Yeah it's hard to gain the high value skillsets these days, and I think it's one of the reason those of us that have been in it for decades are able to do fine now. I got lucky where early on in my career I got in with a company that was small and had enormous growth over a 10 year span.

I'm similar paid to the person in question and am also an independant contractor. I make similar due to my experience level and rather unique combination of skills so I just cut my hours way back and typically work a few hours a day. So burnout is a non issue. I take no work where I'm on call or "first responder" and I make sure it's always written into the contract that way.

It took 25+ years of busting ass to get here, although I have no regrets, and I recognize I am incredibly lucky to have the circumstances play out this way.

This person got in somewhere good early on and rode that career train. These opportunities rarely exist today unless you arre a charismatic super talented genius.

Not really true. It takes a bit of knowing your worth, advocating for yourself in interviews, and job hopping as needed for pay raises every year or two while continuing to build your skills both on the job and outside of it. IT isn't an industry that lends itself to job stability and high pay if you stay in a role long term, and stagnation can certainly be a factor if you decide to stop learning things.

Also. it's still very possible to get in, but focus these days is DevOps, automation, virtualization, and more recently, AI. You won't make bank in some shitty low tier helpdesk role.

A good start would be certification path to pick up some straightforward "guaranteed to get you work" kind of certs like:

• Linux+
• Network+
• VMware VCP-DCV (and later with experience maybe VCP-CMA)
• Any Redhat cert
• Security+ if you're interested in cybersecurity and/or federal work (USA, not sure about other places)

Alternately, getting a few programming languages under your belt is totally doable for free with Youtube and other online courses and then doing your own projects with public repositories on Github for prospective employers to see. Getting a foot in the door with dev is gonna be very luck of the draw though.

You definitely wont' start out making a wage that high on the Ops side, but finding a foot in the door at between $25 and $30 an hour shouldn't be hard once you get some bare minimum experience under your belt.

College grads may have an easier time, but I wouldn't know, I dropped out and went the certification/experience route some 15+ years ago.

$300/day @ 8 hours = $37.50/hr / $78k/yr $500/day @ 8 hours = $62.50/hr / $130k/yr

Which are imo on the low end of U.S. tech salary. Considering a contractor also has overhead like healthcare, business expenses, any time spent in administration take home would potentially be lower.

The market is softer right now but will probably rebound in a couple years.

I'd say IT sysadmin work sucks unless the company runs proper shit and has a handle on it, which is more than often beyond your influence in the position. A lot of times the company doesn't want to hire enough people, and overworking yourself will never be enough to get everything done. So you spend your days trying to handle the highest impact tasks coming from management and above, constantly being pulled in different directions, and never really feeling like you got anything meaningful accomplished. IT priorities also often conflict with business priorities, and if not handled right you will be caught in the middle of this and all your decisions will be scrutinized by the interested parties.