Honestly, this is what we currently have at our mid sized company. We get paid dogshit, nobody has a dedicated position we’re just all “IT” and we do everything to keep shit running
I worked a short stint as a network administrator for a company I did not like at all. I figured it’d be a foot in the door, but boy was I wrong. I didn’t last 6 months, I was doing work of a network tech, network admin, security tech for door locks and cameras, a custodian, and general computer tech in all that. It was a VASTLY underpaid position for the work.
Meanwhile CEO makes 3mil a year while planning to
sellmerge the company with another one and get the golden parachute.this sounds… entirely reasonable? like, had it not been in california that’s about what i expect a position with those responsibilities to pay. the median income here is just below $40k a year and for an it manager these are all completely expected skills. i don’t get it.
- The responsibilities are way outside of a typical it admin job
- Starting salary for a junior dev/sure/ops in the area is 90k+
i’d disagree on the first one, that’s just par for the course here. and 90k is senior staff engineer territory here. that puts you in the 99.9th percentile.
I’m guessing It would put you in the bottom 10% in the area mentioned in the job listing.
You probably don’t live in America or are underpaid with all this remote work out there.
There’s bottom of the barrel for any tech management. Our jira pencil pushers get 130-50…
Staff engineers with actual technical skill clear 200.
There is also the fact that you can tell your actually working 50 hours a week from this post if you read between the lines. Most of my tech friends and myself are doing a solid 25 hours of real work and jiggling the mouse from home for the rest.
I don’t get it. Everyone in IT is screaming about the employment crisis. I have a friend who can’t even get a job that pays 40k € with a Bachelor’s in CS and two years of semi-relevant experience. Are things really that much better in the US that you can get paid over 200k for a job similar to the one in the OP?
Like, I have a similar amount of responsibilities to the OP and closing in on a decade of experience, get paid in your “jira pencil pusher” range and yet consider myself lucky compared to my friends in IT. Granted this is remote work in europe with interesting technical work and open-source aspects, but still…
Yes. But it won’t be written like this.
A company that values it’s tech workers and that has a decent salary will write a better post, then have you work 3 jobs, because they’ll have other decent tech managers to write it.
This post was written by HR at after a Google post for "good it manager skills’ for a cfo who doesn’t understand a word and just wants it done for cheap.
Younger cs students are just fucked BTW. Despite the screeches AI bad, it’s not. It is eating up junior coding jobs and I’m not sure what to say to them or about how new people will learn to code when I have as many agents as I can muster up in my brains context. From a pure velocity perspective there is just no way to compete. I’d never choose, training a junior dev over AI even in it’s current state. It’s just not efficient to train someone to hand code and learn about what will break, who is going to do stupid shit, architecture, etc. but you don’t learn it well being an operator.
There’s largely still above average working conditions for the people that do land a job in tech, but right now the job security is rather low.
The thing is, if you’re managing an important project. The companies want to pay extra, to ensure they’re having decent people hired and have their time if something breaks out of hours.
But remote hirers, do also factor regional factors into account. Most US companies okay with remote workers, will have payranges per state. Most European companies, have at least pay ranges per country. You’re getting paid more in Denmark than you’d be in Hungary as an example. To account for cost of living as well as local competition
well duh. i’m in the top 5% of earners here, and i make just shy of €60k a year before taxes.
You won’t get away with 100k if printer issues are included… your soul and those of the other employees would be a start.
God, I hate printers.
Don’t work with me, I manage 60+ across 2 sites with 3 separate-function print servers.
Anyone else here still manage a fleet of dot matrix??? We’ve got about a dozen left 😅
I really thought the response was an AI suggestion at first glance; that would’ve been hilarious.
I usually reply to shit job offers and tell them why it’s shit.
Even when I’m not interested in the job, if it’s anything but full time work from home I’ll let them know I’m only considering ft wfh so that they either raise their offer or reconsider their in-office requirement for the next person that’s actually interested.
A German three letter agency had a similar ad. They were looking for someone who was proficient in encryption, hacking, protocols on Windows, Mac and Linux, and a few other things in that area. Experienced both in programming and leadership. And as a cherry on the top, this person would have to have knowledge about all the legal aspects of all of this, too.
All for a midrange bureaucrat salary. A security expert commented on this something like “if i had someone with that kind of skill set and experience, I would hire him out for a daily fee about as high as their offered monthly salary.”
Many years ago I got offered 20% over minimum wage to manage, among other things, all email servers of a large banking association representing >90% of a national market.
It was less than what a Tesco cashier was making in the area.
When I was a student, I already had my Novell admin certificate, so it got some jobs on the side. Someone pointed me to a law firm where the owner wanted their PCs networked. We met, he showed me the list of hardware he wanted to buy - everything top notch, big server, new PCs with all bells, whistles and gongs back then, 19in rack for all the necessities, etc. That list was an offer from an expensive office outfitter he knew.
He “just” needed someone to install the stuff. I could easily have done that, but all he offered was a kind of internship. Oh what I could learn from working with top of the pop equipment! I told him I was here because it already knew everything that was needed. He then offered me that I could take the old PCs as “compensation”.
I left, and warned others not to waste time with that idiot.
And people still get mad when we give honest feedback about compensation.
Shout-out to the recruiter who tried to convince me to take a 60k paycut because nobody will pay my current rate ( the one I was already being paid ). I strive to reach your level of audacity one day.
Well it doesn’t say you have to do any of them well.
Well you must have excellent communication skills.
For the actual IT stuff, they don’t really care.
That one’s the dealbreaker. If you do all that stuff, you only have time for a grunt or two from behind your 17 inch TFT monitor.
If its a small company you are going to have people split between multiple things as it doesn’t make financial sense to have 3 specialists.
Where I work is under 30 people, we don’t have a HR department or even a HR role. HR is done by someone who also has other roles to fill.
That looks closer to a 220~260k salary job posting.
100~110k in LA area is entry level IT.
in the rest of the world that is basically a three-job salary.
It’s USD 8333 per month, or EUR 7177. I wouldn’t say 3 jobs, but pretty good even if it has to feed a whole family and/or taxes are high.
You aren’t going to get close to that amount per month after taxes and health care. Its definitely not minimum wage, its around a teacher salary, or entry level office worker
Yeah I was gonna say. I didn’t understand what people were complaining about, that’s loads of money to me. I know stuff’s more expensive in the US but it’s not that much more expensive that 100k isn’t an insane amount of money to live off.
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That’s about 5-6k a month pay, with rent around 3-4k a month
100k/12≈8k, including taxes, after taxes idk depends where you live. My rent is the majority of my income, and I make much less than that, so the absolute amount of money I have after paying for things like rent and utilities, to spend on food, is much less too, even if we assume the same % of income going to rent. Again I’m not saying things aren’t more expensive in the US, but it is still a lot of money. You aren’t going to be struggling financially. My friends in the US make much less than that. Maybe you’d be less well-off than peers who do the same job, but I hope you realise that for a lot of people elsewhere in the world, that’d be 3 salaries already.
Yeah its not a bad pay, my wife makes close to that amount, I make less and we were able to buy a house after we split the mortgage with her parents instead of paying two rents, we are comfortable just a bit cramped and now have about two hour commute a day, my job offers free ev charging so that saves us about $500 a month we used to spend on gas
Two hour commute is quite a lot. Can you not change job?
We could, but not for the same pay. For example my wife is a teacher if she switches to a local school the salary is 20k less. Another big thing is my job doesn’t have a set schedule so when we all commute together I’m not really in a rush as long as she gets there on time. And my parents live right by her school so we can drop off our kid, then I drop her off, and my job is like 15 minutes further so it kind of just works.
When she’s on summer break I can go to work earlier like 5 or 6am and avoid traffic which cuts the commute in half
You have to have so much more reserves in the US because of the broken health care system, and the car dependence. I live in Germany and my wife and I were thinking about how much more we’d need to save and we found out that we didn’t need that much. Healthcare is basically free, we don’t have a car, we had enough for a new set of appliances and months of rent. All that with about a half of that salary. But in the US you can easily go broke with that amount of money if you get sick or have car troubles. Also depending on the state poor job security.
Also depending on location cost of living varies widely. That’s a really low salary for somewhere as expensive as LA.
TBF I am offering 40k to hire someone who should do frontend, backend, GPU shader optimization, database design optimization and API design.
I have been told this requires a full team of experts. I am not a software engineer, I took the time to study and this is what I’ve been doing the past 4 years. This person will earn more than I do.
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The salary itself is a decent one. Quite above the average. Either way it is what I can offer.
I didn’t say it’s difficult to find workers: found plenty good workers for about half that salary.
I did not start interviews yet, I’m confident I will find someone.
You are undervaluing yourself right alongside the roles you’re trying to hire
As a system administrator, I’ve done all of these to some extent. But at that pay range, it better be part-time.
PTO listed as a benefit? Must be the USA 😁
It’s three jobs on a slow day.
I don’t give a shit about the broadness. I’ll do whatever they want for my salary . 100k though is 50k short of I’m being generous.
100-110k is a lot of coin, you’re being paid pretty well to wear those hats.
Listen, if you meet the requirements for this job your entire resume is just a link to your wikipedia page. This is a hilariously, bafflingly out of touch posting.
Probably a posting to justify hiring a foreign worker needing a visa. Claiming they can’t find anyone qualified in country.
A lot of it is vaguely described. I could probably apply and argue I meet all of these as it depends on what level of experience they really want.
Communication skills - whatever, many jobs asks for this.
Data migration and APIs - HR don’t know what an API is but I have setup software that uses them and I can copy data from a server easily with rsync.
SQL - I passed a SQL test in an interview despite having never used or seen it. Only had some HTML, CSS and bash from a few home projects. Now used SQL a fair bit.
Cloud - yep, used GCP to run a factorio server when I didn’t have Ethernet for a stable connection to run a server
Train staff - generic, sure.
Deploy security solutions - yeah I can probably install an antivirus.
Software/hardware/user issues - I worked in a computer repair shop, got that coveted.
But 100k USD isn’t enough of an improvement over 29k GBP. I’ll stay here thanks.
I know it’s a joke, but in case you decide to go for a position like this in the UK: you probably wouldn’t make it past the technical with those examples. Mainly, data migration is a system migration process (rsync might be a tiny part of the process but it’s absolutely not what they’re asking about) and endpoint security is not the same thing as an antivirus.
Honestly it’s pretty standard stuff you’d find in a posting for a senior technical position, but it’s just… three senior tech positions rolled into one (Four if they actually want training plans) and for low-journey pay. Pretty damn ridiculous.
May not be in USA, because the employer doesn’t pay social security on your behalf.
Sherman Oaks = Los Angeles, California suburbs and it’s not that great of pay for LA.
Source: SoCal resident.
It absolutely is not a lot of coin.
It’s less than twice as much as I make as a line cook. It’s not that much coin.
Line cook isn’t an easy job, to be fair.
It’s low skill and easily replaced.
We don’t pay based on how hard.
Yeah, we do to a point, someone has to want that job.
5% weighting. Tops.
If no one wants it, harder to replace.
👌👍
Lol, I’ll fight you on “low skilled”.
What’s minimum wage in the area?
Around $18.50
Would be an OK salary for most of Europe. Most countries here have relatively solid health care insurance, affordable education and a pension fund included, so that some of the biggest costs of living in the US don’t even make a dent in the salary.
I’m in Sweden, this would be an amazing salary. I make maybe 40% of that, and I’m pretty well paid.
Same!
But you have a functional social safety net, insurance and retirement covered with your taxes. We don’t and is horribly expensive to fork $24K a year to have access to health with a $7K deductible while thinking that if you get fired the equivalent of UB pay is $226/wk after you present substantiation to the state that you’re trying to get work. On top of that insurance is tied to employment and that heavily influences work mobility and care as if anyone gets anything catastrophic loses the job, the insurance and all your savings.
But you have a functional social safety net
I grew up in poverty, I know what this social safety net looked like 20 years ago. It’s been hollowed out by a decade of alt-right governance since. They’ve pushed the non-white welfare king/queen narrative hard.
Living on subsistence minimum isn’t really a comfortable life. You have to constantly apply for it and get scrutinised, and sometimes you get automatically denied because the government has applied a quota that försäkringskassan has to fill; it’s luck of the draw.
It’s certainly not something I’d ever view as a nice stress-free fallback to recover from, it’s a full-time job in and of itself, and that’s not counting the critique you have to put up with from society for using the system as it is intended.
insurance and retirement covered with your taxes.
Ish. Current retirees are covered by current taxpayers. My retirement will be covered by future taxpayers. This has lead to the retirement age being bumped up a couple of times the past few years, because there’s not enough taxes coming in to cover retirement. I don’t expect to ever actually retire.
The average pension income currently is 16400 crowns a month before taxes. My rent is 8.4k and it goes up with several hundred a year. Pensions generally remain fairly static.
By insurance I guess you mean healthcare. This is largely true, we have a high-cost protection, and that includes visits so if you buy enough meds or visit the doctors enough each year, the high cost protection kicks in, it’s currently at approximately 3000 crowns.
My a-kassa isn’t free, nor is it tax funded. I personally pay for that on a monthly basis. It’s also tied to you looking for work.
There are upsides and downsides to everything. Things get bad here, too.
Great perspective, thank you for sharing that effectively not everything is perfect or works as intended.
I see your struggle and hope we all can make it right for us, our kids and their kids, thank you for fighting the good fight.
Yeah. I mean I’m grateful I struggle with things here, because I’ve seen what it can look like in the U.S. - visited a dear friend in 2019, and despite having two people work four jobs they still couldn’t really make ends meet. It’s heartwrenching.
Struggle is always struggle. I hope things improve for all of us.
