IT support jobs

ncit9933

Does anyone know why the wages are gone so crap in IT/Desktop support?
Doesn't seem to be much out there above the 25/28K range if your lucky

Asok

I'm guessing outsourcing to cheaper countries is at least somewhat to blame

ncit9933

That's what I heard from a few recruiters.... foreigners are cutting the salary by approx 5/6K

No disrespect to receptionists but they're earning 26/30K for work that is nowhere near as skilled?

What's happening?

matrim

ncit9933 wrote:

That's what I heard from a few recruiters.... foreigners are cutting the salary by approx 5/6K

No disrespect to receptionists but they're earning 26/30K for work that is nowhere near as skilled?

What's happening?

You don't need to be very skilled to do a 1st level (sometimes 2nd level) IT support job. I've worked in them before and everything I did, I was able to do when I was 16 / 17 before going to college. All you need is a good interest in computers and you can do them.

As you move up the ladder it starts to become skilled.

The problem isn't with foreigners coming here and taking less pay. The problem is that many (big) companies know that you can move the department to somewhere like India and pay the staff alot less than you can here.

Asok

Aye but it seems to be part of a cycle. Eventually companies will tire of hearing bad reports from customers about their customer service experience which to be honest the most trouble I have ever had calling those lines was with call centre staff based in india / pakistan. I'm not trying to be a rascist or anything like that but I do recall when I was trying to buy a laptop of dell it took me 5 calls to get through to d a rep that I could understand and could aslo understand my country accent. Having worked call desks in large firms a very common compliment we would get was that it was nice to hear an irish voice on the end of the phone as it does benifit the companys image somewhat making it seem more of a "local" company that the caller can associate with.

leeroybrown

I've had to use 'offshored' technical support internally within a company. Sometimes it was fine but on other occasions it was someone with mediocre English and a heavy accent talking over variable quality long distance phone lines.

It can be quite frustrating to waste unnecessary time like that especially when in my case it was generally a problem I had already identified that just needed to be passed on to a local support technician.

ncit9933

Matrim, I would be talking about 2nd level and to do the job right you would need more experience than a 16/17 year old, but yet there is Credit controllers and receptionsts earning as much if now more.........what was the point of studying IT in college?

layke

Tech support is a filth job tbh.

Also if you tend to specialise in an area you get more pay. E.g IT security. If it's something like Eircom BB i'm not suprised you get paid FA seeing as anyone who can read questions off a screen can do it (Monkies working for peanuts).

If you've done college level 1 tech support should only be used for experience in say year one of working, after that you should not even look at a position like that. Frankly, your looking at doing the wrong sort of job if your getting offered so little pay.

Finally I agree with secretarys getting paid much more then they should, when I was in my early 20's and working as a juniour sales person the secretary was on the same money as me. I couldn't and still don't understand it, I broke my arse every day to reach targets and she sat around and did nothing most of the time yet raked in the cash.

For the record, I deal with HP daily. I HATE having to deal with Indians sho I cannot understand me and vice versa.

ncit9933

There seem's to be crossed wires here somewhere.
I'm talking about IT/desktop support not tech support.....there is a big difference. Whereas tech support generally support one or a couple of products such as BB, IT support would generally be dealing with supporting a company with 300+ staff on a wide range of products from desktop/application and network support to name but a few.

BTW, I agree that most tech support staff are not properaly trained on the product they are supporting or may not have the experience.......In my opinion this may have somthing to do with all the hiring been done through recruiters who haven't a clue what skill are needed but are just looking for their slice of the cake

layke

Ah right, in that case I just tell them I want more money or I won't work for them. If they have any sort of sense in IT management they will bend backwards or at least make you an offer. You can decide to go ahead with it or not.

shoegirl

After 6.5 years working in IT support (various areas) I have to say that outsourcing is just one part of the problem.

Here are the reasons I see:

1. Hugely inflated wages paid to more senior staff & management (in many cases totally unjustified) sometimes has the company bled dry before they come around to level 2 or 1 (eg once worked in one company where the "managing director" - who didn't actually do anyting - was paid 120k, house rent paid for and company car, while entry level techs got little over 20k)
2. Outsourcing to cheaper locations eg India, Indonesia, etc
3. Increasing perception after tech bust that IT support is a "low value" function
4. Increased fiscal scrutiny on IT functions after so much money wasted in late 1990s
5. Large pool of available labour - at one point you had Gateway, Dell, Apple, IBM, Compaq all churning out staff. Each had up to 500 techs on the phone and huge turnover rates - so there were technically several thousand on the market looking for (usually) desktop/server or helpdesk style work at any one time. By now there must be tens of thousands of ex-employees of the above on the market - all with similar skills and training.
To make matters worse, most of the above fail to upskill staff to a useful level, so most go out with desktop skills rather than network/server skills which is less in demand.
6. Simplification of the technology - when I was at university in the early 90s IT was mostly based on mainframes so support was very highly skilled requiring some kind of Unix skill - I notice these kind of jobs are still very well paid. The takeover of Windows over the last 6 years has reduced the skill level and so the wages have stagnated to take account of this.
7. Loads of people taking IT courses, especially at certificate level in the 90s, who don't have strong enough skills to do developer or management jobs. All now competing for the same roles!
8. And finally, the people themselves. Have worked in so many places where some cabbage gets a level 2 job despite the fact that his highest achievement was the A+. He is either totally incompetent or lazy, and so you need to hire more to get the work done. Eventually he is filtered out through redundancy or retirement and not replaced. But the management write off the savings rather than redistributing it.
Have seen places where "level 2" style roles dropped from a paycheck of 28k pa to 22k pa and from 32k pa to 26k respectively over a 2 year period without counting for inflation.
9. And lastly, desktop support is the favoured place for ex telephone support people who no longer want the stress of working over the phone! Lucky you!

My suggestions to get around this is to develop the skills below:
1. networking (start with CCNA and work up)
2. Server 2003 (MCP good MCSE better)
3. Security (firewalls, IDS and monitoring good!)
4. Linux/Unix administration

WhiteWashMan

shoegirl wrote:

5. Large pool of available labour - at one point you had Gateway, Dell, Apple, IBM, Compaq all churning out staff. Each had up to 500 techs on the phone and huge turnover rates - so there were technically several thousand on the market looking for (usually) desktop/server or helpdesk style work at any one time. By now there must be tens of thousands of ex-employees of the above on the market - all with similar skills and training.
To make matters worse, most of the above fail to upskill staff to a useful level, so most go out with desktop skills rather than network/server skills which is less in demand.

exactly why i left ireland. i came out of gateway, although i did work i nthe IT dept, not the tech support department, and there was just a huge amount of unemployed techies.
i figured bugger this for a game of soldiers and went to the UK. wages are higher and cost of living is lower. and then i left the techie side to join the dark side of sales.
now i want out of that and im not sure what i want to do.
suggestions welcome

shoegirl

WhiteWashMan wrote:

exactly why i left ireland. i came out of gateway, although i did work i nthe IT dept, not the tech support department, and there was just a huge amount of unemployed techies.
i figured bugger this for a game of soldiers and went to the UK. wages are higher and cost of living is lower. and then i left the techie side to join the dark side of sales.
now i want out of that and im not sure what i want to do.
suggestions welcome

Fair point - also its worth noting that when many of these companies setup a "presence" in Ireland they dumped most of the lower-value, poorly paid jobs here, but left most of the more interesting roles in the UK/US/Europe.

I have often noticed that these companies resolutely refuse to upskill workers and you have to look beyond what they offer in order to gain good enough skills to even upskill enough to move up within the organisation, never mind outside. I do think the IDA should be a lot more proactive in vetting organisations like these in terms of the long term viability of their operations as many seem to have a shelf-life of up to 15 years and as little as 1-2 years. Have lost count of the number of IDA job annoucements that I know of that either never materialised, or many of the jobs disappeared within 2 years.

WhiteWashMan: I would suggest exploring the business side perhaps? Its no coincidence that a large proportion of the better, management jobs in the tech support field are taken up by people with business skills but no IT or tech support backrgound. Same goes even sometimes in industrial jobs.

wandererz

Look, i hate to sound crass but this isn't rocket science (no,far be it, it's computer science )

However, the truth of the matter is that IT jobs are & always have been flaky at best. I remember living in Dallas & when Texas Instruments laid off people it wasn't just a few dozen or a few hundred, it was 2 or 3 thousand at a time.

My goal a few years ago was to become a CCIE. Well, i followed the path but eventually realised that the field was becoming too saturated - in many cases by people who had paper qualifications & no hands on experience. I found myself knowing a heck of a lot more than many CCNP's out there. So i looked at the market & decided to specialise. Thankfully, it was an field i enjoyed - security.

Before this, as well as since then, i also paid for most of my own training. I did not complain when employers refused to send me on a course or two, i simply paid for them for myself - investing in my own future (My bank helped a lot).

So here i am, the qualifications i hold (if i remember them) are CISSP, CCSE, CCSA, CCNA, CCNP, WCSE, NSA. ACSP,CME & a bunch more.

Over the years, i've developed infrastructure for many large organisations, designed the network infrastructure for the LUAS line as well as for the Dept. of the Taoseach and several police forces over in the UK.

My point is this: if you consider yourself to be network/IT/heldesk support person you will get nowhere. This is just a stepping stone. Decide where you want to to be & draw a straight line from there to where you are now. the steps in between are achievable, but sometimes you've got to be forceful, speak your own mind & go get things.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You decide those points. Speacialise in something, anticipate where the market may go in the next few years & position yourself. there are too many "IT" peaople out fighting over 30-45K a year jobs. there are too many recruitment consultants out there who don't have a clue.

make yourself one in a million. It may sound difficult. But when it comes to this - straight lines are what i believe in. See it, do it.

Raekwon

€25k - €27k is pretty bad for a skilled Desktop Support Technician/Engineer, especially considering that the average industrial wage is €32k. But I have to agree with some of the other posters here, outsourcing is probably the main reason for the low wage. But then consider that the likes of Intel, Dell and HP will have *moved to low-cost economies by 2025, it is hardly surprising.

*source

ToxicPaddy

wandererz wrote:

My point is this: if you consider yourself to be network/IT/heldesk support person you will get nowhere. This is just a stepping stone. Decide where you want to to be & draw a straight line from there to where you are now. the steps in between are achievable, but sometimes you've got to be forceful, speak your own mind & go get things.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You decide those points. Speacialise in something, anticipate where the market may go in the next few years & position yourself. there are too many "IT" peaople out fighting over 30-45K a year jobs. there are too many recruitment consultants out there who don't have a clue.

make yourself one in a million. It may sound difficult. But when it comes to this - straight lines are what i believe in. See it, do it.

well said..

I'm in the process of trying to do this myself.. have had a run of bad luck in the last few years, been made redundant 3 times in 6 years, spent a lot of time job hunting and building up skillset etc so I've finally got to a stage where I'm working towards some prof qualifications, making my skillset more valuable and opening more doors to myself opportunity wise..

Im lucky in that I'm on a fairly decent wage so I can afford to pay for the various courses myself if need be and the company is willing to spend on training relevant to my job here.

However if you want to move up the ladder, one thing is definitely try and get experience as well as paper.

Tox

shoegirl

ToxicPaddy wrote:

.. have had a run of bad luck in the last few years, been made redundant 3 times in 6 years, spent a lot of time job hunting and building up skillset etc so I've finally got to a stage where I'm working towards some prof qualifications, making my skillset more valuable and opening more doors to myself opportunity wise..

I don't think thats unusual. I've spent 5.5 of the last 6 years working in 3 companies and again all 3 made at least 25% of the workplace redundant. I think IT companies have heavily cut back in recent years and non-IT companies have outsourced or cutback IT functions.

The problem from friends who have accepted the redundancy is that a lot of recruiters and managers with decision making functions have been protected from this and don't really understand it, and can make very unfair judgements about people who in all honest are just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Having said that I have seen redundancy plans cynically used to "correct" the dire hiring errors of HR and their recruiters - usually at the non-mishired employees expense.

ToxicPaddy

Yeah I've seen this alright, people who are not wanted in the company being made redundant and its an easy way for employers to get rid of what they consider troublesome or unwanted.

Unfortunately, 2 of the companies I was made redundant from actually ceased operations altogether so a lot more than just IT lost their jobs. But as shoegirl said, its happened a lot over the past few years.

One place I worked for actually made half the HR dept redundant which really amazed me.. seems that no one is safe these days.. :rolleyes:

youcancallmeal

I've only been in IT a year now, I'm doing first level tech support which I don't expect to last much longer as once our contract is up I'm certain it’s going to India. Anyway I'm currently studying for the N+ and A+ and planning to do an mcp in server 2003 after them. I'm also in second year of a 3 year part time course in the evening to get a certificate in technology (Programming).

With all the effort I'm putting in this talk seems very depressing from my point of view I would totally agree with specialising in something though, it always made sense to me to do that. Just have to keep an eye on IT winds and try and see which they are blowing

Skud

im in 3rd year comp sci and i have to agree witht he previous poster. It does look gloomy now, even our work placement companies that have come in are very limited (cork). There was no 02, no google (which i'm really surprised at) and no motorola (for obvious reasons). Apparently intel have reduced, somewhat anyways, operations in kildare and that shows in the work experience offers. most of intels are coming from shannon and the research side. Although I have to admit being lucky as I was employed with a non it company to do an IT support role. So some companies are going that way. You just got to be in the right place at the right time i guess. I totally agree with the outsourcing... Although we were told they are expecting a shortfall in programmers by 2010, so may the companies are trying to sort this out by out sourcing...

leeroybrown

Skud wrote:

no google (which i'm really surprised at)

If you reed some of valen's posts in the 'Going for a job in Google?' you'll see that they (1) don't tend to employ interns here in Ireland and (2) that their recruitment model means that they probably wouldn't be happy with the college placement system.