Offered a sysadmin/help desk manager role…am I being paid appropriately?
Hey guys, I got an offer Friday for a job at a major manufacturing company in my state of Massachusetts.
The companies Help Desk has been “on an island” for the last two years or so, and doesn’t have the means to escalate or seek help from higher levels. This job would have me taking escalations from the help desk and trying to bridge the gap/act as a liason for the helpdesk to the infrastructure teams. In addition I’ll be tasked with managing their day to day operations and looking to make improvements to the process of ticketing/base images/working out consistent pain points that can be resolved before users ever call us. My team would be six people with other help desk techs on the other side of the globe.
In addition, I am told I will be taking part in system administration tasks such as spinning up servers, updating software and hardware, configuring networks, etc. I’d be working closely with the infrastructure teams on projects.
I am told the reason they included sysadmin work into the role is they understand many IT professionals don’t like the idea of dropping infrastructure and becoming a paper pusher. I am told that people who join this company typically stay for decades, and if I wanted to move more into the infrastructure aspect or more into the management aspect, they would nurture my desire and respect my wishes. Schedule of the job is fairly flexible as is work from home privileges (once I’m established). The job is 10 minutes from home and the closest I’ve gotten in terms of commuting yet.
I was offered 91k originally and was able to bump them up to 96k. It’ll be the most I’ve earned in this field, I have no certs or degree to speak of and I’ve been at it for four years now (five if you count a phone repair shop I worked at)
Am I being offered a good opportunity here or am I getting positioned to do the work of two people for the price of one?
Posted Nov 21, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC
That depends on what their overtime / on-call policy is.
If there's no reasonable expectation of any sort of compensation (overtime pay or comp time), then you will be doing both jobs full-time.
If the expectation is just 40 hours a week and that's on paper, then this could turn out to be an opportunity to advance.
Weekend on call is on a rotation 5-6 week rotation I believe, there’s no real overnight on call as we have teams for each time zone block.
As far as I can tell so long as I’m not being deceived, my day will start at 9 and end at 530.
Do they have an overtime policy? Emergencies do happen. In my case, I'm told explicitly that if someone needs me to come in and work during off-hours, I'm to take off the same amount of hours so that I don't work more than 40 hours a week.
Nothing explicit on my offer letter. I was just told about the rotation during the interview. I would have to ask. I’ll put it on my list of questions to ask.