Career advice

Posted by winsys@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 14 comments

Last August I was laid off after 15 years, I was an IT manager making around 150k. I had 15 weeks of severance, and spent the next 8 months desperately looking for work. I burned through all of my severance and savings. I finally found a sysadmin role making around 100k. It’s been extremely difficult making things work with that significant decrease in salary. We’re doing it, but just barely. I’ve been interviewing, and got an offer from a large fintech, bringing me back to the 150k salary, however the position is contract to hire, and the company recently announced they’ll be reducing staff due to AI. I’m torn, leaving a stable yet lower paying job for a hirer paying contractor to hire job. Any advice? I can’t afford to continue what I’m doing, but I also can’t afford to be rif’d again.

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14 Comments

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rcp9ty@reddit

Never leave a full time job for a contract job. Ive been burned by every contract job I've had. I'm rarely burned by full time employment. "When you see a good move, look for a better one" ~ Emanuel Lasker / Elliot aka Mr. Robot.

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sole-it@reddit

especially in current job market. 'Contract to hire' means nothing and you could be first to cut when the decision comes down from the top.

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rcp9ty@reddit

I once had a contract end over one question asked during a meeting with leadership... Granted the leadership was doing something fucking stupid and I was calling them out on it but still they fired me that day... But at the same time once people saw that leadership no longer had a clear dialog with staff the 50% of the support team quit within a month. They literally lost every tier 4, 3, and the majority of tier 2 support staff in a month because they all understood what I was asking and agreed with my question. I've also had contracts terminate because I did the job too well. Like a windows xp to windows 7 migration... they were doing 4 computers a day max... They had a dedicated image server with pxe all setup with way too many resources available ( it sat at 1-3% utilization ) and had tons of speed available so I took a couple unmanaged switches that no one cared about and started doing 20-40 computers a day allowing the IT team to finish an entire truck worth of computers. My 6 month to hire contract was done in 2 months.

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sole-it@reddit

wow, that last story is crazy, any sane people would think 'what else shall we let this genius help us optimize'. I guess your incredible work made the IT team look bad, thus the early termination.

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rcp9ty@reddit

Yep, i took their 1000+ ticket backlog and turned it into 10 tickets all of which couldn't be resolved by me as I was waiting for computers to be imaged... the stupidest part of all is that the company that let me go I shit you not made Millions of dollars a day to the point that it was a joke amongst the sales teams they had warehouse buildings full of cubicles and the sales team had a fake million dollar bill printed out the size of a flag. Whenever one call would reach over a million dollars it was draped over the front of their cube. One day I watched that flag move 4 times in a day. Someone had a 1.1 million dollar sales call, lost it to another person for a 1.7 million dollar sales call, lost it to another person who made a 2.4 million dollar sales call, lost it to another person who made a 4 million dollar sales call... Call center with 100+ sales reps always on the phone and 4 calls made them 9.2 million dollars of money coming in.... at the time they were paying me $14 an hour or $33,280 per year... xD

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sonicc_boom@reddit

A stable job in IT? What's that?

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rcp9ty@reddit

A one man system admin at a company that thinks its small and has the system admin over worked and underpaid.... basically they act like they can't afford anyone else and over pay their owners

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Kumorigoe@reddit

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Career advice

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rcp9ty@reddit

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