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Dude I'm sorry to hear that but its cool that you have an upbeat attitude about it

 

Wait... noooo, I didn't get fired yet. Actually just got a promotion last week. Saying I'm hoping when I do get fired they give me a generous comp package.

 

Oh my bad I misread you lol

 

The I.T. industry is a hard one. This is why I decided to do my own thing. It's hard for me to leave my job, were I'm already making pretty decent money, to start over, with a help desk job.

I operate my little business on the side and, for now; I'm good. I would like to build it more but, there's a lot of competition out there. I often wondered how I'd do on some of these I.t interviews and, how my experience would translate to them.

I got some of my experience by joining a contract company called onforce (it used to be ComputerRepair.com). They find techs for companies and, you bid on the jobs. It's not the best place I'd recommend for companies to find techs because, most of the people are just learning on the job. When I signed up with them, I had no experience outside my home lab and helping friends & relatives with their computers.

I learned a great deal from that experience. When I started out, I was doing these little home wi-fi setup jobs were I only made $55.00 flat ($49.99 after the Onforce took out their fee). I would spend hours cleaning viruses off peoples computers just to allow me to set up their home network. Cleaning the virus's was something I wasn't obligated to do but, I did it just to help out the customer and, learn (which I did).

When I got some of the bigger networking jobs, if I stumbled through something, some of the higher level techs who worked for the company; would walk me through it over the phone. I learned a great deal from that, while still studying at home on my own. It can be rough but, you've got to start somewhere and take chances, it's the only way to get experience.

 

Let me tell you man... before I moved from Chicago to South Florida I was contracting myself out to companies for $75 - $85 /hr, and that was low just to undercut other contractors. It was really simple stuff too.... set up an AD domain, set up Exchange servers, organize file and app servers, install a corporate AV solution. It was usually for small businesses ~20 employees. It was nice having a part time job that paid $1500 + /week. I thought I'd be able to get the same set up here in So Fla, boy was I wrong...

 

I don't get a lot of jobs were they want a AD domain, usually it's already set up by someone else. I really like those type of jobs and it's fun to me, anything dealing with servers is. I don't have a clue about exchange but, think I could figure it out, by what I have seen of it.

That's too bad you couldn't get that going in Florida. In Atlanta it's pretty tough also. I've had a few good jobs but, not like I truly want. I always have to go in after a tech has already set up a network, to try and troubleshoot something that went wrong.

It would be nice, for once; to be able to set the whole thing up from the beginning. It seems like every year, I get a company who calls or emails me, that wants a quote for a network setup and, I always seem to get outbid. I charge $69.00/hr and, some tech's charge more and some charge less.
I guess it's different everywhere you go. I think a lot of it has to do with the economy also. Companies - especially the smaller ones - are trying to save every penny they can.