Differences in Pay

Like i said this was more of a general moan and not specific to my situation. All i was trying to say is that I think IT sysadmins and system support should be earning more money than it does at the moment, because i think it is under valued.

Basically if you work in X level it job and you earn Y and you are supporting staff members and organization that earn £300 an hour, then you should receive Y. But if you are supporting people that earn £800 per hour. Then you should be receiving more than Y, not necessarily double Y but definitly more. More often than not the people earning £800 per hour are paying more for their IT support, but that is not given to the staff thanks to everyone accepting a specific market rate for a specific level.
 
I wouldn't say should, but I think i would like to encourage that. Many other services have this different sort of pay structure for supplying exactly the same service. Bodyguards, drivers etc, they offer the same service but the price can vary drastically. Similar to say driving for example all you have to do is drive to a location. There is only the system and IT that you have supply service to, take a 50 user firm as an example. If it is just one IT guy supplying all the IT services for that role, do you think if it is 50 people at a 100k revenue firm or 50 people at a 10 million k revenue firm should be paid the same salary because the technical skills requirements are the same? This is where the IT sysadmin/system support classification kind of fails to adequately assign the overall value for the service.
 
The Halk said:
Of course they should be paid the same.

A while back I tried to explain it to you, but you ignored it. You've still not managed to grasp it, and you're still bleating on about nonsense claiming IT is much more important than it is.

You're a cost, like a cleaner or like paying tax. You're ten a penny and there are lots of people who will do your job.

Why on earth would people value IT folks more than they do just now? If you hired a tradesman to put an extension on your house you would pay the going rate, you wouldn't spurt cash all over him for no reason. If there were a great deal of unemployed tradesmen around then the going rate would be lower, and again you wouldn't pay more.

I'm running out of ideas on how to explain this to you. I don't want to insult you, but I'm getting to the point where I believe you're either incapable of grasping a very easy concept, or you're unwilling.
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Well this is exactly the sort of attitude that I am trying to change. IT sysadmin/system support add value to modern day businesses and they should be adequately compensated for that.
 
You do get a bit more pay direct Ev0 but not that much. I have seen jobs for these law firms that are direct that are not much more or no more than going through a managed services company. The large ones will often have a support desk and they will have 2nd line support engineers that will be 1st line as well, who's job can vary significantly. In the larger law firms it is not common that the IT director and what is called third line support will be out sourced.
 
You force me to reply. I had given up on this topic already.

Well this is what i was trying to say, is that sysadmin/system support can be a varied role. Where i work at the moment my job involves everything IT related, procurement, invoicing, infrastructure design, upgrades, maintenance, fixing client problems, printers everything. So realy it is a IT director to first line support role and this is more common than you may think. This is where the classifications of IT sysadmins fails to truly represent the service that the IT person delivers.

Depending on the company IT may be the make or break of the organization. If you are the sole sysadmin for a graphic design company and they want X to perform their job to make money. If you delivery a good X then they can perform better and make more money etc. A bad delivery of X good destroy the business and most likely see the person lose his job.

But people who do all the IT related tasks for a business as described above, thanks to stupid IT job classifications, just get put in to the second line support classification because the IT person has to fix client problems and thus they get underpaid due to this.
 
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Well yes I am the sole IT guy supporting a small company. I have to send over a recommendation to my boss at the IT company i work for, for what i recommend based on my experience on site for example the planned virtualisation of one of server farms on one of the networks. Then my boss will create a quote based on my recommendations.

But even at other sites where we have a different set up. 100 users, two "1st/2 second line" and one "3rd line". The roles of the 2nd and third line guys are broad, they do everything apart from quote for infrastructure upgrades, which is done by our boss. But design, implementation, upgrades, procurement of most things. When it comes to installing a new bt line, the second and third line guys will have to take that from start to finish as an example. So the scope of the traditional second and third line that you see in say a 1000 user company with a larger support desk is different. But yet they have the same job title and receive the same pay etc. The second line guys will have a weekly meeting where there input could be a kin to the input you would see in a larger company from the IT director. Where he makes recommendations for software/hardware etc based on all factors considered.
 
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xxalxx said:
You are in a role where if you cannot do the job there are hundreds more people available, who will more often than not do the job for even less than you are on now.

Either skill up into a role that has specialist skills, or move to another industry.

I promoted a chap from 1st to 2nd line last month, I had replaced him before the day was out.
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I can't believe, after i have repeated myself a million times, as someone pointed out, that people are still misunderstanding what I meant and the point of the thread.

Another example that came to me was a chef. You have a chef or cook in one restaurant making steak and chips and he earns more because the restaurant charges more for the food. A cook that works in a very expensive restaurant is seen as at the top of his field. Even though he is making the same steak and chips that you find down the street at a pub, where the cook is on half his salary. It is in this same way that I would like to try and encourage IT people to value their service more and expect more from big organisations.

Telling me "that is life" is pointless, i aware what is life and that this is life, that however is the point of the thread to try and change the image of IT sysadmin/system support.

Of course it is within the interest of employers to try and make out as if their employees and specifically IT are expendable and as such deserve less of a salary. I realy don't think that every job in IT is as easily replaceable as people on here try and make out. I know this because my bosses do interviews to try and hire people and they say that the level of competence and experience is a lot lower than people make out. People think that there are an abundance of highly skilled and experienced IT staff that are just waiting to work for half your salary. That is absolutely incorrect and ridiculously wrong. Even if that was the case, i would still continue to try and convince people that they should demand more money for their services etc.

I said i was not going to repeat myself again, but i did.
 
Basher said:
You've missed the point.

It's difficult for the business to value IT when it is sometime unclear as to the value they are offering. You're talking bits and bytes, they're talking cash flow, revenue and profit.

If you can start to communicate your activities in that language, you will start to be valued more.

Add to that that IT support is a saturated market. LOTS of people can do it, as it's relatively straightforward.

How would you like the business to perceive you? Someone who knows a lot? Someone who is focussed on IT problems? Someone who resolves problems that matter to the business? Someone who will just do anything?
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The IT market is not as saturated as you might think. Sure anyone can work a PC but not everyone can work in IT. I think you might be getting the two mixed up. Just like a lot of people can use word and adobe photoshop, not everyone can be a legal secretary or work in marketing.

This is the point i am trying to make, the image that sysadmin/system support have does not do justice do their actual function. The role has out grown its classification if you will.
 
PeterNem said:
Bad example. If the chef in the pub is really that good, he needs to go find work in a better restaurant. The world needs cheap pubs, and if we had to pay executive chef wages to get a steak, chips and a beer everywhere we went, Wetherspoons wouldn't be very busy! There's a world of difference between a poorly cooked £7.99 pub rump steak and the sort of thing you'd find at a decent steak house. In the poor restaurant, the chef is providing a commodity service (heating some food up). In the decent restaurant, the chef is actually providing something that is differentiated in some way from the cheaper location.
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Well that is what i am saying. How a service such as sysadmin/system support can vary. Even though it is the same service (steak and chips), there might be that little bit extra which warrants you actually being employed by the large organisation (or expensive restaurant). The difference is that the chef gets more money for that little bit extra he has, while the sysadmin does not.
 
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