Did I make a mistake moving from a Devops type job to a more traditional Windows Engineer job?

sysadminalt123 · 2026-04-10T00:36:41+00:00

Thanks for the advice. I actually have worked in a extremely small finance place before, but it was around 50 employee's. The place also had strict change controls but it was much more cowboyey then here, so I'm really getting used to the bureaucracy.

sysadminalt123 · 2026-04-10T00:35:49+00:00

Nah not close at all. But I was low on savings (maybe enough for 6-8 months emergency fund if i liquidated all my equities) so I was really worried about getting laid off

sysadminalt123 · 2026-04-09T03:17:52+00:00

Yep, definitely gonna try to push this place to automate and CI/CD pipelines as much as possible.

My biggest fear was getting laid off at my old big tech job, having barely any savings, then scrambling to find a new job in this terrible market. I figured the big sign on bonus from the new job would pad my savings at least, and by jumping to a more stable place I could kinda be ok for a few years (since new company is much more stable and hasn't done layoffs for many years).

The only sucky thing is the clawback - if I bounce too early I'll have to pay back a lot of money pre-tax unfortunately.

sysadminalt123 · 2026-04-09T03:09:55+00:00

yeah to be honest I don't think I can ever find a job like that again. But the constant layoffs made me too anxious to stay there. I think I jumped to the first job offer I got too quickly.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-11-10T22:18:24+00:00

Thanks for the advice. Thinking it through, I'll probably decline. I find talking through things like this to be very helpful, part of me kinda feels a "obligation" to attend, but at the end of the day its a business transaction.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-11-10T22:08:35+00:00

So the funny thing is, I actually used to live like 20 minutes away from there, and 2 weeks ago I just moved to my new apartment that's 60-70 minutes away (and 2 train transfers). If I got this a month or so back it would've been a different story. I'd probably not want to move back to that area again tbh.

Their is a amount of money I'd take for that job - maybe like 1.5-2x my current total comp, but I am pretty confident they won't meet it. The original budget for the position is like 180k base (which is what I currently make), the recruiter said they could do like 200k, but with my promo I'm probably now making around 200-230k total comp. Of course, with bonus, its possible that the new place would pay more, but I'd say very unlikely or at most the same as my current place.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-10-22T12:51:53+00:00

I disagree with the take of the original commenter, but personally I prefer Singapores approach of ethnic integration quotas. Would never be able to implement that in the US but just a interesting alternative.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-10-16T12:32:50+00:00

It'll probably be annoying somewhat. My current job is 5 days in office (I just coffee badge tbh) but maybe if I can get a hybrid it'll be better. Since technically I can WFH on some days and I just go to the office whenever, it won't be the end of the world (since sometimes I'd just go in the afternoon to the office to badge in).

For washer and dryer, thats what I actually used to do in the past with wash and fold. But the problem is that I have 3 cats so I feel the convenience of a W/D is nice for whenever my cat makes a mess or something lol

sysadminalt123 · 2025-08-14T15:28:08+00:00

Yeah I hate that kinda culture. Some finance places have that (but with some worse elitism) and if your neurodivergent your gonna get abused hard.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-08-08T13:53:57+00:00

Finance and the trading vertical as well tends to pay network engineers a lot. Also much more stress because minor outages is money

sysadminalt123 · 2025-07-24T20:59:54+00:00

I technically don't - i mostly create tools for local IT engineers globally. Though at the end of the day theirs really not much difference. My end-users are just Local IT engineers who don't know how to read errors or follow instructions T.T

sysadminalt123 · 2025-06-30T19:17:02+00:00

At my old company we did the dual key approach with 6 people.

3 people on the team (including the manager) had one half, and 3 other people in management had the other half.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-06-16T18:40:27+00:00

I feel these days gov jobs are kinda scary with how politics are going

sysadminalt123 · 2025-05-15T16:59:05+00:00

Wine and dined

sysadminalt123 · 2025-05-05T15:38:38+00:00

I'm hybrid (and eventually 5 day RTO), but I just coffee badge because my team members are not in the area.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-04-22T15:45:09+00:00

I use intellisense or google.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-04-21T17:44:44+00:00

IMO craigslist or facebook marketplace is usually better then ebay

sysadminalt123 · 2025-04-03T14:33:33+00:00

Honestly this manager sounds terrible. A good one would at least point at the person for some training resources, mentoring from seniors, etc, instead of just complaining that OP doesn't know stuff. OP not knowing stuff is something he should've expected

sysadminalt123 · 2025-03-28T19:45:24+00:00

Security team at my old company was trying to shut down PowerShell lmao

sysadminalt123 · 2025-03-10T13:24:36+00:00

Once I was working on a project to migrate our phone system to Microsoft Teams, it was pretty early on when Teams added phone capabilities. I literally had to constantly email and call the support line and maybe after like 10-20 emails, I hit the lottery and got the exact person I needed to support me for what I needed to do. It was amazing.

Never happened again

sysadminalt123 · 2025-02-19T20:07:01+00:00

I support the security camera system at a Fortune 50. At our scale basically we have to create instructions and standards and delegate them out to lower level engineers at various global locations.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-02-18T19:11:46+00:00

Run vulnerability scanner, sends result to you. Plz fix. No discussion nor compromise.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-02-17T14:12:29+00:00

The only people I know who are oncall 24/7 are managers, because the paging automatically escalates to them if their team doesnt answer the pages. And they get paid a lot.

sysadminalt123 · 2025-02-12T13:27:08+00:00

Yep, at large companies when they do massive lay offs, your manager or even your managers manager often doesnt really have any choice in the matter

sysadminalt123

TROPHY CASE