Thing you gotta realize too, experience is nice but the right kind of experience can boost your salary by a lot.

For example if you're a network admin, and you have a lot of experience with switches and routers and vlans etc that's great. But then, you also have experience in lets say ServerIron - I bet your salary goes up at least 5k to 10k.

Same thing with Linux. Yeah being a Red Hat admin for 10 years is great, but when you get into virtualization (and I don't mean using VMWare), and doing high-availability clustering and using Virtual I/O servers for everything is where the money is at.

All I'm saying is there are different kinds of experience, which relate to different kinds of pay.