When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator
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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.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
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.
Obviously this is not true. The hallmark of the SMB is bad business decision making. SMBs dont' do what is smart, especially around IT. We even talked about that specifically at MangoCon. The average SMB goes out of business within a couple years.
That SMBs avoid smart moves like MSPs actually suggests that the MSP model is better, rather than worse. SMBs routinely make emotional, illogical moves that don't make them money. This is both why so few have MSPs, why so many that hire MSPs dont' hire good ones and is the top struggle that MSPs have in dealing with SMBs.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
@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.
Right, they are a weird mix of government and non-profit. NHS is similar.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
SMBs mostly just don't have any care or interest in anything but results.....
Actually that's the problem. SMBs almost never care about results. Just look at SW threads. Are people producing good results? Rarely. Do their companies care? Even more rarely. SMBs make bad business decisions, this is often what causes them to remain SMBs. One of the biggest things is acting emotionally instead of logically and seeing results as "what they wanted to see" rather than "what was good for the business", if they bother to measure the results at all.
Few SMBs have any capability to even know when they are getting good results. This is why many VARs pretend to be MSPs and screw SMBs up and down and the SMBs thank them for it. This isn't a niche case, this is the most common case.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
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.
In the real world, though, this isn't true. SMBs are insanely uniform, to the point of absurdity almost. They are way too uniform for their own good. As an MSP, it is actually very frustrating just how uniform SMBs are and demand to be. SMB IT has, through necessities of scale, pushed the SMB market into cookie cutter solutions that often make little to no sense and offer, at best, no competitive advantage for the SMBs.
How I see SMBs, is the polar opposite here. They should be treated more uniquely, but the lack of leveraging the specialists necessary to do that and eschewing the use of competent MSPs has left them without the resources, scope of experience and access to drive necessary to have the unique variations that would make them more valuable.
Specialists actually make having variation a lot easier, not harder.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
The problem is that the market seems to disagree with your thinking.
Consumer markets, of which the SMB mimics, don't do what is good for them. So it is very much how you look at the market. Companies doing SMB IT well (with MSPs normally) tend to succeed more often. I see the market very much agreeing with my assessments.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
The problem with SMB and IT has always been poor business decisions, not necessarily poor IT.
IT isn't really a separate thing from the business. Bad IT and bad business decisions are really one and the same. Often the issue is shadow IT, with managers who know nothing about IT seizing control of IT decisions and being in charge of IT without admitting it and the IT person with the title actually being lower on the totem pole than people realize and the actual IT happening elsewhere in the organization. Even ten person companies have this problem.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met.
This is purely an SMB problem. MSPs at least have the benefit of abstraction and showing lower cost via TCO whereas internal IT staff can only be seen as salaries. MSPs have a huge advantage here.
Outside of the SMB, enterprises see experts = cheap. Because they actually look at numbers instead of resenting people being paid to be "smart" when they are not.
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@scottalanmiller Structure naturally impedes flexibility by design. Not sure how you're getting that adding structure somehow increases flexibility when by the very nature of structure, it is by design intended to reduce flexibility by adding rigidity. That's not to say that some rigidity is good, but the larger a structure, the more rigidity becomes necessary to maintain efficiency, ultimately reducing the flexibility similarly.
SMBs problem isn't too little flexibility, it's too much flexibility. My argument is that you seem to not understand the issue with SMBs, since you keep saying they're too rigid when that's the complete opposite. The problem is that SMBs tend to lack enough structure, while larger organizations lose flexibility due to size and scale necessitating increased levels of rigidity. SMBs suffer from too many options and not enough expertise to find their medium. Your position seems to be swinging wildly the other way by offering far too much rigidity to allow many SMBs the freedom they need to adapt as quickly as they often need to.
You keep saying good MSPs, but THERE ARE NONE anywhere remotely close to a lot of businesses. It doesn't matter if there are some if they're half the world away. Scale does matter, but greater scale does not automatically mean better just like how you seem to think that small scale can only be bad is also false. There's a reason most highly creative organizations are not that large. IT is an anomaly in that respect, because the technology is so advanced, it takes a lot of resources to create things; however that is not the norm in many (possibly most) cases.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
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?
It's the fault of the business people for needing others to teach them their jobs when it isn't the job of those other people to do so. There is no excuse for incompetent people being in business, they have no one to blame but themselves.
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@tirendir said in When Is It Okay to Say You Are a System Administrator:
Experts = expensive in the minds of most businessmen I've ever met
No. The SMB expects you to be an expert anyway. They just won't pay you what you are worth. You see this anytime anything goes wrong at all.
