Hey Spice heads, after a recent post i noticed about pay grades in IT, I figured I would start a new topic asking you all, how you first got your foot into the door of IT. Now i’ m not talking about when did you first start to take an interest in technology , as I am sure most of us were fascinated with it, way before getting jobs in the field. So my question to you all is, How did you get started? How did that help you? Where did it take you? How have your responsibilities changed since first entering? To start, I guess I will share my experience thus far;
I am 23 (turned in February) years old, living in NYC, in IT for about a year and a half ( about 10 years unofficially ) making towards the upper range of “B”(refer to this post http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/472958-do-you-get-paid-what-you-should-get-paid?source=homepage-feed ) , love coming to work everyday , learn something new everyday, very self paced environment (except when something breaks of course), work for a construction contracting company where the users are generally not very well versed in anything tech. I was lucky enough to know the family that owns the business for most of my life and they knew I was always into technology and going to school for computer science, so when the last IT guy flaked, and I was done with school, they instantly hired me 
, I was rather green for the first few months, learning most things as I went along day by day ( it amazed me how much i thought I knew , but realized how much there was to learn still after starting this job.) I feel I am getting paid “OK” but believe I could be worth more, but then again, I am not complaining considering the wonderful opportunity presented to myself. My day to day tasks , include but are not limited to, general help desk, managing exchange server and AD, managing ERP’s/Accounting software, assisting with AutoCAD, managing Primavera OracleXE and SQL Databases, purchasing IT hardware, servicing printers and plotters ( our office has multiple 20,000$ plotting machines for construction plans, these are quite scary to meddle around with when something goes wrong with them ) , among these responsibilities is going to various job sites that the company is working on and setting up the networks in the trailers, making sure all trailers are equipped with printers and computers, adding my expertise to any other technology related tasks on job sites, and configuring/troubleshooting switches for layered access control CCTV systems for various housing projects in the NYC area. Like i said, I feel I could be paid more, but my main gratitude is all this awesome experience I am getting at such a young age, you cant put a price on that. ;), I plan to use all this experience and my eventual college degree and certs, to land me a great job here in NYC either in IT, programming, or database management, as well as start my own little consulting business and see where I am able to take that. So whats your IT story? How did you get your foot in the door?
