Currently I am a Network Administrator, Software Analyst, QA Lead and Web developer but I only get paid 25% the salary for each job ...
Sounds pretty much like my job. I've never bothered with business cards because the only thing I can think to put on them would be "Hacker" but that doesn't portray the level of professionalism we strive for
I actually studied commercial photography in college but with a specialization (it's almost like a mini-second-major that's required in the visual communication program I was in) in networking - but due to changes in administration at the school I never got to take even one networking course (head of viscom who was super supportive of my plans retired my sophomore year and his replacement felt my plans were ridiculous.) Due to a motorcycle accident my Junior year I wound up spending 6 years in college and leaving fed up and with no degree. When I started they were teaching "Multimedia" as how to hook up 4 slide projectors timed to a soundtrack...and if you got really fancy maybe add a filmstrip in as well. I was already building websites at the time ('93) since I had a high school friend who graduated a year before me and wound up at UIUC where he lucked into becoming friends with Marc Andressen - so I was getting pre-release builds of what would later become netscape/mozilla before anyone knew this whole web thing was coming. My freshman year I actually had the first web page at the entire college when they got their first web server up and going. Yet by my junior year they were finally starting to teach modern multimedia (Interactive CD's build with director) but their idea of web design was to just build something pretty in photoshop and smack an imagemap on top of it. I was already building full interactive sites with perl backends connecting to databases so I wasn't very impressed. I did take the director class and that's a whole post in itself about how backwards they were teaching that tech.
Before college I worked part time during school and then full time on breaks at a one hour photo place which also had a studio for portraiture. I stuck with that for a few breaks in college as well but had also been working with a large company on getting them on-line (UUCP on a timer back them) with e-mail and convinced them to build a website. So I ended up building an award winning site for them and started doing webdesign part time while at college (all before the school even had a single class on web design.) That job paid a lot better than the already well paying photo job so I started getting more serious about the web and less serious about photography. I had also worked in a photo lab on campus my first 3 years. We provided photo services for the med school so things had to be done to a VERY high quality but most of it was just stuff like making slides out of x-rays so they could be used for presentations. Occasionally we got to do really neat things like document a cadaver dissection, or document some crazy experiments - but a lot of it was just doing headshots and presentation materials. Unfortunately my Junior year when I had my motorcycle accident I got replaced by a computer - partly due to my own suggestions that the lab move that way (this would be 1996 and a high end mac with film printer and film scanner cost about the same as funding my position.)
After getting fed up with school (I had 6 requests to change my program from photo communication to photo illustration in my file signed off by the head of the department but it never actually got applied to my transcript so a lot of the credits I had earned couldn't even be applied towards graduation. After fighting up the chain of command from the department to the college to the school to the university bursar I finally gave up.) I started my own web design company but really hated doing design work and much preferred the backend stuff.
About that same time a friend of mine from high school who had taken an internship in AZ at a newspaper was invited by that newspaper to start their "new media" division and build them a website. He was promised a big budget for equipment and a staff of 3 others - but only got half the equipment and no staff. He still built their website and a number of sites for other local companies through them...but the paper wanted him to focus on cranking out template sites while he wanted to do custom work. So he left and started his own company (he left on good terms but when most of the clients he had worked with jumped ship from the paper to him those terms soured a bit.) So just as his company was getting started and he was needing technical services my own company was getting started and I was wanting to get away from design. I always loved the west so I jumped at the chance to move to AZ and have our two companies work together.
That worked quite well until about 4 or 5 years ago when we reached a point where he had built his company to the point he had 2 employees and an office - but mine was reaching the point where taxes were becoming a huge burden due to my lack of expenses. Since he was my main client accounting for 90% of my work I shut down my business and joined his as an employee.
So now I work in a 4 man shop and do pretty much everything except design. I keep our servers going, build our backend software, solve problems for us and our clients and just generally keep things running. So I get to wear a lot of hats and play a lot of rolls...but only get paid for about one of them.
But being a small 4 man shop run by a childhood friend there are perks. I get to work from home on Fridays, and my schedule is super flexible. I also just really enjoy the small team and the way that the job stays fresh with new challenges with every client. I just really wish we could get another technical person in here to handle some of the more mundane coding tasks...but there aren't a lot of people with those skills around here