[geeks] job hunt...

[Shannon]

On 01-Apr-2012 14:22, Nadine Miller wrote:
> 72K/yr is insultingly low, IMO, Shannon.  I'm in Las Vegas, and making more
> than the offer you received from Dahlgren.  Las Vegas is not known for high
> salaries in tech since the majority of folks employed here are Windows
> admins.

Ya... I do know that people locally have signed up and did get promotion
at the 6 month mark, and their employee status levels are fairly high
pay raises (like 20K/year each level).

Unfortunately, $72K is hardly the lowest offer I've gotten. I've had 6
offers since December, and only 1 of them has been over that to give you
an idea.

Its fairly common to have to quit to get a raise, but I'm really tired
of that. I would like to find a company that gave a damn about their
employees and wanted them to train and stay on.

The local yard is old and stable, and they promise that I won't need to
leave. I told the recruiter point blank "If a year from now I am not
making what I asked for, I won't stay." and he said "We never hire
anyone without the expectation they will be promoted."

I'm pretty cynical so that didn't mean much to me, but I can't keep
looking forever and if they really mean it, it seems a decent place to be.

> I interviewed at Dahlgren back in '05 time frame, and rec'd an offer
> contingent on clearance investigation but never heard back from them as to the
> status of my clearance.  I'd consider their budget talk to be questionable
> based on my experience.

There is that. They still talk to me but "have no new information".


> I recently had a recruiter contact me from the DC area looking for a NetBackup
> expert in Alexandria offering 85K/yr for a perm role with clearance required.
> I told the guy that was way too low.  He said he agreed fully and had told the
> client the same, but that they refused to raise the rate.

Yea, I see that all the time. Shops have offered me $50K/year and even
got mad when I said it was far too low. Even shops in expensive areas
are lowballing like crazy.

> I know that I will ruffle feathers with this comment, but in my opinion the
> influx of Linux admins that will take really low pay has somewhat diluted the
> salary expectations for skilled UNIX admins.  This is one of the primary
> reasons I'm seeking to get out of SA operations.  At my last job the Linux
> admins got paid between 30-40% less than I did as a Solaris admin.  I see
> Solaris admins still being offered reasonable amounts, but shops that are
> primarily Linux always low-ball.

I feel the same. The local shop is currently mostly AIX and Solaris,
with Linux taking the majority of new servers. They don't have much
Linux knowledge having just started using it for virtualization.

[demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-keys which had a name of 0x5936BC24.asc]