I don't think threatening your current employer about how in-disposable you are and how they'll have production outages if you leave shows you're a very good teammate/employee/team player.
If you ever find yourself as a single point of failure at a company, and you feel you're underpaid, screw being a "good team player"
Adopt a "fuck you, pay me" attitude and get what you're worth or get out.
"Good team player" is how companies manipulate you into getting more value out of you than they are paying you for.
Edit: this will not always work. And you might burn bridges. Be warned.
Edit2: Also dont actually say fuck you, that's internal monologue. Stay professional!
Agreed. Life's much too short to get screwed by a job for a long time.
As soon as a certain security clearance gets approved, they're in for one hell of a shock.
Absolutely they should be somewhere they're more valued, but should be patient while they work out how to do that.
How is this any different than the recent uprising of the r/antiwork movement?
I've got one person under me and have done for 3-5 years.
Most have enjoyed working under me (so I understand it), most resignations have been for bigger opportunities / bigger cities / bigger money (1 out of 4, and TBH I missed they wanted more money - this was my fault).
My current "report" seems very happy (though I expect them to leave soon, not for money but they are far more interested in another industry and tech challenges that come with it).
I left my first sysadmin job after about 3 years because the advice I recieved is that if you work solo for too long, you develop your own ways of doing things, become unable to integrate into more mainstream best practices, and become effectively "unhirable". I wonder if that has something to do with your lack of success in the job hunt.
It sounds like maybe there's a lot of 'institutional knowledge' about how that 42U rack and the rest of the network is assembled that only you know. It would be expensive for your employer to replace you, but with an external consultancy that replaces a large fraction of your infrastructure with something they can manage, they could survive if you left.
If you're willing to take the risk and switch careers, it might very well be worth having that sit-down with your employer where you lay out exactly what will happen to their infrastructure when you leave.
Edit: I would reconsider how you wrote your CV.
- It's not a matter of the degree to which you fit some specific title (didn't go to enough board meetings to be the Director of IT, or whatever). It's not percent score match, it's pass/fail. Were you the director of IT, or weren't you?
- Eight years is a lot of problems to solve, and a lot of weird niche technologies to learn just enough about to be dangerous with. Those are specific examples of your ability to be really good at the stuff you've been doing. Mention it. Plus, who knows if someone else is looking for someone with experience with a weird niche technology?
- Given how long you've been doing this job, PHP dev might be too big a leap to make at one go. Might be worth looking for something halfway there, that's still perceived as similar to what you've proven you're good at.