View Single Post
Old 10-22-2014, 10:22 PM   #6
downtime!
Senior Member
 
downtime!'s Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2012
Location: Keller
Age: 61
Posts: 1,006
Default

I've been doing it for a long time. Great field to get into, but you'll need to specialize these days. The era of the "many hats" IT guy is over.

A computer related degree will likely not help you much at all. Experience and certifications go much farther with prospective employers. Security is, has been, and always will be, a hot field. Virtualization is another hot field, and that's what I do. My current project is VMware's Horizon View virtual desktop product. I've rolled out 350 desktops on two different environments, for users in FtW, Houston and Buenos Aires, all managed here locally. We'll be expanding the usage to include most everyone on the FtW campus over the next year, so that will be approx. 2500 users. It's a neat product, the newest version adds hosted applications via RDS farms, and it tickles the bosses when you show them you can save the company (in our case, anyway) about 3 million dollars every 3 years by doing away with hardware refreshes.

The bottom line is, it's good clean work, no real physical side to it, can be stressful at times, the pay will be decent when you start out (and you'll probably start out in Help Desk) and if you play your cards right, the pay gets much better (mine has ranged from $10.00 an hour as a part time help desk tech right out of school, to $65k a year as a network admin, to more than twice that now as a VMware admin). You'll get to work with cool technology and seriously weird co workers. The hours can be long, depending on the project (Disaster Recovery time, end of business year, things like that) and other times, it feels like a 3 day work week. But, like anything else, you need to want to do it, to have a passion for the work. Without that, it will get boring with a quickness.
__________________
downtime! is offline   Reply With Quote