Anyone work in helpdesk or have CCNA certs or anything similar?

[jgarza928]

Shed some light on your experiences working in this industry.


Sometimes I feel like I should have completed my CCNA certs right out of high school. My high school gave me CCNA 1 and 2, just needed the other 6. I have a buddy who works at some tech company doing some pretty simple stuff and getting paid good money for it.

[Greyhaven]

IT is a shady business. It all depends on the company and the person above you.

I have several certs and a degree and make a pretty fair amount of money but none of it is worth the stress I go through and the long hours.

Best companies I have worked for were Fortune 5 (they tend to have specialized groups for each technology)

Toughest was Health Care. I had to wear multiple hats and got mediocre pay.

Consulting was fun but the there wasn't a good amount of business.

Best thing I have done was team up with 2 other consultants - I do the leg work to get business and they do the grunt work. I walk away with a finders fee and no stress. So 3 days of work nets me about $1000.00

SO in short - IT sucks but I love it

[StrangeWill]

Two things I've realized about certs/education:

Getting jobs - They help you land them.

Working with people that have them - They're basically a useless indicator of the person actually knowing anything.

Once you have these certs, back up your resume with a lot of field work, application matters a lot (at least to me, and it's been what I typically try to impress upon people hiring me, is actual work derived from your [ongoing] education).


Basically: mandatory to get past HR, useless to impress anyone actually working in the field.



Also I back Greyhaven: Gotta love IT, the hours and the bullshit (lots of bullshit) can be brutal (though I've got it pretty cushy as is, little overtime, side work is easy, got some OSS projects I'm involved in, work only taxes me when they honestly need it and they usually compensate me hours off, which is practically unheard of), however I'd argue I deal with a lot more people based problems due to the "many hats" problem Greyhaven mentioned above.

Consulting was fun but the there wasn't a good amount of business.

Best thing I have done was team up with 2 other consultants - I do the leg work to get business and they do the grunt work. I walk away with a finders fee and no stress. So 3 days of work nets me about $1000.00

Which is funny, I'm the opposite, I hate the leg work to get business, dealing with billing, and all that, let me design and roll implementation. Having a handful of consultants all doing what they like is pretty much heaven if you can cover all the operations required.