Job Advice needed.

RTmarc

Let me preface this by giving a little background information on this job. I took this job back in the first part of September. The pay was a full $10k less than the minimum amount in the pay range I was seeking but it got me back in this part of the state and I was promised as much training as I wanted. At this point I have yet to be sent to any real type of training but there really hasn’t been time to do so. The company I now work for has had several really bad Network Administrators before me. One was a NT 4.0 guy that never caught onto AD or anything to do with it so instead of asking he pretty much did whatever “seemed” right to him. The second guy to come on the scene was just inept and really should have been a bottom level help desk employee but was able to BS himself though the interview. He probably did the most damage I’ve ever seen to a company. These two nearly brought the entire domain to its knees. One of them actually implemented My Documents folder redirection but had it routed to the SYSVOL!!! The damage that caused was almost irreconcilable. At one point the company had anti-virus A but apparently it wasn’t good enough for one of them so he went out and purchased anti-virus B. When I came on the picture, 70% of the machines had no anti-virus whatsoever (he was in the process of swapping people over so he began uninstalling well before pushing the new software), 10% had anti-virus A, 10% had anti-virus B, and the rest had pretty much had whatever they wanted. After getting that cleaned up I had to rebuild Group Policy and the domain structure from the ground up. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say I basically created a new domain and migrated everyone over. I also had to repair the My Documents folder redirection so that it either worked or was setup correctly. For some reason, one of them implemented redirection but stopped it later on (after the sysvol incident). Anyway, you get the picture; very bad situation.

Fast forward to last Friday.

I get a letter from a local police department that I have made it through the six-eight months of bureaucracy and they are now down to a select few and want to start the interview process; anyone that has ever applied for or works for a local government knows they get into no hurry. They expressed a high level of interest in me so I’m going to be presumptive and say it probably wouldn’t be that big of a deal to get the job. The pay is just about double what I get paid now and comes with all of the typical state government benefits. Sounds great! But…

On the one hand, I feel compelled to stay where I currently am and continue to rebuild the network. I’ve almost taken it personally and have made it a personal and professional goal to rebuild the network here and get it into the order it should be. I have unbridled control over the network and can spend what I need to get everything like it should be; and that is very uncommon. If I left now, I get the feeling as though I’m abandoning an abused child or something like that. They’ve put a lot of faith in me and it’s one of those places where you know that people really do give a crap about you.

On the other, it's working for the state. I applied for the state job months ago; before I even considered working for my current employer. They pay much, much better and the benefits are presumably much better too.

I usually make the comment it’s not always about the money but when your salary could potentially double it tends to change your perspective somewhat hence my indecisiveness.

Any advice would be appreciated because I'm quite confused at this point.

sprkymrk

Are you comfortable enough with your current employer to explain the situation to them? You can let them know you feel a responsibility to stay on board and continue to help, but an immediate salary increase of 100% is hard to ignore. Maybe they will be willing to give you an incentive to stay.

You might consider continuing for a period of time after you leave for consulting/part time work until they were comfortable with a new hire or past the worst of their troubles.

FijianTribe

If it were me, I would see how immediate the PD wanted me to start working and work out a reasonable leave date from the job you are in now. Supposing you do want to make the switch.

I like to look at things as in "5 years from now". Currently I am looking at a job offer that is about 14K less a year (but with way better benefits and training) however in taking the job I am hoping my skill set and experiance will put me at 30K More than I make now.

What about working more as a consultant a couple days a week to your current company if they do not want to lose you and are unwilling to pay you more.