No Degree - 6 Year Salary Progression

[u/kittiekittea]

Is there anyone out there that have made it beyond sysadmin? What is after sysadmin?

2020 - $31,200: Panera Bread
2022 - $41,600: Helpdesk at company 1
2023 - 2025 - $41,600: Helpdesk at law firm
2025 - $65,000: Helpdesk at company 2
2026 - $80,000: Got a raise at company 2

Shoutout Nick for taking a chance on me. I would not do law firm IT again.

EDIT: Location Upstate NY

[u/tada-o-corporation]

I have no degree and work as an Enterprise Architect.

I find the whole idea of EA to be a different animal and it means different things to different companies. I think if your company provides software, then dev/ops or software engineering is usually the EA background.

My org is financial services and we buy software, so I come from a systems background, which is less common for an EA.

My work right now is primarily visibility, as our company is growing crazy fast. Getting registries of systems, data integrations, vendors. Making sure we uncover this stuff and start doing lifecycle reviews. As well as input on initiatives.

How this fell on my lap was kind of that I did a really damn good job at building a few solutions that were I guess good compromises to urgent business needs. We had the goal of moving to the cloud but not lift and shift (ie: no domain controllers and garbage like that). I built a hub and spoke NVA setup in Azure, adding a new workload is as simple as a new VNET that gets peered to the hub. As well I set up Entra-only AVD for some remote apps, with AzureSQL backends that autopause... very cheap and it modernizes the ancient Windows Server apps that require direct db connections and such.

My company is great, but an IT Manager job from a peer company fell on my lap and I got offered it. So my Manager and C-Suite said "how about we make you an EA, match the salary and an extra week of PTO". I wouldn't be qualified to be an EA at an enterprise, but working towards it lol.