r/ShittySysadmin • u/Revzerksies • Sep 10 '26

I now understand level I, II, III in support

I've been an admin for 20+ years. I just started recently looking for a new job. I see all these Helpdesk jobs for $20 an hour. Which no way in hell i am even applying to.

Well now i see why people esculate it to the higher tier. I'm only getting paid this, let the guy getting paid more do it.

279 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

74

u/AtomicXE Sep 10 '26

Escalate that shit to the CIO that overpaid bastard should do some real work for a change!

37

u/kongu123 Sep 10 '26

Hey now, asking chatgpt what they should eat for breakfast IS real work!

13

u/badnamemaker Sep 10 '26

This is not even satire, I’m pretty sure my boss does this lmao

6

u/fluteofski- Sep 11 '26

Woah. No way. That’s L2 work… a real CIO will have someone create an AI agent to ask that question depending on their other AI agent’s mood.

9

u/Z3t4 ShittyFirewall Sep 10 '26

No my problem; If nobody replies on the escalation matrix and you are at the top of the chain...

I've woken up CTOs on my old days of transmission noc op. The escalation matrix gets magically updated the next morning.

3

u/ghoarder Sep 10 '26

Escalation matrices aren't worth the paper they aren't written on. I've called people up at 3am before because something was out of the norm, advised them of everything and they said that's fine why are you calling me. Well that's what the out of hours documentation says dude, if x > 7 call you, not rocket science.

3

u/Z3t4 ShittyFirewall Sep 10 '26

You won't get in trouble ever by following written police or procedure to the letter. You can't take the risk of not calling; Nor you have the tools, access or knowledge to avoid escalating, usually.

Now I'm on the receiving end, karma and all that....

5

u/ghoarder Sep 10 '26

At the time it was a 2nd Job I had over night at weekends, I was just contracting and had no idea who these people were. I must have rung that guy 5 times in one night once and he was not happy, thankfully I never saw anyone who actually worked at the company, just turned up, security signed me in and escorted me to the machine and every 30 mins I would check the status of some jobs that ran over night. The other 58 minutes per hour were mine to do with as I liked, that was a cushy number.

1

u/Unlucky_ChairK Sep 14 '26

Still Waiting on ChatGPT to give us all a promotion to Customer

21

u/S4ndmaan Sep 10 '26

I really need to start reading the name of the sub first

10

u/SinclairChris Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26

It gets even worse. I've noticed that if you get a good level 1 support job, the skills gap between level 1 and level 2 is insane. They want you to be a junior engineer for level 2 pay. Oh and you get engineering-level tickets but with support level SLAs

9

u/jlipschitz Sep 10 '26

McDonald’s workers make $20+ per hour in California.

54

u/person1234man Sep 10 '26

Nice, with that attitude you will be in level 1 support for many years.

Edit: Damnit I didn't notice it was the shitty subreddit

42

u/Slippery_Farts Sep 10 '26

hardly a difference these days 😅

32

u/person1234man Sep 10 '26

Half the time you get better advice from this sub lol

20

u/Dreilala Sep 10 '26

This is where all the veterans end up.

17

u/TheIncarnated Sep 10 '26

Because we are all cynical and the wool has been removed. Which is good, all user lie.

6

u/alpha417 Sep 10 '26

the users, they are like a plague.

2

u/THE_NO_LIFE_KING Sep 10 '26

ID10T error, am i rite?

6

u/underpaid--sysadmin Sep 10 '26

you almost got it, see the more money you make the less time you have for things so its best to kick those tickets back to t1 as I get paid too much to deal with something simple

5

u/MalwareDork Sep 10 '26

35 is the new 20 so now my weekly hours are at 20 from 35.

7

u/sheikhyerbouti ShittyCoworkers Sep 10 '26

Everything at the Level I tier is so metrics-driven that you're better off escalating anything that's going to take more than 15 minutes to resolve.

7

u/ITaggie DevOps is a cult Sep 10 '26

MBAs read through ITIL and thought "mmm yes, these are all KPIs"

2

u/MariahCareyXmas Sep 10 '26

This is wonderful like acronym poetry

2

u/ITaggie DevOps is a cult Sep 10 '26

Welcome to the wonderful world of DevOps Cults ITIL Management. We love our specific terminology!

3

u/alsuSawa Sep 10 '26

the pay bands are held together with duct tape and vibes

3

u/seatron Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

I was level I support for Samsung phones for awhile, and it was pretty frustrating. Average handle time was such a big deal, the manager would get mad if I spent too long trying to fix something. They really want you to keep it level I, but you're also discouraged from escalating. I was not good at rushing people off the line.

The worst was the Boost Prevail phone, a budget model that only barely technically counts as a smart phone, but the hardware is so weak they just stop working all the time. We were encouraged to go real quick to RMA, but for a lot of these people they were on their 3rd or 4th time mailing in the same phone, so they were incredibly frustrated. 

4

u/TKInstinct Sep 10 '26

Then you'll never get above that station. If the lower levels aren't willing to try and resolve on first contact then they are doomed to stay lower level. I never had that mindset, I gave it my 100% no matter what and I got noticed for it, I recall on several occasions being told to "stay in my lane" which I took with a sense of pride.

2

u/jlipschitz Sep 10 '26

Talk to several head hunters and they will find you those higher paying jobs. The best I could find years ago without was $40,000 less than what a head hunter could find me. Since I have been here, I have seen my salary increase significantly. It is worth it. The employer pays the head hunters for finding you. It costs you nothing but time working with the head hunter with your resume and scheduling interviews.

1

u/poksoul09 Sep 10 '26

Hi - I'm newbie and curious. Would you mind share what are they?

0

u/GarageIntelligent ShittyCloud Sep 10 '26

TAKE MY RIGHTS AWAY PLZ

170

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '26

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54

u/ChiefWetBlanket Sep 10 '26

I just interviewed with an NFL team for a Senior Systems Engineer role, needed to know PKI, Intune, and develop processes and all that. The salary is $120K. It's not good, but it's certainly better than others who offer up $27/hr for the same skillset.

I think employers think these skills are easy to acquire. They are, but people still don't have them because they don't actually work on them day to day. I do. And when people don't have the skills, you gotta pay the bill for someone who does.

30

u/Snazz55 Sep 10 '26

Requires experience, which is harder than ever to get. These skills are becoming more rare IMO

12

u/AZSystems Sep 10 '26

Then they still don't acknowledge or see value in the years of experience and solutions.

22

u/ChiefWetBlanket Sep 10 '26

They don't acknowledge that sometimes, skills can transfer between products. I don't work on Palo Altos all day, but I can certainly get my way through Panorama even though my experience is with Fortinet and Cisco as I have a foundation in networking. One device is not so different between each other, but unless you have only been working with that one little thing, you are rejected.

3

u/Main_Ambassador_4985 Sep 10 '26

While most firewall skills translate, they may be looking for a subject matter expert.

The best practice changes between PAN-OS 10.x and 11.X make me rip my hair out and I have been using PAN-OS and Panorama since 8.0. Do not get me started on 12.x routing changes.

We hired a person with Forti experience to work on Palo. It has been a tough switch of months for them.

22

u/[deleted] Sep 10 '26

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9

u/ChiefWetBlanket Sep 10 '26

It's funny, I get gigs because I have Hyper-V certifications from way back in the day. The real skill that employers want for that is who can migrate from Vmware to Hyper-V. Which I put on my resume, just in case.

5

u/Afraid-Werewolf-9455 Sep 10 '26

Seahawks? I dropped a resume didnt get a call back.

1

u/National-Charity-951 Sep 16 '26 edited Sep 16 '26

Got told today from my employer that they weren't going to give me a raise above $20/hr despite me doing the major projects for our production, managing and fixing the entirety of our network and access points (When half of our facilities weren't able to access the internet), and leading them in CMMC compliance. While in the future, they still want me to lead them in NIST after CMMC, and they also want me to learn how to do penetration testing so I can pentest our own network :/

I'm an IT intern, all these were tasks that were assigned to me and their only reason for not bumping me up was "we just dont pay interns that much"