Systems or Networking career path

Alexsmith

I'm sure this thread has been repeat before, but I was wondering which area in IT leads to a better work/life balance and higher salary cap? I tend to hear from the people at my job anyway that cisco is the way to go for a higher salary range and MCSE's are more plentiful. Do people in the Systems world of MCSE's make a good amount of money or do Cisco/net engineers people tend to have a higher salary cap?

I was interested in pursuing the MCSA/E track and tackling the VCP area as well, do anybody have any advice one whether this would be a good path?

Danielm7

It depends on the area, the job, the title, etc. You can look up CCIE salaries, then you can look at Sr Systems Architects, both of what I would consider around the highest level of networking and systems people. Both are going to have very high salaries, but both take a ton of hard work and passion. It would make more sense to decide which side you enjoy more, then try to excel at that instead of pushing towards an area you don't enjoy as much with the chance of maybe an extra 10% a year in your paycheck.

kohr-ah

Both have well paying careers that you can go far in.
If you want to go MCSA route you are doing the right thing by learning VMWare and Hyper-V as that is a must know now I'd say.

Also if the company you work for has EMC or NetApp learning something along those lines will help a lot too as they play very well (at least netapp does) with Virtualization.

Work life balance entirely depends on the company more than anything and your position in the company.

But I know Systems Engineers that are pushing about 150k per year and work about 50 hrs a week so their work life balance is pretty decent.

Alexsmith

Thanks for the advice, My company isn't using NetApp but I will study up on that. Should I learn a little Linux as well? Maybe Linux+?

Danielm7

Depends on the shop, but linux can be very helpful and surely wouldn't hurt to know some.

it_consultant

Easy answer, do both. If you really want to make money in infrastructure then you should do VOIP or storage but you generally don't go directly into either of those. Do networking if you want to go VOIP (since that underpins the whole thing) do systems if you want to go storage since storage networking is nothing like ethernet networking.

If you are early in your career then doing both is the best bet because an opportunity may come up in either systems or networking and you will be happy that you covered your bets.