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Tech workers react to UPS drivers landing a $170,000 a year package with a mixture of anger and admiration
(www.businessinsider.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The Tech field does encourage laziness in certain specializations. Networking is notorious for it because once it's up and configured properly you should be able to sit back and relax. For the most part it will run itself when set up correctly. And you pay for that downtime by not getting paid as much.
CyberSecurity is absolutely booming right now, and those dudes are making a mint. Why? Cause they're going to run around like beheaded chickens more times than not with the pace that attacks are happening. What's that do for their salary? Shoots it through the roof.
Just because your job is business critical doesn't mean you deserve as much as someone else who's doing business critical work. How much work are you doing to maintain the business is the real question, and like I said above, proper Networks should not require tons of intervention. Security solutions, however, do.
Well I only work on new stuff/deployments for data centers. Once it's deployed it goes to ops for support. I don't know if you have a lot of experience in large networks but there is a lot of break/fix work with failing hardware components and physical issues ..but that's not the side of the house you want to be in because operational stuff like NOCs are always high turnover fast-paced jobs where everything is your fault. If you're going to work networking you gotta transition to the "money-making" side of the house for better quality of life. Right now the "sexy" stuff is devops/automation and that's where a lot of gripe comes from with the old school CLI guys because they don't want to learn anything new.
Job before this was at a university with a small team of infrastructure engineers and you would think their job was to stifle progress. Their whole team and millions of dollars in expensive networking equipment could get replaced by a private cell tower.
Cyber security field is a bit different, companies know now they have to spend money on it now so the faucet is open. Most of the real preventative methods for security happen at the network. Security guys that are paid deep into six figures know networking, Linux, programming and other things.
Being an SME and earning the big bucks, in my opinion, is about knowing quite a bit about many things