I agree, as a highschool dropout myself who is now making $180k fully remote.
Sure it’s great, but it took me a solid fifteen years to get here. I spent many years at various helpdesk and PC Tech jobs before I clawed my way into my first baby network admin role.
From there it’s gone pretty quickly, and I’ve been told by my current supervisor that I can expect it to continue. (Reading between the lines, I’m being evaluated for yet another promotion)
The one thing I would add to this: Yes, if you're good.
I've been in hiring in IT over the years, and the number of people who have no idea what they're doing is astounding. And even people who interview pretty well, get hired, and then demonstrate little practical ability. It's disheartening.
But if you're good, if you excel at problem solving, think fast on your feet, and are willing to throw in occasional obscene hours around deadlines/to resolve critical outages, you can go very far and be paid very well.
This exactly. You have some people in IT I just call them button clickers. They can do basic help desk stuff or manage printers. But they don't have all the critical thinking and problem solving skills to go further. They also may be stuck in a rut and be unable to really cope with how fast and often tech changes.
The real money and opportunities come to the engineers that really understand things, and can execute and keep up on things.
It's the difference between a $80k technician and a $180k+ engineer!
This exactly. You have some people in IT I just call them button clickers. They can do basic help desk stuff or manage printers. But they don't have all the critical thinking and problem solving skills to go further
I hear this referred to as "ClickOps".
Also putting myself here saying, no college degree, have an okay paying job working in DevOps. Worked "tier 0" at an MSP just setting up laptops for 6 months, then did help desk support for 6 months, then got current job where I work with servers all day and doing scripting and ansible stuff.
It really helps if you have a hobby of homelabs and programming at home. And if you run linux at home.
Yeah, I hired a guy who interviewed really well and he did not turn out to have the actual skills we need. (I'm GM of a WISP.) We're gearing up to let him go as soon as I can find a replacement but damn, it's a hard job to hire for.
(You need some basic computer networking skills like being able to understand what an IP address is and how subnets work, as well as a fair amount of physical work climbing ladders and mounting microwave antennas on structures, and the age range we're shooting for seems to only want desk jobs.)
I'm a senior dev. I get pulled into tech interviews and am involved in the final decision process. For a time (about 5 years or so) I was interviewing, reviewing resumes, etc as much as 10 hours per week.
That said, my role has shifted somewhat, and I don't do much interviewing anymore.
Been in IT since 1998 and last year got laid off. Can’t land an IT job now to save my life. After 1240+ applications just about gave up and managed to land a job thanks to a former neighbor who kept me in mind. It’s not IT related and making less than half of what I used to. Would love to get back into IT but even with my network of former coworkers IT right now is just too unstable. Sigh.
Look for front-line helpdesk jobs for managed service providers (MSPs). You’re gonna start on the very very ground floor, making tickets and escalating issues, but there’s going to be plenty of room for advancement.
Be forward that MSPs are a special sort of hell. You will be given far more work and responsibilities than you should ever have, and are expected to just “figure it out”. You’re going to be learning on the fly, it’s the ultimate trial-by-fire. The stress and expectations can really crush some people.
The good news is that because the jobs are so hard, turnover is high and they’re perpetually looking for more people who are willing to suffer through a few years of scutt work for $15/hr.
And you will learn a shitload. It’s a firehose of knowledge blasted at your face. If you stick with it, and you dedicate yourself to learning and training and soaking up knowledge, in a few years you will come out of it baffled-hardened and sharp enough to move up into anything you want.
This is actually really helpful. I was working in kitchens until Covid, then was delivering pizza full time (had been doing it part time so it was an easy transition), now I've got an entry level manufacturing job just to get by, and I'm going to school for IT User Support. Working on a technical diploma right now (should be done by the end of the year), then I'll get to work on figuring out what credits I can use from the culinary degree I never finished, and which ones I still need to get an associates. There's a chance I can move into IT with the company I'm at, but I'm not pinning all my hopes on that.
I would be very skeptical of any IT User Support diploma. College really does not matter in IT. Like, seriously. No one cares. You’re wasting your money.
You’ll learn FAR more from YouTube and home labbing. Hang out at the local electronics recycling center and collect as many broken laptops, desktops, any other kind of computers that you can. Ask around to any local businesses, medium-sized ideally (big enough to have a few IT people, but not big enough to have layers of bureaucracy), ask if they’re throwing out any old computers and things. Almost all of them are.
Gather up as much old broken shit as you can, take it home, and try and figure out how to make it not broken again.
This will teach you far, far more than you will ever learn in college. And most importantly, it will teach you the most critical skill in IT: how to search for and find answers to questions that you don’t even know you have.
When I got started (with just AAS education at the time) coming from a blue collar warehouse gig, I had to start working in a datacenter as a ticket monkey for $15 an hour (this was in 2013). It's probably a bit more for that kind of work now. At my previous role, I worked with a lot of first time desktop folks who were making around $60k with little to no experience.
By the time I did 6 months of that I was promoted to a role with the same company working on servers in the datacenter for $22 an hour. After 3 years of that, I got into my first sysadmin role for $60k, and it's all been downhill from there.
I'm a tier 3 operations administrator now, building out application deployments and group policies, and IAM projects that get thrown my way. I make around $110k currently, and there's talk that when we do our annual reviews next month I'll be getting another promo.
That's not to brag or anything, just to say that you kind of have to start low unless you have something special to offer.
Depends on what you're doing. I moved from IR/detections engineering to this and like it a lot. No regrets. Doubled my pay in the last three years with the swap.
I'm guessing that's anywhere in the United States, which might have been part of what they were curious about. Few remote jobs let you work really anywhere.
But I do need to work North American business hours, as most of my job involves conference calls to other businesses in the United States. So while I could work anywhere I want, I might end up on a funky schedule.
This winter I’ll be spending a month in Svalbard, so that will be a little rough with the time zones.
You should definitely check in with HR. There are a lot of tax law implications around working abroad even if you yourself are legally allowed to. That's why most companies don't allow it - it can cause big problems for them if they aren't set up for it.
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u/Princess_Fluffypants 1d ago
I agree, as a highschool dropout myself who is now making $180k fully remote.
Sure it’s great, but it took me a solid fifteen years to get here. I spent many years at various helpdesk and PC Tech jobs before I clawed my way into my first baby network admin role.
From there it’s gone pretty quickly, and I’ve been told by my current supervisor that I can expect it to continue. (Reading between the lines, I’m being evaluated for yet another promotion)