On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Aleksey Tsalolikhin <
atsaloli.t...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The few respondents who cited salaries greater than
> US$200,000 are excluded from most of the analyses
> throughout this document.
>
> Can anybody shed light on what it takes to get to that level?
A bunch of people answered that for a technical role. That's hard but not
impossible. To make that while remaining a full-time sysadmin:
- disqualify the 99% of companies which are not already paying at least 1
entirely-technical person more than you want to make, whatever it is. Short
of a management change, a recent hire will never change the culture at a
company that hasn't already paid someone else more. Focus on the relatively
few companies who share your expectations.
- your skills may need to cover 10x or 100x more systems or users than
they do now, so expect to be writing code for administering systems
("operations as code"), not personally doing it. See Facebook's 7-figure
users-per-sysadmin metric.
That's the purely technical angle. However, I think most of those $200k+
folks have one of these attributes, rather than being a better sysadmin:
- at a financial services company.
- in sales engineering at a sales-driven tech company. Be the tech half
of sales team for complex products that are heavy on systems integration.
Or, have established trust from customers with budgets -- folks who will
listen to the product simply because you joined the company and they trust
you. With a reasonable book of business, $200k is totally doable; the rep
you'd work with will be making more.
- in upper-middle management. Most CTOs and CIOs in midsize companies
make well over $200k, and there are probably companies with a CxO or
VP-level person who considers themselves enough of a sysadmin to answer the
SAGE survey :-) Certainly almost all have director-level systems positions
like that, and some are above your bar.
- in an industry with extremely important data *that someone pays a lot
for or makes a lot of money from*, and running a service that everyone knows
keeps the spigot flowing. Overlap with financial svcs, but also business
analytics, for-profit actuarial niches (global logistics, weather
forecasting, oil & gas), ad serving, ridiculously large Oracle & Teradata
databases, etc. The guy who runs the systems which let Apple predict how
many iPad motherboards to pre-order - 6 months before launch - is probably
pretty valuable, and the guy who leads Walmart's Teradata systems group sure
is.
- are really good at communicating complex systems and ideas to others.
Aside from the value of that skill, others will realize faster that they're
irreplaceable and pay them more.
Also, I've ignored another totally viable way to average over $200k/yr total
comp: take more risks. Start a sysadmin consultancy, or for more risk, a
sysadmin-related product company (see Hyperic, Cloudera, Opscode,
Reductive/Puppet, Gluster, Eucalyptus, Zmanda, many more). That's not
salary, but over a couple attempts you'll probably receive a risk premium.
May also have more fun.
Cheers,
Troy
--
http://twitter.com/troyd
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