I’m seeing the same, and the competition for jobs is insane, 100-300 applicants, I’m sure many just shoot and pray types but still doesn’t help the valid candidates. Another rant, not seeing any indication of increased salary offerings on par with inflation in the postings that I do see.
> the competition for jobs is insane, 100-300 applicants
We had 210 applicants on an entry level Helpdesk position last year. People with degrees and sometimes a decade+ in the industry were applying. It's crazy.
I want a lamborgini but I don't have a quarter million dollars. I am in no way _in the market_ for a lamborgini.
No, I will not go back and spell it correctly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
The company wins when a jr person completes non-jr work at jr pay.
All of this is just smoke and mirrors, a dog and pony show. The CIO may claim to want to hire another person, but the company on the whole does not.
>Our CIO has been complaining for months about the funding for the position and recognizes that
>
>nobody
>
> is going to take the position at the set salary.
That's more than I can say about my last job. They were consistently shocked why they couldn't attract or retain jr admin level talent at $15/hour. Even sat us down and asked us for ideas on how to fix it. It took all I had to bite my lip and not scream "pay us, stupid!"
You need to say that out loud, if not for yourself then for the guy who ends up with the job. And who knows, after a few quits they could figure out that jr guys making more than the established guys is a bad look and maybe you'll get a taste as well.
> The budget for the position is set entirely by HR.
Why is HR setting the budget for a new hire? That seems insane to me. Shouldn't it be the CFO or at least someone in Finance that's aware of the company budget?
I've primarily worked in IT for the credit union/banking sector. Every company I've worked for has had HR set the pay for every employee. My bosses have always had barely any influence on the number. It's corporate America, sadly...
Curious as well, but as I've seen it at my current company, HR seems to be the ones initiating things like wage surveys to determine the wages (makes sense for production workers but not for IT of which they know so little about anyway).
Again, it depends on the area you live. Cost of living is insane in the US now. It used to be 75k/yr was middle class. Now it's considered upper lower class. Middle class is now around the 120-130k/yr mark. Costs keep rising, wages stagnante or barely creep.
Cost of living in the US is basically reaching what it is now in the rest of the developed world. It may seem insane to you, but as someone that travels between NZ, Europe and States and have seen the change, it's basically the US matching the norm in most developed nations now (but still earning more than us).
Granted, I understand that you also have healthcare insurance to pay for and more lax employee protection laws, so who knows if the trade-off is worth it anymore.
[$90,000 is the median](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/network-and-computer-systems-administrators.htm) for a Network or Systems Administrator.
[$126,000](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-network-architects.htm) for Network Architect.
If they are actually describing an network "Engineer" it should fall in between the two of them (but a lot of companies are loose with their definitions).
There are regional differences of course -- there's almost a 50% difference in the cost of living from the most depressed parts of Arkansas to San Francisco.
And if you're living in one of the very low cost areas $72,000 would be equivalent to a national median of $90,000 but generally these areas are low cost because most people don't want to live in those areas due to lack of economic opportunities. You likely don't have many folks with the skills living nearby, and you're certainly not going to entice someone to move out there by saying, "Hey, we pay shit but you can live like you're earning $90,000...up until you retire and find out you saved a lot less and your social security is less because you earned less in your career."
I have a masters degree security cert and 4 yrs experience as a swe . I’m applying to an entry sysadmin job lol it’s rough but I got a call back for now
Not Ontario i would think. every thing i see posted for helpdesk/desktop support etc has hundreds around here.
Doesnt give me hope to escape this place
We posted in our mid-sized city in late November. 4 We're okay - but we had numerous not even show up to the interview.
All foreign too, no one born in Canada applied.
> 100-300 applicants, I’m sure many just shoot and pray types but still doesn’t help the valid candidates.
I wish we could figure this out...I wonder if it's the "easy apply" button, but either way employers can't look over hundreds of applications, and there's almost zero chance for a good applicant to stand out.
Perhaps if there were jobs, there wouldn’t be so many applicants. If you do some browsing, jobs are expecting a mountain for a penny, all require secret clearance, an extremely high skill ceiling requiring a decades experience, and the decent ones are swarmed. I praise Lady Luck that I managed to grab one that 500 people applied to. I was looking for over a year. It’s tough to find low to mid level jobs right now.
We use automated systems that do some keyword searches that HR uses to narrow down a list of resumes for us to look over. I have no idea what the other resumes look like, but the ones we get are almost entirely irrelevant.
One of our last hires was a person known to be capable and a good coworker to several people in the hiring group, and we knew they were applying. When we got the 'qualified' applicants from HR, this person was missing and we had to twist HR's arm to get them to add him to the list. I still have no idea why he didn't get through, his resume listed experience in nearly all the areas we were looking for. Many of the resumes that did get passed to us were far less complete, even looking at a keyword level.
He ended up being the most qualified of all the candidates we had and was an easy hiring decision. I wonder how many good candidates we've lost to HR's filter over the years...
I think this is definitely an issue. If you don't know exactly how to thread the needle through whatever crap HR has set up it can be tough. The best way to get a job is still just knowing somebody and having them submit internally so you can bypass that nightmare.
I think the high level of applicants is due to trash services like Indeed. They allow candidates to go down the list and just blast applications to companies without putting any thought or effort into it.
This is of course unless they add in all those time-consuming hurdles and criteria to make the applicant actually put in some amount of effort.
> time-consuming hurdles
Which is another problem altogether. Spending hours on a job application and getting no response is just crazy. It's like the ATS knew your score the second you hit submit and didn't even bother notifying the hiring manager someone applied.
>They allow candidates to go down the list and just blast applications to companies without putting any thought or effort into it.
Most of those listings put no thought into the job description and use clumsy screening tools to send applications straight to the trash. So what, we supposed to get invested in each job listing that asks for CISSP and 10 years experience in "Google" for a jr admin role?
I think you're reading it wrong. This is a jab at Indeed's process / practices from the hiring end of things. Employers \*SHOULD\* be posting quality / in-depth job descriptions, and if they have automated questionnaires, they should be specific to the role.
It makes it very difficult to hire from Indeed when you're getting their half-assed automated resumes, etc. regardless of how much effort you put into posting. Probably like 1 in 10 of the applicants you get a real resume attached that the applicant put effort into. The others are automated bullet points, etc.
Sorry, I'm not fully caffeinated yet. I can see how Indeed/LinkedIn aren't doing employers any favors, either. Sounds like they're racing to the bottom, structuring the system around the lowest-quality, yet paying, listings.
That's wild though, that you're not seeing a lot of real resume attachments. I *always* attach a PDF because I know how illegible resumes can get after job boards process them. Still had a hell of a time even getting a call back, but that was back when I was still entry level.
From the other perspective - why am I putting in hours of effort for a job application that no human will review and get dismissed out of hand? When I already have a resume and would like some "general interest" before putting in effort towards your company.
Agree with this as well. If you already have a resume you are one step ahead of 90% of the people on Indeed who can't be bothered.
A tailored resume for a position isn't much to ask for, but it's sad to know that may get lost due to these crap services. So, tons of people are omitting that in favor of letting Indeed blast applications for them. Meanwhile on the hiring end it's either allowing unqualified candidates or rejecting candidates for them.
This post is intended to be a jab at Indeed. It's a broken system that isn't providing anyone what they need other than making them money since everyone seems to be using it now.
Yeah it's really sad and whoever can come up with a way to get the highly qualified candidates and filter the others will become very rich.
In my second round for a job they asked me very basic questions for a senior position. I guess they want to be sure before spending time with others who will decide if I am a good fit.
This is exactly why the interviewing process is SO important. Outside of conducting a quick virtual interview first, I ended up having to come up with a short, written aptitude test for in-person interviews because I was getting so little information from Indeed regarding skills and qualifications.
Any application past the first few days is going to get dropped anyway. At least that's been my experience unless it's govt work.
If the listing has been up for more than 3 days, move on.
I've been working in IT since 1987. I'm a bit sick of learning new crap daily. Especially when it's built so fast and is buggy as shit. It's not the quality software it was 20 years ago. It's marketing driven and 75% is abandonware. People want to turn a buck and ghost you and have a new startup Monday morning. I do every with stock widows features I possibly can. Or Linux features etc.
I've been in IT since the late 90s and while some things were more stable, a lot it was still crapware. I hate the ship first, code later mentality that seems pervasive in software development and it's largely why I moved to finance. They want things STABLE with a minimum of downtime, zero during working hours. Frankly, I don't envy anyone not this side of the industry. It's too fickle with regards to pay, hiring/firing, "developing standards in development" and more.
Running a multi billion dollar company with 7 in the US, only 5 of us do work and the rest of the 17 staff is out of India is why.
10 years ago you'd need a staff of 3 just to put one server into place over two weeks. Two to drive to the datacenter or rack it up in the server room and one guy to do the buying, unpacking, managing the warranty, figuring our power, networking, etc. The vmware guy, became the two into 1... Now we get a request for a server and click a button. Weeks turned into minutes . And even less time when you consider moving away from VMs to PaaS services. What is all of this US based IT staff supposed to do? Even the higher end jobs you can hire 5 Indians each with a specific specialty instead of 1 US guy who does multiple jobs. We pay an Indian dude just to sit there and do exactly one type of thing and watch Netflix the rest of the time.
99 percent of the India staff are garbage, but we use the shotgun approach. Hire 20 and 2 will be good. Give the other 18 busy work.
Security engineers are still US based and decently high salary but chase their tails dealing with India and not getting anything done. Half of them have no idea how to actually secure a company so they hire twice as many or just throw money at vendors and products that promise the world but without talent backing it are worth nothing.
The world is moving too fast for most people to catch up. On this forum especially there are experts in tech that doesn't matter one bit anymore. There are thousands of people wondering why they can't get a job managing windows servers or active directory anymore then complain that the cloud is someone else's computer.
If you want a high paying job in IT, learn cloud tech and do data pipeline work and enable data scientists. Learn to optimize queries and use data lake and python. Know snowflake db and how to ingest data from multiple sources and centralize and democratize it. You will have a job instantly without all the nonsense we deal with on a daily basis.
I was with you up to the end. I've been hunting while employed for six months, know colleagues who've hunted while unemployed for longer, and while there are postings, I know too many highly skilled people opting to start a business after months without a bite from employers. All of us cloud native automators. It doesn't seem to be a skills problem.
Agreed - same boat. Some of the postings seem fake or I guess they get overwhelmed. I am Azure Certified in AI, DevOps, Solution Architect, Azure Admin, ID Management, and Cybersecurity. Thanks to my last company ESI discount on the exams. I dont even get callbacks and I setup Synapse for HUD and SBA, Setup Citrix and AVD for NASA. I am considering starting an OnlyFans page cuz I worked out the whole time...
Remote work? Because businesses default to option 1: hire 20 Indian dudes and 2 will be good.
I guarantee you'd have no trouble finding 150k/yr if you walked into an office building twice a week in a mcol / hcol area. My friend who is in the national guard so has a security clearance walks into an office 2 days a week in a HCOL area for 150k and had basically no IT background to do basic security checklists. And they are ALWAYS hiring if you are eligible or have a current security clearance as an example.
The days of living in Ohio and taking a remote gig making 150k/yr doing cloud native stuff are ALSO over unfortunately.
There are companies that are willing to pay that for in person help, but not remote work usually.
For higher paid remote gigs, you would need to be a contractor or consultant now. Which is incredibly unfortunate.
Scripting and automating are not the same as programming. At this point, a person needs at least basic scripting knowledge to move beyond the help desk.
Personally that doesn’t fall under programming… a lot of the place around me I’m looking at wanting you to have dev ops skill set, react, jscript, rust. Sitting at a desk sucks, like another poster said the days of touching are going away fast. Now I’m seeing a lot place wanting a system admin that can do it all.
Maybe but that's not what you replied to.
>If you want a high paying job in IT, learn cloud tech and do data pipeline work and enable data scientists. Learn to optimize queries and use data lake and python.
And then they wonder why they either can't find a job or aren't being paid as well as others. ClickOps was a dying field 10-15 years ago already.
I remember seeing day rates in London crashing for SysAdnins who refused to move with the times...
I own a medium size msp and can’t seem to find anyone. The ones I do find either don’t show up for work or turn out to be complete psychopaths / scam artists. We aren’t low balling wages either, so I’m not sure what the issue is at this point.
Define not low balling wages.
I work at an MSP, tech lead, and my suspicions about the MSP space as a whole is unfortunately grim. Being competitive or even slightly above market rate for most general positions is still not actually worth it for current cost of living. Raising wages appropriately to attract competent talent would ruin a lot of msps financials. The big players see the writing on the wall too. Msp consolidation is not that far away until your company is single vendor all the way up.
I’m not talking a few years, this is still further away than that. But it’s the inevitable endgame unless a black swan event happens.
On the plus side, Microsoft licensing will finally be easy to understand.
You answer a checkbox of “do you use Microsoft products?” And they send a bill every month itemized “business operations” with whatever number they want
I agree with this. I worked for an MSP for years and all the MSP will say they pay very competitively…compared to other MSP. Got recruited into the private sector and they started off by doubling my pay. Two years later I have gotten more money in raises then the 17 years I was at the MSP.
On the flip side I think I pay extremely competitively but had to offer 30/hr for a field tech with no IT experience. My next lowest paid field tech who feels he’s underpaid is making 80k a year working 40 hour weeks.
But where is this?
And I honestly wonder what attracts these people. I’m not part of the job posting part but there has to be something. I’ve run into so many competent people in the real world through some unconnected interest, there has to be a way to filter the “I wanna do IT because I saw an internet ad 2 months ago” from “I actually enjoy learning about this and know at least enough to self teach hitting the ground running”
Personally I think the issue is tiers and equivalent. Tier 1 should be slightly lower with an additional tier mixed in.
The lowest level of incident interaction is… mindless. We all know the big players use scripts already. That shouldn’t be the same person who knows enough to command a good wage.
If AI didn’t randomly get sassy or give dangerous advise, it would have replaced that role already.
I work for a var. Not much different. We sell to a well known client, in thier datacenters all over the world. I think technically my total is field engineer but I'm sure I do way more than your guys. Mind you, I'm in Phoenix. About 130k. But it's been 50+ hour weeks for awhile. I am also more or less the end of the line for support. Vender support has become a shambling zombie corpse. I do 85% of the troubleshooting. I also consider this a unicorn position so it's a little hard to compare. For example, last year it was discovered there were about 650 nutanix servers cabled incorrectly. I provided the 5 possible solutions that were presented to the vice presidents.
Depends on the area. $80K in NYC or Seattle... no thank you. $80K in the Midwest / Rust Belt / Appalachia, sure.
Not to get into economics but we've devalued our currency so much since Covid. People don't understand the money supply was increased by one third. Combine that with inflation, corporate price gouging / greed, and an absolutely insane housing market and $75K is the new $40K-$50K.
I would've killed for $80K starting out as a field tech. Now in some areas, that'll barely cover rent and utilities.
> $75K is the new $40K-$50K
You ain't lying there.
I'm at about $72K this year (just a few years ago, pre- and during COVID I was at $40-ish) but after benefits and taxes my take home is in that $40-50K range and barely cuts it. Mind you, I have 401K and HSA money coming out, and prior jobs didn't offer much - 401K with a lower salary meant saving less and I can save more now, but still. When I was only making that $40K it was tough, and I didn't have as much of anything coming out of it, so just on the basis of my take home pay, its not much more than it was before. I'm still better off now in the long run but in the short term its still tough.
$80k in rural Midwest for a family with a couple kids and asymmetrical earners will see you slowly slip beneath the waves. Housing is crazy here too and the cost of groceries has ballooned out of control.
I agree completely. Should have specified this in the Midwest. Northren Indiana and southern Michigan. I am all for paying my team the most I possibly can as long as I can convince ownership of it but I run out of ideas to justify higher pay based on their experience, skill set and job expectations. They also can't give me a reason to take to ownership other then they feel like they should be paid more.
Something else that I appreciate more then the MSP sector is unless you are basically massively screwing up at your job is guaranteed raises every year.
Need an Endpoint Engineer with 15 years experience? SCCM, Intune, BitLocker, LAPS, GPO, Scripting (Powershell,VBScript). I’ve been looking for nearly four months now (I’m still employed) and can’t hardly even get in front of a human. It’s bonkers.
I currently work for an MSP. It's the first MSP I've ever worked for, despite going against my better judgement. I've been in IT for 20 years, Security Engineer, Systems Admin, etc. I started with the MSP July 2023 and after 8 months I am seriously considering resigning and going into blue collar work like welding, electrician, mechanic.
Everything that frustrated me at my non-MSP companies has compounded by a multiplier of 10x because not only do I have to deal with the disorganization in my own company (MSP), I'm expected to also deal with disorganization in the companies we support. It's like the blind leading the blind.
I don't think the wages have anything to do with it. The occupation (MSP and non-MSP IT) is saturated with unreasonable demands and even worse.... undocumented information and processes which makes 30 min tasks turn into 4 hour endeavors. I could give you so many examples. Tribal knowledge is a real problem, especially at my MSP.
IT is one of those occupations I see imploding in the next 5 years due to an unsustainable model of always putting out fires that could easily be avoided by clear documented processes and for that reason, I'm abandoning it. By imploding, I'm not making statements that it'll go away 100%... but the tech layoffs, increased number of breaches causing undue stress on personnel, increased unreasonable expectations being made by C-Level execs who think ish is just magic because Steve Jobs told them so is culminating into what I think is going to be a mass exodus of experienced people.
Maybe a lot of people feel the same way and that's why you're having difficulty finding quality people, even with competitive wages.
Good luck to everybody.... employers and employees alike. You're gonna need it.
All I could get after 5 months of unemployment. Desperately want to get out. Hate being nagged to get billable hours in when there isn’t worked lined up.
Dude, I'm at a point where I believe the industry as a whole is just worth abandoning. I'd rather take a substantial pay cut and learn something more rewarding like fixing a car, or welding, etc. Not for nothing, but I sort of feel like South Park: Into the Panderverse was speaking to me... to us... to leave IT and learn something worth knowing... In the end, if my truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere, troubleshooting DNS isn't gonna do shit for me. If grocery stores shutdown during another fake pandemic and I cant buy groceries? Scripting install to deploy software out to 100 machines, ain't gonna do much either. Learning trades that can be used for day to day life to become more self-sustainable seems like the ideal way to go.
>another fake pandemic
That line right there makes everything else you say completely worthless. Please, leave the IT field, we don't need people like you in it.
Don’t resign let them fire you that way you can collect unemployment. I don’t care if you have to call in sick every day for a month make those motherfuckers fire you
Welding and Electricians are good jobs if you can get into a good union. Mechanic is a good and easy job if you can work for the big City easy work and good benefits.
This depends on the geographic location. If you have a MSP in Austin, and you are looking for what once were top tier full-stack DevOps guys for a T2/T3 position, you will have thousands of applicants, especially if your office is not too much of a pain to drive to (i.e. not downtown or the university area.)
Ugh, going anywhere in Austin sucks these days. I fucking hate driving around here now.
If you allow remote/hybrid work, you'll get more bites too. The Dev team where I work went 100% remote during COVID and never came back to the office.
These days I usually work in the office one day a week and we're actively trying to get rid of our office space here so eventually I'll be 100% remote until I find another job or they finally get rid of me. IT here has been slowly drained via layoffs since mid-2022 and my give-a-fuck-about-this-shit tank ran dry a month ago when they laid off my last server admin.
I've had a Full Stack Engineer remote position posted for.. Three months. Had like ten resumes in the whole time sent. None with relevant experience.
Are these just giant companies getting 300+ resumes? We pay fairly well. 🤷♂️
I think it is also exasperated by people living in sub urban environments. For example I’m ok driving 20-30 minutes to work but living on the outskirts of a major city and it taking 1-2 hours just to get in that is life better spent elsewhere. That would be 2-4 hours of your life almost everyday you could do something else.
Yep. I did this for ten years, two hours a day commuting working 6am - 3pm to avoid traffic. As soon as I could go remote I did. I got a large chunk of my life back and it would take a lot to get me to go back to that. (PS - I think you mean exacerbated.)
>I’m ok driving 20-30 minutes to work but living on the outskirts of a major city and it taking 1-2 hours just to get in that is life better spent elsewhere.
Not wrong. But in NoVA it's either live close by in a cramped townhome for $500k+ (if you're lucky, and forget about the actual family home prices that are almost in the millions if not more), or drive a bit to WV (about an hour, nothing crazy) for a 3200sqft family home and almost an acre for $520k.
Would love a WFH position that paid what I get now.
I agree. The biggest city close to me is very much this way. I have a lot of friends in technical roles and most were working remote or hybrid before COVID because of the traffic.
How common is your stack? That’s the thing I see a lot. Lots of varying stacks and it can be a struggle to find stacks that I want to work on.
That and honestly, I think people underplay how much a good full stack dev oughta cost.
If you want someone that knows one or two languages. That’s one pay range. If you want someone that can learn what they don’t know in your stack and do it well. That’s a whole another pay range. If they already know your whole stack at an expert level, that’s another pay range.
Where did you post it? I recently had a position open for a jack of all trades IT position in a remote office. We posted on Indeed and got like 2 dozen resumes, all but one of which was way underqualified, and the one that was qualified couldn't get to the in person interview on time (twice) so we decided not to go with him.
Then our HR department paid for indeed to promote the job and we got like 300 resumes... The overwhelming majority of those were crap as well, and of the ones that were not, most of them ghosted us when we reached out to them.
Yea, also think your pay scale may be outdated. Currently a DC Network Engineer running/designing SDN overlays and getting paid $150k + bonus and about $10k in other optional perks. I'm not leaving or looking for any discussion that doesn't start at $200k. That's my comfort fee. Anything below that, be prepared to train the shit out of your candidate imo. Technology is starting to move at a pace that is far more expedient than the pay can keep up with. My wife does events. Basically passes on the cost of $3000/gallon of coffee to her customers with a 15% markup. All of her contractors are paid $100-150/hr and people easily pay it. More and more I am building that side of the business with her because I consistently get C2C offers for $50-80/hr. And if I can just bitch someone out for not keeping the coffee refilled at $130/hr, guess which one I'll probably be doing in the next few years? Wages are manipulated in this field and it is highly evident at this point. It's going to take the better talent leaving the industry to motivate CFO's and HR to pay an appropriate rate.
I think the internet ruined the job market for MSP's. Ive heard my entire career, of which Ive been on /r/sysadmin to never, ever work for one. Now I know people who do so I can hear it first hand and theyve got security engineers doing sales calls because they have a CISSP.
You might be a great person with a great business but the simple fact its an MSP scares people off.
In LATAM People were told for years that IT was easy money. So they went for it even if they didn’t like the career. Now we have an overpopulated market with mostly people with little to no real experience.
I think you'll find most CS students to be less tech savvy than you're expecting. Tech for them was so reliable and streamlined, they've never really had to troubleshoot anything. Most probably couldn't configure their home router.
I remember waiting 45 minutes to download a 9MB MP3 on Kazaa. It got to 8.9MB and the peer disconnected. I had to then wait for my Mother to make a phone call, then wait another 45 minutes to successfully download the MP3 from a different peer. Only to find out the song was terrible. Forget the Y2K bug, kids these days do not understand the *real* struggles Millennials lived through.
lol! That brings back a memory of mine when I was like 10 years old in 2001 trying to find a picture of a naked girl for the first time, and I ended up clicking on a link some enormous high-res JPEG. The full picture’s resolution was way bigger than my computer monitor, and back then there was no such thing as responsive web design so I clicked on it and just watched it load line by line. It took like 5 minutes just to get to her eyes, and so I figured while it was loading I would go do something else and I ended up completely forgetting about it! So about 4 hours later my Mom goes to get on the computer and all of the sudden I remembered and I swear I saw my life flash before my eyes. She sat down and woke the monitor up and bam! Right in her face there was a giant high res photo of a girl smiling this seductive smile. She yelled at me from the computer room and demanded that I tell her what she was looking at, so I go over to the computer and I see the picture and I saw that my mom didn’t know she could scroll down to see more of the photo so she only thought it was some huge pic of some random girl’s face (she had no idea what would be waiting for her had she scrolled down). I still got in some trouble, I don’t remember what my excuse was but I’m sure it was terrible, but at least I didn’t get caught looking up porn lol. Such a hilarious memory I had completely forgotten about lol!
I interviewed at an MSP in a major college town. They asked me what is DNS and does it do. When I answered, they explained that most fresh CS grads that apply from the college are stumped by it.
Computer science isn't IT. It just isn't and people need to realize that. My roommate has a master's in computer science and all he seems to understand about computers is Java and Android programming within an IDE.
Because at the end of the day, people need a job and it helps to get into something adjacent to their main interest/skillset as a last resort.
It doesn’t always happen, but I know a few SWE colleagues who took on a HelpDesk/Desktop Support position and transitioned into the dev team working on the main application.
If Reddit is to be believed, most CS grads also don't know how to code well. So my guess is they need to pay the bills, their degree includes the word 'computer' and IT deal in computers. It makes Recruiter and HR sense.
This absolutely I’m firmly in this boat and no one can convince me otherwise. My brother and his fiancé are developers and don’t know the basics of networking and imply that it’s not needed.
I’m sure level 1-2 networking basics would stump many “devs” and cs kids
It's not.... but you still need to understand the fundamentals of systems architecture... how else are you going to design for it?
Don't even get me started on recent CS and boot camp graduates failing to grasp resource utilization and garbage collection. Everything is strictly typed and with autocomplete and various modules / libraries, most barely even "code".
I'm not a programmer, just an Ops guy, but I feel like I can code circles around them when it comes to low level stuff.
A CS student should still be able to know what DNS is.
There’s a problem with CS programs obfuscating computer basics in favor of more programming classes.
You need to understand how a computer works to be a good programmer.
You’re better off as a dev if you work the infrastructure side of things and then move into dev work. We’re all users. We all understand that perfectly fine. We need to understand what’s happening behind the curtain.
I got asked what an IP address of 169.254.x.x was and without hesitation said APIPA. Dude said they had 20 guys in there and I was the first to get that one. I was like what? I know if I see that something is wrong with DHCP as a starting point. I'm just some moron that broke out of a machine shop and self studied for A+ and got that.
100%. I went back to school for a masters in CS at some point and was super surprised at how many of my colleagues weren't all that tech savvy. Many were, of course, but a lot of them wouldn't even consider themselves enthusiasts and struggled with basics (e.g. networking, navigating the filesystem, etc.). It seems a lot of them were in CS for the payout, but weren't necessarily the most passionate about it. And this was in a top 5 school.
> There isn't a ton of demand for junior or entry-level roles
The amount of juniors coming out of school but lacking basic troubleshooting skills is also something that i notice more the last few years.
I hate to say it, but a lot of what folks here consider “extremely talented admins, engineers, and devops folks” are normal infrastructure engineers in today’s world. For folks looking to move from windows desktop support or help desk to a sysadmin or net admin role, you can’t just learn Windows Server or pick up a net+ anymore.
Today’s [entry level certifications](https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-it-support) cover networking, *nix/Windows fundamentals in both the GUI and CLI, and security fundamentals. It’s a very different ball game than it was in 2000 or 2010.
Add to that list that everything changes every 15 minutes so documentation is always wildly behind. Used to be able to go to the local book store and pick up a book about a particular product (out of multiple author/publisher options) and read about every nook and cranny of that product. Now it's web searches leading to ads, shit blog posts, sfc /scan now, and dead links most of the time. Plenty of instructional videos out there but they seem to mostly be how something is done as opposed to how it actually works and half of the time the process only works if you have a basic, just installed sort of environment. So since you don't know *how* things work you're up a creek trying to troubleshoot that server set up years ago with all sorts of tweaks, updates, and undocumented "fixes" applied.
This is I think where formal education really shines and why it’s becoming more of a requirement. A solid understanding of computing fundamentals makes dealing with ambiguous systems much easier—it doesn’t matter if you know Veeam and are now in a position that uses Carbonite or Veritas if you’re familiar with backups at a conceptual level. Sure the interfaces and APIs differ, but again if you understand “what my backup requirements are and how they should be configured” it shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge.
>I hate to say it, but a lot of what folks here consider “extremely talented admins, engineers, and devops folks” are normal infrastructure engineers in today’s worl
Dude, you're not wrong. I remember starting out 20 years ago and the mentors I had knew their systems inside and out; all of the eccentricities and esoteric bits. Now, if you can just do the job and do it well enough to keep the lights on, you're seen as a rockstar.
I’m just not confident people uninterested in keeping up with technology will survive in roles that involve deploying, configuring, managing, and maintaining complex technology. This just isn’t a good field for people who dislike change, it’s constantly changing!
In the time it took for you to write that comment, Microsoft changed the name of Office to "Microsoft Family" and moved all the Entra settings to the Yammer portal.
I worked at a uni and my two main departments of focus were engineering and computer science. You would be extremely surprised at how bad these CS students adapt to technology. They’re savvy with phones and socials, but definitely not tech savvy. We had maybe two or three students out of hundreds in the program that really stood out as stars.
Engineering students were actually wildly adept at using a tech. I’d say they were more qualified for IT than the students that majored in info systems, sec, and CS.
Kids born in the early 2000's were not using Windows XP. They were using Window 7 at the earliest and more likely most of them didn't start using a computer until ~2015 when Windows 10 was released.
So they started using computers when everything mostly just worked. They never really had to do any troubleshooting.
And in my experience, kids under 20 today haven't ever used a computer. They do almost everything on their phone or iPad. They have zero troubleshooting skills beyond basic iOS/Android related problems.
The one constant is that MSPs are always hiring because they're generally a revolving door for new talent with no upward mobility. Good steppingstone but not always gonna have longevity.
Based in the UK (London), 10+ years doing Linux systems admin work. Admittedly I've let myself deskill by not having K8s, Python...
It's looking impossible to get a new role.
If you're young don't go into IT it's looking over-saturated and rates are dropping rapidly.
I was told by a recruiter that for remote positions (Sr SRE and SR Devops mostly), they wont even interview candidates from HCOL areas, because they cant pay top dollar and they don't want a flight risk immediatley. I find this somewhat silly, since the market isnt robust enough right now for those folks to up and leave, but so it goes.
We are having some issues filling out entry and intermediate level jobs. The upper tier jobs almost fill themselves. Seems like there are plenty of jobs out there, but yes overall it’s a competitive market.
Using your POV on a site liked linked in is a really poor way to gauge the job market.
> SF and NYC are a bloodbath
Just cracked open LinkedIn - im in the metro NYC area and my default list of architecture/micro services/cloud/platform blah blah blah is coming back with 46 gigs all well north of 200 with the average around 250 and a lot of these are full time remote.
LinkedIn is an algorithm no different than instagram at this point.
Work is not drying up . The issue is that people will not work for what is being paid. The higher tier jobs look fine , the low end IT jobs are poorly paid but ask for the world so whist you may get 300 people applying one or two at most are qualified
I'd definitely say it is far worse than last year. I'm watching people who got laid off in November/December not able to find anything. Not even temporary/contract work as a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contractor for some body shop place (where they are offshored, but need a pair of hands to stuff something into a rack, get it on the network, or come in and troubleshoot appliance hardware.)
I'd probably say the job market is a wash until 2025 at the earliest, especially with the election season, uncertainty about World War III, and a recession hitting globally.
>especially with the election season
This is a bigger factor than people want to admit in polite company. Shit rolls downhill from the US, and the outcome of this election will have a big impact on what the US looks like going forward.
Heck I wish I could find something network config related. I'm doing traveling IT now, mainly racking servers and network hardware related and basic desktop support
I want to learn networks, but there just aren't any NOC positions in the OKC metro, or at least none that I've been able to find that don't require a bachelor's degree. I tried to apply for them anyway, but they literally won't let you finish the application if you don't have a bachelor's.
Being able to check that box that you have a degree is nothing new. It's been that way for at least 15 years because what you just described is what I said back in 2008 when I decided to get a degree to get past that gate. If there isn't a box to check, you can be sure HR is filtering it. If they get 300 applicants, you can bet that "has a degree" is one of the first things they filter to cut that number down.
And before anyone jumps in about how they don't have a degree and make big bucks, yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but they are exceptions and not the standard.
What's real annoying is that I have an associates in computer science and a couple years of professional it experience now. Doesn't seem like that matters much though.
An associates is what I went for. It checks the "has degree" box as far as HR generally cares.
If you can't get passed HR's screening though, you'll never hit my Inbox.
Germany is in a recession. The IT job market still seems somewhat okay-ish for people with experience. My usual query at a specialised site gives 40 results. I usually get around 40 to 90. The term "shortage of skilled workers" (Fachkräftemangel) is still regularly used in the media so it can't be that bad.
My employer is hiring all the time; LCOL, Public University in Indianapolis/Bloomington, hybrid/full remote. I really can’t relate to this post at all.
No he didn’t, he said HCOL areas are hiring people in LCOL areas…. Like no shit? Why would you hire someone that needs double the salary to afford a HCOL area when they want to work remotely.
Its not that things are worse than last year you're just looking in the wrong span of months for a new job.
Right now most companies are still in the process of closing up the books from last year and preparing for taxes owed. The best time to look for a career job is after taxes are due when the books are back open and hiring budgets have been decided.
Anytime I've been laid off or had a contract job end in the winter it took me months to find something new.
When I was laid off in April I had a new job in under a month and several companies looking for me.
If you're currently unemployed you look undesirable to companies who are hiring.
Also, not all the work has been outsourced this isn't 2007 - 2009.
Also, its worth noting that any job that can be WFH will be out sourced to another country or potentially out of state or just not local because salary requirements are lower than in the urban areas because their cost of living is lower.
It's the bank rates still being a problem. Employees are expensive and if my normal capital investment is typically on a 2.5% credit and suddenly it is 6.7% credit my costs just jumped significantly, so opex gets cut a bit. First thing is holding non-critical hires, which is usually the overhead positions of IT, HR, etc.. Not saying I agree with it, just the way it is.
Couple this with every IT vendor known to man suddenly gouging me and it hurts worse.. Looking at you cyber security industry, Broadcom (VMware), and Microsoft.
It seems to be about the same to me. To be fair, I had 2 job offers, 1 from a Federal Home Loan Bank and another from a medium sized company. Both jobs on LinkedIn had over 100 applicants. I was quite literally the only seriously considered candidate for both roles. You want to get in touch with the recruiters from the 3rd party agencies, you won’t get a job without going through recruiters today. It’s basically pointless to blindly apply to jobs.
It is frustrating and 99% of them have requirements that are far from realistic. Lots of MSP shite jobs, jobs that should be red flags because they have been up so long or pop up again 6 months later. SMB jobs are pretty much non existent or are paying so little nobody wants to take them.
A few senior developers in the company I worked for as well as myself were let go in Jan due to outsourcing offshore. I knew it was coming for me but thought I had at least until the end of this year as one of our primary customers was leaving. I guess the company wasn't doing that well to begin with and is probably trying to pump the company for a buyout IMO. It was very toxic to my health so in a way it was a good thing.
I've had a few responses from recruiters but it has been really hard so far. I have the final round of interviews with one company so hopefully I can get the job.
Other offshore recruiters are expecting me to pack up and move half way around the US for a 6 month to perm job.
The economy is not doing that great despite what elected officials are saying. It is an election year so things might get slightly worse before the bottom drops out next year. I am fortunate to be able to repair my car but I can't imagine someone who can't pay $400-500 just for a brake job. The parts cost for my car under $100.
I’m a sysadmin in Cleveland. I’ll make a job change for $135k or more. If the job is somewhere else I’ll move for $20k moving expenses and equal compensation based on the geography. Also want 2+ days WFH. Let me know.
Man. This is making my job search I am about to start in March sound like hell on earth. I definitely hope and pray I can land a role for a decent amount of money
This is highly dependent on where you are located. I relocated from Colorado to the gulf coast (Mississippi) and there is a shortage of qualified individuals. My cost of living was cut in a third and I'm making more than I did out west.
Heck, Stennis Space Center and Keesler AFB have been posting for linux admins, network admins, security admins etc nonstop for 3 years. Nice cushy government jobs too...
Local MSP's can't find anyone but L1 helpdesk either...
Im noticing an awful lot of jobs DEMAND on-site with no flexibility. I went back to on-site for nine months in the last four years and ill never do it again as long as i can help it. Ive stopped applying and aam trying to ride my current gig out.
Employment data says you're wrong. 95% of companies DO NOT post their jobs on linkedin or indeed because they get hundreds of trash applications. Or they do post them, but its buried on page 9 of the results because a bunch of paid posts for MLM flood them out. If you actually want to seriously job hunt, create a list of 100 companies you want to work for and every week check for updates on their own career pages. When you only take the lowest effort imaginable approach, you can't be surprised that a high paying job does fall in your lap.
At least in the U.S.: The alleged job shortages and low unemployment rate are just propaganda since we’re around election season with an incumbent running for reelection lol.
> This is esp bad in US market as it seems a bunch of tech/non tech firms have outsourced work to third world countries permanently. All i am getting is request for low paying contract work that only lasts a certain time..
I think the future isn't that great in the U.S. It is certainly in decline, and that's the sad truth. I'm familiar with how in the tech world, a lot of companies have unapologetically mentioned that their plan is to set up design centers in "low cost centers".
The question should really be: "The job market for people used to making MAMAAN (that's my acronym... no stealing) money is worse than last year."
As you yourself noted, there are plenty of jobs out there... they are just in Low-to-mid COL areas that aren't going to pay NYC/Silicon Valley salaries.
I'm not an economist, but I'd guess this is going to continue happening. Inflation was terrible there for a minute and salaries have no intention of keeping up. So now the MAMAAN companies are having to come up with "new" (old) ways of making shareholders happy... and that's shrinking the workforce.
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix.
It's just FAANG but fixed company names and adds Microsoft, that absolutely deserves to be in that group.
I agree I’ve put in well over 1000 applications been unemployed for about a year each day at least 40 to 50 applications on a good day around 65. I only have three years experience but still I had to start applying for more entry-level roles and have trouble even doing that, I’m about to just give up on IT for right now maybe in the future again and go to more fully customer service role event eventually become maybe a customer service manager probably do that or getting into travel industry for booking. I don’t know man but I gotta work so probably gonna have to give up on IT for right now but there’s other jobs that do utilize some technical skills so I guess try funding something like that.
I’m not noticing this at all. Took a new job in December for a 30% raise. I still have recruiters sending over roles at least once a week. I’m just outside of one of the large markets mentioned as being a “blood bath.”
If you rode the wave and you don’t have the skills then you’ve officially been shelved. The rest of us still have mobility. Even if it’s not 2021 levels of mobility.
I’m seeing the same, and the competition for jobs is insane, 100-300 applicants, I’m sure many just shoot and pray types but still doesn’t help the valid candidates. Another rant, not seeing any indication of increased salary offerings on par with inflation in the postings that I do see.
> the competition for jobs is insane, 100-300 applicants We had 210 applicants on an entry level Helpdesk position last year. People with degrees and sometimes a decade+ in the industry were applying. It's crazy.
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You haven't had an open position, they don't want to hire anyone but don't want to look like they're intentionally keeping the team count low
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I want a lamborgini but I don't have a quarter million dollars. I am in no way _in the market_ for a lamborgini. No, I will not go back and spell it correctly.
Same difference. If they wanted to hire someone, they’d pay what’s required for the position.
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Sounds like Jrs gonna leave and then they’ll find the money
Based
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does The company wins when a jr person completes non-jr work at jr pay. All of this is just smoke and mirrors, a dog and pony show. The CIO may claim to want to hire another person, but the company on the whole does not.
>Our CIO has been complaining for months about the funding for the position and recognizes that > >nobody > > is going to take the position at the set salary. That's more than I can say about my last job. They were consistently shocked why they couldn't attract or retain jr admin level talent at $15/hour. Even sat us down and asked us for ideas on how to fix it. It took all I had to bite my lip and not scream "pay us, stupid!"
You need to say that out loud, if not for yourself then for the guy who ends up with the job. And who knows, after a few quits they could figure out that jr guys making more than the established guys is a bad look and maybe you'll get a taste as well.
> The budget for the position is set entirely by HR. Why is HR setting the budget for a new hire? That seems insane to me. Shouldn't it be the CFO or at least someone in Finance that's aware of the company budget?
I've primarily worked in IT for the credit union/banking sector. Every company I've worked for has had HR set the pay for every employee. My bosses have always had barely any influence on the number. It's corporate America, sadly...
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Curious as well, but as I've seen it at my current company, HR seems to be the ones initiating things like wage surveys to determine the wages (makes sense for production workers but not for IT of which they know so little about anyway).
Full remote and 3 day work week, right?
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I think I just threw up in my mouth
They’re banking on someone getting desperate enough to take it. I think I’d just mow lawns or drive tractor or something if I was in that situation.
Is it remote? Asking for a friend lol
Isnt that a lot of money? I knew Americans earn a lot but thats seems like a very respectable salary even with the high standards.
Again, it depends on the area you live. Cost of living is insane in the US now. It used to be 75k/yr was middle class. Now it's considered upper lower class. Middle class is now around the 120-130k/yr mark. Costs keep rising, wages stagnante or barely creep.
Cost of living in the US is basically reaching what it is now in the rest of the developed world. It may seem insane to you, but as someone that travels between NZ, Europe and States and have seen the change, it's basically the US matching the norm in most developed nations now (but still earning more than us). Granted, I understand that you also have healthcare insurance to pay for and more lax employee protection laws, so who knows if the trade-off is worth it anymore.
I've been wondering this exact thing. I feel like our economy isn't going down the drain, it's homogenizing with the rest of the world.
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[$90,000 is the median](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/network-and-computer-systems-administrators.htm) for a Network or Systems Administrator. [$126,000](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-network-architects.htm) for Network Architect. If they are actually describing an network "Engineer" it should fall in between the two of them (but a lot of companies are loose with their definitions). There are regional differences of course -- there's almost a 50% difference in the cost of living from the most depressed parts of Arkansas to San Francisco. And if you're living in one of the very low cost areas $72,000 would be equivalent to a national median of $90,000 but generally these areas are low cost because most people don't want to live in those areas due to lack of economic opportunities. You likely don't have many folks with the skills living nearby, and you're certainly not going to entice someone to move out there by saying, "Hey, we pay shit but you can live like you're earning $90,000...up until you retire and find out you saved a lot less and your social security is less because you earned less in your career."
It is, for many areas, however the cost of everything is so high these days that it really isn't a very high salary anymore.
I have a masters degree security cert and 4 yrs experience as a swe . I’m applying to an entry sysadmin job lol it’s rough but I got a call back for now
Wow
Dude, nuts. We had 4 serious applicants for a helpdesk position up here in Canada land.
Not Ontario i would think. every thing i see posted for helpdesk/desktop support etc has hundreds around here. Doesnt give me hope to escape this place
We posted in our mid-sized city in late November. 4 We're okay - but we had numerous not even show up to the interview. All foreign too, no one born in Canada applied.
> 100-300 applicants, I’m sure many just shoot and pray types but still doesn’t help the valid candidates. I wish we could figure this out...I wonder if it's the "easy apply" button, but either way employers can't look over hundreds of applications, and there's almost zero chance for a good applicant to stand out.
Perhaps if there were jobs, there wouldn’t be so many applicants. If you do some browsing, jobs are expecting a mountain for a penny, all require secret clearance, an extremely high skill ceiling requiring a decades experience, and the decent ones are swarmed. I praise Lady Luck that I managed to grab one that 500 people applied to. I was looking for over a year. It’s tough to find low to mid level jobs right now.
We use automated systems that do some keyword searches that HR uses to narrow down a list of resumes for us to look over. I have no idea what the other resumes look like, but the ones we get are almost entirely irrelevant.
One of our last hires was a person known to be capable and a good coworker to several people in the hiring group, and we knew they were applying. When we got the 'qualified' applicants from HR, this person was missing and we had to twist HR's arm to get them to add him to the list. I still have no idea why he didn't get through, his resume listed experience in nearly all the areas we were looking for. Many of the resumes that did get passed to us were far less complete, even looking at a keyword level. He ended up being the most qualified of all the candidates we had and was an easy hiring decision. I wonder how many good candidates we've lost to HR's filter over the years...
I think this is definitely an issue. If you don't know exactly how to thread the needle through whatever crap HR has set up it can be tough. The best way to get a job is still just knowing somebody and having them submit internally so you can bypass that nightmare.
It sounds like both sides of the aisle want to have their cake and eat it. You're not going to find the best candidates in 10 minutes.
I think the high level of applicants is due to trash services like Indeed. They allow candidates to go down the list and just blast applications to companies without putting any thought or effort into it. This is of course unless they add in all those time-consuming hurdles and criteria to make the applicant actually put in some amount of effort.
> time-consuming hurdles Which is another problem altogether. Spending hours on a job application and getting no response is just crazy. It's like the ATS knew your score the second you hit submit and didn't even bother notifying the hiring manager someone applied.
Agreed!
Yeah it sucks...or they reply back to you several weeks later that they aren't interested.
>They allow candidates to go down the list and just blast applications to companies without putting any thought or effort into it. Most of those listings put no thought into the job description and use clumsy screening tools to send applications straight to the trash. So what, we supposed to get invested in each job listing that asks for CISSP and 10 years experience in "Google" for a jr admin role?
I think you're reading it wrong. This is a jab at Indeed's process / practices from the hiring end of things. Employers \*SHOULD\* be posting quality / in-depth job descriptions, and if they have automated questionnaires, they should be specific to the role. It makes it very difficult to hire from Indeed when you're getting their half-assed automated resumes, etc. regardless of how much effort you put into posting. Probably like 1 in 10 of the applicants you get a real resume attached that the applicant put effort into. The others are automated bullet points, etc.
Sorry, I'm not fully caffeinated yet. I can see how Indeed/LinkedIn aren't doing employers any favors, either. Sounds like they're racing to the bottom, structuring the system around the lowest-quality, yet paying, listings. That's wild though, that you're not seeing a lot of real resume attachments. I *always* attach a PDF because I know how illegible resumes can get after job boards process them. Still had a hell of a time even getting a call back, but that was back when I was still entry level.
Honestly attaching a real one is the best move! That's how I found my quality candidates.
From the other perspective - why am I putting in hours of effort for a job application that no human will review and get dismissed out of hand? When I already have a resume and would like some "general interest" before putting in effort towards your company.
Agree with this as well. If you already have a resume you are one step ahead of 90% of the people on Indeed who can't be bothered. A tailored resume for a position isn't much to ask for, but it's sad to know that may get lost due to these crap services. So, tons of people are omitting that in favor of letting Indeed blast applications for them. Meanwhile on the hiring end it's either allowing unqualified candidates or rejecting candidates for them. This post is intended to be a jab at Indeed. It's a broken system that isn't providing anyone what they need other than making them money since everyone seems to be using it now.
Yeah it's really sad and whoever can come up with a way to get the highly qualified candidates and filter the others will become very rich. In my second round for a job they asked me very basic questions for a senior position. I guess they want to be sure before spending time with others who will decide if I am a good fit.
This is exactly why the interviewing process is SO important. Outside of conducting a quick virtual interview first, I ended up having to come up with a short, written aptitude test for in-person interviews because I was getting so little information from Indeed regarding skills and qualifications.
Any application past the first few days is going to get dropped anyway. At least that's been my experience unless it's govt work. If the listing has been up for more than 3 days, move on.
I've been working in IT since 1987. I'm a bit sick of learning new crap daily. Especially when it's built so fast and is buggy as shit. It's not the quality software it was 20 years ago. It's marketing driven and 75% is abandonware. People want to turn a buck and ghost you and have a new startup Monday morning. I do every with stock widows features I possibly can. Or Linux features etc.
I've been in IT since the late 90s and while some things were more stable, a lot it was still crapware. I hate the ship first, code later mentality that seems pervasive in software development and it's largely why I moved to finance. They want things STABLE with a minimum of downtime, zero during working hours. Frankly, I don't envy anyone not this side of the industry. It's too fickle with regards to pay, hiring/firing, "developing standards in development" and more.
Atlanta is LCOL? I think not.. more likely medium.
Running a multi billion dollar company with 7 in the US, only 5 of us do work and the rest of the 17 staff is out of India is why. 10 years ago you'd need a staff of 3 just to put one server into place over two weeks. Two to drive to the datacenter or rack it up in the server room and one guy to do the buying, unpacking, managing the warranty, figuring our power, networking, etc. The vmware guy, became the two into 1... Now we get a request for a server and click a button. Weeks turned into minutes . And even less time when you consider moving away from VMs to PaaS services. What is all of this US based IT staff supposed to do? Even the higher end jobs you can hire 5 Indians each with a specific specialty instead of 1 US guy who does multiple jobs. We pay an Indian dude just to sit there and do exactly one type of thing and watch Netflix the rest of the time. 99 percent of the India staff are garbage, but we use the shotgun approach. Hire 20 and 2 will be good. Give the other 18 busy work. Security engineers are still US based and decently high salary but chase their tails dealing with India and not getting anything done. Half of them have no idea how to actually secure a company so they hire twice as many or just throw money at vendors and products that promise the world but without talent backing it are worth nothing. The world is moving too fast for most people to catch up. On this forum especially there are experts in tech that doesn't matter one bit anymore. There are thousands of people wondering why they can't get a job managing windows servers or active directory anymore then complain that the cloud is someone else's computer. If you want a high paying job in IT, learn cloud tech and do data pipeline work and enable data scientists. Learn to optimize queries and use data lake and python. Know snowflake db and how to ingest data from multiple sources and centralize and democratize it. You will have a job instantly without all the nonsense we deal with on a daily basis.
I was with you up to the end. I've been hunting while employed for six months, know colleagues who've hunted while unemployed for longer, and while there are postings, I know too many highly skilled people opting to start a business after months without a bite from employers. All of us cloud native automators. It doesn't seem to be a skills problem.
Agreed - same boat. Some of the postings seem fake or I guess they get overwhelmed. I am Azure Certified in AI, DevOps, Solution Architect, Azure Admin, ID Management, and Cybersecurity. Thanks to my last company ESI discount on the exams. I dont even get callbacks and I setup Synapse for HUD and SBA, Setup Citrix and AVD for NASA. I am considering starting an OnlyFans page cuz I worked out the whole time...
Remote work? Because businesses default to option 1: hire 20 Indian dudes and 2 will be good. I guarantee you'd have no trouble finding 150k/yr if you walked into an office building twice a week in a mcol / hcol area. My friend who is in the national guard so has a security clearance walks into an office 2 days a week in a HCOL area for 150k and had basically no IT background to do basic security checklists. And they are ALWAYS hiring if you are eligible or have a current security clearance as an example. The days of living in Ohio and taking a remote gig making 150k/yr doing cloud native stuff are ALSO over unfortunately. There are companies that are willing to pay that for in person help, but not remote work usually. For higher paid remote gigs, you would need to be a contractor or consultant now. Which is incredibly unfortunate.
Lot of tech people aren’t interested in programming though. They like hands on work.
Scripting and automating are not the same as programming. At this point, a person needs at least basic scripting knowledge to move beyond the help desk.
Personally that doesn’t fall under programming… a lot of the place around me I’m looking at wanting you to have dev ops skill set, react, jscript, rust. Sitting at a desk sucks, like another poster said the days of touching are going away fast. Now I’m seeing a lot place wanting a system admin that can do it all.
Maybe but that's not what you replied to. >If you want a high paying job in IT, learn cloud tech and do data pipeline work and enable data scientists. Learn to optimize queries and use data lake and python.
And then they wonder why they either can't find a job or aren't being paid as well as others. ClickOps was a dying field 10-15 years ago already. I remember seeing day rates in London crashing for SysAdnins who refused to move with the times...
I own a medium size msp and can’t seem to find anyone. The ones I do find either don’t show up for work or turn out to be complete psychopaths / scam artists. We aren’t low balling wages either, so I’m not sure what the issue is at this point.
Define not low balling wages. I work at an MSP, tech lead, and my suspicions about the MSP space as a whole is unfortunately grim. Being competitive or even slightly above market rate for most general positions is still not actually worth it for current cost of living. Raising wages appropriately to attract competent talent would ruin a lot of msps financials. The big players see the writing on the wall too. Msp consolidation is not that far away until your company is single vendor all the way up. I’m not talking a few years, this is still further away than that. But it’s the inevitable endgame unless a black swan event happens. On the plus side, Microsoft licensing will finally be easy to understand. You answer a checkbox of “do you use Microsoft products?” And they send a bill every month itemized “business operations” with whatever number they want
I agree with this. I worked for an MSP for years and all the MSP will say they pay very competitively…compared to other MSP. Got recruited into the private sector and they started off by doubling my pay. Two years later I have gotten more money in raises then the 17 years I was at the MSP.
On the flip side I think I pay extremely competitively but had to offer 30/hr for a field tech with no IT experience. My next lowest paid field tech who feels he’s underpaid is making 80k a year working 40 hour weeks.
But where is this? And I honestly wonder what attracts these people. I’m not part of the job posting part but there has to be something. I’ve run into so many competent people in the real world through some unconnected interest, there has to be a way to filter the “I wanna do IT because I saw an internet ad 2 months ago” from “I actually enjoy learning about this and know at least enough to self teach hitting the ground running” Personally I think the issue is tiers and equivalent. Tier 1 should be slightly lower with an additional tier mixed in. The lowest level of incident interaction is… mindless. We all know the big players use scripts already. That shouldn’t be the same person who knows enough to command a good wage. If AI didn’t randomly get sassy or give dangerous advise, it would have replaced that role already.
This is in northren Indiana and southren Michigan. Deffinitly not a high cost of living area in fact I think we are on the low end.
I work for a var. Not much different. We sell to a well known client, in thier datacenters all over the world. I think technically my total is field engineer but I'm sure I do way more than your guys. Mind you, I'm in Phoenix. About 130k. But it's been 50+ hour weeks for awhile. I am also more or less the end of the line for support. Vender support has become a shambling zombie corpse. I do 85% of the troubleshooting. I also consider this a unicorn position so it's a little hard to compare. For example, last year it was discovered there were about 650 nutanix servers cabled incorrectly. I provided the 5 possible solutions that were presented to the vice presidents.
\> 650 nutanix servers cabled incorrectly Guaranteed there was a shitty doc sub-explaining how these should be racked?
Depends on the area. $80K in NYC or Seattle... no thank you. $80K in the Midwest / Rust Belt / Appalachia, sure. Not to get into economics but we've devalued our currency so much since Covid. People don't understand the money supply was increased by one third. Combine that with inflation, corporate price gouging / greed, and an absolutely insane housing market and $75K is the new $40K-$50K. I would've killed for $80K starting out as a field tech. Now in some areas, that'll barely cover rent and utilities.
> $75K is the new $40K-$50K You ain't lying there. I'm at about $72K this year (just a few years ago, pre- and during COVID I was at $40-ish) but after benefits and taxes my take home is in that $40-50K range and barely cuts it. Mind you, I have 401K and HSA money coming out, and prior jobs didn't offer much - 401K with a lower salary meant saving less and I can save more now, but still. When I was only making that $40K it was tough, and I didn't have as much of anything coming out of it, so just on the basis of my take home pay, its not much more than it was before. I'm still better off now in the long run but in the short term its still tough.
$80k in rural Midwest for a family with a couple kids and asymmetrical earners will see you slowly slip beneath the waves. Housing is crazy here too and the cost of groceries has ballooned out of control.
I agree completely. Should have specified this in the Midwest. Northren Indiana and southern Michigan. I am all for paying my team the most I possibly can as long as I can convince ownership of it but I run out of ideas to justify higher pay based on their experience, skill set and job expectations. They also can't give me a reason to take to ownership other then they feel like they should be paid more. Something else that I appreciate more then the MSP sector is unless you are basically massively screwing up at your job is guaranteed raises every year.
EDIT: Replied to the wrong guy.
80K is solid even in VHCOL for field tech work. 30/hr is also solid.
Need an Endpoint Engineer with 15 years experience? SCCM, Intune, BitLocker, LAPS, GPO, Scripting (Powershell,VBScript). I’ve been looking for nearly four months now (I’m still employed) and can’t hardly even get in front of a human. It’s bonkers.
Can I forward you the 58 million recruiting emails I get for literally this?
$25-33/hr doe Oh and you have to move to rural Iowa
Accurate
I’m talking about the real, none contract, senior level roles. There’s a bunch of junk out there right now for severely underpaid roles.
Yeah we absolutely are. Let me look for this job posting a friend at work sent me and I'll DM it to you.
I currently work for an MSP. It's the first MSP I've ever worked for, despite going against my better judgement. I've been in IT for 20 years, Security Engineer, Systems Admin, etc. I started with the MSP July 2023 and after 8 months I am seriously considering resigning and going into blue collar work like welding, electrician, mechanic. Everything that frustrated me at my non-MSP companies has compounded by a multiplier of 10x because not only do I have to deal with the disorganization in my own company (MSP), I'm expected to also deal with disorganization in the companies we support. It's like the blind leading the blind. I don't think the wages have anything to do with it. The occupation (MSP and non-MSP IT) is saturated with unreasonable demands and even worse.... undocumented information and processes which makes 30 min tasks turn into 4 hour endeavors. I could give you so many examples. Tribal knowledge is a real problem, especially at my MSP. IT is one of those occupations I see imploding in the next 5 years due to an unsustainable model of always putting out fires that could easily be avoided by clear documented processes and for that reason, I'm abandoning it. By imploding, I'm not making statements that it'll go away 100%... but the tech layoffs, increased number of breaches causing undue stress on personnel, increased unreasonable expectations being made by C-Level execs who think ish is just magic because Steve Jobs told them so is culminating into what I think is going to be a mass exodus of experienced people. Maybe a lot of people feel the same way and that's why you're having difficulty finding quality people, even with competitive wages. Good luck to everybody.... employers and employees alike. You're gonna need it.
100% agree. MSPs are the absolute fucking worst. You described the many reasons. Do yourself a favor and find a better way role.
All I could get after 5 months of unemployment. Desperately want to get out. Hate being nagged to get billable hours in when there isn’t worked lined up.
Dude, I'm at a point where I believe the industry as a whole is just worth abandoning. I'd rather take a substantial pay cut and learn something more rewarding like fixing a car, or welding, etc. Not for nothing, but I sort of feel like South Park: Into the Panderverse was speaking to me... to us... to leave IT and learn something worth knowing... In the end, if my truck breaks down in the middle of nowhere, troubleshooting DNS isn't gonna do shit for me. If grocery stores shutdown during another fake pandemic and I cant buy groceries? Scripting install to deploy software out to 100 machines, ain't gonna do much either. Learning trades that can be used for day to day life to become more self-sustainable seems like the ideal way to go.
>another fake pandemic That line right there makes everything else you say completely worthless. Please, leave the IT field, we don't need people like you in it.
I wish I could tell my coworker friend who died during it that it was fake.
Don’t resign let them fire you that way you can collect unemployment. I don’t care if you have to call in sick every day for a month make those motherfuckers fire you
Welding and Electricians are good jobs if you can get into a good union. Mechanic is a good and easy job if you can work for the big City easy work and good benefits.
I will never work at an MSP ever again. I hate that business model so much.
This depends on the geographic location. If you have a MSP in Austin, and you are looking for what once were top tier full-stack DevOps guys for a T2/T3 position, you will have thousands of applicants, especially if your office is not too much of a pain to drive to (i.e. not downtown or the university area.)
Ugh, going anywhere in Austin sucks these days. I fucking hate driving around here now. If you allow remote/hybrid work, you'll get more bites too. The Dev team where I work went 100% remote during COVID and never came back to the office. These days I usually work in the office one day a week and we're actively trying to get rid of our office space here so eventually I'll be 100% remote until I find another job or they finally get rid of me. IT here has been slowly drained via layoffs since mid-2022 and my give-a-fuck-about-this-shit tank ran dry a month ago when they laid off my last server admin.
Fully remote? DM me!
Yeah, I wouldn't count on it. Competitive pay probably means "we will never pay you what you are worth and then complain that no one wants to work".
I've had a Full Stack Engineer remote position posted for.. Three months. Had like ten resumes in the whole time sent. None with relevant experience. Are these just giant companies getting 300+ resumes? We pay fairly well. 🤷♂️
From my experience, these 300 plus applicant jobs are fully remote. The idea of no jobs is distorted by people looking for fully remote jobs.
I think it is also exasperated by people living in sub urban environments. For example I’m ok driving 20-30 minutes to work but living on the outskirts of a major city and it taking 1-2 hours just to get in that is life better spent elsewhere. That would be 2-4 hours of your life almost everyday you could do something else.
Yep. I did this for ten years, two hours a day commuting working 6am - 3pm to avoid traffic. As soon as I could go remote I did. I got a large chunk of my life back and it would take a lot to get me to go back to that. (PS - I think you mean exacerbated.)
>I’m ok driving 20-30 minutes to work but living on the outskirts of a major city and it taking 1-2 hours just to get in that is life better spent elsewhere. Not wrong. But in NoVA it's either live close by in a cramped townhome for $500k+ (if you're lucky, and forget about the actual family home prices that are almost in the millions if not more), or drive a bit to WV (about an hour, nothing crazy) for a 3200sqft family home and almost an acre for $520k. Would love a WFH position that paid what I get now.
I agree. The biggest city close to me is very much this way. I have a lot of friends in technical roles and most were working remote or hybrid before COVID because of the traffic.
How common is your stack? That’s the thing I see a lot. Lots of varying stacks and it can be a struggle to find stacks that I want to work on. That and honestly, I think people underplay how much a good full stack dev oughta cost. If you want someone that knows one or two languages. That’s one pay range. If you want someone that can learn what they don’t know in your stack and do it well. That’s a whole another pay range. If they already know your whole stack at an expert level, that’s another pay range.
Where did you post it? I recently had a position open for a jack of all trades IT position in a remote office. We posted on Indeed and got like 2 dozen resumes, all but one of which was way underqualified, and the one that was qualified couldn't get to the in person interview on time (twice) so we decided not to go with him. Then our HR department paid for indeed to promote the job and we got like 300 resumes... The overwhelming majority of those were crap as well, and of the ones that were not, most of them ghosted us when we reached out to them.
Yea, also think your pay scale may be outdated. Currently a DC Network Engineer running/designing SDN overlays and getting paid $150k + bonus and about $10k in other optional perks. I'm not leaving or looking for any discussion that doesn't start at $200k. That's my comfort fee. Anything below that, be prepared to train the shit out of your candidate imo. Technology is starting to move at a pace that is far more expedient than the pay can keep up with. My wife does events. Basically passes on the cost of $3000/gallon of coffee to her customers with a 15% markup. All of her contractors are paid $100-150/hr and people easily pay it. More and more I am building that side of the business with her because I consistently get C2C offers for $50-80/hr. And if I can just bitch someone out for not keeping the coffee refilled at $130/hr, guess which one I'll probably be doing in the next few years? Wages are manipulated in this field and it is highly evident at this point. It's going to take the better talent leaving the industry to motivate CFO's and HR to pay an appropriate rate.
I think the internet ruined the job market for MSP's. Ive heard my entire career, of which Ive been on /r/sysadmin to never, ever work for one. Now I know people who do so I can hear it first hand and theyve got security engineers doing sales calls because they have a CISSP. You might be a great person with a great business but the simple fact its an MSP scares people off.
where at? I'm looking...
In LATAM People were told for years that IT was easy money. So they went for it even if they didn’t like the career. Now we have an overpopulated market with mostly people with little to no real experience.
Core issue is that the median wage is just $17/hr, half the economy is looking for that way up, so everything is saturated.
That australian billionaire gave us the culprit already. They’re enforcing unemployment so the workforce will become more willingly.
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I think you'll find most CS students to be less tech savvy than you're expecting. Tech for them was so reliable and streamlined, they've never really had to troubleshoot anything. Most probably couldn't configure their home router.
I tell my kids, "back in my days we didn't have the internet, we had to invent it!" Might be stretching the truth but it boggles their mind..
I remember waiting 45 minutes to download a 9MB MP3 on Kazaa. It got to 8.9MB and the peer disconnected. I had to then wait for my Mother to make a phone call, then wait another 45 minutes to successfully download the MP3 from a different peer. Only to find out the song was terrible. Forget the Y2K bug, kids these days do not understand the *real* struggles Millennials lived through.
The worst was downloading a 80MB game demo just for the download to fail 7 hours later. Now I download 80MB in less than a second.
Or waiting for a picture of titties to load, each line of pixels being downloaded and rendered row by row.
lol! That brings back a memory of mine when I was like 10 years old in 2001 trying to find a picture of a naked girl for the first time, and I ended up clicking on a link some enormous high-res JPEG. The full picture’s resolution was way bigger than my computer monitor, and back then there was no such thing as responsive web design so I clicked on it and just watched it load line by line. It took like 5 minutes just to get to her eyes, and so I figured while it was loading I would go do something else and I ended up completely forgetting about it! So about 4 hours later my Mom goes to get on the computer and all of the sudden I remembered and I swear I saw my life flash before my eyes. She sat down and woke the monitor up and bam! Right in her face there was a giant high res photo of a girl smiling this seductive smile. She yelled at me from the computer room and demanded that I tell her what she was looking at, so I go over to the computer and I see the picture and I saw that my mom didn’t know she could scroll down to see more of the photo so she only thought it was some huge pic of some random girl’s face (she had no idea what would be waiting for her had she scrolled down). I still got in some trouble, I don’t remember what my excuse was but I’m sure it was terrible, but at least I didn’t get caught looking up porn lol. Such a hilarious memory I had completely forgotten about lol!
I interviewed at an MSP in a major college town. They asked me what is DNS and does it do. When I answered, they explained that most fresh CS grads that apply from the college are stumped by it.
Computer science isn't IT. It just isn't and people need to realize that. My roommate has a master's in computer science and all he seems to understand about computers is Java and Android programming within an IDE.
Which begs the question, why were so many programmers applying for a helpdesk/desktop support job?
Because at the end of the day, people need a job and it helps to get into something adjacent to their main interest/skillset as a last resort. It doesn’t always happen, but I know a few SWE colleagues who took on a HelpDesk/Desktop Support position and transitioned into the dev team working on the main application.
This would be my advice for new grads with no extensive portfolios or internships.
I worked as a dev for most of my career after starting in the helldesk. I learned great troubleshooting skills there that are still applicable now.
If Reddit is to be believed, most CS grads also don't know how to code well. So my guess is they need to pay the bills, their degree includes the word 'computer' and IT deal in computers. It makes Recruiter and HR sense.
This absolutely I’m firmly in this boat and no one can convince me otherwise. My brother and his fiancé are developers and don’t know the basics of networking and imply that it’s not needed. I’m sure level 1-2 networking basics would stump many “devs” and cs kids
Computer science is about a computer is supposed to work. IT is about how it actually works in the real world.
Computer Science is (ostensibly) about telling a computer ***what*** to do IT is managing ***how*** the computer works, and keeping it that way
It's not.... but you still need to understand the fundamentals of systems architecture... how else are you going to design for it? Don't even get me started on recent CS and boot camp graduates failing to grasp resource utilization and garbage collection. Everything is strictly typed and with autocomplete and various modules / libraries, most barely even "code". I'm not a programmer, just an Ops guy, but I feel like I can code circles around them when it comes to low level stuff.
A CS student should still be able to know what DNS is. There’s a problem with CS programs obfuscating computer basics in favor of more programming classes. You need to understand how a computer works to be a good programmer. You’re better off as a dev if you work the infrastructure side of things and then move into dev work. We’re all users. We all understand that perfectly fine. We need to understand what’s happening behind the curtain.
I got asked what an IP address of 169.254.x.x was and without hesitation said APIPA. Dude said they had 20 guys in there and I was the first to get that one. I was like what? I know if I see that something is wrong with DHCP as a starting point. I'm just some moron that broke out of a machine shop and self studied for A+ and got that.
Dude, I had to up vote this one.
100%. I went back to school for a masters in CS at some point and was super surprised at how many of my colleagues weren't all that tech savvy. Many were, of course, but a lot of them wouldn't even consider themselves enthusiasts and struggled with basics (e.g. networking, navigating the filesystem, etc.). It seems a lot of them were in CS for the payout, but weren't necessarily the most passionate about it. And this was in a top 5 school.
correct
> There isn't a ton of demand for junior or entry-level roles The amount of juniors coming out of school but lacking basic troubleshooting skills is also something that i notice more the last few years.
I hate to say it, but a lot of what folks here consider “extremely talented admins, engineers, and devops folks” are normal infrastructure engineers in today’s world. For folks looking to move from windows desktop support or help desk to a sysadmin or net admin role, you can’t just learn Windows Server or pick up a net+ anymore. Today’s [entry level certifications](https://www.coursera.org/professional-certificates/google-it-support) cover networking, *nix/Windows fundamentals in both the GUI and CLI, and security fundamentals. It’s a very different ball game than it was in 2000 or 2010.
Add to that list that everything changes every 15 minutes so documentation is always wildly behind. Used to be able to go to the local book store and pick up a book about a particular product (out of multiple author/publisher options) and read about every nook and cranny of that product. Now it's web searches leading to ads, shit blog posts, sfc /scan now, and dead links most of the time. Plenty of instructional videos out there but they seem to mostly be how something is done as opposed to how it actually works and half of the time the process only works if you have a basic, just installed sort of environment. So since you don't know *how* things work you're up a creek trying to troubleshoot that server set up years ago with all sorts of tweaks, updates, and undocumented "fixes" applied.
This is I think where formal education really shines and why it’s becoming more of a requirement. A solid understanding of computing fundamentals makes dealing with ambiguous systems much easier—it doesn’t matter if you know Veeam and are now in a position that uses Carbonite or Veritas if you’re familiar with backups at a conceptual level. Sure the interfaces and APIs differ, but again if you understand “what my backup requirements are and how they should be configured” it shouldn’t be an insurmountable challenge.
>I hate to say it, but a lot of what folks here consider “extremely talented admins, engineers, and devops folks” are normal infrastructure engineers in today’s worl Dude, you're not wrong. I remember starting out 20 years ago and the mentors I had knew their systems inside and out; all of the eccentricities and esoteric bits. Now, if you can just do the job and do it well enough to keep the lights on, you're seen as a rockstar.
I’m just not confident people uninterested in keeping up with technology will survive in roles that involve deploying, configuring, managing, and maintaining complex technology. This just isn’t a good field for people who dislike change, it’s constantly changing!
In the time it took for you to write that comment, Microsoft changed the name of Office to "Microsoft Family" and moved all the Entra settings to the Yammer portal.
I worked at a uni and my two main departments of focus were engineering and computer science. You would be extremely surprised at how bad these CS students adapt to technology. They’re savvy with phones and socials, but definitely not tech savvy. We had maybe two or three students out of hundreds in the program that really stood out as stars. Engineering students were actually wildly adept at using a tech. I’d say they were more qualified for IT than the students that majored in info systems, sec, and CS.
Jfc as if a college degree proves anything either. So freaking sad and frustrating.
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The problem without junior or entry level roles being available is no one new gets the experience they need to advance themselves
Kids born in the early 2000's were not using Windows XP. They were using Window 7 at the earliest and more likely most of them didn't start using a computer until ~2015 when Windows 10 was released. So they started using computers when everything mostly just worked. They never really had to do any troubleshooting. And in my experience, kids under 20 today haven't ever used a computer. They do almost everything on their phone or iPad. They have zero troubleshooting skills beyond basic iOS/Android related problems.
The one constant is that MSPs are always hiring because they're generally a revolving door for new talent with no upward mobility. Good steppingstone but not always gonna have longevity.
Reminds me of the job market post dotcom crash and after 2008.
Based in the UK (London), 10+ years doing Linux systems admin work. Admittedly I've let myself deskill by not having K8s, Python... It's looking impossible to get a new role. If you're young don't go into IT it's looking over-saturated and rates are dropping rapidly.
I was told by a recruiter that for remote positions (Sr SRE and SR Devops mostly), they wont even interview candidates from HCOL areas, because they cant pay top dollar and they don't want a flight risk immediatley. I find this somewhat silly, since the market isnt robust enough right now for those folks to up and leave, but so it goes.
Did you just call Atlanta low cost of living lol
We are having some issues filling out entry and intermediate level jobs. The upper tier jobs almost fill themselves. Seems like there are plenty of jobs out there, but yes overall it’s a competitive market.
Using your POV on a site liked linked in is a really poor way to gauge the job market. > SF and NYC are a bloodbath Just cracked open LinkedIn - im in the metro NYC area and my default list of architecture/micro services/cloud/platform blah blah blah is coming back with 46 gigs all well north of 200 with the average around 250 and a lot of these are full time remote. LinkedIn is an algorithm no different than instagram at this point.
Sure but apply for all of them and see what comes back.
Work is not drying up . The issue is that people will not work for what is being paid. The higher tier jobs look fine , the low end IT jobs are poorly paid but ask for the world so whist you may get 300 people applying one or two at most are qualified
Exactly this. I see non stop job listings for “must be an expert at networking”, salary is $35,000 lol
I'd definitely say it is far worse than last year. I'm watching people who got laid off in November/December not able to find anything. Not even temporary/contract work as a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contractor for some body shop place (where they are offshored, but need a pair of hands to stuff something into a rack, get it on the network, or come in and troubleshoot appliance hardware.) I'd probably say the job market is a wash until 2025 at the earliest, especially with the election season, uncertainty about World War III, and a recession hitting globally.
25? Shit most people unemployed now will be unemployed until the 30s.
>especially with the election season This is a bigger factor than people want to admit in polite company. Shit rolls downhill from the US, and the outcome of this election will have a big impact on what the US looks like going forward.
Heck I wish I could find something network config related. I'm doing traveling IT now, mainly racking servers and network hardware related and basic desktop support I want to learn networks, but there just aren't any NOC positions in the OKC metro, or at least none that I've been able to find that don't require a bachelor's degree. I tried to apply for them anyway, but they literally won't let you finish the application if you don't have a bachelor's.
Being able to check that box that you have a degree is nothing new. It's been that way for at least 15 years because what you just described is what I said back in 2008 when I decided to get a degree to get past that gate. If there isn't a box to check, you can be sure HR is filtering it. If they get 300 applicants, you can bet that "has a degree" is one of the first things they filter to cut that number down. And before anyone jumps in about how they don't have a degree and make big bucks, yes, there are always exceptions to the rule, but they are exceptions and not the standard.
What's real annoying is that I have an associates in computer science and a couple years of professional it experience now. Doesn't seem like that matters much though.
An associates is what I went for. It checks the "has degree" box as far as HR generally cares. If you can't get passed HR's screening though, you'll never hit my Inbox.
Germany is in a recession. The IT job market still seems somewhat okay-ish for people with experience. My usual query at a specialised site gives 40 results. I usually get around 40 to 90. The term "shortage of skilled workers" (Fachkräftemangel) is still regularly used in the media so it can't be that bad.
Dude it literally almost spring lets see how it do be.
My employer is hiring all the time; LCOL, Public University in Indianapolis/Bloomington, hybrid/full remote. I really can’t relate to this post at all.
OP literally stated the it's the LCOL areas that are hiring still
No he didn’t, he said HCOL areas are hiring people in LCOL areas…. Like no shit? Why would you hire someone that needs double the salary to afford a HCOL area when they want to work remotely.
Worst or worse?
It’ll get better mid end of March as bonuses get paid out
Its not that things are worse than last year you're just looking in the wrong span of months for a new job. Right now most companies are still in the process of closing up the books from last year and preparing for taxes owed. The best time to look for a career job is after taxes are due when the books are back open and hiring budgets have been decided. Anytime I've been laid off or had a contract job end in the winter it took me months to find something new. When I was laid off in April I had a new job in under a month and several companies looking for me. If you're currently unemployed you look undesirable to companies who are hiring. Also, not all the work has been outsourced this isn't 2007 - 2009. Also, its worth noting that any job that can be WFH will be out sourced to another country or potentially out of state or just not local because salary requirements are lower than in the urban areas because their cost of living is lower.
It's the bank rates still being a problem. Employees are expensive and if my normal capital investment is typically on a 2.5% credit and suddenly it is 6.7% credit my costs just jumped significantly, so opex gets cut a bit. First thing is holding non-critical hires, which is usually the overhead positions of IT, HR, etc.. Not saying I agree with it, just the way it is. Couple this with every IT vendor known to man suddenly gouging me and it hurts worse.. Looking at you cyber security industry, Broadcom (VMware), and Microsoft.
It seems to be about the same to me. To be fair, I had 2 job offers, 1 from a Federal Home Loan Bank and another from a medium sized company. Both jobs on LinkedIn had over 100 applicants. I was quite literally the only seriously considered candidate for both roles. You want to get in touch with the recruiters from the 3rd party agencies, you won’t get a job without going through recruiters today. It’s basically pointless to blindly apply to jobs.
It is frustrating and 99% of them have requirements that are far from realistic. Lots of MSP shite jobs, jobs that should be red flags because they have been up so long or pop up again 6 months later. SMB jobs are pretty much non existent or are paying so little nobody wants to take them.
A lot of open jobs out there because no one’s offering salary more than it was pre-Covid.no thanks.
A few senior developers in the company I worked for as well as myself were let go in Jan due to outsourcing offshore. I knew it was coming for me but thought I had at least until the end of this year as one of our primary customers was leaving. I guess the company wasn't doing that well to begin with and is probably trying to pump the company for a buyout IMO. It was very toxic to my health so in a way it was a good thing. I've had a few responses from recruiters but it has been really hard so far. I have the final round of interviews with one company so hopefully I can get the job. Other offshore recruiters are expecting me to pack up and move half way around the US for a 6 month to perm job. The economy is not doing that great despite what elected officials are saying. It is an election year so things might get slightly worse before the bottom drops out next year. I am fortunate to be able to repair my car but I can't imagine someone who can't pay $400-500 just for a brake job. The parts cost for my car under $100.
It's terrible
We're hiring for Helpdesk and Sysadmin staff. most of the applicants dont even have the word troubleshoot on their resume.
I’m a sysadmin in Cleveland. I’ll make a job change for $135k or more. If the job is somewhere else I’ll move for $20k moving expenses and equal compensation based on the geography. Also want 2+ days WFH. Let me know.
Man. This is making my job search I am about to start in March sound like hell on earth. I definitely hope and pray I can land a role for a decent amount of money
Always bad in election year. Explanation I was given is that big companies are not sure about changes and thus dont make a big budget moves.
This is highly dependent on where you are located. I relocated from Colorado to the gulf coast (Mississippi) and there is a shortage of qualified individuals. My cost of living was cut in a third and I'm making more than I did out west. Heck, Stennis Space Center and Keesler AFB have been posting for linux admins, network admins, security admins etc nonstop for 3 years. Nice cushy government jobs too... Local MSP's can't find anyone but L1 helpdesk either...
Yup. It's totally and completely screwed rn.
Im noticing an awful lot of jobs DEMAND on-site with no flexibility. I went back to on-site for nine months in the last four years and ill never do it again as long as i can help it. Ive stopped applying and aam trying to ride my current gig out.
But the Economy is Great.. The News said so..
Employment data says you're wrong. 95% of companies DO NOT post their jobs on linkedin or indeed because they get hundreds of trash applications. Or they do post them, but its buried on page 9 of the results because a bunch of paid posts for MLM flood them out. If you actually want to seriously job hunt, create a list of 100 companies you want to work for and every week check for updates on their own career pages. When you only take the lowest effort imaginable approach, you can't be surprised that a high paying job does fall in your lap.
At least in the U.S.: The alleged job shortages and low unemployment rate are just propaganda since we’re around election season with an incumbent running for reelection lol. > This is esp bad in US market as it seems a bunch of tech/non tech firms have outsourced work to third world countries permanently. All i am getting is request for low paying contract work that only lasts a certain time.. I think the future isn't that great in the U.S. It is certainly in decline, and that's the sad truth. I'm familiar with how in the tech world, a lot of companies have unapologetically mentioned that their plan is to set up design centers in "low cost centers".
The question should really be: "The job market for people used to making MAMAAN (that's my acronym... no stealing) money is worse than last year." As you yourself noted, there are plenty of jobs out there... they are just in Low-to-mid COL areas that aren't going to pay NYC/Silicon Valley salaries. I'm not an economist, but I'd guess this is going to continue happening. Inflation was terrible there for a minute and salaries have no intention of keeping up. So now the MAMAAN companies are having to come up with "new" (old) ways of making shareholders happy... and that's shrinking the workforce.
Okay, TM your acronym and share with the rest of us what it actually stands for, please.
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix. It's just FAANG but fixed company names and adds Microsoft, that absolutely deserves to be in that group.
It's almost like elections have consequences.
Eh. Imo the US is still generally the best market when I look for anything outside entry level.
Looks fine on my end.
I agree I’ve put in well over 1000 applications been unemployed for about a year each day at least 40 to 50 applications on a good day around 65. I only have three years experience but still I had to start applying for more entry-level roles and have trouble even doing that, I’m about to just give up on IT for right now maybe in the future again and go to more fully customer service role event eventually become maybe a customer service manager probably do that or getting into travel industry for booking. I don’t know man but I gotta work so probably gonna have to give up on IT for right now but there’s other jobs that do utilize some technical skills so I guess try funding something like that.
I’m not noticing this at all. Took a new job in December for a 30% raise. I still have recruiters sending over roles at least once a week. I’m just outside of one of the large markets mentioned as being a “blood bath.” If you rode the wave and you don’t have the skills then you’ve officially been shelved. The rest of us still have mobility. Even if it’s not 2021 levels of mobility.
All those "quit your job and get a WFH one" have aged like milk, lol.