@ryanblahnik said:

I wasn't sure whether you were referring to a lot of learning starting to move toward Googling and boards, or any change in what's available in books, or maybe if your experience just got to a point where that wasn't as necessary.

Oh no, I think that learning has gotten harder. Google is good for fixing things, it is not good for learning. There are many fewer IT books today and the lack of physical book stores has made learning about and sampling IT books much harder.

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

I think that whole, seniority doesn't have to work on days off, etc thing really depends on the position. For example, if you're the senior person on a platform, say O365 hosted Exchange - I'm willing to bet that guy gets called in on his vacation when there is a problem that reaches a certain point. Granted you hope that the people below you can handle 99.99% of things, but there is always that 0.01% that bites you.

I've been that guy, final level of support for a bank with tens of thousands of machines under me. Yes, I was on call 24x7, but I also got three hours days, able to drink on the job, could work from home any time I wanted, could work from any country in which we had an office, had a staff of people just to screen my calls and connect me only when needed, no normal workload except for the escalations. Once you get to that level, you get to pick how you take your benefits. Yeah, I was always on call, but the benefits more than made up for it.

I have to ask, what was your job in that position?

Work three hours a day? doing? when not in an escalation.

Yeah, in the office like three hours a day. I'd spread it out with time at the bar in the middle. Position was Linux Technology Chief. I didn't get assigned projects, but I had to always be available for escalation, 24x7x365. I was there for guidance, to authorize things that no one else could, to be a bypass for SVP approval (when the "staff" couldn't get their hands dirty) or to handle the technical issues that didn't get caught by the staff before me.

Nice - but really, how man of those types of jobs are there? a dozen? Even if we say there is one at every Fortune 1000, that's only 1000 of those jobs, so they are pretty impractical to aspire to.
Sure, everyone wants to be President some day (ok not really, but you get my point), it's just not a realistic goal for 99.9999%.

Why does it matter how many there are of that kind? The point isn't that I had some special job, the point is that as you get more senior, the jobs generally get better and better. Think about it, who has the worst jobs, the entry level people. If they had better jobs than the people above them, they would refuse to take promotions. Each level of seniority has to bring enough benefits for people to want to do it. It's a gradual scale. Keep moving up, it keeps getting better (on average.)

I haven't seen this be the case. I suppose if I take helpdesk out of the equation, then maybe I see it.

You start as an IT Admin in a medium + sized company and move up to Admin II, Admin III, from there you either change to engineering or management generally.

I'm unclear how you are saying that this does not support what I said. You are saying it as if you feel it disputes what I said, but it sounds to me like it agrees. So there is some disconnect between us here.

@Dashrender said:

@IRJ said:

My experience with staffing companies is that they get more than 2%. Most of the time I have worked with them I have been able to negotiate a higher salary. I know they have to have more wiggle room than 2% to allow negotiation on salaries.

Why? They simply pass the cost along to the company you really work for. I'd guess that the employing company and the staffing company have some sort of agreement of salary range for the position. Though if you think about it, assuming a straight percentage is how they are paid, it would be in the best interest of the staffing company to get all staff placed at the maximum rate the position allows.

Not if the customer sets the price. All depends on the contract.

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

For somebody who feels they are definitely qualified, the initial phone interview, or potentially second phone interview would cover this, I think.

Except that they already stated what the "range" is for "qualified." Salary IS negotiable, but it also tells you that you are going into a bad situation.

I'd definitely agree with that.

@lhatsynot said:

Yea... Knowing him it was probably a life lesson that he learned the hard way. Man, I'm going to miss my current boss. 😞

Maybe the MSP wants to hire him, too.

@quicky2g said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@dafyre said:

@Kelly said:

@Nic said:

So SAM - what's the generic title for a jack-of-all-trades IT person then?

Who does Systems and Network Administration for a majority of their time.

At my last job, I did. It was roughly split half and half. I'd spend half my time chasing down network issues and tweaking switch configurations and adjusting VLANs as needed on a campus with ~800 students and 200 staff / faculty. The other half of the time was spent working on servers doing upgrades, updates, and checking to make sure backups worked. For my first year or so there, I did a lot of desk-side support, but that tapered off after we got the IT team to have good folks in that role.

At 1K+ staff you are starting to edge away from the SMB. That starts to warrant a networking title. Maybe Networking Tech, but networking. Certainly if you really top 50% of workload.

It was ~1k End-users in all. (Just out of curiosity): Does it matter to you that 800 of them were students, and only ~200 of them were Facutly and/or staff -- or do you lump them all together into the "End user" category?

From an IT perspective, is there any difference? IT normally refers to uses, not categories of users. Except other IT staff and/or developers as a special group, sometimes.

Faculty will always be more of a pain because they need "special" access to servers, applications, and networks. I'd consider them separate from an IT perspective just because of the extra headaches they cause.

Yes but there are always pools of high pain users and low pain users in any business. The percentages are probably similar.

In all my years of interviewing on both sides of the table, I've never seen a shop look at development certs one way or the other. They've always been ignored and generally don't exist. Most development paths don't have certifications so it is rare for people to look for them. And using them to differentiate is hard because it would favour people in stodgier paths.

A lot of people also never look at the big picture. Things like whenever someone quits to go to another job they forfeit their bonus. Of course they do, makes sense. But it is a major point of cost savings to businesses that employees often overlook and never realize that they agreed to lower their income "on job change" when they signed up.

Very helpful.
Thank you for sharing.

Well, obviously there are many ways to skin a cat, but I'm pretty there are best practices. Its like separation of support levels - its specific for product, but you still can google for guide lines.

@gjacobse said:

That sounds like a awesome place to work. I'd consider it if I was:

Living in that area looking which I am not. able to work in the shop
Wanting learn some metal skills.,...

Come hang out at my place if you want to be taught some "metal skills"! \m/

@Dashrender said:

JB, did you take the new job offer of $30K more to the old employer and try to extort that higher level of pay out of them?

No, the wage came up during the meeting the president of the company called when I put in my (4 week) notice. He asked and I told him. I had no intention of ever taking any counter offer. I honestly did not expect one at the salary difference. That is probably why I was still shocked enough to get mad when they did.

Or, did you tell them the amount of the new offer to show them that in fact you were worth the money you were requesting all along

No. It was asked, I answered. I did not do it to prove anything.

and never had any intention of staying at the old company?

I was leaving. Period. I never had any intention of staying at that company after having been treated as I had been.

And most importantly, did the old employer understand just that, that you were in fact not trying to get them to give you a raise, but that you were simply informing them of your current value?

Who knows what they took away from the meeting.

I did end up giving them 5 weeks to put my termination date on the end of a payroll as well as in an attempt to give them time to hire someone prior to my departure for on boarding.

That's how I would see it.

@MattSpeller said:

@Jason good grief, where do you work?

At a fortune 100. We are across america, Mexico and a few other places. The work we do, well not I but the bread and butter of our company does can be quite dangerous.

@scottalanmiller said:

If you want to learn CRM basics and not a specific system, SugarCRM is very popular and is free and open source. You can install it on a Linux VM quite easily. Or you can install it to a system like A Small Orange with a single click. Getting access to a common CRM to play with it would be pretty easy. Then you can say that you have deployed it as well.

Azure has an out of the box SugarCRM in the Web App gallery 🙂