Anyone know of some ridiculously well paying IT jobs?
Kudos if its easily upskillable through Tafe/free courses.
Surely theres some niche programing languages out there people will pay contractors a motza to use.
Best Paying IT Jobs
mavis30551 on 29/07/2022 - 15:53
Last edited 29/07/2022 - 15:58 by 1 other user
Last edited 29/07/2022 - 15:58 by 1 other user
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Or Model 204, used in Centrelink
Or, not legacy, but being good at ServiceNow will pay big bucks as it is so unpleasant and painful
Or Model 204, used in Centrelink
And here I was thinking some councils use really ancient database management systems. Seems the replacement is facing some delays - no surprises there.
They tried SAP but it failed
@Quantumcat: Ah so you're ex-DHS? Same. A few years ago I was working on SAP switch-over, and hadn't heard that it failed, but haven't kept in close contact.
@moar bargains: Yeah I did an IT cadetship there 2014ish, part spent in a team that ran payments simultaneously with SAP and ISIS, to identify the mistakes that SAP made and raise issues with the ABAP people to fix them. They were probably just repeating a rumour they heard themselves that is like Chinese whispers and has changed significantly from the truth (they didn't know any details), so don't go selling your shares in SAP or anything :-p
@Quantumcat: Nice. I left in 2017. Funnily enough my ex-supervisor has kids at the same school as mine, so I bump into him from time to time. I know there were heaps of issues with SAP, but my impression was that they had spent enough money by that point that they were going to fix the issues rather than do something different.
@raiseyoursteaks: Mainframe systems were mostly phased out by the time I left I think and that was >5 years ago. There were only a few niche things still running on ISIS from what I recall.
ServiceNow feels like you could copy it but do a better job in a weekend after youtubing MS Powerapps on a Friday night.
free servicenow Certified System Administrator courses for everyone till August 31 (just sign up and you have 12 months to complete, i think)
https://nowlearning.servicenow.com/lxp?id=learning_path_prev…
but personally i'd go and study basic data engineering - especially if you can pick up a bit of data science / AI / ML along the way there's super demand for it and great pay
Yep, old and hard to find and used by large organisations.
"not-for-profit", "entertainment industry", "COBOL", yep, no serious grasp of reality there. Shows in the salary offer too. Any serious COBOL dev would be looking for $200k+… And the skills you'd need from that person is not only the dev skills but super clear technical writing and documentation skills so that knowledge transfer is guaranteed if they leave and their shoes need to be filled down the track.
exactly, I used to teach Cobol back in the early 90's to business/IT students at Uni as part time income while finishing my degree, I was told at the time it was a dead language with no future. I told my students that there was so much Cobol in mission critical places around the world that if they wanted high paying career for life with relatively low stress take up Cobol. Though not sure how much more life is left in that career line it has to be good for at least another decade or so.
Still as true today as it was back then. A truly disgusting amount of critical infrastructure still relies on graybeard COBOL/Fortran programmers knowing how to maintain code written in the 70s that 'just werks'.
I learnt COBOL through my job. Yeah the contracting rates people seem to ask for do seem quite high. But man so many of the ones we've had over the years have been absolute duds and yes unfortunately they do all seem to fit the stereotype of an old man who finger types at one character every one or two seconds and takes a while to move the mouse across the screen.
Lol, if you paid big bucks by an hour makes sense to be slow!
lol touche!
Australia is seriously lacking people with COBOL as they don’t teach in uni anymore. There are serious money to make if you are experienced in COBOL. Contract rate is about $700 a day.
That's not a lot for a dev…
Even if it’s excluding super?
@Dr-StrangeLove: Day rate is what you get. You need to account for super, sick leave, annual leave, tax, fees etc out of it. If you see a day rate, don't bother adding super on top of it!
good Cobol Developers will not get out of bed for $700 a day.
I wouldnt contract for less than a $1000 a day and i dont even do Cobol, i just do normal modern language. The thing with Cobol is that yes it could be high but there are not as many job. I could contract for similar if not higher than Cobol by just doing python.
@od810: While the jobs are smaller in number they are in high demand and have been for many many years and plentiful enough as so many older Cobol programmers retire or die off. There is a lot of legacy code that needs to be maintained or converted. The few left that I know will all be well above $1500 a day and I suspect $2000+ for some of them.
I can make 700 a day as a run of the mill sys engineer. COBOL dev should be able to make way more than that
Can I ask what a typical work day looks like realistically or at least a range. My current physical labour job is killing me and I think I need to figure out an office job or something less physically demanding before I kill myself in a few years.
@AlienC: I'm an IT systems engineer / infrastructure engineer. My day to day shit can vary wildly and a lot of the time I'm doing stuff will outside what I would consider standard fare
But I generally work on servers, networks and some systems that rub on them.
With changes around cloud and the general move away from on premises stuff, I'm finding it tough to keep up.
I wish I had a physical job :)
@AlienC: After programming for 18 years, my body is killing me too because my body freezes up from sitting too long. Scoliosis, nerve pain from shoulder to wrist, RSI in wrist and elbow, eye issues (I barely blink anymore), shoulder/neck pain… I’m 33, and couldn’t pick up a fork the other day my wrist was so sore.
And yeah I have an ergonomic setup and constantly adjust and take breaks every hour…. I think at this point my body is just a frozen husk.
If you’re otherwise physical and have been doing a physical job forever, maybe you’ll Be ok 😂
@Benno007: I feel that.. Having done a lot of gardening and just basic labour stuff my whole life my body isn't sore per se but it is definitely picky in the way it moves now compared to when I was younger.. I don't get physical fatigue as much at a computer but I do get mentally burnt out quick.
Having said that I am limited now I think for how long I can sit at a computer even though I still try to pull all nighters on games every now and then my body mind and soul does not like it and so I have heavily switched to mobile games in bed to acclimatise myself to the long term effects of er um addictive gaming.
I can quit any time promise I'm not addicted…. Lol /s
No but yeah because I have been doing a cleaning job now for nearly 3 years and it is repetitive my body has certain muscle memories and actions it cannot go without now or let go.
It's not bad it's just there and needs to happen now everyday lol haha.
With COBOL you don’t get high rate at the start. Because it is a simple language so you can really test how much a person know during the interview so you can’t just started of paying high. You do a 3-6 months contract and if you are good then you get higher rate.
$700 a day for contract rates is typical for the average senior software developers.
Specialist languages are going to drive that to over $1.5k easy, particularly if the contract agency is skimming the top as well.
you don’t get 1.5k a day for COBOL writer. It’s a niche market but not that niche. The highest I have seen is 1k although I don’t know that has agent fees included or not.
700 a day is not great in the current IT market esp if you are in sydney or melbourne
But the irony is that learning the actual language of COBOL should be dead easy for an experienced dev - firmly procedure oriented, HEAPS of syntactic sugar (incredibly verbose in fact).
What will take much more time to learn is the totally obsolete environment and DBMS the bloody old thing works with. I used to teach statisticians Fortran in a batch mainframe environment about 30 years ago, and always found that that environment - things like JCL and DB/2 - were far harder to teach (and use) than the programming language itself.
Serious money would mean $1200+ per day.
Surely if people can still code in assembly, you could hire devs & get them to train themselves in COBOL?
In cloud companies we don't expect anyone to know 2/3rds of the tools we use.
700 a day is nothing lol, a good data engineer can get 1200+ a day.
depends on context.
700 a day, where you faff about for about 1 hour and take rest of the 7 hours off would be a good deal.@slowmo: Do these exist? Asking for a tired friend only getting $190 per day for 6 hours of cleaning
@AlienC: i know it used to because it happened for me for a good year or so. i can't "earn more" but I used all the remaining time to do useless things like playing games at home (because i left office early)…. do non-work things.
colleagues complained to my manager, which he told me about it… i just said, i could do their 8 hour job in 1 hour. Does it mean if i stay for 1 full day, you can fire 7 of them and pay me their salary? I don't mind.
there's no further discussions since.
@slowmo: Damn that's gangster.
But it's true from an owner or manager perspective if you can do the task it doesn't matter much about anything else in IT of course.. They just want results.. I wonder on the flip side if they over stayed and was in the office for 12 hours to do an 8 hour job would the manager complain or even keep that person because that is my fear. I like to take my time with complicated things so I don't make a mistake but at least get it right.
@AlienC: it really depends on where you are at.. i am no longer in that role (on my own choice) as it obviously wasn't challenging me enough and i am not about to 'retire' yet… so i moved on to a more senior role with a pay bump before switching companies.
it's all good to "do things right the first time", and that's pretty much my mantra, but once you get to a point you are blazing through your tasks well before your peers can do it.. then you need to 'grow' outside of that role.
my ex-manager was happy to keep me in that role because it's hard to find a replacement and not offer me a promotion but that's another story.end of the day, everyone of us have a fixed time in this world, it's also our choice to determine what's something is worth or not worth spending our time on. i've worked with colleagues who are resigned to taking 15min smoke breaks every hour, but they work from 8am to 9pm.
don't worry to much about others in this context, just focus on your own goal and run your own race.
@slowmo: Personally if I can do the same stuff every day and knock it out quick I would rather that role and good money than working many times harder for just a bit more money.
I guess I have no clue or experience in a desk job so I have nothing to really draw from.
I guess if it does get boring and not challenging that is good grounds to grow or change.
I just don't like getting ahead of myself both physically and mentally because I have done it both and it was not a nice adventure.
I guess the colleagues doing the 8am to 9pm with 15 minute smoke breaks every hour are doing the same amount of work and hours as a normal 9am to 5pm I take it or was I missing something there about overtime or just cheating the system.
Learning a programming language is not easy for everyone.
When I was doing Computer Science, 1/3 of students dropped out and the other 1/3 cannot graduate on time.
Even if you learn the language, not everyone can be good at it.
Just like learning a real language, some people are gifted and able to speak a language quickly and some people can never speak properly in another language.
COBOL might have a small market right now and a niche pay but it won’t last long, the language will be dead one day eventually. Best to learn newer languages.
Similarly, when I did my computer science degree we had something like 400 enrolments in the year I started and something like 50 graduated when I graduated.
And some didn't have the UAI to get into computer science so they tried to get into it through information systems and failed catastrophically.
But still maybe want to try it again because their fall back cleaning job is physically killing them to the point that they are desperate for anything not cleaning lol haha.
For $80-100K to be considered a "motza" - I'm hoping they mean for a ~4 month contract!!
Inflation these days that is not a good income for Sydney to even consider close to "ridiculously well paying". Barely pay the rent + living expenses on a basic level in SydneyUniverse / D3 / Pick (All under Rocket Software) - used by insurance, banking, automotive, police, etc. you name it. way easier than COBOL.
OMG - does Pick still exist? I evaluated it for my employer in the late 80s (for an early PC network) and recommended against it, concluding it had absolutely no future. Seems I was wrong again.
Management makes more than Programming
Programming makes more than Operations
Operations makes more than Helpdesk
Helpdesk makes more than NobodyIn my experience (10 years in IT plus an IT degree) working IT support is the hard way to get to good money, but you do get there. Grinding up the ranks at a Managed Services Provider (MSP) pretty much guarantee's you can walk into a job anywhere if you ever want to move companies. The downside is you have to put up with MSP bullshit.
That is a seriously low paying job for a COBOL dev. Probably trying to use the "Not for profit" as an excuse to not pay properly.
These days, if you are fluent in COBOL, you can earn big consultancy bucks in converting old databases but you would do that as part of your skillset for the occasional request, not something you rely on for income.
Tried googling ?
"nah don't really do computer stuff much n e way wheres the links to free courses that get you best programming/it pay yeah? chop chop"
got my feet up watching youtube with a crowny at moment
Woah haven't had a crowny in yonks. I'll have to keep an eye out
Are the shelves bare at the bottleO or did you get them for free from an after work vendor training?
https://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/dan-murphys-to…
Easily their most believable article ever
crowny
Geeze Louise, what a blast from the past.
I can't really talk though, I'm drinking a Tooheys new I got from the fridge at work, it's disgusting.
Seems like the new normal:
I am so slack that I do not use google and instead prefer to ask a bargain site for non bargain questions.
ridiculously well paying IT jobs + easily upskillable through Tafe/free courses
and pigs fly.
Not with Qantas anymore.
Used to be MCSE but it’s pretty useless now that everyone going to the cloud.
There's cloud equivalent courses now with MD100 and MD101
Cyber security is all the rage now
You don't even have to be good to earn decent money.
Agreed on not having to be good-
Barely a step above script kiddies, most of cyber sec right now. They all run off the shelf tools these days and can't even explain to the product owner why the service has failed pen testing, let alone if it's an actual risk vector or a theoretical.
You don't even have to know how to fix the issue your tool found. Just hand it back to the engineering teams and write a linked in post about how you've saved the company.
But yeah, easy money- downside is you'll have to live with being hated by exactly one mid level dev manager (me).
/Rant
Haha did I write this?!
Many just stare at dashboards all day, play with Rapid7/Forescout and stuff like that. Throw the ISM around like it's the gospel and make life hell for everyone else.
If the org is big enough, they've even got people sitting there just issuing certs outta the CA all day long. Now that would be a brain-dead, cruisy role.
The risk is that it become even more automated and that fewer people are wanted.
It's definitely super hot.
It's modern day snake oil complete with theatre act.
Can't get cyber attack insurance without it so companies are stuck paying for people to destroy their productivity.
If you learn python and some data analysis skills - you can easily make yourself useful in Cyber Security groups as a data 'engineer'.
IT workers are a dime a dozen and Unis/courses/foreign countries churn them out constantly.
Experienced knowledgeable IT workers are a different story and heavily demanded and well paid.
Don't expect to do a basic course and get a high paying job off the bat. You need a decent resume and/or portfolio of work to earn the big bucks.
This 100%! I work in high up management for a software company and I can find as many devs as I need in any field - SQL, React, Python, Java and .Net from any country (South Africa, India, China, Eastern Europe) they won’t be as good as onshore devs but you get what you pay for. But finding onshore devs who are actually really good and have 10 years experience who can manage off shore dev teams is hard to find. My company pays big $$$ for those type of devs. If your thinking of earning $100K + after doing a TAFE course or a bachelors degree with 0 experience it just won’t happen.
On the other hand, at the moment a starting salary for a programmer straight out of university/short courses is decent enough (~70k), and if you play your cards right you can learn an “in demand” language such as React Native, and in 2-3 years you’d be making bank. Seen it many times myself.
Unless you change job constantly and go for higher salary position. No way you get high increment in any company these days.
Yeah you have to jump around but who doesn’t? Median tenure in an agency is around 2 years.
The exception to this is Cyber Security. The market for Cyber Security roles is extremely overheated at the moment. Grads are easily asking for $90-$100 per hour in agency contractor rates. That is with nil work experience. I have seen several average to below average competency grads getting $100+ per hour rates. Just because organisations can't find good Cyber Security talent at the moment. It is a very tough market to be in as an organisation wanting to employ/recruit.
Edit: I should add a word of caution to people thinking they'll just jump into cyber security courses - this bubble will burst and the cycle will come around 180 degrees as it always does. The number of oppertunistic students entering cyber security courses in the last couple of years will lead to oversupply in the market in 2-4 years time. I expect hourly rates to drop 20-30% over the next 2 years.
Learning obscure programming languages takes forever (plus plenty of practice in the real world) to be fluent and eventually the available roles will just shrink to the point where it's pretty much obsolete.
IT Project Management will be better. It'll take a few years too, but the pay is massive and the skills are transferrable. Of course, you can only do it if you've got the right personality for it.
Bit of fallacy imo. It's marketing (like any CV and recruitment process)and corporate stupidity to thinking it's exclusive. When I had to learn it on the job I found it pretty easy to pickup using the programming skills taught at Uni. All the basic concepts like variables, "functions", data types, etc. etc. all still apply. Which clearly most contractors I've had to work with don't have that background cos they struggle to even copy a file in a shell …
But hey that just makes me the fool for not getting into contracting for it.
Being able to learn the functions and data types and then writing simple one line code isn't difficult. Being able to apply that code efficiently in practice is a whole different thing. The latter is almost impossible for some people to get the hang of. That is often what makes the difference between a fresh graduate and an experienced coder. An experienced coder has proved that they can do it.
The most popular programming languages are typically the highest paid, i.e. Java + Javascript/React.
I'd say this is because the $$$ is to be made on new projects contracted out rather than maintenance on old stacks. Also any company with $$$ to burn will spend money re-writing in a more modern stack / adopting all the latest trends, while those short on funds will try to just keep existing stacks in maintenance.
This page reckons that Python still inches out Java though, and based on what I've seen personally in the industry I'm inclined to agree. "Data science" (or the gross facsimile of it that passes for a profession these days) is very much in vogue, and doing data science/stats/numbering/graphing/charting/cleaning/mangling/wrangling/rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty on Java is always just a massive pain compared to e.g. Python and R.
Then again, who the heck knows if those surveys mean anything. This Stack Overflow one reckons that Clojure devs are in high regard, closely followed by F#, Elixir and LISP programmers, which is a whole new level of cope I didn't know was possible.
I'm in the industry and I disagree. The highest paying companies and roles in Sydney at least would be primarily Java/Kotlin/C#/Javascript web dev. I don't know the salaries for data science programming, but with Java/JS skills you can earn ridiculous amounts of money already.
If you are a strong Java/JS developer you can easily land a ~$250k total comp senior role.
You won't be doing any programming at 250k a year, you will be doing a lot of zoom meetings a and a lot of planning, talking and directing. It I'll be very different once you cross the $160k line.
@skillet: that actually sounds ideal, tbh I got sick of coding a long time ago and the higher level stuff is a little more interesting (and the idea of being the buffer/layer in between the non-technical guys who sold some nonsense implementation and the poor technical guys tasked with building it)
A large firm into explosives and fertilizers has a large spend (after flights and hotels) with ebay / Amazon buying parts / spares for obsolete equipment!
Generally you will easily earn more with older languages as getting staff for them is hard so you can command a large premium. E.g Cobol or model 204. While jobs in more popular languages are abundant, the niche ones have higher potential pays as they are essential and hard to come by.
Surely theres some niche programing languages out there people will pay contractors a motza to use.
ADA
Assembler. Go ancient…..
No it isn't ancient. I still do it for hobby, it's pretty efficient if you have limited resources for eg 8bit microcontrollers. It's just hard to get around it and many people just quit before they could even blink a LED hence the explosion of Arduino and micropython.
Many IT jobs pay well… But it's rare to be able to get one of those straight out of tafe or uni. Maybe a few years after establishing yourself and getting the knowledge and experience
A lot of ppl have mentioned programming. Another avenue you can explore is IT sales. But again, you'll need to work your way up to the high paying roles.
COBOL is the traditional example, and actually found one in Sydney (that pay is on the lower side for such a niche tech skillset, but it looks like there's still COBOL jobs around even here in Australia).
Honestly, most programming work commands a reasonably high salary pretty much everywhere if you're good at it. Even Python devs are making bank.