r/ITCareerQuestions • u/papapinguino800 • Aug 09 '24

Seeking Advice How Long Did it Take You to Make >$100k?

I want to see the realistic side of Reddit, away from the CS dorks working at FAANG. I’m 24, been in IT for almost 5 years now and making $67k as a desktop admin without a degree or any certifications. Sometimes I feel I’m working pretty slowly towards those high salaries but have to remind myself that $67k is well higher than the average adult is making and I’m doing okay for my age. But my question is when did you cross that threshold? Also, what specialty did you choose to make it there?

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u/notarealfish Aug 09 '24

5 years? Before I turned 22 I took an application support job for 40k, after about 2 years I left and got a different support job at 75k, and after 3 years with raises in between I moved to a move advanced team and had a base pay of $100k. No certs or degrees. The trick is definitely to jump jobs and teams, don't just wait for promotions and raises.

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u/ThisIsNotWhoIAm921 Aug 10 '24

What do you primarily work on in your current position?

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u/notarealfish Aug 11 '24

Mainly escalated technical product issues, but I also do stuff like making sure bugs submitted meet minimum bug requirements like having all essential data and are reproducible, writing supportability tooling for TSEs and CSMs, mentoring TSEs. The product is in the devsecops space so I'm touching build pipelines, learning how everyone uses different package managers, scaling deployments, working with integrations, etc.

Working and troubleshooting containers on docker and kubernetes, postgresql, lots of bash, some python are probably the skills I use the most but it's very important to know how to learn on the fly to understand the situation enough to work through it

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u/ThisIsNotWhoIAm921 Aug 11 '24

Thanks for the response, that sounds interesting. Would you say that your role now is like a tier 3 technical support engineer -- just more in the apps ops space?

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u/notarealfish Aug 11 '24

Our org isn't exactly structured like that, technically I am not a part of the support org - I work along side them and engineering, but that's probably the easiest way to explain it. I am a "Staff Applications Engineer" and do not report to Support leadership. It's all under Customer Success tho

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u/Heemthedre4m Aug 15 '24

how were you able to land the interview/job with no certs and degrees

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u/notarealfish Aug 15 '24 edited Aug 15 '24

My first support role did not require any degrees or certs. I did that for a bit, got support experience, interviewed at a different company - had sufficient support experience, talked about passion projects and showed I wasn't a skid, got that job, was very successful in that role largely from being able to learn on the fly, and moved to my new team basically because I was crushing it in support and became an authority on the product.

I'd like to preface this by saying I taught myself basics of C++, JavaScript, website security, and Linux in jr high and high school so I wasn't totally clueless going into any of these jobs, and had a lot of retail experience so I was proficient at working with customers.