Sysadmin at a small company in a LCOL area. BS in Computer Science, working on a Master's in Cybersecurity, to be finished Dec 2027. Started my IT career as a help desk analyst for another company in June 2024. Came to current company February of this year.

I own security, networking, and Entra/Intune/M365. I deployed our SIEM, built two internal web apps, and handle most of our automation. All of that landed on me when the other admin moved to a field role.

I asked for $70k at hire. Got $55k with a verbal "we'll get you there at 6 months." Nothing happened at 6 months. At 8 months I brought it up myself and asked for $80k because of the bigger role, and because another IT employee had just gone from $62k to $100k by claiming an outside offer. He has no formal CS/IT education, and his first IT job was this one, starting in 2024, so we have about the same experience. His role was mostly marketing and web dev, and with the raise he also got a systems architect title.…