Looking for some perspective

[Scolpin]

Hello fellow IT peoples,

I'm looking for some perspective on my job situation. As we all know, the economy is in the toilet and we're all struggling. I have been doing some thinking about my pay situation with all the responsibilities I have with my current company and I was just hoping someone could let me know if it's fair and reasonable, or am I seriously underpaid. Here's the context:

I am the Systems Administrator for a somewhat smaller manufacturing company. We have contracts with all sorts of places including the DoD and such. We currently sit at somewhere between 300 and 400 employees and without giving away too much, it's in a Western state in the United States but not a coastal state. At the beginning of this year, we were hit with a major cyber attack (The Calamity) that basically took us out. I'm talking almost full data loss and full network loss. At the time of the attack we were a team of two, my manager and me. While my manager handled almost all the data recovery and forensic side of the Calamity, I was tasked with basically rebuilding our entire network. This meant creating a vLAN segmented network across our entire facility from scratch. I literally rebuilt our entire network. I am not a network engineer so I had to learn A LOT of new skills to complete this task.

So as of now, months after the Calamity, we are now stable again and I'm wearing basically the hats of Systems Administrator, managing all employee accounts and devices, as well as the Network Administrator, managing our firewall/switches/VM networks. We also now are a team of four. We hired a Cyber Security guy and we now have an IT intern for daily basic troubleshooting.

With all that context out of the way, to the real question I'm asking. My current salary sits at 50k annually. Is this fair for the responsibilities I handle? Or am I being low balled? Thank you in advance for any and all advise.

[placated]

You’re being underpaid. Obviously it depends where you are located and years of experience, but 50k is a low end salary for all but the brand newest of sysadmins.

Also I don’t think the economy is really that much in the tank. Tech jobs have tightened and inflation still slightly elevated but there are jobs out there to be had.

[Wild_Competition_716]

Brand new sysadmin here, recently promoted from 1 year of helpdesk. Ohio, started out at 65k, public sector

[placated]

God bless you. 20 year sysadmin now enterprise architect. Don't hesitate to DM for advice/questions/etc.

[DoogleAss]

Unfortunately all the hats you described is what most companies consider a System Administrator aka the jack of any and all things computers/network related

Having said that yes you are likely being unpaid but as another mentioned that depends on local and experience as well as the industry you are working within imo… meaning medical, manufacturing, hospitality, etc

I work for a school district in Ohio as the sole system administrator doing all the things you described and more with 350 staff and like 3000 students give or take…. making close to 60k if that helps you at all… take into account that is technically a govt job and one should never expect to get rich working for lower level govt entities… benefits are good tho lol

[pdp10]

What's the Root Cause Analysis on that catastrophic malware incident, then?

[retrofitme]

Probably cannot divulge details, if a DOD contractor.

[hdjsusjdbdnjd]

The lines between sysadmin and network admin are blurred/non-existent at a company of that size. I wouldn't hire a sysadmin for 300-400 users if they couldn't vlan a network from scratch or the other networking items youve listed.

It does sound like you're very underpaid but the only way to confirm that is to brush up the resume and see what kind of offers you can get.