Source
r/ITCareerQuestions•
qnull

What kind of pay increase would you expect between T2 & T3?

Found out that there’s only a 4% pay gap between our second tier support and third tier support teams (about $100/week) which seems ridiculous to me.

Both teams support the same stuff (Windows server, AD, Exchange, Citrix, VMware etc.) the only real difference is T2 does more “Operations” (Break/Fix) and T3 does more platform management (Patch/Upgrade) and has more “responsibility” + oncall.

To me this feels like the organisation doesn’t really value the T3 team because I know that another company in my city pays between 80-90k for senior (T3) guys while it seems like our guys are between 70-80k at both T2 & T3 (I’m middle of the road at 75 but on the T2 team).

Obviously pay is only half of the picture (opportunity and growth being the other) but what kind of pay increase would you expect between T2 & T3?

This is a large publicly traded company and a large brand in the APAC region so not a small MSP/mum and dad shop.

Salaries aren’t in USD either but converted we’re talking 40-50k USD (70-80 local dollar)

Posted Sep 16, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC · edited

32
Helpjuice•

Since you are not the boss or an executive you have no way to change the pay bands. If you don't like it, you need to go somewhere else that values your capabilities more than your current employer. Sometimes you need to leave to get a proper raise unless you are making enough change at the company you become the secret sauce that increases the bottom line.

Remember just because you are working at a big company doesn't mean they will take care of you or treat you right. I would recommend going elsewhere if you want more money in your pockets and do it for at least 30% more than what you are making now.

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[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
AMv8-1day•

A dozen different factors come into play there, the least of which is the actual support tier.

I've found that there really is no solid payscale for "levels" of work as much as there is a constantly shifting supply and demand along with local market expected rates. I've seen people working the exact same job get paid upwards of $30-40K difference depending on when they were hired or who the manager was at the moment.

We had cable techs making 6 figures while I've known senior engineers making $60k. At one point, I was making $~10K more than my boss. I'm currently working alongside a couple of individuals that negotiated themselves into an insanely lucrative pay rate that they would normally have no business charging, but the company was in a bind, needed bodies for work in a town no one wanted to go to, and had a hefty gov fund to work with.

Even the "Tier" structure is deceptively vague enough to pretty much mean anything a given IT environment needs it to. I've worked in many different organizations that all had completely different concepts of "Tier 1-3, etc." with very different expectations of the accepted technical level of the techs/engineers working the different teams.

That said, I work in a very strange industry in a large city with a wealth of opportunities at a given time. With the right qualifications, finding work that will pretty much pay whatever you need within reason isn't impossible. Many other markets are a lot more constrained, and that limitation will temper the sliding payscale.

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