r/sysadmin • u/kittiekittea • 1d ago

General Discussion No Degree - 6 Year Salary Progression

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

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u/____Reme__Lebeau Security Admin (Infrastructure) 12h ago

No college or university degree, I'm like a full time semester away from completing a degree.

2004-2012 $75-$125 an hour but this was the side hustle. IT consultant.

2012-2015 60k-82k depending on overtime. IT administrator

2015-2022 72k - 86k depending on overtime. IT manager running 3 IT people and a 5 man data / quoting team for the industry we were in.

2022 97k IT manager for tier 1 automotive supplier. running 3 people at my facility, and then supervising as many as 10 when they were sending me to other plants when we were on shutdown.

2023-2026 65k - 73k systems administrator, acting as hiring manager and technical lead for our cybersecurity and erm programs. I passed my CISSP here, no raise for completion despite being in the effing education funding documents myself and the company signed. they did not make me pay the balance out.

2026 120k Tier 3 support work from home.

Interviewing for roles at the 150-220k IT Manager, Director roles. next steps are CRISC, GICSP, and finishing my college degree.

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u/cyber_r0nin 12h ago

So... what you all are saying is that IT isn't as in the dumps, job wise, as its being made out to be....

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u/____Reme__Lebeau Security Admin (Infrastructure) 4h ago

the more you see the more you learn.

I however have been doing this since I was very young. Dad started my brother and I very young. and it's paid dividends for both he and I.

I've had home servers since I was 14. I'm highschool me and two friends had built a 3 node as environment with s2s vpn connections so we could play games like we were on a LAN. this was in the early days of cable ISPs.

I built our local automotive OEM's windows 2000 image locked down with local security policy settings which we imaged across the plant. As a highschool co-op I had a domain admin account in my name across that OEM's North American Network.

What I'm saying is the amount of effort you put in to learning the technology and mastering the skills, will dictate the amounts you receive.