honestly I know a person that does those things as well and he makes well over 100k annually. Id say look for another job or demand a raise. If they dont want to lose u they will give you waht your worth

 

i don't think this is the economic scenario to be demanding a raise in.

looking for another job is fine if his talks don't go well... but having a job is generally better than not having a job (although a lot of us who are employed wish we weren't at our jobs)

 

With three years of experience? Not a chance in hell.

 

I work in an IT Consulting Firm, pretty much jack of all trade for SOHO Dental and Ortho offices. I gross exactly the same as you and I also think it is a bit low, and I live in the bay. 1 year experience (now) in IT installations, PC repair, Server config, Cisco config, data recovery, backups, and on and on... 1 year in QA Software Engineer and 2 years PC repair.

$3200 gross is really wack IMO, but I think from reading previous threads about tech pay, we are kinda inbetween Systems Admin, Network Admin, and Desktop Support. Pay can range as low as $13.hr to 55k for a systems admin, which still seems low, guess times are rough.

I took my current job over one that would pay 60k for phone support of PeopleSoft college systems, YUCK! or should I say Yut...Ugghhhh! "Hi, I cant register for my class...blah, blah, blah"

But job hunting as we speak. Sounds as if you might be too...



As far as a raise. My company on average gives $1.60~$3 depending on performance per year.

 

That is another very good point when it comes to IT jobs!

 

And yet another very good point that is a big difference.

You don't need to have a 4 year degree - there's plenty of well paid guys with associates or even only a high school degree, but they ALL have good certifications (RHCE, CCIE, JCIE, etc. etc.)

 

All the best sysadmins I have met in the past 15 years have few, if any, certifications. The same goes for desktop support guys.

Job experience > certifications > college degree.

 

That is low. ~$90k is what a talented senior sysadmin should expect.

 

Yea, your right, i meant for a "junior" or entry level systems admin.

Certs > college degree for support in terms of tech knowledge

college degree > certs for management in terms of pay

 

I'm an IT manager and in the sys admin, network admin, desktop support arena job experience is the key factor.

I've interviewed college grads that think "mapping a network printer" is something that has to do with networking or a network admin job. Those interviews end rather quickly.

 

Right, for sysadmins maybe... but all the guys I've met who actually make more massive bank from this job, have a medal case full of certs (dual/triple CCIE, etc. etc.)

Why? Because you HAVE to have certs to be a certified partner for MS, Cisco, Sun, etc., and you (pretty much) HAVE to be a certified partner to run your own show (because you can't be very competitive without the 30-40% discounts from being one), and you pretty much HAVE to run your own show to make good money in a business where most people hit a paygrade upper ceiling as an individual contributor, and many people without certs/degrees hit a lower ceiling than that.



The reason there is that ceiling is because as far as the individual contributor (IE non-managerial) path goes, unlike in the engineering world there are not principle engineer, distinguished engineer, research fellow (director, VP level analogous) positions in the IT world.

 

What majors have you been choosing to interview?

I have friends that have majored in MIS, CS, and e-commerce. Most of the time the above majors seem like "IT" appropriate, but exactly, 99% of the time they cannot even map a drive, let alone know why you would need to.

Originally, I majored in ECE, then CS....to find out after my first internship, QA Software Engineer, that I'd rather be a gadget freak, or "any kind of electronic box freak." Studied all the technology related majors and found CIS to be the closest to what an IT job would want, at least for a 4-year college.

Honestly, there is no IT major at a true 4-year university, got to go to Heald, DeVry, ITT Tech, and some community colleges. I understood that fresh out of college I needed a Cert to be more valuable, so I got my CCNA after a 5 day IT bootcamp and got a job a week later. Most of the techs I work with do not have a bachelors, but have degrees at techincal schools. They ***** about previous employees that had masters degrees and they didnt know thier *** from elbow.

IMO, IT techs and admins is not a good area for college grads strictly because they dont teach how and why to map a drive, install an OS, configure a Server. Seems as if there is an assumption that college grads should know low level Desktop Support knowledge. I can go into crazy detail on what they do teach, but in general, for your CORE classes professors teach knowledge that would only come in handy for jobs that pay 80K or higher. For example, in a telecom managment class we would use appplications to contruct a corporate network across the U.S. and calculate all sorts of line costs and a million other things. In Forensics, I learned how to pull Metadata off of hard drives using Encase and FTK and run stupid mock trials like your in court. OMG, then Network Security went over every fricken Cryptography Algorithm, Authentication, Authorization, and Message integrity technology to existance, and how to implement the useful ones.

If I posted a class list for even the most computer related majors, it would be way too much useless information for 90% of IT jobs. Even half of the classes that every technology related major has to take tons of computer programming and database classes, which doesnt help a bit in an IT tech and systems admin world.

I just think that non-managment IT jobs's skill requirements and tasks that those jobs demand are NOT complicated and hard enough to incorporate in a 4-year college major's course list or track.

Also, I think most hiring managers know that a college degree somewhat proves that canidate has the ability to learn.

 

Our company is an MS partner and no one is MS certified.

 

I might want to add... Getting an extremely diverse set of certificates is VERY good most of the time... Meaning, certs in DBMS, Networks, enterprise computer hardware (includes servers and workstations). But the only problem is that a lot of these "specialized" certs can cost A LOT of money. Last time I checked, to be certified with some Oracle DBMS cost upward of $2K-$5K for a 3-4 day training course.

If you want to get a pay upgrade, you should show that you really do want to excel at your job by requesting the company to pay a part of your certification courses, which I know many of them do

 

Uh... no you don't. You just have to pay them money. The company is the certified partner, not the individual, and companies don't get certs.

More importantly, every company has different requirements to be their certified partner.

Aaaand that's not true either. I've worked at far more companies that were not certified partners than were. There are deals to be had everywhere -- Dell will throw out great discounts all the time just to keep you buying, and chuck in software licenses to compliment your purchases.

That's great and all, but we're not talking about any of that here. We're trying to give advice to a three-year support person.