Tech workers react to UPS drivers landing a $170,000 a year package with a mixture of anger and admiration::Some tech workers questioned whether UPS drivers deserved high pay — others jumped in to note the importance of the jobs and harsh working conditions.
Worked in Ed-Tech making less than teachers while at the same time seeing that when the network went down so did the majority of teachers’ ability to teach. Didn’t make me mad that the person with a Masters made more than the person with an A+. Also spoke to a former tech who, in six years, went from making less than I did in the same position to making over $300k a year.
If you want it, it’s out there. You want UPS driver pay? You want to put yourself in one of the more dangerous jobs and do physical labor? You want CISO pay? You want to forego intimate relationships and free time? You want Ed-Tech Technician pay? You want to sit in an air conditioned office, answer printer and smart board tickets and goof off for half of every day?
High paying tech jobs are out there yeah but you gotta be an SME and own a solution which really involves in my POV knowing programming, some backend, networking and infrastructure. Tech work is so vast people only really master one thing. Tech workers are notoriously lazy as well, soon as people get a “cushy” job it’s like pulling teeth trying to get them to learn a new skill. Can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve tried to teach old school network guys some devops stuff and they say something like “I don’t want to have to learn programming” and when I tell them it’s really not as complicated as they think they have some other excuse locked and loaded
The Tech field does encourage laziness in certain specializations. Networking is notorious for it because once it’s up and configured properly you should be able to sit back and relax. For the most part it will run itself when set up correctly. And you pay for that downtime by not getting paid as much.
CyberSecurity is absolutely booming right now, and those dudes are making a mint. Why? Cause they’re going to run around like beheaded chickens more times than not with the pace that attacks are happening. What’s that do for their salary? Shoots it through the roof.
Just because your job is business critical doesn’t mean you deserve as much as someone else who’s doing business critical work. How much work are you doing to maintain the business is the real question, and like I said above, proper Networks should not require tons of intervention. Security solutions, however, do.
Well I only work on new stuff/deployments for data centers. Once it’s deployed it goes to ops for support. I don’t know if you have a lot of experience in large networks but there is a lot of break/fix work with failing hardware components and physical issues …but that’s not the side of the house you want to be in because operational stuff like NOCs are always high turnover fast-paced jobs where everything is your fault. If you’re going to work networking you gotta transition to the “money-making” side of the house for better quality of life. Right now the “sexy” stuff is devops/automation and that’s where a lot of gripe comes from with the old school CLI guys because they don’t want to learn anything new.
Job before this was at a university with a small team of infrastructure engineers and you would think their job was to stifle progress. Their whole team and millions of dollars in expensive networking equipment could get replaced by a private cell tower.
Cyber security field is a bit different, companies know now they have to spend money on it now so the faucet is open. Most of the real preventative methods for security happen at the network. Security guys that are paid deep into six figures know networking, Linux, programming and other things.
Being an SME and earning the big bucks, in my opinion, is about knowing quite a bit about many things