Hey @nz , sorry I’m not checking in too often. For getting a foothold in the market I wanted to start not too high with my demands (so I thought ) and asked for 1.2 million NTD per year. They said they can do it but they made funny calculations with many months of bonus payment which were of course not guaranteed at all and there was no document detailing out on what the payment of the bonus depends.
I opted for an international assignment instead which is of course much more attractive.
Sorry to jump in, you pretty much work like a SysAdmin, not even close to a Devops or Secops right?
By the description of skills above, the IT department in any company in Taiwan will hire a local with master degree and plus able to speak Chinese and English for around 60K NTD monthly and this person will work without complain for 12H or so.
If you can do DevOps or SecOps you will have higher chance. I personally never saw a foreigner working as IT SysAdmin in any tech company that I know here, however is you can do those 2 above the opportunity is different, if you can do code, better chance.
Your classification as “SysAdmin” is right insofar as I know how to manage and administer SIEM systems and how to prepare data for ingestion / write parsers etc. My scope is however much broader, developing scripts for automation, leading incident response, analysing security incidents, assessing the risk posture of clients, conduct purple teaming, creating security use cases and implementing them etc. So, my role is maybe 5% SysAdmin and my job is actually one of Security Consultant. You are right however that DevSecOps is not part of my job.
The challenge I see in the local job market is not so much that I would be replaceable by a much cheaper local resource, but that the maturity level of local companies is so low when it comes to security that neither the technologies (SIEM), nor the organizational structures (SOC) I focus on are widely in place. Additionally, my work requires a lot of presentations and people management, so not being able to do this in Mandarin is of course also a major drawback.
But as I said, I found an international solution and I’m very happy with it.
incompetency of developers. and of course, move fast and break things culture prevalent in SV these days.
Securing an API these days is literally one of the easiest things one can do. And free to do. Like about a day’s amount of work, but you would be surprised.
) and asked for 1.2 million NTD per year. They said they can do it but they made funny calculations with many months of bonus payment which were of course not guaranteed at all and there was no document detailing out on what the payment of the bonus depends.
