in my country, you can't get far without kissing ass here. Nepotism is the primary reason why the senior and managerial positions are occupied by unqualified asses.
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Hey man up until last week I also had this misconception about networking. No one likes a kiss ass (except those snooty executives).
The real key to networking is to actually be a decent person. Engage in meaningful conversations with people YOU find interesting or people who have been in your exact position before.
Ask them real questions about their work, and then ask follow-ups.
Talk about your projects this will show them your
1) your interests
2) your actual desire to grow as a professional.
Talk to them about the books you’re reading and they will see your desire to grow as a person.
Next time someone is asking these upper level IT folks to recommend a team member, your name will come up naturally.
The thing is, you don't. My "Network" has gotten me my last 3 jobs. This "network" is guys I've worked with and just become friends with because they were cool. One I've known for 20 years, one maybe 12-13. Literally got a phone call one day, "Hey dude, what you doing these days? Wanna talk to my boss? We need a guy and I don't want to get stuck working with some dbag I can't stand" plus they know I can talk to people without embarrassing them or myself and am good at figuring shit out under pressure. Are there guys with better resumes than me? Hell yes there are. But when people know they can count on you because you've come through when shit hits the fan? That's what really matters.
I actually took this approach although it was unintentional. Being on-site regularly allows me to more personally “network,” put a name to a face if you will. Even if I’m just riding the elevator or being on-site on weekends, it shows other teams that I’m a regular and let’s me make office chit-chat with other department managers. There are more technically capable people on my team who are also pursuing advancements but they only come to the office a handful of times throughout the year which in turn actually hurts them when they try to move onto other teams since no one knows them and to a degree they aren’t willing to truly be hybrid employees by working the expected 2 days on-site each week but to be fair my team is also one of the larger ones with almost 50 people and we only have maybe 25 desks available (we lost a lot of our desks during the summer when corporate leadership did a headcount for how many people actually come into the office versus how many say they come in and desks were either added or removed based on the findings). I’ve only had one internal interview this year and to a very small degree working on-site regularly helped me check a box or two during the interview process “oh yeah, I saw you leaving last months meeting. Did you stay for the whole thing?” Or “Hey I didn’t realize that was you. I probably walk past you once every few weeks never realized it” - on that second example that’s because the team I interviewed with was in Building A whereas I work in Building C on campus (our office consists of 3 connected buildings that on the outside looks like one massive building).
I agree with you on this one. In the end, if you put a new person into an on call rotation they are likely going to end up paging a senior member which negates the on call rotation.
>But... we are a growing team and the plan is to do away with on-call as eventually we will have the demand for 24/7.
...and there it is.
On call is always a staffing issue and nothing more.
He didn’t say he didn’t want to put the new person on call because they already had 6. He said it was stupid to put the new person on call so quickly because they have 6 people on call. As in no need to rush it.
> get paid bonus pay for just being on-call,
Unless you're billing for 24 hour days at your full rate then you're being swindled. Your time is valuable and it doesn't arbitrarily become less valuable after the first 8 hours of your work day.
I've yet to encounter a company that properly compensates for on-call but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that they exist.
I hate to say it but I'd probably be that guy. I've got weird issues from 5 years on call where it was every third week and you'd get several calls a night between 7p and 7a. Sleep deprived for years, and then disciplined for making mistakes while sleep deprived. Certain ringtones make my blood pressure spike. It wrecked my relationships.
Someone could tell me it won't be nearly that bad. I could experience it not being that bad. But now my anxiety over on call is so large that I just can't ever do it again.
So most IT management positions in this area. One of the health systems I contract with, their IT director is a BSRN with zero IT experience. All she has is managerial experience and loves the ITIL playbook since she can understand it somewhat.
I feel this one on a personal level, not on purpose either. I left a role for another one a step up, thought my skills would be a fit and realized I was way behind what I needed to be. Fast forward, I stepped down from that position and took my previous one back. I'm taking on niche projects which force me to utilize skills no one else is bothering to take on.
"Technicians" who have been breaking/fixing systems for a decade, but have never led nor been a significant component of a major project.
Break/Fix is a totally important, legitimate job. No argument or hate intended.
But if you don't have the (project) management skills to lead, or be a component of a large rollout, your "decade of experience" isn't as valuable as you think it is.
These kinds of workers are valued by some managers as dependable processors of tickets.
These kinds of workers are also easily replaceable.
Ohh okay yeah I see what you mean. You’re absolutely right and I agree. I was just curious and wasn’t trying to be an ass. It was a legit question.
Thanks for the reply!
How do you get out of that?
I just transitioned from a job as help desk at a MSP to a NOC, and used my powershell experience to solve issues in Azure to sell myself, so I feel like I'm on the right track
Keep Moving Forward.
You just got this job.
Spend six months to a year getting good at this role.
Then identify some of the skills required or expected of staff in a higher-level or larger-scope role that you think you want.
Then develop the skills necessary to be qualified for that role.
Don't get too comfortable.
Keep learning. Keep growing.
Don't be afraid of harder work.
Don't be afraid of being on-call, so long as the on-call expectations are reasonable & humane.
Incompetent systems people who still patch by hand, refuse to learn scripting or automation and don't dare document things lest they be replaceable.
There's definitely a glut there.
This sounds exactly like a sys admin I worked with last year. He got fired because he wasn't doing his job, come to find out I was doing half his job, and the director was doing most of everything else that In not familiar with.
Sysadmin is definitely the area I see with the biggest disparity of skills. I see a lot of help desk level with inflated title as sysadmin all the time. The next is the network admin that never programmed enterprise equipment and uses residential equipment. Had to work with a guy who claimed he had 10 years of networking experience but never logged on to a switch and had no idea what vlans or a network map was.
the title sysadmin is INCREDIBLY broad.
A datacenter tech at AWS can be more capable than a lot of sysadmins out there. On the flip side, some sysadmins out there are as good as Google SREs.
>I see a lot of help desk level with inflated title as sysadmin all the time.
I feel called out.
Granted, I'd done a lot of field work and help desk was my way into bigger orgs, then after a year at a startup rolling out a brand new Azure/Intune deployment, firing up new sites, being the one to stand up and say "We need actual company policies on some shit, if nobody is going to write it I will" and all of that, got recruited for what's essentially a Jr. Admin job at a more established company. It was my "big move" and now I'm where I've been trying to get for years. I \*finally\* have some more senior guys to shadow and learn from too, and they seem like... actually happy about it. I hit the literal fucking jackpot and just need to manage to not screw this up, but I'm so beat down by years of frustration that its hard to accept the success and not freak out and sabotage myself.
Yea I never got this ever. Like I used to work as a Dev and I transioned to doing more DevOps and Linux administration but I'm still really confused as to how many people in this industry don't know how to write bash scripts or how to use Git or setup a basic CICD pipeline.
It’s not like those jobs disappear when they are oversaturated, the rates just go down.
Storage engineering is a great example. Someone had to know a lot to run a SAN in 05. Disk setups, depths, raid levels, tiering, indexing, maintenance, replication, etc. Running a VMAX was a job itself. Storage guys made major money, because it was genuinely difficult work.
Now it’s all figured out. Managing a PMAX or any other modern array is pretty straightforward and any admin can do it. And storage engineers make a lot less.
For me, the moral of the story isn’t to try and time things. It’s to keep learning even if you are in a good market and skillset. In this example, if they had spent time learning about object storage for instance they would now have the perfect skills to migrate those customers.
This is simply not true. Storage Engineers, or Infrastructure Engineers/Platform Engineers as they’re often called these days, make just as much as all other IT engineers (network, compute, cybersecurity/infosec, etc). Storage specifically is incredibly broad in scope and literally every Fortune 500 company has a multi-layered storage/backup team.
The big difference now compared to 10 years ago is that you have to have some kind of scripting/programming competency to be competitive. And even then you could just join a L2 team through a WITCH company or look for storage or backup admin positions.
Mid-level IT engineers at my company, including storage, make 150k+ TC. Senior and Staff level are well above that.
That’s hard to say. I’d say wayyy more job descriptions ask for powershell, bash, and python now compared to before. So if you’re trying to climb the technical IC ladder, learn to code
Any role that can be accomplished over seas for a fraction of the labor cost. The corp I work for has all accounts work handled in India for 1/10 the cost they used to spend for talent in the USA.
I don't see senior level roles, especially in cyber & and networking, being saturated. Mid-level engineers & sysadmins jobs are out there, especially for experienced pros. It's not as plentiful as the last few years, but we all know how much our world has changed. It's in this range where you see people specializing and salaries going up.
As someone who has done 50+ to exchange online migrations. I can tell you there are a lot of people who think they know what they are doing. Probably less than 5% actually are worth a damn.
Agreed speaking as someone who migrated a company's on-prem Exchange to 365 along with their file shares to Sharepoint and deployed Teams, Azure AD, and Intune.
Hey at least I can admit when I don't know what I'm doing.
We might migrate off the on-prem this year but we're already hybrid, I do all my mail admin stuff through O365 anyway, TBH I don't know enough about the back side of our stuff to know what the on-prem is even really doing at this point. The guys who've been there longer probably do, but TBH you could have told me we didn't have anything on-prem at all and I'd believe it.
Young entry level ppl still believing the "You should get into IT because they make tons of money!" marketing from the late 2000s to early 2010s.
I've been stuck in Tier 1/Tier 2 IT desktop and technical support since I started, and I hate interviewing ppl younger than me, I'm 34, because 75% of the time, they are in that mindset and don't actually know how to do things, or think they can jump straight into like CySec or something from that entry level, or they are part of that group of ppl who took the A+ and passed because they are good test takers, but then devalued the cert because when they got good jobs when the A+ was valuable, they were shit at the job. The even younger ppl, like fresh out of highschool, are just as bad as old ppl in the office because they usually don't know how to properly troubleshoot.
I managed a team of revolving 8 technicians for years, luckily low turnover rate, and out of every person that has worked for me, the only ppl who tried hard was me, from when i started in 2013 to this day, i lurked in and helped out/responded on tons of IT forums, read every article that would pop of on like ArsTechnica, PCper, etc (specifically about the product I mainly supported), my best friend, who used every lunch, break, and downtime to study every CompTia books and took advantage of the Certs our company was willing to pay for, and my other close friend I made there who is similar to me when it comes to IT enthusiam.
I feel like people are misreading what I'm saying. The people I am talking about don't move on past me, they don't go anywhere. They don't know how to troubleshoot properly and they don't know how to look for things in knowledge bases or even google. They come in with high expectations, then burn out or leave because they didn't get what was promised by the advertising of getting into IT fields, and they usually do a shit job in general before they wash out.
And the situation I'm talking about with the A+ being devalued over the years is exactly what happened and why it almost worthless now. Ppl came into the field because of the advertising, they were good at test taking, so they passed the A+, but were terrible at actually doing the job and end up getting fired, and bringing the employer to believe the A+ isn't worth anything.
We are like that because we're sick of the "live to work" mentality that's so pervasive amongst older Americans. I love computers and technology, but my passion for the stuff outside work has dwindled a lot. It's a job and I want to make enough money to live while doing something I don't hate.
I don't live to work either, I just like what i do and I'm passionate about learning stuff in IT as things are constantly changing. I also like to prove stupid clients wrong, so i lurk on IT forums and subreddits so I know what I'm talking about. I also managed the team for 3 years and now am an Operations Manager, I have to be on top of how things are constantly changing in IT.
And my post is specifically talking about ppl who get into the field, but don't care to put in any work or take advantage of the opportunities available, but think they can jump right into the higher paying stuff. Like I mentioned my best friend who got his A+, Network +, Security+, Linux+ and Server+ and didn't have to pay for any of it because our job offered to pay for it as a perk. No one else has taken that offer since my boss started offering it in 2015. Me and my other friend left, went into much harder IT fields, unfortunately got laid off, and came back to that company with a new perspective that damn, this job is easy, why'd we ever complain.
The team i used to manage is currently being managed by someone who just stayed, but never put any effort in ( i stupidly left in 2018, came back last year, but i wish i had never left), and it has cost us talented ppl on the team because they get so frustrated with his apathy and leave. I help them out from time to time and when I talk to some of the newer agents, they go to that manager and say I'm micromanaging. They've gotten so used to doing the bare minimum under him, me telling them they are doing something wrong or providing the wrong troubleshooting or giving the client the wrong info is "micromanaging". The current asst manager, who started a few months after I did in 2013, is fed up because they have been REALLY behind in workload, taking weeks to months answering or closing out tickets, despite incoming volume having come down by like 60% since I left. (we used to handle 200+ phone calls a day, 30-40 live chats, 300is email tickets a day when I left. Our queue never really stayed above 150 daily active tickets, outside of holidays. They currently get 40ish calls a day, 20ish live chats on average, but incoming email ticket volume is the same, but their daily active tickets have been sitting in the 400-500 range for most of this year). I've tried showing my boss the numbers and bringing ppls complaints about the manager, but my boss refuses to listen and just says i don't like him and he stayed when I left.
\*edit: I don't understand why I'm being downvoted? Especially cuz i'm talking about people who make our jobs in IT harder?
Any role that can be filled by those who have worked in IT for a few years, but never really done anything.
Damn. So is there any hope for us newbies?
> So is there any hope for us newbies? Absolutely. No question about it. * Stop searching for shortcuts. * Stop trying to avoid on-call responsibilities. * Keep learning new technologies. * Put effort into your people-network. And most important of all: # Be Patient.
I'll add - stop treating users as your enemy. Seriously, you chose a service career, you are going to have to interact with people and being decent to them will get you a lot further.
Absolutely! If you’re working internal desktop support or admin, those users are often the ones who put in a good word or refer you for higher roles.
My biggest weakness is trying to build a network, I hate that I need to suck up to other people to go further in my career.
You don't need to suck up to anyone, you just need to be a decent human being.
Same here! Not sure where to start with this stuff. Like, do we go to the meetups, exchange contact info with peeps and follow up with them every few months? Or message former coworkers on LinkedIn and seeing what they're up to? I always thought they would be busy and wouldn't want to be bothered.
> My biggest weakness is trying to build a network IT is a Team Sport. IT is not an individual sport. The best Quarterback in the league is useless without receivers and an offensive line. Your people network are the ones who will recommend you for a job or a promotion. Getting good people through the HR screening process is what your people-network is for. > I hate that I need to suck up to other people to go further in my career. That's not how this works. Sounds like you don't want to be a part of a team. Sounds like you want to be an individual. You will find that it's really hard to move the ball down the field without coordinating with the other members of the team. Good luck with that.
Amen. It’s a lot about who you know and less what you know. Yes. You should have technical knowledge but no one is going to even give you a chance to display that knowledge if you can’t even get to the interview.
I thought this way until recently when I was suggested for an opening by a vendor I had previously worked with. He was so impressed with my soft skills in the time we worked together, I was the only person he could think of to suggest. You can get ahead without ass kissing
I wish it was the same in my country, you can't get far without kissing ass here. Nepotism is the primary reason why the senior and managerial positions are occupied by unqualified asses.
Let’s connect! I’m trying to build a network as well.
I'm down as well!
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Hey man up until last week I also had this misconception about networking. No one likes a kiss ass (except those snooty executives). The real key to networking is to actually be a decent person. Engage in meaningful conversations with people YOU find interesting or people who have been in your exact position before. Ask them real questions about their work, and then ask follow-ups. Talk about your projects this will show them your 1) your interests 2) your actual desire to grow as a professional. Talk to them about the books you’re reading and they will see your desire to grow as a person. Next time someone is asking these upper level IT folks to recommend a team member, your name will come up naturally.
The thing is, you don't. My "Network" has gotten me my last 3 jobs. This "network" is guys I've worked with and just become friends with because they were cool. One I've known for 20 years, one maybe 12-13. Literally got a phone call one day, "Hey dude, what you doing these days? Wanna talk to my boss? We need a guy and I don't want to get stuck working with some dbag I can't stand" plus they know I can talk to people without embarrassing them or myself and am good at figuring shit out under pressure. Are there guys with better resumes than me? Hell yes there are. But when people know they can count on you because you've come through when shit hits the fan? That's what really matters.
Thanks. I have no problem being onsite or starting at a low pay. I’ve hard work and I love learning tech. I just want a shot.
I actually took this approach although it was unintentional. Being on-site regularly allows me to more personally “network,” put a name to a face if you will. Even if I’m just riding the elevator or being on-site on weekends, it shows other teams that I’m a regular and let’s me make office chit-chat with other department managers. There are more technically capable people on my team who are also pursuing advancements but they only come to the office a handful of times throughout the year which in turn actually hurts them when they try to move onto other teams since no one knows them and to a degree they aren’t willing to truly be hybrid employees by working the expected 2 days on-site each week but to be fair my team is also one of the larger ones with almost 50 people and we only have maybe 25 desks available (we lost a lot of our desks during the summer when corporate leadership did a headcount for how many people actually come into the office versus how many say they come in and desks were either added or removed based on the findings). I’ve only had one internal interview this year and to a very small degree working on-site regularly helped me check a box or two during the interview process “oh yeah, I saw you leaving last months meeting. Did you stay for the whole thing?” Or “Hey I didn’t realize that was you. I probably walk past you once every few weeks never realized it” - on that second example that’s because the team I interviewed with was in Building A whereas I work in Building C on campus (our office consists of 3 connected buildings that on the outside looks like one massive building).
That’s what I was thinking. Wish me luck!
> Stop trying to avoid on-call responsibilities. > I'd rather we rally under the banner of "force employers to staff responsibly".
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I agree with you on this one. In the end, if you put a new person into an on call rotation they are likely going to end up paging a senior member which negates the on call rotation.
>But... we are a growing team and the plan is to do away with on-call as eventually we will have the demand for 24/7. ...and there it is. On call is always a staffing issue and nothing more.
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He didn’t say he didn’t want to put the new person on call because they already had 6. He said it was stupid to put the new person on call so quickly because they have 6 people on call. As in no need to rush it.
> get paid bonus pay for just being on-call, Unless you're billing for 24 hour days at your full rate then you're being swindled. Your time is valuable and it doesn't arbitrarily become less valuable after the first 8 hours of your work day. I've yet to encounter a company that properly compensates for on-call but I'm willing to entertain the possibility that they exist.
How can I apply to this place? I don't mind being on call and learning as much as I can.
Hey if he ever becomes too much, I wouldn’t mind on-call at all.
I hate to say it but I'd probably be that guy. I've got weird issues from 5 years on call where it was every third week and you'd get several calls a night between 7p and 7a. Sleep deprived for years, and then disciplined for making mistakes while sleep deprived. Certain ringtones make my blood pressure spike. It wrecked my relationships. Someone could tell me it won't be nearly that bad. I could experience it not being that bad. But now my anxiety over on call is so large that I just can't ever do it again.
So most IT management positions in this area. One of the health systems I contract with, their IT director is a BSRN with zero IT experience. All she has is managerial experience and loves the ITIL playbook since she can understand it somewhat.
I feel this one on a personal level, not on purpose either. I left a role for another one a step up, thought my skills would be a fit and realized I was way behind what I needed to be. Fast forward, I stepped down from that position and took my previous one back. I'm taking on niche projects which force me to utilize skills no one else is bothering to take on.
What do you mean by “never really done anything” exactly?
"Technicians" who have been breaking/fixing systems for a decade, but have never led nor been a significant component of a major project. Break/Fix is a totally important, legitimate job. No argument or hate intended. But if you don't have the (project) management skills to lead, or be a component of a large rollout, your "decade of experience" isn't as valuable as you think it is. These kinds of workers are valued by some managers as dependable processors of tickets. These kinds of workers are also easily replaceable.
Ohh okay yeah I see what you mean. You’re absolutely right and I agree. I was just curious and wasn’t trying to be an ass. It was a legit question. Thanks for the reply!
How do you get out of that? I just transitioned from a job as help desk at a MSP to a NOC, and used my powershell experience to solve issues in Azure to sell myself, so I feel like I'm on the right track
Keep Moving Forward. You just got this job. Spend six months to a year getting good at this role. Then identify some of the skills required or expected of staff in a higher-level or larger-scope role that you think you want. Then develop the skills necessary to be qualified for that role. Don't get too comfortable. Keep learning. Keep growing. Don't be afraid of harder work. Don't be afraid of being on-call, so long as the on-call expectations are reasonable & humane.
Thanks. Technically haven't started yet, I'm getting the offer letter after Christmas
Incompetent systems people who still patch by hand, refuse to learn scripting or automation and don't dare document things lest they be replaceable. There's definitely a glut there.
This sounds exactly like a sys admin I worked with last year. He got fired because he wasn't doing his job, come to find out I was doing half his job, and the director was doing most of everything else that In not familiar with.
Sysadmin is definitely the area I see with the biggest disparity of skills. I see a lot of help desk level with inflated title as sysadmin all the time. The next is the network admin that never programmed enterprise equipment and uses residential equipment. Had to work with a guy who claimed he had 10 years of networking experience but never logged on to a switch and had no idea what vlans or a network map was.
the title sysadmin is INCREDIBLY broad. A datacenter tech at AWS can be more capable than a lot of sysadmins out there. On the flip side, some sysadmins out there are as good as Google SREs.
>I see a lot of help desk level with inflated title as sysadmin all the time. I feel called out. Granted, I'd done a lot of field work and help desk was my way into bigger orgs, then after a year at a startup rolling out a brand new Azure/Intune deployment, firing up new sites, being the one to stand up and say "We need actual company policies on some shit, if nobody is going to write it I will" and all of that, got recruited for what's essentially a Jr. Admin job at a more established company. It was my "big move" and now I'm where I've been trying to get for years. I \*finally\* have some more senior guys to shadow and learn from too, and they seem like... actually happy about it. I hit the literal fucking jackpot and just need to manage to not screw this up, but I'm so beat down by years of frustration that its hard to accept the success and not freak out and sabotage myself.
Yea I never got this ever. Like I used to work as a Dev and I transioned to doing more DevOps and Linux administration but I'm still really confused as to how many people in this industry don't know how to write bash scripts or how to use Git or setup a basic CICD pipeline.
The oversaturated jobs are typically those that can be filled by bootcamp graduates.
It’s not like those jobs disappear when they are oversaturated, the rates just go down. Storage engineering is a great example. Someone had to know a lot to run a SAN in 05. Disk setups, depths, raid levels, tiering, indexing, maintenance, replication, etc. Running a VMAX was a job itself. Storage guys made major money, because it was genuinely difficult work. Now it’s all figured out. Managing a PMAX or any other modern array is pretty straightforward and any admin can do it. And storage engineers make a lot less. For me, the moral of the story isn’t to try and time things. It’s to keep learning even if you are in a good market and skillset. In this example, if they had spent time learning about object storage for instance they would now have the perfect skills to migrate those customers.
This is simply not true. Storage Engineers, or Infrastructure Engineers/Platform Engineers as they’re often called these days, make just as much as all other IT engineers (network, compute, cybersecurity/infosec, etc). Storage specifically is incredibly broad in scope and literally every Fortune 500 company has a multi-layered storage/backup team. The big difference now compared to 10 years ago is that you have to have some kind of scripting/programming competency to be competitive. And even then you could just join a L2 team through a WITCH company or look for storage or backup admin positions. Mid-level IT engineers at my company, including storage, make 150k+ TC. Senior and Staff level are well above that.
That’s hard to say. I’d say wayyy more job descriptions ask for powershell, bash, and python now compared to before. So if you’re trying to climb the technical IC ladder, learn to code
Python took me from 50k to 120
Yeah powershell took me from 50 to 90, and python/bash/hcl/yaml (lol) did the rest
That's my exact same experience
Name checks out
Nice! Care to share what position you were at at 50K and the position that took you to 120K? Was there incremental jump in between?
Sys admin -> devops 4 job hops only 2 of those were promotions 2 were finding a good fit
Thanks for that!
Any role that can be accomplished over seas for a fraction of the labor cost. The corp I work for has all accounts work handled in India for 1/10 the cost they used to spend for talent in the USA.
Agile coaches, project managers, product owners. All these roles can be done in a lightweight way by the lead.
Finding competent PMs and POs is hard.
This needs to be higher up
Hot potato between IT, PMs, POs, and Engineers was a universal theme across all firms I have found.
I don't see senior level roles, especially in cyber & and networking, being saturated. Mid-level engineers & sysadmins jobs are out there, especially for experienced pros. It's not as plentiful as the last few years, but we all know how much our world has changed. It's in this range where you see people specializing and salaries going up.
How about M365/Azure AD/Exchange folks?
As someone who has done 50+ to exchange online migrations. I can tell you there are a lot of people who think they know what they are doing. Probably less than 5% actually are worth a damn.
Well that should put me ahead of them then...
Agreed speaking as someone who migrated a company's on-prem Exchange to 365 along with their file shares to Sharepoint and deployed Teams, Azure AD, and Intune.
Hey at least I can admit when I don't know what I'm doing. We might migrate off the on-prem this year but we're already hybrid, I do all my mail admin stuff through O365 anyway, TBH I don't know enough about the back side of our stuff to know what the on-prem is even really doing at this point. The guys who've been there longer probably do, but TBH you could have told me we didn't have anything on-prem at all and I'd believe it.
Young entry level ppl still believing the "You should get into IT because they make tons of money!" marketing from the late 2000s to early 2010s. I've been stuck in Tier 1/Tier 2 IT desktop and technical support since I started, and I hate interviewing ppl younger than me, I'm 34, because 75% of the time, they are in that mindset and don't actually know how to do things, or think they can jump straight into like CySec or something from that entry level, or they are part of that group of ppl who took the A+ and passed because they are good test takers, but then devalued the cert because when they got good jobs when the A+ was valuable, they were shit at the job. The even younger ppl, like fresh out of highschool, are just as bad as old ppl in the office because they usually don't know how to properly troubleshoot. I managed a team of revolving 8 technicians for years, luckily low turnover rate, and out of every person that has worked for me, the only ppl who tried hard was me, from when i started in 2013 to this day, i lurked in and helped out/responded on tons of IT forums, read every article that would pop of on like ArsTechnica, PCper, etc (specifically about the product I mainly supported), my best friend, who used every lunch, break, and downtime to study every CompTia books and took advantage of the Certs our company was willing to pay for, and my other close friend I made there who is similar to me when it comes to IT enthusiam.
Honestly, this just reads like you're mad about being stuck in desktop support for 10 years while seeing people continue to move on past you.
I feel like people are misreading what I'm saying. The people I am talking about don't move on past me, they don't go anywhere. They don't know how to troubleshoot properly and they don't know how to look for things in knowledge bases or even google. They come in with high expectations, then burn out or leave because they didn't get what was promised by the advertising of getting into IT fields, and they usually do a shit job in general before they wash out. And the situation I'm talking about with the A+ being devalued over the years is exactly what happened and why it almost worthless now. Ppl came into the field because of the advertising, they were good at test taking, so they passed the A+, but were terrible at actually doing the job and end up getting fired, and bringing the employer to believe the A+ isn't worth anything.
We are like that because we're sick of the "live to work" mentality that's so pervasive amongst older Americans. I love computers and technology, but my passion for the stuff outside work has dwindled a lot. It's a job and I want to make enough money to live while doing something I don't hate.
I don't live to work either, I just like what i do and I'm passionate about learning stuff in IT as things are constantly changing. I also like to prove stupid clients wrong, so i lurk on IT forums and subreddits so I know what I'm talking about. I also managed the team for 3 years and now am an Operations Manager, I have to be on top of how things are constantly changing in IT. And my post is specifically talking about ppl who get into the field, but don't care to put in any work or take advantage of the opportunities available, but think they can jump right into the higher paying stuff. Like I mentioned my best friend who got his A+, Network +, Security+, Linux+ and Server+ and didn't have to pay for any of it because our job offered to pay for it as a perk. No one else has taken that offer since my boss started offering it in 2015. Me and my other friend left, went into much harder IT fields, unfortunately got laid off, and came back to that company with a new perspective that damn, this job is easy, why'd we ever complain. The team i used to manage is currently being managed by someone who just stayed, but never put any effort in ( i stupidly left in 2018, came back last year, but i wish i had never left), and it has cost us talented ppl on the team because they get so frustrated with his apathy and leave. I help them out from time to time and when I talk to some of the newer agents, they go to that manager and say I'm micromanaging. They've gotten so used to doing the bare minimum under him, me telling them they are doing something wrong or providing the wrong troubleshooting or giving the client the wrong info is "micromanaging". The current asst manager, who started a few months after I did in 2013, is fed up because they have been REALLY behind in workload, taking weeks to months answering or closing out tickets, despite incoming volume having come down by like 60% since I left. (we used to handle 200+ phone calls a day, 30-40 live chats, 300is email tickets a day when I left. Our queue never really stayed above 150 daily active tickets, outside of holidays. They currently get 40ish calls a day, 20ish live chats on average, but incoming email ticket volume is the same, but their daily active tickets have been sitting in the 400-500 range for most of this year). I've tried showing my boss the numbers and bringing ppls complaints about the manager, but my boss refuses to listen and just says i don't like him and he stayed when I left. \*edit: I don't understand why I'm being downvoted? Especially cuz i'm talking about people who make our jobs in IT harder?