[BC] The wrong way to deal with tech budgets

[Alex Hartman]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 3:57 AM, Broadcast List USER <Broadcast at fetrow.org> wrote:
>Comments within:

>On Nov 22, 2010, at 9:00 AM, broadcast-request at radiolists.net wrote:

>> Message: 21
>> From: Alex Hartman <goober at goobe.net>
>>
>> I would like to know who the hell is paying $160k on the INTERNET
>> side of things. I can see DBAs or sysadmins of enterprise
>> datacenters containing large mainframes making that kind of coin,
>> but your friend, unless he carries any of the above titles and a few
>> degrees, is overpaid. And if he's a DBA or a sysadmin, he is most
>> certainly on call at some point.

>Um, that is pretty easy.

>The folks who deal with critical Internet infrastructure.  Those folks
>who make the Internet actually work.

Interesting.  I know several high-level infrastructure folks at Sprint/Qwest/UUNet/Level3. They churn MAYBE $120k/yr to engineer the SONET rings running around the country. Again, market correction. This may have been true a few years ago, but currently there is NO internet job (unless your title is CTO) paying this much to the man on the street who hasn't basically worked in the company for many years and worked his ass off to get to that level. The other side is too, if you have gotten to that level, your head is always in jeopardy since the managers won't trim their fat when it comes to a budget shortfall, they look for the highest paid non-manager.

But yes, the people who make the "internet work" as you put it, are marginally well paid people, but they can't do their jobs without the $40k/yr guys out in the field splicing the fiber, configuring the switches. Grunt work. I'm perfectly happy with that, i'd loathe a desk job where all you do every day is change router configs and set up email addresses for corporate goons. I did that once, never again.

 
>> Besides, 70k/yr is about 2x my current pay at my "day job"... i
>> could live pretty cozy on twice the paycheck.

>Dude, you really need to apply at Best Buy.

>You can make more, and not be on call.  Being on call means dates and
>worse cannot be insured.  I recall several times as a young guy who
>had to "complete the transaction" because the voice pager sounded when
>I was ...  Well...

Out here in the midwest, not really. Best Buy pays their managers about 35-40k/yr and are expected to work 50-60 hours a week, unless bi-lingual, then they get a $10k kick for that trait. (and the EEO write-down) Out here in corn country, where the people are realistic about how much crap should cost ($1M for a 600 sq. ft. apartment?!!? WTF? NOBODY should pay that, west coast, east coast, doesn't matter, it's simply not worth it!) don't overpay their employees for a good reason, it can bankrupt the company! Target Corporation is based here for that simple reason. It's cheap to maintain when your employees are happy with $40k/yr with some nice bennefits and such. They also supply on-job daycare, free lunch cafeterias, etc. Those "little" things there make an employees quality on the job increase 10 fold versus giving a guy $150k/yr and the guy is miserable. The obvious exceptions to this would be the guys at google, yahoo, etc. They took the same premise and applied it at a higher level.

Ever seen the movie "Office Space"?

--
Alex Hartman