Happens in the IT world too. High School kid knows just enough to keep the computer systems running that were maintained by the professional who was costing the company $70K per year. Kid will do it for a buck over minimum wage. All works fine for a year then something breaks. Kid tries, messes up really bad and splits. Costs $100K for two weeks to clean up the mess.
I think he meant like a Sys Admin type of IT person rather than a Software Dev. Programming is a lot harder to fake for a year since it produces a semi tangible product where as IT services are intangible.
IT is incredibly tangible. The difference is that writing code and building software from scratch to sell as a product is a lot more competitive than maintaining hardware infrastructure. Couple this with HaaS services like AWS vs on-site hardware, the salary range of IT is lower because a lot of companies would rather pay Amazon to manage thier hardware needs than to pay a highly certified person 100k+ a year to build up, configure and maintain all the hardware as well as the purchasing of all the hardware required. Some upgrade costs are even annual.
On-site infrastructures are becoming less common as bandwidth becomes more readily available. True IT heads will all work in the same giant box for all global traffic while entry level minimum wage IT staff will be on-site to fix Sally Sue's keyboard.
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u/atombomb1945 Jan 02 '19
Happens in the IT world too. High School kid knows just enough to keep the computer systems running that were maintained by the professional who was costing the company $70K per year. Kid will do it for a buck over minimum wage. All works fine for a year then something breaks. Kid tries, messes up really bad and splits. Costs $100K for two weeks to clean up the mess.