IT Field Employment/Job Crisis at 35... What to do?

[Grooveriding]

I would go back to school. Do not lock yourself into being behind the eight ball of not having an in demand skill set. 35 is not that old and you have enough time to go back.

Way too many people attend college/university without properly evaluating the viability of their program. Some get lucky and it turns out they made a good choice, most find they fucked up. It can be hard at 18 to have a clear sense of what you want to do not necessarily being what you should do. The whole 'go to school for what you love' in many cases is bullshit. You should go to school for whatever program will make you the most money and present the most vibrant job market when you exit school. I'm not saying one should do something they hate, actually I probably am wrong there. It should be a sensible mix of whatever program will make you the most money and present the most vibrant job market along with presenting you with stimulating challenges that you are passionate about or work that you see as beneficial and something to proud of. But I don't believe one should ever pursue those latter ideals if they do not include the former values. Money is important like it or not.

Money can and does buy you happiness by reducing your worries about the future and allowing you to live a better lifestyle, and quite likely, a longer life.

Research what is going to be in high demand, be willing to move wherever you need to and go back to school.

 

[zinfamous]

It's a problem I face when I've been hiring. How do you convince someone that moving to Indiana is a good career move. They can't understand that 95-100k here is a LOT more money than 150k in SanFrancisco.

My 3000sq foot home has a $900 mortgage. I couldn't even find an apartment in SF for that.

what do you mean apartment? you wouldn't even find a tin-roofed dirt lean-to in SF for $900/month. pffft.

 

[OutHouse]

Have you considered not living in NYC?

this, Denver has a net negative for IT jobs. the market is hot here, its better now than before the .bomb. i just left my company that i was at for 18.5 years for a job that had a juicy pay increase, benefits started immediately and 3 weeks vacation. I start on the 18th. I applied at 2 companies got job offers on both.

my suggestion to you is to branch out and learn server support, like vmware, citrix hell even telecom like avaya or shoretel, or get into networking working with firewalls, IDS's, Security. if you get competent in those areas it build on what you have and makes you more desirable.

 

[FelixDeCat]

I was thinking about studying about computers. I heard they are the wave of the future.

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[Exterous]

Soooooo much easier than dedicated single-OS physical servers haha!

I had to hand install the OS on a physical server last month for the first time in years. Had to rack the server, hookup the KVM, find a USB drive big enough, configure the USB drive, write the image to it, plug it in, set the boot order, wait for freaking ever for the OS to load and then configure networking. What a PITA compared to: Deploy VM from pre-configured template, mount ISO from the datastore and be done in like 5 minutes.

 

[Viper GTS]

I had to hand install the OS on a physical server last month for the first time in years. Had to rack the server, hookup the KVM, find a USB drive big enough, configure the USB drive, write the image to it, plug it in, set the boot order, wait for freaking ever for the OS to load and then configure networking. What a PITA compared to: Deploy VM from pre-configured template, mount ISO from the datastore and be done in like 5 minutes.

These days I need a really, REALLY good reason to justify deploying ANYTHING on physical hardware. Even vendors saying 'we won't support you' is not enough.

For the OP - ESXi is available in a free version. You can play with it at home if you have a reasonably recent PC to put it on. If you can come up with the money to take a VCP eligible class that is nearly guaranteed to double your current income without any real trouble. See if you can get your employer to reimburse you, or if a local community college offers one. If you can do the CC route it's dramatically cheaper and far more schedule friendly vs the typical 3-5 days VMware class. The VCP on my resume gets me several cold job emails/calls a month, and I basically taught myself by playing with it at home starting in 2009. You eventually need to take a class to be test eligible but if you're well prepared from home use class will be boring and easy.

Nearly all of this stuff is available in free, trial, or heavily subsidized (eg VMUG) versions to encourage people to play with stuff outside of their jobs. If you can come up with some basic hardware (a few hundred $) it's readily accessible.

Viper GTS

 

[Zeze]

I learned jack crap with my useless 'management' degree. My first job was 35K/yr.

I'm now in IT. I'm not much of a technical person, but I do pretty well so far. Similar to you I blamed my crappy college and lack of hard skills. But I think most of us learn on the job.

I spent lots of time learning on my own - youtube, online learning, I mean the whole damn internet. And I don't care to admit here that I had to pad my resume a bit to get the kind of job I wanted based on what I was learning.

Today I do pretty well for myself - six figs. And just got another small promotion with a small raise. Clients love me.

The moral of my crappy story is get to learning. Don't be a victim. Learn up stuff. You don't need actual courses or schools. We are living in the best learning environment than ever thanks to internet.

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[Kaido]

You think that is amazing, I moved from being a vmware guy to a aws guy. Now I just run small snippets of code to manage everything. You can build a whole datacenter with just some yaml. Change config management built right in. It's a dream.

AWS is awesome; I've been messing around with their Elastic GPU system this past summer & it's pretty dang slick:

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/elastic-gpus/

 

[Kaido]

I had to hand install the OS on a physical server last month for the first time in years. Had to rack the server, hookup the KVM, find a USB drive big enough, configure the USB drive, write the image to it, plug it in, set the boot order, wait for freaking ever for the OS to load and then configure networking. What a PITA compared to: Deploy VM from pre-configured template, mount ISO from the datastore and be done in like 5 minutes.

Yup. I mostly do small biz consulting; most of them are still running on physical servers & old desktop computers, but due to the lower cost of entry into server virtualization, more of them have been open to upgrading to VM's. I used to not be a huge fan of building servers, but I've been banging them out for the past six months or so on a regular basis because the 22-core Xeon E-2696v4 & E5-2699v4 chips can be had for around $1,800 each, and you can order a dual-CPU motherboard straight off Amazon. For about $7k, I can have a 44-core server, lots of RAM, a RAID SSD boot volume, a Windows Server license (if you're going the Hyper-V route), and spare parts in case anything dies. The number of VM's you can run on that setup is pretty nuts! Even building a full hardware clone for failover is typically far cheaper than buying the equivalent Dell, and with an integrated iDRAC-style remote access system, plus a separate IP-KVM system, management is super easy. A pair of those, plus a nice Synology to act as an iSCSI NAS and/or backup works like a champ. A 100TB Synology with dual-drive failover is $9k these days...it's bananas how cheap & easy everything has gotten.

 

[Exterous]

You think that is amazing, I moved from being a vmware guy to a aws guy. Now I just run small snippets of code to manage everything. You can build a whole datacenter with just some yaml. Change config management built right in. It's a dream.

Yeah we're working towards cloud services but the people we work with can get crazy educational discounts. When you can get a 4PB Isilon cluster for 90% off list and 40 core Dell hosts for 50% off its hard to make public cloud make sense $ wise. So we end up with a lot of one off situations based around rapid\temporary scaling

A pair of those, plus a nice Synology to act as an iSCSI NAS and/or backup works like a champ. A 100TB Synology with dual-drive failover is $9k these days...it's bananas how cheap & easy everything has gotten.

I'm not a huge fan of Synologies for iSCSI. To reclaim space you have to either delete the volume or let it sit unused for an ungodly period of time - neither of which are great options for a production environment. Granted they may have changed that in new releases but we aren't deploying any 6.x version because of this 27 page thread on iSCSI drops\speed issues with 6.x and their inability to fix it since April 2016

https://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=147&t=116743&start=390

 

[Red Squirrel]

I would be worried about working for a company that is moving to cloud. Once you're done migrating everything, the company no longer really needs a full team of IT people. They might want to keep a few desktop guys around to fix printers and odd ball OS/computer issues and stuff and that's about it.

 

[Kaido]

Yeah we're working towards cloud services but the people we work with can get crazy educational discounts. When you can get a 4PB Isilon cluster for 90% off list and 40 core Dell hosts for 50% off its hard to make public cloud make sense $ wise. So we end up with a lot of one off situations based around rapid\temporary scaling

Daaaaaaaaaaaang

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[holden j caufield]

LOL that is actually pretty funny. I'm not one for contacting a company that I applied for because it makes you look desperate, but I'd almost be tempted to contact them to clarify the reason for checking the box. They might just laugh at you and not consider you but it probably would not hurt.

Me thinks that's not going to go well.

Him: Hey you know the bridge building project. I'm not retarded so I think I can build it. What I meant was I have ADHD so you can trust me to build a bridge that people's lives and your business depends on. My mind might wander and forget an integral part sending many people falling to their demise. Please reconsider as I meant I had ADHD. Thanks TTYL

 

[Red Squirrel]

Me thinks that's not going to go well.

Him: Hey you know the bridge building project. I'm not retarded so I think I can build it. What I meant was I have ADHD so you can trust me to build a bridge that people's lives and your business depends on. My mind might wander and forget an integral part sending many people falling to their demise. Please reconsider as I meant I had ADHD. Thanks TTYL

Yeah tough to say, really. Either way that guy is done for I think for checking the box haha.

 

[Red Squirrel]

That is IMHO 100% not true. Maybe for SaaS, but we still have the same workloads. The way we deal with them has changed. It's more about monitoring and response and devops. I don't fix a bad server for example, I will make sure I have the logs, destroy the server and let the autoscaling group build a new one. Then do root cause on the logs and fix the root cause in the base image or code. I deal more with reducing cost and ensuring build pipelines work, focusing on more security related tasks and testing backups/DR. Its way different then when I was on prem, but IMHO way more interesting.

I always assume when people say cloud they mean a SaaS solution, but if it's simply offsite hosting like through Softlayer or w/e but you still manage the servers, then yeah I guess that's a bit different and you still need techs. Though it still slightly reduces the need for any IT work as there is no physical interaction with the servers but that tends to be a fairly small part of the job anyway. Like when I was a server tech it was rare we really had to touch the physical hardware other than running tapes.

 

[OutHouse]

I would be worried about working for a company that is moving to cloud. Once you're done migrating everything, the company no longer really needs a full team of IT people. They might want to keep a few desktop guys around to fix printers and odd ball OS/computer issues and stuff and that's about it.

yea not true. Office 365 still comes with all the exchange admin headaches. the only difference i dont have a onprem exchange server anymore.

 

[Insomniator]

Haven't read the whole thread but where in NYC is help desk only 36k/year? I made almost that much hourly as a network/server intern in college in NJ. I'd say try to pick up new skills/projects as best you can, work on VMware or Hyper-V (free trials) at home and try to fake your way into a basic server admin position which should pay 50% more. You could even look into a VCA certification, which is kind of for VMware sales guys -- but does show a basic understanding of Virtualization (plus a lot of companies won't know its such a basic cert). https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=50483&ui=www_cert

My schooling was useless for IT. Don't go back. Literally 100% of my knowledge came from working with computers as a kid --> internship --> help desk --> home lab and server admin. My IT degree for $60k is a piece of toilet paper that got me my first job. 4 years of meaningless filler IT/communication courses. "How to treat Women in the workplace" "What colors to use on webpages" "How to deal with a mean team member." Did you take a "Social Informatics" course? I was ready to drop out half way through that.

 

[Fritzo]

So here's my story... Fresh out of High School, I got very ill. I had to drop out of several colleges because of my health and did very poorly in college. Eventually, in the course of the next 11 years, I barely managed to get an AS Liberal Arts in a community college and at around 25 I tried to do a 4 year school again. Same thing happened. Health suffered, had to drop out.

At 29, I found a crappy private school and enrolled, because small size classes, and friendly environment were easier for me to handle. I first got a BS in Data Communications, and then an MS in Information Systems. I also got a CompTIA A+ Certification.

Now here's my problem. After all that schooling, I can honestly admit that they didn't really teach me anything. Well, that or barely thought me anything at all. My Information systems program was heavily focused on Web Development. I learned the basics of HTML, JavaScript and CSS. And that's pretty much it. The rest was useless fluff! In the course of the program I realized I hate programming with all my heart. It's boring, too difficult, tedious, and just not my thing. But I pressed on, not wanting to waste the time I put into that degree.

So here I am today, with a Masters Degree I might as well shove up my *** and a shitty 36k/year job as a help-desk support technician. When I ask myself what I can do today, the answer is pretty much just "fix and troubleshoot computers". I cant say I know much of anything else.

I don't think going back to school at 35 to start all over again in a different direction would be a good idea. I honestly don't think I can handle it all, what with all that Trigonometry, Pre-Calulus and Calculus they will most definitely bombard me with. I would most definitely get sick again with all the stress, and will be forced to drop out. I barely remember any programming, and I don't think I want to do it.

What would you do if you were in my situation? How can I break this deadly cycle and hopefully get a 70/80k/year job? 36k is just not enough to make any kind of a living in New York City.

A lot of people say... "Well, what do you expect? You don't know shit, and you are not marketable. You didn't go to a prestigious college, and did not get a good education. No wonder you are stuck in this position!"

Hearing things like this, doesn't help. I wonder what I can do in my particular situation to help myself.

I was in the helpdesk hell role for a while too. GET OUT. It sucks your soul away.

Find a small consulting firm. They almost always need help, and it'll get your feet wet for field work. From there, move to firewall security. I guarantee you'll be making big money down that route, especially with cloud firewalls and switching. That alone is our company's bread and butter.

 

[Exterous]

That is IMHO 100% not true. Maybe for SaaS, but we still have the same workloads. The way we deal with them has changed. It's more about monitoring and response and devops. I don't fix a bad server for example, I will make sure I have the logs, destroy the server and let the autoscaling group build a new one. Then do root cause on the logs and fix the root cause in the base image or code. I deal more with reducing cost and ensuring build pipelines work, focusing on more security related tasks and testing backups/DR. Its way different then when I was on prem, but IMHO way more interesting.

I think it can be somewhat true from the VP\C level impression. I've seen plenty of cases where they look at it as "Well we don't need to maintain hardware anymore or (potentially) doing as much patching so we can eliminate a certain % of positions or not backfill a certain % of positions" so I am sure places have downsized their IT because of it. Its one of the many cloud myths we have to work against, along with speed expectations for high bandwidth high IOPS cloud crunching of locally generated data and storage costs (So no where in your fancy spreadsheet analysis on cloud cost savings did you account for Put and Get costs).

 

[Red Squirrel]

I was in the helpdesk hell role for a while too. GET OUT. It sucks your soul away.

Find a small consulting firm. They almost always need help, and it'll get your feet wet for field work. From there, move to firewall security. I guarantee you'll be making big money down that route, especially with cloud firewalls and switching. That alone is our company's bread and butter.

Yeah Helpdesk is a good way to get your foot in the door as it's often one of few positions that don't require experience, just knowledge. But after a few years it really does drain you. It's not actually the irate customers that bother me, and it's not the dumb ones. It's the irate dumb ones. You just want to reach through the phone and strangle them.

I then moved to server, thinking that was over. Oh, I was wrong! The IT manager was like if you took every irate user and every dumb user I dealt with, and combined them into an iratedumatron. Basically, Imagine doing tech support for Trump. (I was going to say Hitler, but he was pretty smart)

Of course your mileage will vary, once you move away from tech support. If you land in a non customer facing role then you're golden. That's what I like about my job now. Though I sometimes feel like a hermit, I'm in a building with no windows, typically work nights, then go home and sleep during the day. In winter I basically go weeks without seeing daylight, though that goes for even a normal 8-5 job anyway.

 

[Fritzo]

Yeah Helpdesk is a good way to get your foot in the door as it's often one of few positions that don't require experience, just knowledge. But after a few years it really does drain you. It's not actually the irate customers that bother me, and it's not the dumb ones. It's the irate dumb ones. You just want to reach through the phone and strangle them.

I then moved to server, thinking that was over. Oh, I was wrong! The IT manager was like if you took every irate user and every dumb user I dealt with, and combined them into an iratedumatron. Basically, Imagine doing tech support for Trump. (I was going to say Hitler, but he was pretty smart)

Of course your mileage will vary, once you move away from tech support. If you land in a non customer facing role then you're golden. That's what I like about my job now. Though I sometimes feel like a hermit, I'm in a building with no windows, typically work nights, then go home and sleep during the day. In winter I basically go weeks without seeing daylight, though that goes for even a normal 8-5 job anyway.

Yikes! Not sure that's the best place for your well-being either.

I lucked out and hooked up with a small consulting firm that happens to be one of the most respected in the area. The talent pool we have is top-notch, and everyone is viewed on equal footing. Our owner is the nicest, most personable guy you can imagine (he puts an energy drink on my desk every morning, pats me on the back, and says "how's it going? What's on the schedule today?" every morning....to every employee!).

It's a job-driven market, and there are perfect jobs out there now. The trick is sticking your neck out to find them.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It's a job-driven market, and there are perfect jobs out there now. The trick is sticking your neck out to find them.

Totally the opposite here. Not enough jobs, too many people looking for a job. So you take what you can get. Though I consider my job a jackpot as it's really good pay and stress free, most tech jobs here are close to minimum wage. I actually cleared 80k once with OT etc. The shift work is nice too as I get more time off. I'd hate to go back to a miserable 8x5 type job. 2 day weekends are not long enough to get anything done.