When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator
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@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@coliver said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
As far as SMB, The lack of pay, long hours, and almost no appreciation has definitely turned me off to ever looking for a SMB job ever again. I can look at these past employers and see how vastly I was underpaid and overworked. I saw one of your earlier posts talk about how you are on the bottom of the pay scale and are fine with that. Can I ask you a question? WHY!?
He answered your why - because he has nearly no stress, and a flexible schedule.
I'm not sure... you'd probably get that in the enterprise as well. Every admin I talk to who works in larger organizations then me has said they have a fairly stress free work environment and their hours are extremely flexible. Including things like being able to work from home, or on the road, without too much forethought.
Well I know we here that from Scott all the time. But I don't specifically know people outside of ML that work for fortune 500 companies beyond the one I always mention - and the friend who is back there now - yeah, talk about stress, ridiculous amounts of hours (60+) with what appears to be minimal flexibility. He has gotten to work from home when his kid is sick, but that's about it.
Is it a real Fortune 500? The ones you mention regularly are always very borderline enterprise (just under the normal definitions in terms of size) and for other reasons didn't seem to act like enterprises and typically are located in rural places (this leans companies away from enterprise) and tend to be coming up from smaller (so new to enterprise thinking.)
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@coliver said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
As far as SMB, The lack of pay, long hours, and almost no appreciation has definitely turned me off to ever looking for a SMB job ever again. I can look at these past employers and see how vastly I was underpaid and overworked. I saw one of your earlier posts talk about how you are on the bottom of the pay scale and are fine with that. Can I ask you a question? WHY!?
He answered your why - because he has nearly no stress, and a flexible schedule.
I'm not sure... you'd probably get that in the enterprise as well. Every admin I talk to who works in larger organizations then me has said they have a fairly stress free work environment and their hours are extremely flexible. Including things like being able to work from home, or on the road, without too much forethought.
Well I know we here that from Scott all the time. But I don't specifically know people outside of ML that work for fortune 500 companies beyond the one I always mention - and the friend who is back there now - yeah, talk about stress, ridiculous amounts of hours (60+) with what appears to be minimal flexibility. He has gotten to work from home when his kid is sick, but that's about it.
Is it a real Fortune 500? The ones you mention regularly are always very borderline enterprise (just under the normal definitions in terms of size) and for other reasons didn't seem to act like enterprises and typically are located in rural places (this leans companies away from enterprise) and tend to be coming up from smaller (so new to enterprise thinking.)
Now who's looking at semantics? You looked them up, you know they are on the fortune 500 list. If you're on the list, you're on the list.
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@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@coliver said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
As far as SMB, The lack of pay, long hours, and almost no appreciation has definitely turned me off to ever looking for a SMB job ever again. I can look at these past employers and see how vastly I was underpaid and overworked. I saw one of your earlier posts talk about how you are on the bottom of the pay scale and are fine with that. Can I ask you a question? WHY!?
He answered your why - because he has nearly no stress, and a flexible schedule.
I'm not sure... you'd probably get that in the enterprise as well. Every admin I talk to who works in larger organizations then me has said they have a fairly stress free work environment and their hours are extremely flexible. Including things like being able to work from home, or on the road, without too much forethought.
Well I know we here that from Scott all the time. But I don't specifically know people outside of ML that work for fortune 500 companies beyond the one I always mention - and the friend who is back there now - yeah, talk about stress, ridiculous amounts of hours (60+) with what appears to be minimal flexibility. He has gotten to work from home when his kid is sick, but that's about it.
Is it a real Fortune 500? The ones you mention regularly are always very borderline enterprise (just under the normal definitions in terms of size) and for other reasons didn't seem to act like enterprises and typically are located in rural places (this leans companies away from enterprise) and tend to be coming up from smaller (so new to enterprise thinking.)
Now who's looking at semantics? You looked them up, you know they are on the fortune 500 list. If you're on the list, you're on the list.
I thought that they were below the list. I must be remembering a different one. I thought they were in the 2,000 range. We looked up more than one company. Was this one like 490 something?
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@coliver said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
As far as SMB, The lack of pay, long hours, and almost no appreciation has definitely turned me off to ever looking for a SMB job ever again. I can look at these past employers and see how vastly I was underpaid and overworked. I saw one of your earlier posts talk about how you are on the bottom of the pay scale and are fine with that. Can I ask you a question? WHY!?
He answered your why - because he has nearly no stress, and a flexible schedule.
I'm not sure... you'd probably get that in the enterprise as well. Every admin I talk to who works in larger organizations then me has said they have a fairly stress free work environment and their hours are extremely flexible. Including things like being able to work from home, or on the road, without too much forethought.
Well I know we here that from Scott all the time. But I don't specifically know people outside of ML that work for fortune 500 companies beyond the one I always mention - and the friend who is back there now - yeah, talk about stress, ridiculous amounts of hours (60+) with what appears to be minimal flexibility. He has gotten to work from home when his kid is sick, but that's about it.
Is it a real Fortune 500? The ones you mention regularly are always very borderline enterprise (just under the normal definitions in terms of size) and for other reasons didn't seem to act like enterprises and typically are located in rural places (this leans companies away from enterprise) and tend to be coming up from smaller (so new to enterprise thinking.)
Now who's looking at semantics? You looked them up, you know they are on the fortune 500 list. If you're on the list, you're on the list.
I thought that they were below the list. I must be remembering a different one. I thought they were in the 2,000 range. We looked up more than one company. Was this one like 490 something?
OK I just looked them up, right now they are 840 something.
So not 500, but 1000, still pretty good list. -
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@coliver said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@dashrender said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
As far as SMB, The lack of pay, long hours, and almost no appreciation has definitely turned me off to ever looking for a SMB job ever again. I can look at these past employers and see how vastly I was underpaid and overworked. I saw one of your earlier posts talk about how you are on the bottom of the pay scale and are fine with that. Can I ask you a question? WHY!?
He answered your why - because he has nearly no stress, and a flexible schedule.
I'm not sure... you'd probably get that in the enterprise as well. Every admin I talk to who works in larger organizations then me has said they have a fairly stress free work environment and their hours are extremely flexible. Including things like being able to work from home, or on the road, without too much forethought.
Well I know we here that from Scott all the time. But I don't specifically know people outside of ML that work for fortune 500 companies beyond the one I always mention - and the friend who is back there now - yeah, talk about stress, ridiculous amounts of hours (60+) with what appears to be minimal flexibility. He has gotten to work from home when his kid is sick, but that's about it.
Is it a real Fortune 500? The ones you mention regularly are always very borderline enterprise (just under the normal definitions in terms of size) and for other reasons didn't seem to act like enterprises and typically are located in rural places (this leans companies away from enterprise) and tend to be coming up from smaller (so new to enterprise thinking.)
Now who's looking at semantics? You looked them up, you know they are on the fortune 500 list. If you're on the list, you're on the list.
I thought that they were below the list. I must be remembering a different one. I thought they were in the 2,000 range. We looked up more than one company. Was this one like 490 something?
OK I just looked them up, right now they are 840 something.
So not 500, but 1000, still pretty good list.That's more like what I remembered. They were pretty far off the F500 and low on the F1000 and overall were not an enterprise behaving company. So not a good indicator because they were at a size where they were teetering on being big enough to be an enterprise, but were caught in the non-enterprise world. Hence why his experiences weren't like those in the enterprise space.
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Back to the OP, if I had to look at the most important skills that I've learned throughout my career, it has to be marketing myself and negotiating salary.
@scottalanmiller told me NEVER take less pay. Always take the job with the most pay and never look back at lower pay once you do. For some reason, it is a very difficult concept to comes to accept. Many IT people think they are worth less than the really are or are willing to accept lower temporary pay. When you do this you are your own worst enemy. Way too many IT people stay at $40-60k throughout their career. There is nothing wrong with $40-60k, but that should be for someone with less than 5 years experience.
As far as marketing, I haven't seen many IT tasks that I couldn't handle with a little bit training. So when in an interview I have the utmost confidence that I can handle anything. I never lie and say I have worked with a system that I have not worked with before, but after being in IT for 13 years there isn't much I haven't seen or at least put my hands on. Imagine this @wirestyle22 , you go the interview with a completion certificate for a course like this. You could have increased your pay big time.
https://www.udemy.com/advanced-mac-os-x/
What Will I Learn?
Learn How To Secure Your Mac
Learn How To Carry Out Advanced Tasks
Gain A Solid Understanding Of The Operating System
Learn How To Troubleshoot And Fix Complex Problems On The Mac OS -
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Personally MSPs are not for me. As mentioned on here, you can learn many different skills working for MSP, but you are likely to do more work than enterprise and get paid less. Not to mention that you are multiple customers emergency response team. So there are alot of late hour fires that you may not see in Enterprise or SMB. You will see fires across many customers and many different specialties.
Now when you do have these late hour fires for Enterprise, you are expected to get things up and running very quickly due to the amount of money at stake. That is why specialization is so important here.
This is true, MSP might be better than SMB, but unless your MSP is the size of an enterprise [IT department] you must take on some pains from the smaller scale.
MSPs do offer value ,though. Especially for someone wanting to get their feet wet in IT or someone who enjoys new daily challenges.
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@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
https://www.udemy.com/advanced-mac-os-x/
What Will I Learn?
Learn How To Secure Your Mac
Learn How To Carry Out Advanced Tasks
Gain A Solid Understanding Of The Operating System
Learn How To Troubleshoot And Fix Complex Problems On The Mac OSHonestly though @wirestyle22 imagine if you took that course before the interview and you could explain the process of securing a Mac or how to carry out advanced specific tasks such as automation and scripting which this class teaches you.
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Something that I learned from watching people fail at this (not in IT, just in jobs in general) is that there is a trend to take lower pay, lower responsibility jobs hoping to have more free time and more flexibility - thinking that it is a trade off. But in reality, it is not. It just makes you worth less in the eyes of the employer. It takes away your leverage - both in house and with other firms. The more you earn where you are, the more power you have to make that or more elsewhere. The more power you have to leave, the more incentive there is to give you flexibility to stay.
In the real world, people making six figures get way, way more flexibility, work from home, low stress, fun and challenging and just generally better job positions than people making, say, $50K. There are exceptions, of course, but in general with as much else equal as possible, the higher your salary, the more flexibility you will get with it. Soft benefits increase with hard ones.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Something that I learned from watching people fail at this (not in IT, just in jobs in general) is that there is a trend to take lower pay, lower responsibility jobs hoping to have more free time and more flexibility - thinking that it is a trade off. But in reality, it is not. It just makes you worth less in the eyes of the employer. It takes away your leverage - both in house and with other firms. The more you earn where you are, the more power you have to make that or more elsewhere. The more power you have to leave, the more incentive there is to give you flexibility to stay.
In the real world, people making six figures get way, way more flexibility, work from home, low stress, fun and challenging and just generally better job positions than people making, say, $50K. There are exceptions, of course, but in general with as much else equal as possible, the higher your salary, the more flexibility you will get with it. Soft benefits increase with hard ones.
You get treated much better when making $100k vs $50k as well.
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An example at the extreme end is a friend that was a factory worker. He took factory work specifically because he wanted set hours, guaranteed lunches, never to be on call, zero overtime, loads of personal time at home, etc. He avoided high end white collar work because he saw it as long hours, always on call and no freedom.
At 19, his life was way easier than mine. He worked fewer hours, made more money. By 22, that was no longer the case. I had flexible schedules and higher income. Over the years, the gap got bigger and bigger. His lunch never strayed from 11:30 - 12:15, on the dot. Mine was three hours and involved martinis. He had to be at work at 8:00am on the dot. I'd straggle in when I felt like it, if I went in at all. He put in eight hours, every day, plus a useless lunch break, no matter what. I'd often top out at six hours. He'd have to commute every day, all weather or not get paid. I would work from home for a year at a stretch. He can't be home for his kids, I'm nearly always home for my kids. By the end, he was making only about 10% of my pay, putting in more hours and had no freedom. Whereas I got to be well paid, work when and where I wanted and my work environment was fun and rewarding.
And by my late 30s I even had things like a personal chef and all food paid for by the company. Not many factory workers getting that.
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@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Something that I learned from watching people fail at this (not in IT, just in jobs in general) is that there is a trend to take lower pay, lower responsibility jobs hoping to have more free time and more flexibility - thinking that it is a trade off. But in reality, it is not. It just makes you worth less in the eyes of the employer. It takes away your leverage - both in house and with other firms. The more you earn where you are, the more power you have to make that or more elsewhere. The more power you have to leave, the more incentive there is to give you flexibility to stay.
In the real world, people making six figures get way, way more flexibility, work from home, low stress, fun and challenging and just generally better job positions than people making, say, $50K. There are exceptions, of course, but in general with as much else equal as possible, the higher your salary, the more flexibility you will get with it. Soft benefits increase with hard ones.
You get treated much better when making $100k vs $50k as well.
Both at work and not at work!
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@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Personally MSPs are not for me. As mentioned on here, you can learn many different skills working for MSP, but you are likely to do more work than enterprise and get paid less. Not to mention that you are multiple customers emergency response team. So there are alot of late hour fires that you may not see in Enterprise or SMB. You will see fires across many customers and many different specialties.
Now when you do have these late hour fires for Enterprise, you are expected to get things up and running very quickly due to the amount of money at stake. That is why specialization is so important here.
This is true, MSP might be better than SMB, but unless your MSP is the size of an enterprise [IT department] you must take on some pains from the smaller scale.
MSPs do offer value ,though. Especially for someone wanting to get their feet wet in IT or someone who enjoys new daily challenges.
I think a key difference with MSPs is people who want broader business challenges. Enterprises are better for broader technical challenges.
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@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Something that I learned from watching people fail at this (not in IT, just in jobs in general) is that there is a trend to take lower pay, lower responsibility jobs hoping to have more free time and more flexibility - thinking that it is a trade off. But in reality, it is not. It just makes you worth less in the eyes of the employer. It takes away your leverage - both in house and with other firms. The more you earn where you are, the more power you have to make that or more elsewhere. The more power you have to leave, the more incentive there is to give you flexibility to stay.
In the real world, people making six figures get way, way more flexibility, work from home, low stress, fun and challenging and just generally better job positions than people making, say, $50K. There are exceptions, of course, but in general with as much else equal as possible, the higher your salary, the more flexibility you will get with it. Soft benefits increase with hard ones.
You get treated much better when making $100k vs $50k as well.
Your pay should parallel your value to the company
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@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Something that I learned from watching people fail at this (not in IT, just in jobs in general) is that there is a trend to take lower pay, lower responsibility jobs hoping to have more free time and more flexibility - thinking that it is a trade off. But in reality, it is not. It just makes you worth less in the eyes of the employer. It takes away your leverage - both in house and with other firms. The more you earn where you are, the more power you have to make that or more elsewhere. The more power you have to leave, the more incentive there is to give you flexibility to stay.
In the real world, people making six figures get way, way more flexibility, work from home, low stress, fun and challenging and just generally better job positions than people making, say, $50K. There are exceptions, of course, but in general with as much else equal as possible, the higher your salary, the more flexibility you will get with it. Soft benefits increase with hard ones.
You get treated much better when making $100k vs $50k as well.
Your pay should parallel your value to the company
Yes, but people often think that if they give up pay that people will appreciate their financial sacrifice and treat them even better while making less. But this essentially never plays out in the real world, or if it does, not for long.
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@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@wirestyle22 said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@irj said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@scottalanmiller said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Something that I learned from watching people fail at this (not in IT, just in jobs in general) is that there is a trend to take lower pay, lower responsibility jobs hoping to have more free time and more flexibility - thinking that it is a trade off. But in reality, it is not. It just makes you worth less in the eyes of the employer. It takes away your leverage - both in house and with other firms. The more you earn where you are, the more power you have to make that or more elsewhere. The more power you have to leave, the more incentive there is to give you flexibility to stay.
In the real world, people making six figures get way, way more flexibility, work from home, low stress, fun and challenging and just generally better job positions than people making, say, $50K. There are exceptions, of course, but in general with as much else equal as possible, the higher your salary, the more flexibility you will get with it. Soft benefits increase with hard ones.
You get treated much better when making $100k vs $50k as well.
Your pay should parallel your value to the company
Yes, but people often think that if they give up pay that people will appreciate their financial sacrifice and treat them even better while making less. But this essentially never plays out in the real world, or if it does, not for long.
That has been my experience, yeah
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@scottalanmiller I had typed out a long response, but I realized it was probably not going to be worth it, so I decided to pick up with where the overnight conversation had moved.
As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I'm well aware that I'm in one of the unusual cases where my organization is an SMB, but it's well managed, so we largely avoid the poor decision making that tends to make SMBs so crappy for most IT to work in (and makes your MSP for SMB argument have so much merit in many cases). My issue isn't with your suggestion, but with it's seeming refusal to acknowledge that the scale is probably too great. I worked at the biggest IT support organization on planet earth for half a decade. Let me assure you from experience, they don't pay better, they're a LOT more stress than I get where I'm at (MSPs are notorious for that phenomenon some of us would know as the "Tyranny of the Urgent"), and scale doesn't necessarily make it better for everyone.. just those who need that specific thing at a level of specialization that benefits from greater scale.
There's so much variation in SMB needs that it's positively ludicrous to even begin to suggest that standardization past a very basic point is going to make things better. It won't. All the specialists in the world dealing with weird crap takes more and more time, making their expertise less and less valuable until the specific specialist has experience with that particular piece of weirdness. However, the cost of their expertise doesn't change for the end buyer no matter what the actual value they get out of the expense turns out to be. If it really was cheaper for all SMBs to contract MSPs for their IT, they would be doing it. If only good MSPs were worthwhile, there wouldn't be so many more bad ones than good.
The problem is that the market seems to disagree with your thinking. Does that mean the market is totally right? Of course not, we all know there are tons of craptastic IT implementations all over everywhere, but "good" is very relative, since even most of IT doesn't understand good IT.. and even much of the good IT folks don't even necessarily agree on a wide variety of what constitutes good IT. SMBs mostly just don't have any care or interest in anything but results, and most IT aren't capable of speaking boss well enough to get most businesses to understand the necessity and value of doing IT correctly. The problem with SMB and IT has always been poor business decisions, not necessarily poor IT. Hiring people who aren't capable is a poor business decision first and foremost. Most SMB IT get hamstrung by their inability to help the organizations decision makers see the value of properly funding their business infrastructure where IT is concerned. Again, goes back to the first problem of not hiring someone who is equipped to do the job properly.
Paying an MSP is no different in many respects, because they're having the same problem obviously, or the issue wouldn't be so prevalent. Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met. It doesn't mean they don't understand that experts also = good at what they do... but if the MSPs aren't convincing them of the value of doing IT properly, whose fault is that? If the "Good" MSPs aren't fixing that, then they're at fault for that exact same issue too. Clearly there are not enough MSPs of the type you describe, because they simply don't exist within about a thousand mile radius of where I am. So the idea that having more of them would fix the issue just doesn't add up in the real world, because there aren't any that are good enough at business apparently to figure out that they're completely missing an enormously underserved area. Or they're not good enough to convince people that paying that much money for doing IT properly is wise. That would make them good at IT, and not nearly as good at business. Sounds pretty familiar unfortunately. There's simply far too many variables to make such blanket statements without automatically ensuring that the statement is flat out incorrect in a whole lot of circumstances. Consolidation and scale doesn't fix the fundamental problem of IT failing to successfully convince many business owners, managers, and executives that doing their IT properly is worth spending the monetary difference to go from good enough to get the job done, to ideal.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
I worked at the biggest IT support organization on planet earth for half a decade. Let me assure you from experience, they don't pay better, they're a LOT more stress than I get where I'm at.
I thought that the biggest IT teams were the US Army and NHS, neither of which is even remotely enterprise class. Government is never enterprise, government is like SMB but worse.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
My issue isn't with your suggestion, but with it's seeming refusal to acknowledge that the scale is probably too great. ...(MSPs are notorious for that phenomenon some of us would know as the "Tyranny of the Urgent"), and scale doesn't necessarily make it better for everyone.. just those who need that specific thing at a level of specialization that benefits from greater scale.
MSPs are notorious for this, sure, so are SMBs. You are trying to point out that this isn't always true with SMBs, I can tell you for a fact it isn't always true with MSPs. Any aspect that MSPs get of that is from the SMBs anyway.
Scale does make it better. It just does. It's not the only factor, but it is the only big factor that changes, and only changes for the better.
I think what you are missing is that MSP vs. SMB there are only upsides, no downsides. Not really. You point out only that MSPs are not perfect, of course not, but you don't point out how SMB work has any means of improving on it. MSPs have a better structure giving more chance for better work. SMBs simply lack those options. All negatives in the MSP space come from the SMBs, but they add some positives that SMBs can't do alone.
Scale matters. A lot, there is no way around this. Unless the SMBs can keep you from being on call and can keep your pay closer to enterprise, that basically proves the point. There is a reason that people don't normally move from MSPs to SMBs, it's not a step up. Once you are in a good MSP, there is really very little better to be found.
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@scottalanmiller Well, the US military is a weird case anyway, so I don't count them either. Besides, they're more like the biggest, strangest non-profit IT outfit in the world I'de say; and they have pretty irregular needs in a variety of ways as well.
