Not with that attitude. If you are healthy, have people skills, and are capable of learning new things regularly then you can generally make as much as you want in this industry.
As a Sysadmin/DevOps engineer, I am expected to be an expert in some new paradigm every 2 years which I have done consistently for 25 years. Working hard and doing solid, consistent, useful work isn't enough to break through a salary ceiling.
Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.
I have a software engineering, sysadmin, and security background with 20 years of experience and I turn down opportunities of 250k+ frequently as I run my own company now which affords me more control of my time.
I have no degree and am no influencer or genius. I just never stop learning so I can be the one bringing new ideas to the meeting.
Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.
I am no workaholic, averaging 35h weeks, but I try to learn a new skillset every month or so. If there is a gap I identify at an employer or client that will make me learn a new programming language, infra stack, or new vulnerability discovery technique, my hand always goes up first.
People are willing to pay more to those willing to run ahead into the dark and document a path for everyone else once they figure it out.
I know others who are more do-what-they-are-asked personalities, who work a lot more hours, but being simply experienced and reliable has earned them 50k+/year bumps every time they change jobs with good referrals and open source projects people can reference.
"Your aversion to learning new things every 2 years sounds like a limiter. Even 2 years is too slow for this industry and probably why you feel capped.
"
You failed to read my comment. I said I did it quite consistently.
You cannot become an expert in a new skillset every month.
I read it. It just read to me like you do not like having to constantly learn new things.
I do not need to be an expert at something new every month. I just have to learn enough to unblock high-value efforts no one else wants to take on. The problems that come up more often I get better at solving faster over time.
Not all skills are even work related, but just challenging myself. Last month I learned to solve a Rubiks cube in spare time. I will not break any records and am not an expert, but I can solve it in a minute which is good enough. I move on to the next skill.
I am not an expert at anything, but I have spent months doing a bit of everything at one point or another. I tend to identify risks most others miss from having breadth-first experience in how entire stacks fit together from kernel system calls to network packets to end user frontend javascript.
I ended up pivoting to full time security engineering several years ago as a result.
Security is in a lot more demand than devops/sysadmin these days but all sysadmins have experience in security. Something to consider.
Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$.
I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube.
Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.
A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk.
Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now.
Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)
> Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems
Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.
You seldom want to become an expert in a single technology. It's doable, but you're putting all your eggs in the same basket. What if the technology becomes irrelevant in 5-10 years?
Get good enough to be proficient and become a broad generalist. This is a much better route imo.
I'd never say this on Reddit, Facebook, or LinkedIn, but you're hanging out in Programmer Heaven right now, for fun, in your spare time. ANYONE hanging out here CAN definitely make a fat living in the SF Bay Area. Go out there and get rich!!! The only things I want to see you complaining about are interview loops, followed by the fact that you can barely afford a house on your $300k/year total compensation
Yes, you're right. After 25 years of mostly being treated like shit by start-ups with an average weekly work rate of 60 hours, my attitude is probably kind of bad.
Do I really need to be a rockstar to get an inflationary raise every year?
Take cost of living into account and we make about 40% less than we did 20 years ago.
This is all a "you" problem. You have made the choice to work in shitty startups, you have made the choice to work 60 hours per week, and you have made the choice to accept jobs that would pay you below market rate.
Being a bitter old man is not the attitude problem mentioned here, being someone that refuses to see that their unsatisfactory situation is 100% due to their own actions (or rather, lack of action) is your attitude problem.
Hey man, sorry people are crapping on you here. It's an unfair world full of selfish pricks and jerkoffs who'll screw you over given half a chance, while telling themselves they're making the world a better place in the process
BUT you have the technical skills to leverage yourself into a favored position, and I'm confident you can do so if you reset your outlook and your approach. Nobody's going to pay you $300k because you deserve $300k, they're going to pay it because they're making $1M in revenue.
I used to be called sysadmin, then I was DevOps, and now I'm SRE. They're all the same thing. Search for Senior SRE on Google, and you'll quickly find jobs that pay more than $220k.
People can't just make as much as they want. There's always competition and other constraining factors. It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.
> It's absolutely reasonable to say that you'll never make $220k (in 2022 $) as a dev when the median is $110k, regardless of one's attitude.
If one's primary objective is to maximize income/money/wealth, then you should be prepared to be more flexible with the kind of work you do. There are many careers that pay more than my chosen career, but I am not interested in that work. Hell, it even applies within an industry. There are some companies in tech that have to pay a lot more to attract talent than other companies, because of their reputation, their culture, etc. You can choose to work there to make more money but it does not mean that other companies with better working conditions and more appealing products etc. should automatically match comp. Put differently, there can be many reasons why people choose one job, or career, over another.
It is unreasonable to lament that your chosen work does not pay as much as another job, and more unreasonable to expect all jobs to pay similarly.
I don't see the part where all jobs are supposed to pay similarly. I think it's fair to bring up pay differences or that your employer is paying you less. That's how people become aware and get better comp. Staying quiet benefits the employer. Hell, it might even be a good reality check for some people on here who think there are enough high paying jobs for everyone (like all the kids thinking they'll be rockstars or play pro sports) that's not how stats, economics, and competitive markets work.
Not everybody is an influencer, an MIT grad or a genius.