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IT field, jack of all trades, or specialized

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sdweim85:
In the Information Technology field what are you better off being.  Someone who knows a moderate amount of information on just about everything, or know everything about a single thing.

stu33:
As a software engineer that was a hardware tech in a previous life, you need to be a little bit of both.  You can't really just say "IT Field".  There's too many subheadings there.  In my experience, pick the one that you want (for me it was application software) and learn as much as you can inside of there.

sdweim85:
Sorry I didn't mean like one specific program, I meant like a branch.  Like either programming or networking, but not both.

JMB:
What sort of company would you like to work for? I have been in the field for 17 years now and the last 9 of those have been with a smaller company. We have grown from under 100 employees to about 150 now. Being a smaller company I do it all on a daily basis and I enjoy it.  An extremely narrow focus job would bore me to tears.  It is a field that you have to be constantly willing to do work to stay current with technology. Figure out what interests you the most and what sort of work environment you would like and go from there.

sdweim85:

--- Quote from: JMB on April 02, 2013, 02:01:24 pm ---What sort of company would you like to work for? I have been in the field for 17 years now and the last 9 of those have been with a smaller company. We have grown from under 100 employees to about 150 now. Being a smaller company I do it all on a daily basis and I enjoy it.  An extremely narrow focus job would bore me to tears.  It is a field that you have to be constantly willing to do work to stay current with technology. Figure out what interests you the most and what sort of work environment you would like and go from there.

--- End quote ---

I'm currently the only System Administrator at a small company of about 20 people with 10 servers.  I monitor the network, setup VPNS for clients when needed, set  UTM web filter restrictions, monitor the camera systems, clean  up  the virus report logs that say it couldn't clean some things, update the PCs, troubleshoot them, change hardware, update software, make barebones websites for clients also, decommission old servers, add and delete FTP users, setup server 2003, and 2008 r2, setup Virtual machines with Hyper-v, dragged CAT6 cable through walls and the ceiling that I made myself, setup a SQL inventory database, started a backup server, and I repair and service the machines the employees use for production. 

I basically do anything and everything technical since it's only me.  The job is very flexible and since we are still small whenever I suggest anything new (recently it was sharepoint) management is totally on board so I get to learn new things pretty much every week.  I get to show up late with no complaints, and wear whatever I want.  Pay is kinda low, I only make 40k, but I only have an associates so I can't complain.

I posed this question in the first place because even though I do all that, I feel like I still don't know everything well enough to be confident or comfortable where I am, and if I ever plan on to move onto something bigger it doesn't feel like my knowledge will be enough.  From what I've seen in job descriptions they are pretty outrageous, and from some people on reddit it seems like when you go to a larger company you are part of a team.  So you might just be given a single role to do.

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