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I actually worked in shadow IT for a while, too - once I had the skills, I made the switch, and my salary doubled. But now what? Did I top out already? No meani

• lsc 13y ago
  >I actually worked in shadow IT for a while, too - once I had the skills, I made the switch, and my salary doubled. But now what? Did I top out already? No meaningful advancement until I retire? Well, the doubling is going to be harder to do again... it will certainly happen much more slowly. But moving from real it in the flyover to real IT in a big coastal city can give you a giant bump; you can also give management a shot, or try to start your own company. Really, if shadow IT paid $15/hr, and you doubled to $30, yeah, you could double again if you are reasonably good and willing to move to a big, expensive coastal city. $60/hr is downright easy if you are willing to be a contractor and work through a body shop; it requires a bit more skill but is still eminently doable to do as a full-time direct-hire with good benefits. Note, my experience has been that if you can gain some network and Linux skills, "production IT" as it were, you have a reasonably large advantage over the windows-only folks, at least in terms of pay. Pay, for SysAdmins, seems to scale more with how expensive the thing you are supporting is than with the actual difficulty of the job, so... keep that in mind