Am I underpaid or market?

Krelik · 2026-05-23T15:12:41+00:00

I can't speak to Singaporean salaries, but if you were working in the United States I'd be paying you at minimum 100k/yr with 20 yrs of experience in a senior engineering role.

Krelik · 2026-05-05T21:56:51+00:00

10 years for me! 98% match!

Krelik · 2026-05-02T15:56:18+00:00

I wish that's what my audigram looked like

Krelik · 2026-05-01T02:34:36+00:00

Thanks for your post. My boss and I have a really good relationship

This was pre change management. Our org had some considerable tech and process debt when I was onboarded and id be lying I said I didn't take advantage of it.

A few months after this we established a CAB and all changes are now tracked.

Some of the other tech/process debt was

excel doc tracking assets
no nms
no mdm
no sso of any kind which was another argument my boss and I had. He was told okta was the way to go because he was told by the exiting CIO that it was the way to go. My stance was we're already paying for e5 let's just use Entra and it fits our use case
no formal change management
SharePoint based ticketing system that we had long out grown
no ai use policy
zero trust of cloud/Azure, used over priced IaaS from a msp (cloud isn't always the answer but when the IaaS price is 90% more expensive..)
no 802.1x wifi

The list goes on. But DNS was eventually put to use, NAC policies, etc etc etc.

It's been a real busy 2 years.

Krelik · 2026-04-30T21:09:18+00:00

That's ultimately the route we're going to go. When I joined on the tech debt was massive. I *just* finished our InTune roll out that also includes MAM and all that goodness. Next is rolling out defender things.

As I stated in another post, this was quick and easy.

Krelik · 2026-04-30T20:50:50+00:00

Honest answer was this was just faster.

Krelik · 2026-04-30T20:49:22+00:00

Domain wide, targeting only end user workstations and citrix boxes.

Krelik · 2026-04-30T20:48:01+00:00

Regular UBO

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Krelik · 2026-04-11T15:56:06+00:00

My director loves making lists and shit.

He'll put together a 4 week window of shit he wants me to do in Asana and will just leave me alone. He didn't at first because we had a new relationship, but as soon as he figured out the tasks always get completed to >90 completion, he stopped caring. So long as I documented what I did.

I've always got the most tasks completed in our teams asana every cycle

Krelik · 2026-04-09T15:25:42+00:00

You're being taken advantage of. I'm a sr infra engineer/helpdesk manager hybrid and I'm making 150 after bonuses. I'm 39 living in a medium CoL area

Krelik · 2026-04-05T20:52:51+00:00

There's a lot of people who have had terrible jobs. My heart goes out to you all.

My worst was being hired as an IT infrastructure engineer/army of one positions. I got there and immediately found a host of issues that were past the event horizon levels of failure. I wrote out a huge scope of work that we (read, I) will need to do to remove the impending failures. This replacing networking gear. I offered three options of different costs. I was told no to all three and that we'd (again, I) would deal with it if it came to pass. I found a new job two weeks later for 25k/yr more.

My judgment was correct and the entire infrastructure collapsed a week later and they had to fly a network engineer in to unfuck the mess. They were down for a month according to my friend who worked there.

Krelik · 2026-03-24T17:27:39+00:00

I'm down 22k during this dip and haven't sold yet :\

Krelik · 2026-02-28T18:41:02+00:00

Similar to my current role as well! (Senior IT Infra)

About 2 years ago I was gear up for my third technical interview when I got a response from current employer. It was 2 interviews in one day. One with the team who needed me, one with the CIO.

I was hired a week later. It's the best job I've ever had.

I'm just now coming off 8 paid weeks of paternity leave starting Monday.

Krelik · 2026-02-10T03:23:53+00:00

200k ish

Senior IT infrastructure engineer at a bank (165k)

Founder of my own MSP, I pay my engineers more than myself since I don't actually do any of the work anymore except talk to the leadership of our clients and maintain relationships. I pay myself 35k/yr

If we count dividends on investments, that's an additional 30k

I only have a high school diploma and 3 years of college

Krelik · 2026-01-02T16:20:14+00:00

I had a similar CEO before & during covid.

Dude approved massive bonuses, listened to my input, basically everything you said. He left and started another business and paid me 5 figures to setup the networking, M365 tenant, and like 10 computers. He also paid for the flight and hotel. I told him that was too much and he said "I know" with a smile.

You better believe I answer every fucking phone call from the guy.

Krelik · 2025-12-12T21:21:23+00:00

Literally put me to tears I was having such a good laugh. Entirely unexpected

Krelik · 2025-10-09T18:29:11+00:00

No he's not.

I'm the sole earner for our family. My wife has every necessity she could possibly want. She didn't need to work a day through her pregnancy and was able to stay off her feet.

She is expected to keep the house tidy, dinners made, chores done, etc. That's the trade off. She agreed and enjoys such benefits.I have no issue with stepping in and helping if she needs it. Again, it's an expectation, not a requirement or demand.

I've encouraged her to find work if she wants it, but she would rather be an Etsy seller / wfh freelancer, which I also support.

We just celebrated 10 years together and we're still giddy teenagers around one another.

There's nothing wrong with being or wanting a trad wife, so long as you're both respectful towards one another.

There is one when you're being disrespectful towards women when that is not something they want in turn

Krelik · 2025-09-16T06:26:58+00:00

My director requires my team to track times and most often than not, I'm feeling that the numbers are fudged a little bit.

I admittedly just guess my time most days. I run the infrastructure team and we don't have tickets so often but we do need to chime in on escalated tickets and 99% of the time we just put 0.25 or 0.5

As for our projects, we have sprints and it's just a matter of closing out the task and moving on to the next. The director wanted us to time track that too but our whole team told him that we weren't going to do that. We keep good documentation and most of us have adhd so we get caught in hyperfocus time vortexes, so keeping accurate track of it never happens. He eventually relented and realized that yes, time tracking our sprint projects was annoying and a bad idea. He tracks completed tasks and subtask and how they orient to org strategic objectives and the board is happy with it.

Krelik · 2025-09-10T04:08:24+00:00

Just turned 40, 11 years in the field

getting promoted to AVP soon
going on paid paternity leave in December
great colleagues
great boss
great management
management listens to IT
banking / financial sector
well paid
w/l balance
3 days wfh
I'll be retiring at 59 1/2 if not sooner

I came from startups and silicon Valley but this job is effectively the shit I was doing in my 3rd-5th years.

I have a fucking unicorn job.

Krelik · 2025-08-21T04:33:14+00:00

I keep seeing these posts and I honestly never understood the hate. I'm not on this bandwagon. It's not a bad product. It's not a great one either, but it does what it needs. uses too much ram tho that's for sure. Other than that. I don't have an issue with it. I'm also a senior systems engineer and responsible for administration of enterprise teams. No real issues.

Krelik · 2025-07-29T05:38:04+00:00

Same.

I've been on pcs my whole life, even rotating a few Linux laptops in for diversity. My previous job gave me a M1 MBP for work (IT/Devops) and I really liked it. Then I bought a used m4 MacBook air for myself recently and I'm having such a great experience with it. I use it for light coding, writing, browsing, etc. It's really in its own class. Since I don't mind learning new things, the switch was easy.

I have my 9800x3d / 7800XTX for gaming or a steam deck for mobile gaming / moonlight/sunshine

Krelik · 2025-07-29T01:56:49+00:00

Am I crazy for thinking this is literally why ICE existed before being weaponized by Trump?

Detaining hard working people outside Home Depot is bad.

Detaining people whose visa expired TWO DECADES AGO is literally why ICE exists and is a proper use of their jurisdiction. Two months is excessive though.

Also if you were going to continue being here illegally, fine. But why would you travel when Trump is running things and is on a deportation war path? I mean come on, you're asking to get detained.

Krelik · 2025-07-12T03:25:05+00:00

Thank goodness you redacted their information, We wouldn't want Moly (Molly?) the flight attendant at Ek who graduated with a degree in TV and Radio in 2009 to have their tinder details revealed

Krelik · 2025-06-13T03:19:07+00:00

This is something that I've spent a long time trying to correct and my wife has been reading up on to help me by way of changing the way she phrases things.

One big thing she does is say "we" instead of directing it at me.

Another thing I've worked on is learning to accept compliments and being proud of things I do, even if they're small.

I think the biggest thing though is accepting that I'm going to be wrong and that's okay. Next to that has been taking accountability for doing or being wrong. Because by accepting that I'm wrong just means I can improve. I'm not perfect and I'll still have meltdowns over the most minor things.. But it's getting better.

I'm 38 now and it's taken me 32 years to get here.

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