u/A_Crafty_Platypus

I'm currently working at an MSP in a lower cost-of-living Midwest area. I’ve been with the company about 2.5 years and started on the Help Desk before quickly being promoted into an onsite "placement engineer" role supporting a ~650 user environment where I've been for the last 2 years. I've been given appreciable increases at each step, but still my current pay is only around $51k.

Current environment is actually pretty broad technically:

-hybrid AD + M365

-Exchange Online

-Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive

-Cisco firewalls + Meraki switching

-AnyConnect VPN + testing Cloudflare WARP

-SAN-backed file servers with DFS namespaces/mapped drives

-Proofpoint, Huntress, Cylance/Aurora, Duo MFA

-branch office support

-onboarding/offboarding

-endpoint support

-general infrastructure troubleshooting

It’s an MSP environment, so the pace is pretty high. Last month I personally closed 195 tickets, including about 62 onboarding/offboarding tickets. Our team handled 378 tickets total for this specific client.

I recently finished my BS in Business Administration and Management and started interviewing for an internal IT role at another company. The salary range they gave me was $72k-$78k.

The interesting part is the environment sounds very different:

-cloud/SaaS heavy

-Google Workspace + Okta

-Apple/Jamf focused

-globally distributed company

-much lower ticket volume

-about 300 Americas users

I have a friend working at the company who was let on that their current tech apparently averages around ~40 tickets/month and 5-10 onboardings/offboardings monthly. My primary concern is that this almost sounds too good to be true compared to MSP life.

Some possible red flags also, like the company was recently acquired, multiple US-based IT people already left, but I don't know why just yet. Their current tech is leaving, and most of the remaining IT org is India-based, which means I’d likely be the primary Americas support person. 

But even with that, the workload numbers sound insanely lower than what I’m used to, while also paying potentially 40-50% more. For people who have moved from MSP to internal IT: Did it actually feel this dramatically different operationally? Or am I missing something obvious here? I feel like regardless, I'd be a fool not to jump for 20K more?

I work at an MSP, started in help desk for the initial 6 months, and was quickly promoted into an on-site support role at one of our larger clients full time where I've been for the last 2 years. In addition to some desk-side support, I primarily deal with:

-AD/Exchange user management

-onboarding/offboarding

-laptop imaging and deployments

-hardware/software/network troubleshooting

-Windows and minor Mac support

-some backup restores with Veeam

-basic firewall/switch and AP replacement work, helping rack Server/SAN hardware and setup connections for network techs to remote into for setup

-admin support in Line-of-Business apps like Salesforce and RingCentral

I also assisted with a Windows 10 to 11 migration project in a ~650 user environment with one other person, and my job title is "Placement Engineer" at this time.

I've been working on my BS in Business Administration and Management, and am set to graduate next week. Once that check box is complete though, I'm kind of at a loss.

What would be my next stepping stone or is it worth continuing to learn and get more experience here? This is my first role, but I'm not sure what level I would say I am, or what would be the next step up to look for. There's a "Primary Engineer" role that is becoming available and is above me, but that reads more like a typical sysadmin position and feels much more infrastructure-operations focused than straight endpoint/user support. Start working on filling in the gaps in my knowledge? I was thinking Network+ to fill my own knowledge gaps, then look into Microsoft certs from there?