mikey88 wrote: » I've met a guy who's been doing desktop support for 30yrs. Some just like the work or are not motivated to advance and that's fine. To advance in this field, one can't be afraid of a bit of overtime or occasional on call. Stress free work will be when I retire and become a parking lot attendant.
N7Valiant wrote: » I don't expect stress free work, but when most of the other techs are also doing overtime every single week and coming in on their supposed day off on Holidays(which they receive no additional pay for because they're all salary), then I don't see that as a sustainable model.
LeBroke wrote: » Heavily depends on which company you work for. My last job I was doing 60 hours a week + constant on call because they couldn't be bothered to hire a second person. I'm doing maybe 35 this place, and on-call is an 8-week rotation with an extra $500 bonus when you've got the proverbial pager.
N7Valiant wrote: » Same position basically?
N7Valiant wrote: » I'm a couple months into a Help Desk position at an MSP and wanted to check and see if my original plan to get into a SysAdmin role is really the best given my personality and preferences. While I'm willing to put more than 40 hours into my job, I'm finding that my body isn't able to keep up, staying another 2 hours past my shift only results in about an hour of productive work and I usually go home in a daze and with a distracting headache. If I've been working in the hour before I go to sleep, then I'm usually still too obsessed with work to fall asleep. Hence I believe sticking with a 40-hour work week is best. Thus when I read that SysAdmin is a really fast pace and stressful environment, I'm wondering if I'd be going from MSP to in-house IT only to end up in the same place? Skill-wise I'd say I'm definitely more System rather than Networking. I actually enjoy hardware as much as software when I'm swapping out parts in a Workstation trying to find that one component that causes it to reboot itself even in BIOS every 5-10 minutes, finding that it was the power supply, and saving myself from having to explain to the POC that it's a motherboard that isn't sold anymore. I enjoy troubleshooting system glitches like a USB device that was shutting down the computer which required a driver install and running DISM to fix the system file corruption that occurred as a result and couldn't be fixed by sfc. As far as personality, I'm generally much more productive when I'm allowed to work on my own initiative as opposed to being forced into it(say, someone just tossing more work in your direction because they think you're not busy enough). Quick example would be growing up in a stereotypical Asian family where I'm physically beaten for having bad grades, my GPA in high school was barely 2.1. Whereas in college when that all stopped and I no longer had a gun held to my head, I got a 3.5 GPA for a Welding degree and a 4.0 GPA when I went back for an IT degree. My general path planned was Help Desk(MSP) > Jr. SysAdmin(in-house) > SysAdmin > Security. But given my personality(I also despise phone calls and being on-call), I'm wondering if I should add Desktop Support after Help Desk and/or choose another path altogether? I noted one of our clients has a SysAdmin who seems to lack some very basic knowledge about the company network and apparently didn't know how to tell if a UPS is actually being used or not in spite of devices being connected to it. It left me with an impression that he had a lot of downtime in his job or that the bar wasn't as high as I expected, but it also seems like one of those "it depends" kind of situations or that he might be the exception.
