Considering that the forum consensus now is $100k is not considered rich, what jobs pay more than $200k a year?
Interested to hear from people who earn this and how they got there.
What Jobs Pay $200k a Year?
pollambo on 06/02/2021 - 15:01
Last edited 06/02/2021 - 15:08 by 1 other user
Last edited 06/02/2021 - 15:08 by 1 other user
Comments
Bank Robbers
Pay is high but stressful job
Bikies
Lots of senior office jobs in IT, Finance etc.
yea?… our whole IT Team of 1 looking after few hundred people in 4 states, and finance team of 12 collective at our shithole wouldnt pay 200k all up.
Time to get out of that shithole
oof, thats not great.
You wont make that as a tech. I'm a senior systems engineer for ~2000 systems across the country and pull 100k after being there a year. My networks person in a role like mine would be on 110-120, IT manager would be making 150 at a guess. But you dont start pulling 200k in big companies until you hit C suite.
You must have a small sample size then. If you go into presales with a tech vendor, 200k base as a starting point is normal for a seasoned engineer.
@TheBooleanOne: See my below comment, I also say that working MSP consulting gets big bucks too. Pre-sales is definitely in the consulting world in my opinion.
I worked as a sysadmin for an aussie msp company linux/aix boxes mostly, roughly 2000 systems!
wonder if it was the same place, walked after my 2nd year when they gave me a 1.7% payrise.
if you are good, just go to a bank or better yet straight to cloud you will double your salary, but the grind is real.
@pikespeak77: What's the workload like for a sysadmin that pulls 200k a year? Is it full on or do you get paid to idle and wait for something to happen?
@Homr: ahhhhh i didn't crack the 200k until i moved bawls deep into cloud… hell I didn't even crack 80k including bonus.
i was pulling low numbers like @intoxicoligist then got a job at a cloud (not an msp) at about as low down the food chain as you can get. but pulled in a 25% hike over my sysadmin job@pikespeak77: ahh ok cool, so what's the workload like for a sysadmin that pulls 200k a year? Is it full on or do you get paid to idle and wait for something to happen?
I.T. is good way to do it, you really don't have to be that senior at all..
Its also not super hard TBH, but its a huge pain in the ass and may just crush you. (look up "amazon desk cry" its not a joke, burnout is real )At AWS/GCP/Azure (corp not subcontractor) a tech role anything above a grad is paying 120k (base + RSU) 200k+ is doable in 3+ years of work there.
Source:
- Personally worked in IT 10-15 years
- Currently a Cloud architect for one of the big 3.
How I got there,
- Public Highschool,
- a TAFE diploma in windows server 2003 admin,
- hand full of vendor cloud certificates (thanks ACloudGuru)
- and a lot of grin fuking the sht out of many turd sandwiches (7 years of).
Tips:
- Get good at talking. Read books about it.
- Apply for jobs you cant do, panic study. “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”
- Learn to be a consultant. package info in ways management wants it.
- CHANGE TEAMS for the love of all things cloud change teams every 2years, never stop moving, this is key as you pick up pay rises along the way.
I'm 8 years full time in doing Sysadmin after grinding up helpdesk with an IT degree. Changing jobs every few years gives you a shitload of pay bumps (I went from 55k > 75k > 100k over the course of 4 years).
The big money is in consulting in MSP's doing cloud stuff or working directly for cloud companies (as you seem to do).
The burnout is real though. You have to be able to cope with a lot of info streams all at once.
Nice work on the jumps!
I was working for one of the big boi's but the burnout got me pretty hard with the 2020 long hours and I have just left.
If you are looking for an in to one of the large ones happy to put you in touch,@pikespeak77: Na I'm psyched with my current gig. Literally 5 mins from my place, I go home for lunch, and my boss is a guy I worked with in my first IT job. Theres yearly pay increases to go with cost of living and its a pretty chill setup overall. I'll probably get bored in another 2-3 years and get itchy feet, but we'll see it goes.
My next dream move after this is going to be to try and get a 100% remote job I can work while travelling the world. But I want/need more Devops skills for that.
Out of interest what roles are around at the higher end?
@Intoxicoligist: mate! thats awesome you are psiched! honestly having a good boss is key!
happy for you dude :)
I had a hard dose of the reality bullet with the digital nomad, tax situation sucks, everything else is great but TLDR: if you are an aussie, you are a tax resident unless you prove otherwise.
how do you get to burn out stage? is it doing 60-80hr weeks?
@Homr: Depends on the position. A lot of IT burnout comes from oncall where you have to constantly have your head in the game even after you knock off. Other than that the inability to switch off after hours does it too. I have colleagues who will check stuff from home after dinner, do some work before bed, or log in early before commuting in to get a jump on the day. And that's without mentioning the constant stream of emails you're expected to read, digest, and answer in some amount of time that you don't have because you're constantly in meetings that should have been emails.
@Intoxicoligist: Interesting, I do a bit of work before I go to bed aswell (30mins to 1 hour) which helps me alot for the following day and I'm not experiencing any burn out issues….yet.
@Homr: Definitely depends on how you handle it. If you're doing it to get your ducks in a line and don't feel like its necessary but you do it because you want to, then you're probably good. If you feel you need to do it or you won't be able to do your job the next day that's a bad thing and will probably lead to burn out.
Also beware the slow burn, it can creep up on you and one day you get hit in the face with a "what the (profanity) am I doing" realisation. Having a good way to blow off steam helps with that though.
@Homr: For me it's not necessary the hours. I've had 8-10 hour days where I'm so drained it feels dangerous driving home.
Weekends where all you do is recover from the week and prepare for the next.I just took a role paying less for a better work / life balance. For me there's no point earning that much money if you have no energy to enjoy it.
@deleted: 100% this. If you're not living in your off time then its not worth all the money in the world
@Intoxicoligist: yeah for 3 years, my job was 99% travel. and I mean 300+ nights in hotels a year. a pretty hollow existence.
I would spend christmas with my family and that was about it.Platinum on a couple of airline programs, more points than is feasibly useful
the receptionists at my favourite airline lounge would ask if I wanted "the usual?" being a glass of wine, some chocolate, towel and a toothbrush to freshen up. it got to the point that I would text them when i was coming up through security and it would be waiting for me.
Well done, that was my plan, but in 6 years got stuck at $84K base.
This guy is 100% spot on.
mostly about the sandwiches yeah? hahah
So you got there with no programming background?
What does your current role involve?
@kiitos, I can debug the hell out bash/powershell, but you are 100% correct I cant program my way out of a wet paper bag.
I have always been HYPER blunt about this in interviews.not surprising I have been knocked back a few times in the earlier years, but if you say.
"I cant program to save my life, but what i can do is draw a map of the internet and explain it to you."
Or "i know a hell of a lot about, blah, Programming isn't my area, but I'm sure you have a lot of other qualified programmers"@pikespeak77: oh right! current role,
I just left my job as an architect for a big boy company, the burnout got me pretty bad.
I have just picked up a gig at a startup doing "architecty stuff" (waves hands) pretty excited about being back on the tools now@pikespeak77: Nice, I thought I was the only one that can't program for shit even if my life depends on it but no probs debugging PS.
@mini2: I can't code to save my life. This year I had to take on the maintenance of all our powershell scripts and automation…. (profanity) me. I'm getting there but thank (profanity) its powershell and not a real coding language. I'd be screwwwwwed.
@Intoxicoligist: You say ps isnt real coding.. but idk man I have seen huge HUGE companys glued together with bash/PS, thats pretty real to me.
Just start trying to iterate on them, adding features, a switch, a delay, something keep your brain active :D
@pikespeak77: I realised how far I'd come when yesterday I wrote a PS to check OU's for users with users with empty email attributes, and replace them with the UPN. Something that would have been unfathomable to me a year ago but I was able to throw together fairly quickly now I've had some experience.
I've mostly been going over the existing scripts we have and modifying them when they break. The next big one is reworking our student account modification script because MS decided to change how to connect to MSOnline… Yay.
As for PS holding things together, in the admin world that and bash are 100% prod allstars. But in Dev land its a totally different story. I can semi read code (thanks to a python uni course 10+ years ago) but some of the stuff that goes on that I see friends write is truly next level.
Fake it until you make it
This! but be honest about your flaws and offer to work on them… on company time of course!
You get find out pretty quickly.
What's some good books on talking you can recommend ?
My mentor put it to me as, Read enough books so you are not under the delusion that you are any good yet.
Three that have helped me:
How to win friends and influence people.
The Trusted Advisor.
The Phoenix Project.and read any book about management, 99% of them are the same stuff re-packaged.
Hi Mate,
This is really helpful. I have done Masters in IT(Network Systems) and I am working in IT Support role for some years. I have recently completed Az-900, AZ-303 certification and preparing for AZ-500. Any tips to get into Azure jobs without work experience?
OOOOF mate you are way way more educated than I have ever been,
The azure certs are pretty dope, but they wont get you in very far past the door, its gonna be culture and how willing you are to grin f*cuk the sandwiches as per above.Find some grumpy old person you kinda know in your network to look over your CV and then canvas LinkedIn asking people to be your mentor, its corny as, but it will work a lot, read the books i mentioned in one of the other comments, and practice the hell out of interviews,
if you get super stuck my DMs are open, or if there not … comment and tell me they aint open!
@pikespeak77: I just got an AZ900 (meh) and a 101 (far more interesting). Hopefully I'll get to the rest eventually.
I know a few places in Brisbane who will take on a junior DevOps person just because they can't hire a ready made one at the moment. But with those certs I'd be looking for a MSP to grind out a few years with (datacom, dimension data, Data 3, or whoever is at the top of the ARN50 list at the moment) so you can get the experience to go with the certs.
A few years of MSP grinding you'll be a level 3 cloud engineer with certs, doing a mix of project and BAU, and looking to do more certs/work to get into the architecting roles.
Disclaimer: Grinding MSP's sucks and may not be for you. Also feel free to chop and change every few years because the will treat you like you're disposable and jumping ship will land you a pay raise (along with the same level of disposability, but thats just how most MSP's work)
@Intoxicoligist: ahhh! BNE! one of my favourites,
You are correct, griding at MSP's does suck.. but stay away from demented data, every single manager I have ever met from there would sell their own grandma for a .001 reduction in SLA.
See if you can hit up some of the more boutique cloud consultancies, pay is way better than the old school companies and you will work on LOTS more things. and the culture is less… horrific. you have some good outposts from companies up there!These days if I see a candidate with more than 5 or so certs, I get hyper sus and will crack out the really hard questions (tell me how computer hardware keeps and calculates time. in detail…) The last thing you want to do is hire someone who can only rope learn. Certs are very good … but don't see them as a shining bullet.
I once had a candidate bring in a raspberry pi with some home made accessories into an interview, he had half the years of experience 'required' on the role. I hired him!, that same day I would have interviewed untold amounts of people with certs.
@pikespeak77: Well you see it hits an NTP server and asks it for its time, and then syncs with it… ;)
I've never had many certs but DDLS did a deal for unlimited training for 3 months so I signed up to get as many as possible in a short time. MS900, AZ900, MD100, AZ104 and hopefully MD101 if I can get off my ass and do the exam prep for it. I'm mostly doing it to get across as much as possible in a short time because I feel like I got thrown in the deep end in my current role. But after doing the courses I'm more like oh, I knew most of that stuff, its not so hard after all.
SDE4s at the big tech companies (Amazon, Google etc) pay in the region of $190k without too much fuss. Their first offer for a co-worker a few years back - excluding relocation costs - was $176k.
Yup, and they normally leave 10-20% on the table for you to negotiate, back in the day amzn would make it rain RSU's if you asked
I made 55k in a full time grad position at Google Sydney in 2013. Its really only the rockstar coders or management who get offers like that.
What WFH Pay $200k a Year?
……….
Your own successful business.
Selling literally anything on AMZ.
I knew a couple of A380 Captain that was on 350k+ a year. "Was" is the key word.
"COVID' changes everything…"
Oh, Canada's (current) Finance Minister
Chrytia Freeland gave a 15-min TED talk,
(on surging Income-Inequality in years):"The Rise of the New global Super-Rich:"
https://www.ted.com/talks/chrystia_freeland_the_rise_of_the_…
Media folks in Canada are wondering
IF she's going to go after the Top 0.1%
and / or Top 1% for more Taxes.If she does, maybe she'll drop Middle-
Class workers' taxes for those at ~$200K…?Did he crash a plane?
Covid crash the industry
There is a huge difference between earning a high income and being rich.
I know people on $125,000 a year but they spend as much as, if it more than, they earn. They are in debt all over the place.
I know others who earn $75,000 that own their own home, have an investment property, a share portfolio etc and don’t owe a single cent.
Everyone’s perspective of ‘rich’ is also different. I would rather be rich in health (physical and mental) than wealth.Yep. People who keeps on trying to make more so they can spend more.
Best thing you can do in life is to manage your money properly and find a partner that shares the same.
How many ex footballers go broke and have their pretty partners leave them.
I am twenty years+ from retirement age but I am looking at the likely income and living at that level now. Not having to deal with a sudden drop and struggling.
I know others who earn $75,000 that own their own home, have an investment property
That have either had help or are in their 50s.
While those 125k people probably aren't out of their 30s and have no help.
It often isn't a perspective thing, it can often be where your family wealth is. You don't have to earn more than 75k if you either bought a house 20-30 years ago or have had the family help you out with deposits/funds/guarantor whenever you've needed to do something big financially. A lot of people in this position will not tell you how much help they have had.
An acquaintance of mine for many years started his own business then quickly acquired a pretty nice property within 2 years, I asked him how he did that because before he started his business he was on newstart, living in share houses etc. He just told me he saved up his cash and "worked hard" and his business was doing well and that "that was all there was too it." Many years later it came out that his dad bank rolled his business and helped him when cash got tight, and the house? given a 20% deposit and guarantor from his parents. That is just one example, seen many others in my life have average jobs, acquire assets, keep quiet about it, but their lifestyle is funding by the bank of mum and dad.
Late 30s for both.
The person earning $75,000 bought their first house approx twenty years ago with no help from anyone else besides their partner, they both at the time would have been earning less than $40,000 each.bought their first house approx twenty years ago
My theory checks out! ;)
i bought my first home 3 years ago for $240,000 earning $750 a week at woolworths… so all these naysayers probably just live in melbourne or some other goddawful city with high housing prices.
so all these naysayers probably just live in melbourne or some other goddawful city with high housing prices.
Some people just want better I guess.
This is so true. I'm in mining and I regularly hear people say they can't survive on less than 120k without going into debt.
Sad part is we have rent covered and live rural so expenses are minimal. Even sadder still is they never have anything cool to show for the spending, it just gets wasted.YOU CANNOT SPEND MONEY IN THE GRAVE
Saving is nice and all, but realize that money is worth much less when you are old.
Dont get me wrong, I drive a car worth less than 10k (because im not interested in cars), but will splurge on a gaming desktop, high end studio monitor speakers and holidays…
It's all about perspective.
I would rather enjoy my life while im young, than have lots of money taken to the grave.
Software dev easily nets you $750/day contracts which is about $200k/year.
As soon as you pick up secondary contracts or do adhoc consulting on the side you're looking at an additional $50k for those extra 5-6 hours/week.
Your maths is off. 750 per day is 150k
750 per day is 150k
For 200 days work. They might work more in the year.
Thanks for letting me know. I'll let my clients know I've been overcharging them and transfer them back lol.
Yeah about right if you factor in 4 weeks leave.
Principal Engineers/Project Managers here earn $200k+. Most of the expats that come over to work on infrastructure, railways, roads, buildings etc are all earning that much easily.
Look at some of those high end business directors, MD's GM's etc on many millions.. they have 200k in the glovebox….
100k is a gross salary isnt anything too flash these days - it is really 76k after tax
100k net salary is decent i would say that is a gross salary of ~135k
100K (gross) + 9.5k super + 4 weeks Annual Leave + 12-13 Public holidays we get every year off - this isnt too bad esp if only doing 38-40 hours a week
Salary is the most important (IMO) but there are a few other perks that make jobs worth doing - I know a fair number of small business owners making over 200k some a lot more but they work at least +55 hours a week sometimes 7 days a week and are on call all the time. It depends on the life style you want to live
Theoretically if you were happy to work 80 hours a week you could make 200k just being a cleaner or supermarket worker
Anything less than a million per year after tax is a pauper's salary. Can't even buy one Sydney beachfront investment property per year for less than that.
TO anyone earning that much money good luck to you and in all honesty why would you want to live in Sydney?
Fair enough a nice apartment to stay now but to live there forever…meh
Might not be your jam, but the houses wouldn't be so damn expensive if people didn't want to live there.
@whooah1979: Ok? And the grass grows. Doesn't change the fact that the house prices in Sydney are generally so much higher than other parts of the country.
@Gnosh: The real estate prices in the major cities are higher than in other areas because they have a higher concentration of cheap money. The supply of cheap money has a direct correlation to the prices of capital growth assets.
Sydney RE prices
https://nimb.ws/fhbVnzCheap money supply
https://nimb.ws/3VEH4g@whooah1979: What you've shown is a factor, you haven't proven that cheap $ is the reason why Sydney real estate is expensive.
@Gnosh: That factor is also pretty irrelevant as it drives up house prices everywhere, arguably less so percentage wise in Sydney because of already high prices.
Real estate isn't expensive. It's cash that is cheap
lol cash has been expensive in the past and now it is cheap. That hasn't stopped Australian property prices continually growing over the last 70 years.
@Gnosh: If you have millions and millions Sydney wouldnt be you main place to live - when you are that rich you can live anywhere in the world.
Madrid, New York etc - if you like cities
Greek/Croatia/Italy/Maldives on the coast or islands if you like the beach or even (sunshine coast QLD)
Canada/NZ/Switzerland if you like snowboarding/skiing
The world is a hell of a lot bigger then Australia we have a beautiful country and a fantastic fairly equitable quality of life but when you sitting a couple 100m there is better out there - if anything just for tax purposes you wouldnt live here.
We probably have one of the worst tax system
@Trying2SaveABuck: I think that's very much your opinion and perspective. Generalisations like this won't explain why people from the top 10% continue to buy and live in Sydney.
I do agree with you for the most part, I would personally live overseas with that kind of cash.
@Trying2SaveABuck: Well you shouldn't say "If you have millions and millions Sydney wouldnt be you main place to live". Simply not true, just because it isn't your thing.
@Trying2SaveABuck: Of course a guy who doesn't know the difference between then and than gives an answer like this. You have no idea about the real world at all.
@Trying2SaveABuck: Plenty of other places have higher taxes but that normally equates to higher prosperity.
Taxes in the US are lower but most places are shite.
80 hours at a week at a supermarket wouldn't even bank you 100k.
The base salary for an Australian politician was increased to $211,250 per annum on 1 July 2019.
Including or excluding the money they make from corruption?
It is only
corruptiondonation money.From prince Siberia?
Ahem. Not corruption. It’s lobbying fees
Yes, of course, it is above board.
@Rescue 26: "QUEENSLANDER !!"