re: Hourly vs. Salary - IT Developer

Never started with the help desk. I had a boss that was unequivocally in my corner on the business side of things. I busted my arse day in and day out to do right by her and she did right by me. I didn’t have experience with development work, but she got me in front of the cio and I didn’t even have to interview thanks to her involvement. I would have bombed anyways.

How are you applying for jobs? I put in 100 applications for different jobs but it wasn’t until I decided to talk to a couple of recruiter the interviews started coming. I don’t like talking to recruiters. Can’t give a good reason why, but they seem critical in IT based on my experience.

I’ll be real honest with you, network + and security + don’t give you real world application knowledge. They’re a great baseline for understanding what each component does, but if you don’t have experience with the physical route paths or firewall rules, companies will look for experience or a ccna or ccsp cert above net or sec +.

If you’re interested in the network path, I’d highly encourage you to download gns3 and get an image of a Cisco router and switch then get comfortable setting up local networks through gns3 or some other comparable simulator. I used a VMware sort of application to clone machines and set up local machines on my home computer to start getting computers working and interacting across the virtual environment. It’s a real memory drain using all of that but that’s what I ended up doing while I was trying to get into networking.