I'm (almost) CompTIA A+ certified!

Casdawer · 24 Jul 2017 at 11:51

Great job and congratulations.

I highly recommend getting into IT Security as I have done this year.

I've spent 8 years doing 1st/2nd/3rd Line work and got so bored of it! Now I'm doing IT Security, the work is far more interesting and the pay is much better!

Narj · 24 Jul 2017 at 11:54

malachi said:
Do something else within IT or leave IT all together?

My plan is to leave IT altogether. It's been interesting and challenging but also extremely stressful and frustrating at times.

I've got a few avenues I can explore and given my mortgage is almost paid off, I'm happy to take a significant pay cut to do something new.

The IPB · 24 Jul 2017 at 12:02

Casdawer said:
Great job and congratulations.

I highly recommend getting into IT Security as I have done this year.

I've spent 8 years doing 1st/2nd/3rd Line work and got so bored of it! Now I'm doing IT Security, the work is far more interesting and the pay is much better!

Hoping to do that this year, we have an internal network security role going which I have applied for, fingers crossed I get it. 10 years of 1st/2nd/3rd line support is more than enough!

Diddums · 24 Jul 2017 at 12:31

So what's a decent salary to expect in this kind of role? How long would it take to earn say £50k?

Ayahuasca · 24 Jul 2017 at 12:40

Diddums said:
So what's a decent salary to expect in this kind of role? How long would it take to earn say £50k?

In what kind of role, there's lots being discussed? In IT support barely anyone will reach that unless you're in charge of a large team in a top company, and then it's more down to your management skills rather than IT.

Diddums · 24 Jul 2017 at 12:43

Ayahuasca said:
In what kind of role, there's lots being discussed? In IT support barely anyone will reach that unless you're in charge of a large team in a top company, and then it's more down to your management skills rather than IT.

Ah right, thanks. It's just that I often hear about people earning silly amounts like £600 a day and whatnot but I suspect that these guys are a drop in the ocean and probably only manage to find work a couple of days a week at that rate. I've been trying to gauge potential earnings for ages but it's hard as so many people lie about what they earn or state a price that they earned on one particular job ages ago. Add to this the millions of job roles in the IT sector and it makes it really hard.

I can say that in my game you will start at £28k at the minimum all the way up to £40k depending on shift, skill and experience levels, etc. The average salary for a building services engineer is £32k at the moment, whether mechanical or electrical. Painters, decorators and fabric engineers earn less, usually around £29k at the moment.

I earn more than enough for a comfy life but I have the hours to show for it. 104 hours overtime last month alone.

Ayahuasca · 24 Jul 2017 at 12:47

Anyone quoting their day rate will likely be contracting, even at £600 a day though you're already above average salary for the week. Then if they're being paid that rate they're likely very good at what they do and shouldn't struggle for work, certainly wouldn't just be working 1-2 days a week unless it was by their own choice for excellent work/life balance.

Nasher · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:06

The problem with IT, unlike a lot of other professions, is the more you get paid the harder the job is

IT generally isn't paid nearly enough considering the entire business relies on it. Security pays a lot, but it won't last forever as more and more people are getting trained in it.

Felon · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:10

I've seen a lot of change over the last 5 years, I was mostly a traditional ISP guy, (CCIE/JNCIE etc) but it's no longer good enough to be a master of the CLI, the high end salaries have been shifting much more towards programming and automation, doing lots of work manually is now frowned upon - being able to turn up and put things together using Python, Ansible, YANG, Openstack, etc is worth it's weight in gold - even more so, if you can combine the programming element with the deep knowledge of networks and/or security then you're currently worth a hell of a lot of money, six figures as a perm, or £600+ per day as a contractor.

dowie · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:24

Diddums said:
Ah right, thanks. It's just that I often hear about people earning silly amounts like £600 a day and whatnot but I suspect that these guys are a drop in the ocean and probably only manage to find work a couple of days a week at that rate.

not at all - contractors generally don't do ad hoc jobs for a couple of days or so but will be contracted for say 6 months at a time... perhaps the project will last for a year or two so they'll get the opportunity to renew the contract a few times (and if they're good/have become essential to it they can start asking for that rate to be increased)

others might not even be involved in project work but simply provide application support - in which case they might find themselves in quite a nice position with a contract rolling over every 6 months for several years - they're essentially hidden employees IMO but they seem to get away with it

Ayahuasca said:
Anyone quoting their day rate will likely be contracting, even at £600 a day though you're already above average salary for the week. Then if they're being paid that rate they're likely very good at what they do and shouldn't struggle for work

sometimes they'll just have a certain skillset/knowledge of a certain application that is in demand, sometimes they're just good at talking to people and getting others to do stuff

for plenty of financial software used in banks 600 a day is the median rate - the people earning that amount aren't necessarily anything special, in fact a few of them are quite the opposite, the top guys who are well known and have established a reputation at a few places will have boosted their daily rate up to closer to a grand a day.

Ayahuasca · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:28

dowie said:
sometimes they'll just have a certain skillset/knowledge of a certain application that is in demand, sometimes they're just good at talking to people and getting others to do stuff

for plenty of financial software used in banks 600 a day is the median rate - the people earning that amount aren't necessarily anything special, in fact a few of them are quite the opposite, the top guys who are well known and have established a reputation at a few places will have boosted their daily rate up to closer to a grand a day.

Of course but I was generalising on the whole, not just banking and I'm guessing those on a grand a day are primarily London based.

Narj · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:28

Screeeech said:
I've seen a lot of change over the last 5 years, I was mostly a traditional ISP guy, (CCIE/JNCIE etc) but it's no longer good enough to be a master of the CLI, the high end salaries have been shifting much more towards programming and automation, doing lots of work manually is now frowned upon - being able to turn up and put things together using Python, Ansible, YANG, Openstack, etc.

I'm seeing the same thing you are with the push to automation. Even giving the power to provision new services to the end users in some cases.

Ultimately I reckon that network engineers on the higher pay grades will basically be expected to be developers too. That'll push a bunch of the "old hands" out, I reckon.

Narj · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:29

DUP post

dowie · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:41

Ayahuasca said:
Of course but I was generalising on the whole, not just banking and I'm guessing those on a grand a day are primarily London based.

I'd presume mostly London based... well that's all I have exposure to - maybe there are people working in IT security or the defence industry etc.. located elsewhere on some juicy daily rates.

And yeah you're probably right, I guess in some areas outside banking that sort of rate perhaps does require someone to be a specialist. It is surprising though what some people get paid within banking for what isn't a necessarily complicated job, I don't know if it is just the culture of being used to pay that sort of money but some of the people earning those rates really don't deserve them and ought to be replaced by a bunch of Indians... on the other hand, on the other end of the scale, some of the people earning the really high sums are more than worth it and the bank would perhaps otherwise have had to spend even more on consultants directly from the relevant vendor.

Felon · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:43

Narj said:
Ultimately I reckon that network engineers on the higher pay grades will basically be expected to be developers too. That'll push a bunch of the "old hands" out, I reckon.

I start a new role next month, and a big chunk of it will be programming and automation inside the network, not just scripting - but the ability to spin up huge piles of infrastructure, and even build the routing inside bare-metal servers, rather than on proprietary silicon... It does present huge challenges though - traditionally we're used to going to Cisco or Juniper and buying a pile of routers and switches, whereas now - a lot of that functionality can be moved into clusters of cheap pizza-box servers, held together with lots of different cogs and wheels built by different people, (Vagrant, Ansible, Boxcutter, Docker, etc,etc,etc) and the moment any part of the chain breaks, the whole thing comes crashing down - which is different than the old mentality of just raising a case with Cisco TAC the moment something goes south..

Nasher · 24 Jul 2017 at 13:43

dowie said:
I'd presume mostly London based... well that's all I have exposure to - maybe there are people working in IT security or the defence industry etc.. located elsewhere on some juicy daily rates.

Theres a few in defence getting paid £100s a day, but some IT actually got taken back in-house. Because it's better to pay someone a steady wage who is there 5 days a week. Also for security reasons (there was a lot of contractors turning up to do jobs with no clearance etc. then getting told to go away).

CREATIVE!11 · 24 Jul 2017 at 14:08

Casdawer said:
Great job and congratulations.

I highly recommend getting into IT Security as I have done this year.

I've spent 8 years doing 1st/2nd/3rd Line work and got so bored of it! Now I'm doing IT Security, the work is far more interesting and the pay is much better!

Random question, but do you know any coding languages?

I'm not familiar with different jobs / prospects in IT you see, learning coding myself at moment (not really thought of a solid direction yet just improving my skill set). I wouldn't mind going down a route like that, seems far more interesting / challenging than being a bug fixing monkey.

Casdawer · 24 Jul 2017 at 15:11

CREATIVE!11 said:
Random question, but do you know any coding languages?

I'm not familiar with different jobs / prospects in IT you see, learning coding myself at moment (not really thought of a solid direction yet just improving my skill set). I wouldn't mind going down a route like that, seems far more interesting / challenging than being a bug fixing monkey.

I do know a few.

VB, SQL, PHP, HTML, PowerShell, BASH, Java (a little bit)

I learnt the majority of these doing my day to day job and automating a lot of tasks that were previously done manually.

Kanpai · 24 Jul 2017 at 16:34

Congrats mate!

I'm currently studying for CompTiA A+ and then will be going on to do MCSA,Windows Server 2012 & CCNA.

I'm looking to go into Network Security later down the line and will be doing Network+ & Security+ too.

Junglist · 24 Jul 2017 at 16:37

Congrats!

You just reminded me that mine has probably ran out or is about to