Getting paid to do what you love
During my 8 years in IT I’ve held a variety of different jobs, met lots of cool people, and been paid varying amounts of money in a variety of different ways. My first job was doing PC repair at the tender age of 16 after I got my A+ certification making a cool $9.50 an hour. With my conservative, WASP background I was striving for that full-time, steady gig after college with a salary hoping to work a good 40 hour week and receive a nice 40 hour paycheck and my first job after college looked like it would meet all those expectations. Sometimes…things don’t work out like you’d hope though.
Something they don’t teach you in college (or maybe they did and I just blocked it out) is that IT is so much more than setting up servers, plugging in cables, and typing dramatically and furiously in a command line. Those things are just the “T” part of “IT.” Notice I said “part” and not half because, proportionally, you spend a lot more time on the “I” part. Information is what drives businesses and technology is one method of delivering that to your end-users. Too many people come out of colleges, tech schools, and cert mills with an associates degree or an MCSE thinking they’re going to get a job setting up servers, plugging in cables, and typing dramatically and furiously in a command line. Those people will usually find themselves in an entry-level position at a help desk dealing with not servers and cables but people. I was fortunate enough at my first job out of college to have the best of both worlds, I got to work directly with the servers and work with the end-users. This gave me an appreciation for understanding what exactly an IT person’s role is in a company and quickly threw out any misconceptions I had that I’d be doing cool things like racking servers and building SANs all day.
As part of my dual-role I also got a hard lesson in what being a full-time IT person is like. Things like night work, weekend work, and being on-call had never really occurred to me. I went in knowing it was a possibility but the sheer volume of time spent working outside the office and coming in on weekends was a real eye opener. When my blue-collar friends noticed me seeking out the nearest computer quite often to do some work while hanging out at their houses on weeknights they started asking, “are you getting paid overtime for this?” That always caused me to pause and think, “well no, I’m salaried but this is all extra time in addition to the 8 hours a day I’m spending in the office.” My employer at that time didn’t offer comp days or time off for extra work, it was just expected as part of your job role and they assumed that was covered in the salary they were paying.
It was when my next job came along that would pay hourly instead of salary that I really began evaluating the pros and cons of getting paid hourly. I’d always liked the idea of a consistent, steady paycheck but I hadn’t ever worked a week under 40 hours so I felt it’d be nice to be directly compensated for all those late nights and spoiled weekends. Due to the nature of work in IT, I believe hourly is the best way to get paid for one simple reason, it prevents your employer from taking advantage of your time. I’m not saying that they do this maliciously but, when time spent after hours impacts their bottom line directly, they think before they pick up that phone at 10 o’clock at night to ask why their printer isn’t working. If it’s something that’s urgent they won’t mind picking up the phone and paying you for 30 min. worth of work and you won’t mind the interruption (as much) when you know you’ll be getting a little extra in your next paycheck.
I believe we’ll start seeing more IT employees being paid hourly as IT makes a shift to being a commodity item instead of an asset or a cost center. We’re already beginning to see the shift through things such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and with virtualization we’ll begin to see more and more Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS.) IaaS is essentially hosting but could you adopt a hosting model internally? Bill out server time and resources on an as-needed basis? People as a Service (PaaS) is essentially consulting which has been done for quite some time and that has typically been paid out on an hourly basis. If your IT staff was hourly, would you bill out their time to various business units as they were utilized? As software and hardware move to a service model versus an asset model, the people in an IT department might become less and less important as the number of resources required to keep the systems running will drop dramatically.
Many big businesses have been running IT shops similar to this for some time now but what about small or medium sized businesses? Rather than hiring one or a few “know-it-alls” to run the IT (and putting up with their salary requirements and typically equally large egos) you could bring in IT on an on-demand, as-needed basis just like cable, telephone, or electricity. Competition in this space would keep prices down and place a high emphasis on good customer service and the ability to deploy the right talent to fit the customer’s needs.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Concerns? Is your current job going away? Do you need to take a look at your career path as you see these shifts?
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