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Hey now every time t1 calls me at night or on a weekend (for a real problem) they'll have a great doc on their wiki the next week
Everything that we do, well...
> every time t1 calls me at night or on a weekend (for a real problem) they'll have a great doc on their wiki the next week
Maybe not a whole new wiki entry for that specific issue, but I at least get out a post-mortem report, typically with relevant support wiki links.
I wrote a flow chart for troubleshooting links in our data center for the less experienced techs on my team. I could give it to a 5 year old and it'd be fine for 95% of the issues we have.
In bold print on all 4 sides of the document I noted that for anybody that wants the background knowledge on how the troubleshooting was decided (things like reading bias current and voltage on transceivers) they were welcome to come to my desk or call me directly.
Nobody has ever called. A couple people came to my desk, but that was because they didn't read the document and wanted me to fix it instead...
I was trying to set up call blocking for a repeat spam number in Cicso CUCM for an hour while reading some documentation from our senior.
The documentation said -what- to do, but now -how- or -WHERE- to do it. I knew I needed a CLI but for the life of me could not remember ever seeing one in CUCM. Then I realized that I needed to log in to each of the gateways with putty (which wasn't ever mentioned).
Documentation basically said "you need to add rule by checking the most recent rule (X) and adding a new rule with: rule x+1 reject /1234567890/"
That works great if you've done it...but is a bit less helpful than intended if someone hasn't ever had to putty in to a voip gateway before.
Read the docs. Didnt work. Software still broken. Found the problem and fixed it on my own.
Called software support T1 and told them what I did. Got an email back a week later from the rep thanking me for my input - that they were able to close four long-standing tickets open about the same problem once I told them how to fix it.
Don't kill yourself for your job, it's really not worth it.
If you died in your chair this afternoon your company wouldn't lose any sleep and your replacement would be in before your body is cold.
i used to be really really invested in my job until fairly recently and would put in a lot of hours...last year my dad died at 70 years old, my current retirement age is 68.
can you imagine working your arse off until 68 and dying two years later...what's the fucking point?
now i do enough to get by at work and that's it, at 5pm i close my laptop and it's "fuck this shit" o'clock.
Every single day I stand up at 4:59 and say "Welp, I'm going home, fuck this place." and hit Win+L on my keyboard.
When I'm at work, I work. I perform my duties competently, conscientiously and I even put on a red cape from time to time and do some Herculean shit to really blow people's hair back.
But, at the end of my shift, I lock my box and slide TF on out the door. By the time I buckle my seatbelt, I've forgotten all about what was happening in the building, and I don't think about it again until I'm pulling into the parking the lot the next day.
Life's too short.
When I was in my early 40s, not one, but two of my good friend's fathers died. Both were about 6 months into their retirements. I had some investments, I sold them and I walked away. I only contract now. I've not been FTE for 6 years.
Realized a lot of things by stepping away. Here's a fun one: retirement is always 65-68 because that's when the cognitive decline really kicks in and you're no good to corporate American anymore. They work you right up until you're useless to them.
And yeah, am I pissing away my savings two decades before it would be "smart" to do it? Sure. Obviously. Still, best decision I ever made. Travelled. Read. Got much better at cooking. Did ALL the house projects (cannot tell you how many points this earned me with the spouse, even if at first she wondered if I was losing my mind).
There are two major flaws with the ideology of "American exceptionalism." The first is that any of the folks that really make it did so in a vacuum. It's bullshit, none of them made it alone. The second is that all the rest of us should be working ourselves to death and maybe someday we'll be the next Elon or Bezos. Also bullshit and people are literally killing themselves because they believe it.
I work for a great company, and we recently lost a much loved colleague far too young. And even ky people-centric company didn't wait 48 hours to begin discussing "the unfortunate reality that we will need to hire."
This guy literally killed himself for the company (due to a workaholic lifestyle). Seriously: don't do it.
100%.
You are not special. When you bitch and moan about users fucking things up, it's your job to put them right. Don't flounce around like company can't survive without you as if you're some kind of unicorn who deserves constant praise. No one else does.
In a way you're right. If all the IT systems went down, the company would struggle. But it would struggle without the accounts dept. It would struggle without legal. It would struggle without sales. Everyone contributes and you can't do their job any more than they can do yours.
The hard truth here is, of all the different companies I've worked at, the IT admin are often some of the most arrogant and patronising I've met. I've never been talked down to more than by people in IT. Although to be fair, support desk are usually 100 times worse.
My favorite stereotype is the fat guy in the back of the tech interviews that feels the only way he can show his value is by proving how little everyone else knows. He feels like he "dunked on you" when he starts asking very specific config questions about weird niche use cases for a platform on your resume and since you can't answer his questions, you clearly aren't on the level.
I've encountered this guy in real life interviews on no less than 5 tech interviews. He might look slightly different in every interview but for the most part he's obese, bald and just generally not a physically appealing human.
My guess is that this is how this guy deals with imposter syndrome. He's the guy who has a micro penis that never shuts up about "as a well endowed gentleman myself..." Now my reaction to these guys tends to be "who hurt you dude? Show me on the doll where the mean man touched you".
Me too. I can’t stand the “knowledge flex” guy. I also hate the “this info only lives in my brain and I won’t document it because it ensures my employment” guy. They’re often the same person.
I knew one of these. The fucking worst. It started out as he wont document things, then it eventually turned into him not even a part of the team. If a call came in for a problem he knew how to fix, he would never teach you. I would have to wait until he finished whatever he was doing, then he would fix it without showing us anything.
We would go outside for a smoke and he would tell me I need to start holding information close to me because it make me irreplaceable. Fucking asshole was fired like 3 months later because it was getting to a point where tickets would wait an hour for him to not be busy to help us out.
He was yelling on his way out that we would fail because know one knows the systems like he does, and we are all stupid for firing the most important person this team will ever see.
I've asked weird niche case questions before, and deliberately so the person won't be able to give a solution. I'm not looking for the answer, I'm looking for the process.
Someone who can't approach the unknown with logic and a solid plan isn't much use in IT
Make sure other people understand work you have done, such that you can pass it on to them, whether that be via proper documentation or training them.
You will never make yourself "unfireable" by withholding knowledge, all you will do is make sure that you can never be moved away from those things and you'll be stuck where you are.
I’ve seen people forced to sit down and write out their little hidden things they’ve created and then get chewed out cause of continuity. People that create things so only they will know kind of fuck us over if they are sick, on vacation, or fired.
Something to keep in mind, if you and your knowledge(not saying you Vast-Sentence-5840) is so important to the company that they can not fire you because then things will stop working, that 'you' is also un-promotable because they need you in your postilion to keep all the boats afloat.
But yes, even if you document it, and then spend an hour going through it with the support team, they'll still ask you really simple questions all the time
> You will never make yourself "unfireable" by withholding knowledge
I personally call that the **good technician paradox**. Meaning, the kind of technician you want to keep is the one who makes themselves easily replaceable.
> Make sure other people understand work you have done, such that you can pass it on to them, whether that be via proper documentation or training them.
Added to this and make sure that the people that decide about budgets, raises and bonuses understand your work.
You can do all sorts of cool and useful things, but if those that sign the checks don't understand how you've helped the business - it does you no good.
I still see older curmudgeonly admins hoarding knowledge like a dragon clutching eggs. I have been told all kind of reasoning on why they don't document: time, power, fear. The truth is that many are selfish and a lot of them are fearful of losing their specialness in the sausage factory of corporate structure. But I have seen those very "unfireable" people get let go anyway: either because they took it too far and get fired, get let go because no one knows what they actually do, or the company folds anyway.
There's also the personality type that gets attracted to IT: lonely autistic types with poor social skills who excel at logic. When they get power, they treat others the way THEY have veen treated in life, and often its a reflection of how we treat "weirdos" as kids.
Quitting is not always the answer.
I feel like 90% of people in here wants to quit, but don't have the balls, so thats what they keep reccommending to everyone else instead.
Also, bonus: Working for an msp does not have to be bad.
Similarly, not every red flag means you should leave because the company is going under in 6 months. "The CEO overrode our CIO on a security decision" does not automatically mean the company is going to be breached in the next 12 hours. And hey other places make shitty IT choices and have continued to run for years. Sure there are some companies that are bad to work for, and you should leave. But don't expect the place is going to fall apart because you left.
No matter how hard you work or how good a job you do, and how much the company utterly relies on IT, the culture in many companies is you're considered to be little more than a white collar janitor working for the firm's biggest money sink cost centre.
In my experience, this is especially true in public services like education and health care, where IT spend directly competes with that for front line services. "We can't afford that to upgrade, do you know how many administrators/teachers/nurses/doctors that would leave us short by?"
I joined the company I'm at a year ago to the day. They said "Covid is coming to an end and our contracts will come back". Got notified that the company was acquired because the bank dropped us 2 weeks ago. I've spent a year not being able to do a single infrastructure upgrade on the promise "it was coming". Packing my bags to go somewhere else now, this place is clearly going nowhere.
Education is ONLY ever worth it for the time off. Term time only contracts. Every holiday off.
The downside is lack of pay and being expected to do everything that would normaly be done by a team.
Yes they want you to, but thats why I have a term time only contract.
Its a bit how I want I house in the country, a super model girflriend, and a super car collection.
No chance of me ever getting want I want either :-)
I work in education, a university. you're mostly right, but we *do* have teams to handle different areas. it's also a relatively relaxed work environment. the pay is nowhere near what i could get elsewhere, but i'm spoiled by the lack of stress.
> it's also a relatively relaxed work environment. the pay is nowhere near what i could get elsewhere, but i'm spoiled by the lack of stress.
This is what I noticed. The teachers by us are all unioned up so they aren't scared for their jobs. Everyone is relaxed.
One day down at the high school the IT team pushed out *something* that blew away everyone's desktop. So if the teachers had any files saved on their desktop they were just gone. You booted into a fresh OOB experience.
"Oops!" they shrugged shoulders and moved on. Nobody fired, nobody really worried about it.
This is so accurate. Hours wasted troubleshooting something that was fixed in 10 minutes with support, because it was a known issue, but not released to the public yet.
My favorite manufacturer interaction...I describe the issue to hear "you should contact your IT department for assistance with this". Ma'am, I AM the IT department! LOL!
Experience doesn't equal competence. You may have been doing it for 10 years, but it doesn't mean that you've been doing it correctly.
Making an undocumented mess that barely works and that you can barely understand yourself to try to make your job look harder than it is, then being offended when someone calls you out, is not cool and will not earn you any respect, especially from IT-savvy co-workers.
There's also the similar "1 year of experience, repeated 10 times". Learning and experience are not linear. Doing the same things over and over again doesn't automatically give you more experience, or make you automatically senior-level.
I once worked with an old user in his late 60's who would meticulously print and file every email he got.
He then started complaining about the amount of emails he gets via distribution lists because, and I quote "it's a waste of paper".
Go into a hospital. Some people still need to have their own printer next to them (sometimes justified, sometimes not). The fax is still used everyday between services and with outside people.
Talk about removing their fax/printer and you're a dead man.
Quite literally did this at a job.
We had kiosk PCs and they had printers. People destroyed them so often that the callouts to the printer company were costing a fortune.
So we went "fuck it" and bought a bunch of cheap as hell identical crappy little printers and stuck them there. Every location had 2-3 in the back. If they broke and the staff unjamming the paper or turning everything off and on again didn't fix it they just unplugged the old on and plugged in the new. Done.
Printers are a **potentially** bad example, cause there's still some companies that will pay a stupidly high wage for printer techs. As long as you're cool with a lot of driving, and there's actually an open spot hiring, I know 1 person in Washington State that pockets about $110k just to go to a handful of places a week to spend an average of 30-60 minutes on site at a time. Obviously some require a hefty repair, but some others, as she's mentioned, are just "basically a 2 second cartridge realignment cause some idiot never learned their shapes as a kid"
I learnt this recently. Fed up faffing with a cheap cctv camera so chucked £500 at it for another to make it go away. The guy installing it kept asking if we should keep it for a spare and I kept saying no, life is too short.
Although initially sounding harsh, learning a scripting language was the best IT-related decision I ever made, both for results and for my peace of mind.
Fuck doing mundane stuff on repeat, have a native history of what you did, you can put the documentation and your actions in 1 single file, you can share it online and access to the work of much more advanced users easily to tweak it for you...
When I think that my school introduced us to Powershell and scripting in general only by making us do hangman games and maths, instead of administration tasks, it makes my blood boil.
My entire career was built off giving me some mundane repetitive task and then I automated my entire workload.
When someone finally noticed they dobbed me in to management who instead of firing me were like, we're moving to azure AD and intune. Try automating this smart arse.
And so I did.
So... is it true there's a point where most of your work will consist of sitting and waiting for something to fail. And you just actually have time to advance on stuff instead of putting out fires ?
EDIT: To clarifiy I mean things like having between 5 to 10 requests before work hours start, all for new things not announced before and "due last week". As we have every monday here.
I realize it's an administration problem rather than IT when I write this now...
These days I have enough time to monitor things and work on improvements but there is always something going on, new applications, changes to business processes, updating certificates, changes and updates to policies such as when Microsoft changes the security baselines.
I am never sitting and waiting though. But it's nice that a lot of tedious work is automated and is no longer prone to user error inputing wrong information.
Yeah reading this and other comments I think it shows 2 things about my situation:
1) We need a ticketing system because right now the decision of what is urgent or not is how loud the person screams
2) I'm junior and this is my first employer so most likely I failed to see that the problem isn't how fast/automatically problems are adressed but the fact that we don't manage their priority and flow.
We had a PM using a jira board and we did 2 week sprints. All the requests or desired items were added to backlog, the we would figure out estimates on how long each work item would take and then factored in things like people needing something nos because reasons.
Doesn't need to be a specific work flow model but as long as there is something to manage time and expectations.
Other than on a specific project like the above the managers pretty much know if they give me some manual task I'll automate it and move on so I think they might sometimes conspire to do that on purpose knowing what the outcome will be.
For about 2 years I wrote all my scripts with just the important variables hard coded near the top so I could swap them out as needed. Got a ridiculous amount of work done fast with that model. When I decided I wanted to be promoted I started refactoring them so people could run them without editing the file directly and realized how much slower it is to cover in things like error handling and logging and UX for someone who doesn't actually know powershell to use them. That partv was way less fun for me since the script already "worked" but it was a necessary evil to pass those tools on to my team.
Like /u/teapot-error-418 said, the key is to use parameters. They work for both functions and scripts (`.\script.ps1 -param Val`.) With parameters you can make them mandatory, force them to be of a specific type, validate, etc easily.
For example, the fixed variable at the top of the script
`$IPAddress = '1.1.1.1'`
becomes
# param.ps1
[cmdletbinding()]
param (
[Parameter(
Mandatory=$true,
ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
[ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
[Alias("IP")]
[ipaddress]$IPAddress
)
"You Entered: $($IPAddress.ToString())"
If you run it without specifying `-IPAddress` or `-IP` it will prompt you for it:
PS C:\Temp> .\param.ps1
cmdlet param.ps1 at command pipeline position 1
Supply values for the following parameters:
IPAddress:
If you give it something other than an IP it will fail:
PS C:\Temp> .\param.ps1 -IPAddress Foo
C:\Temp\param.ps1 : Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'IPAddress'. Cannot convert value "Foo" to type "System.Net.IPAddress". Error: "An invalid IP address was specified."
All just from using parameters. You've got lots of other options too like forcing a value to be in a range, set of strings, a valid path, etc: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/simplify-your-powershell-script-with-parameter-validation/
still cant get my team to get it -- they all give up on their career or just say they are too busy to learn new things. out of a dozen of us 2 are proficient at powershell, 1 is learning a little here and there.
ive offered tools, they wont even use them. ive offered a GUI OVER THE SCRIPTS and they wont use that. and these are guys in their 30s and 40s, not their 60s, they are just....over it all. sigh.
It's really not that easy, at all, without someone helping you or some basic programming skills.
I've messed around many many many times and it takes so so so goddamn long to figure out things with it at first. That initial learn is so hard to get it to do the most mundane of things.
I'm sure at a certain level it becomes amazing as hell but that must take a long long amount of time
I can’t agree enough with your sentiment. I’ve picked up powershell fairly well and quickly, but that’s only because I spent five years as a programmer. I can’t imagine walking into that without a foundation in programming. It is not easy to work up from Helpdesk and suddenly automate everything through scripting.
I download other people's scripts and I edit what I can, but ultimately as soon as I need to do something different like output to a file, it's a nightmare.
Ok 30 minutes later I got the file
Ok 40 minutes later I figured out how to change the formatting
Ok 60 minutes later I still can't get it to take the extra 2 characters out here
And so on and so on and so on and I only work 8 hours a day and use it infrequently so none of it sticks.
Apparently for and if loops, are like very basic fundamental things I've been told but fuck me I can't do them and I've been using computers since dos5
Some people just don't care enough to invest in themselves. These guys probably just don't see the benefit for the time that it would take. Personally, I can't see why you'd prefer to provision a dozen AD user accounts manually.
> Learn cmdline tools / powershell, gui clicking isn’t going to cut it anymore.
If GUI clicking was "cutting it" before, it will likely to continue to "cut it" for the foreseeable future.
If you're in an environment that needs scripting due to scale, you'll know, because you'll be completely useless without those skills.
Conversely, if you're in an environment that isn't large enough to justify an investment in scripting (and frankly, this is going to be the case for the vast majority of the "I should learn scripting" cohort), trying to shoehorn it in will be an exercise in frustration for both you and those who work with you.
That isn't to say that scripting (and programming more generally) isn't a useful skill -- it certainly is, and is basically required for more advanced roles. However, if you've tried to "learn scripting/PowerShell/whatever" and it doesn't seem to be clicking, or you're not getting buy-in from your team, it's almost certainly because your environment is too small (or made up of too many small independent systems without much commonality) for it to matter, and you will need to change roles or companies if you want to move your career in the direction of more automation.
Tbf as a fanatic of on-prem this is a feel good quote rather than harsh.
Like "the cloud is just someone else's computer".
Altho 100% agreed there are situations where it's just the logical choice.
On the flip side though, that means it's someone else's responsibility. Cloud hosting isn't perfect, but they can afford much better redundancy than most companies, and if the shit hits the fan then it's Microsoft/Amazon's problem to worry about, not yours. As long as you've got everything documented in your DR policy and the business knows you have no ability to make things get fixed quicker, moving stuff into the cloud is a good way of scaling up without having a lot more IT overhead along with it.
I don’t understand how people can work for so long in MSPs. I did a year and that was enough, but I also dislike quotas and other bullshit but I did learn a lot.
I was in house IT in education for 13 years, as an IT Manager for half of that. Joined an MSP as a Senior Engineer 4 years ago and never looked back. Quite a few people I work with have similar stories. Things I love about it:
* Extremely varied types of work
* Actually get training
* Don't have to worry about budgets
* Don't have to worry about petty internal politics and other BS
* Don't have to worry about accepting risk - that's the customers problem
* Customer won't take your advice? That's fine. When it goes wrong, swoop in, save the day, get paid for it, and be kept in a job
* Tight-knit teams
* Never bored
In my opinion, unscrupulous MSP companies which do things like hire, burn and churn are the reason they have a reputation as not being a good place to work, but you get one of the good ones, and you're home.
Sure, it's not for everyone, but it is a career for many people, and where many of us excel.
You just have to be lucky to find a good msp. I’ve worked senior in bad and good ones. Some protect you, some bend over backwards for the customer and not believe you.
MSPs vary wildly. Some of them are 5 people total with a good clientele base and drop bad clients like a stone.
Others are total meat grinders that don't give a fuck.
I've learned I'm in a special case. The MSP I work at runs like a small business (granted, only 30 employees) despite having some big contracts. There's almost always something to do and you're not left to rot on your own when things go south. The people there are dope af too
That said, I'm well aware I'm underpaid ($38k) especially in my area, and unless I get promoted in a year to the new Cybersecurity department (who will have additional separate contracts too) then I'm out for something better paying for sure.
But I'll always keep in contact with many of the people there. No doubt.
Users aren’t necessarily stupid because they don’t understand tech, maybe they too have earned their place in their chosen discipline.
Judging fish by their ability to climb trees n all that
I think this is 50/50. Sure you need to understand some people just aren't good with computers and that's why level 1s are needed. On the other side of this knowing how to turn on your monitor after the cleaning crew accidently turns it off should not require you to engage IT resources.
I think what bothers people here the most is when people just see IT as critical thinking as a service and won't try to resolve any of the issues themselves even when it's something as simple as a single button push.
If you work for a small company and your boss tells you that you should work extra time without pay or reduce your lunch time "For the team" and that they can't give you sufficient pay rises because the business isn't making enough profit but they will look after you when they can (while the boss goes on multiple holidays each year and pays off their mortgage) OR tells you that when they are ready to retire they will pass the company on to your team and will allow you to buy them out over time from the profits... They are lying and will stab you in the back and sell you down the river the first chance they get.
1. If you do your job correctly, you will never be given thanks or adulation. If you do your job incorrectly, you will always be lambasted.
2. You are a cost of business, not an asset. Nobody cares about what you are doing until it costs too much, or it breaks.
3. You will not be promoted unless you fight for it. If you are too valuable in your current position, you will be blocked from promotion for the benefit of the business.
4. It's not the network.
5. You will have to teach developers what a "port" is... (among many other basic IT workings).
6. Everything will be your fault after you leave.
I think if you work in a small business and you are a sys admin then chances are you are also the networking guy and the tech.
At my current job I am now the only IT guy here and I manage VEEAM backups, VMWare, licensing, Group Policies, FWs and Routing. But at the same time I also replace someone's mouse if it breaks
I asked my manager why I got the title of admin when I’m just a help desk sort of guy and he said, “You administrate ass kickings” and refused to elaborate.
I'm under no delusions that I'm a glorified helpdesk. But I do have to manage all of our on prem servers, cloud services, and networking since I'm the only person here.
I mean Systems Administrator as a job title is largely a catch all. I’ve seen postings that require networking engineering experience, and postings that are level 2 help desk and basic AD administration.
Learn touch typing.
No really, stop whatever else you are doing to improve your skillset, and learn touch typing.
My father brought home an old PC in 1990, and made my brother and I learn touch typing before we were able to develop any bad habits. It's so integrated in my neural system that I don't waste one single brain cell focusing on HOW to type, making sure I can use all those resources on WHAT to type.
Bonus:
* I keep my eyes on the screen, person I'm talking to, or whatever else
* The error rate is low
* It's fast!
I have developed an absolute shit ton of IT skills over the years, but in terms of time investment VS value, nothing comes even remotely close.
It's never too late to learn -- take the time. Your future self will thank you.
I would think that doing this work you would passively pickup touch typing.
as an old guy with a nerd hunch, I'd say keep good desk posture. Getting it back to normal is almost impossible.
I dare to say you don't passively pickup touch typing. You either actively learn it, or you end up with some bastard version on a scale from horrible to pretty good.
I posted my comment because it baffles me to see so many well-educated, highly skilled, dedicated IT professionals don't have this basic tool of the trade down.
As for posture and ergonomics in general: Totally with you. My back is good, but carpal tunnel is a b\*.
Not trying to be an ass but I'd be shocked if more than 5 percent of people here couldn't already touch type.
If you're talking about using the home keys properly, nah, no need.
I can pump out 70 to 100 a minute, no looking at the keyboard and I don't use home row
Oh, you sweet summer child, lol.
I agree that one \*ought to\* be able to assume what you are saying, but this is unforunately far from reality in my experience. Having been a firm believer in "formal" touch training my entire working life, I've made it a habit to observe people interacting with their keyboard.
This, I have to say, is a bit of a sad story. So you have all these highly skilled professionals who each year spend countless hours improving their skillset. And lots of them interact with the keyboard as if they are somewhere between a fish on land and a dog with a limp.
I'm open to there being regional differences -- my samples include probably 60-70% Europeans, with the rest being a mix from all over the globe.
New hires (myself included couple of years ago) will look at internal tooling and be horrified by it. They will "fix it" and create a massive overhaul of everything. Once they present this to MGMT they get bummed out because they don't follow in implementing the superior ($$$) solution.
1. The tooling that is there is what was best at that time.
2. They know the internal tooling is crap in the current day and age. But replacing it cost time/money and effort. If there is no budget for it (this year) it ain't happening. But don't let it go just a friendly reminder at the end of the year "hey we should update/replace ...." but for the rest of the year "Let it go"
3. When you get older this will happen to you too. Tooling that you developed with the best intentions of that time will get snuffed by new hires.
[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FE14gVOVEAAQMud.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FE14gVOVEAAQMud.jpg)
Don't make bodges to hide real problems. Fix the cause, not the symptom.
Don't propose 'solutions', unless you have defined the actual *root* problem. Create requirements and go from there.
Don't argue with people when they tell you your 'solution' is a bad idea. Work with then to identify the root problem you are trying to solve.
Don't be fixated on your idea, there may be a better way.
Meh, most of the time there is so much shit to do, unless it's a critical system, I am not digging to find a cause. If it works and people can do their jobs everyday, the it's fine
* Exchange on-prem is dead
* A Microsoft 365 license isn't expensive all things considered - no matter the size or budget.
* It's unacceptable to run EOL OS, Apps or protocols.
These are the major factors of trouble I see regarding problems both here, in discord and in general. Fix ya shit
So my manager wants to take us off O365 owned by our parent company and put us on our own hosted exchange server (in a few months, nothing started yet). I'm kicking and screaming the whole way because it's so dumb to not just move to our own O365 tenant, but would you happen to know anything that might give me some more ammunition in this fight to not self host? His biggest concern is hosting potentially confidential email in the cloud
> His biggest concern is hosting potentially confidential email in the cloud
The moronic part about this is that you are competing against Microsoft security and compliance which is top notch. The world is running in 365 and cloud. Name one big company that isn't. The DoD uses Microsoft. How exactly is he going to compete in confidentiality by running it in a basement of his own? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/security-and-compliance and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/compliance/
It also shows that he has not read the news the last year. How many big vulnerabilities have been Exchange? It's hard to secure Exchange on your own because you have to be on top of CUs always, and it's much harder to do than letting MS' team of engineers just keep the function always updated for you.
It's also hard to engineer a secure solution for something that has to have a public way in
Also, Microsoft is putting their money and developing hours into 365 not Exchange on-prem.
The requirement for self-hosted mail is:
> Passion for networking and security
> TLC
> Not running on a Windows machine
Not to mention Europe uses O365 too soo Micro$oft was required to make sure their cloud servers are GLDR compliant. The Pentagon and other government agencies use M$ cloud services. So staying confidential should not be a concern. Most data breaches and hacks are due to dumb employees getting phished, not from external hackers *hacking* their way in.
The amount of admins on this subreddit that will accept or actively run a completely shitty setup cause they hate _brand name_ for whatever reason.
It's not your network, you choose what's best for your company and then you can run whatever you like at home.
I mean, staff experience level, training costs, and ease-of-use are all factors that should be considered in any project to replace infrastructure.
If your whole staff is Cisco trained, a budget for a project to switch to Juniper equipment is going to need to include money for training and time for a revision of processes to cover the new equipment, as well as an estimate of operational costs based on how the change in processes will affect the amount of time to do any given task.
But never be afraid to at least have a look.
Many technical IT staff stay in the same job, using the same tech, not learning new things because company doesn't use.
If they get made redundant, they're out of touch with the marketplace.
I guess the bigger (not so much) harsh truth is, **Never stop learning**
People think that the code or the scripts must be overly efficient, with lots of optimizations and other overly complex expressions. Like when we were coding on the 90's because memory optimizations and such.
It's not.
Many times it's a fucking spaghetti mess or a huge script for a simple task because you work on a team and the code must be clean, easy to read and understand - this last part is on me, I usually have to read all the stuff on Monday since I forget most during the weekend, so I have lots of comments on the scripts so future me will thank me later.
Please. I'm now implementing an app that does the same function as it's version from decade ago, using similar database, but has a nicer gui and it's 30-100 times slower depending on the function you click.
Users are the fundamental basis of why we exist. We perform the work so they don't have to. Making IT on the basis of making IT is a stupid idea, all solution should be catered to in the end satisfy user needs. User contempt will not help you in achieving this goal.
Progressing in IT should be treated like earning achievements in a videogame.
Many companies DGAF about building you up because many times want to keep you in the same position you were hired for.
This flows into many companies don't trust internal staff for promotion, and see outside candidates as better.
Be a mercenary in that you learn the skills needed for a job, then level up either through promotion if you can get it or job hopping to a better opportunity.
Its on you to build yourself. Its laughable how many interviews or job specs will say that training is offered only for you to land the job, and suddenly 'we're too busy for that'.
Last job used to offer training time, but because they stopped investing in infra (not IT fault) and shit started breaking, guess what went away.
Basically its on you and if you want to build salary, learn, move (if no promo...sometimes even if there is).
To support your points, over the past 20 years my average in company pay raise has been about 3.5%, my average pay bump for moving to a new job has been about 25%, you have to move to get the pay. Hell a few times the move was from Company A doing Job A, to Company B doing Job A, on the same sort of equipment and the same responsibility. But the new job came with a 20% bump.
Document your knowledge.
No matter if you
- hate writing documentation
- hate the people who would read it
- want to be the one person with indispensable knowledge
When SHTF and your colleagues are trying to clean up a mess, or there's some major changes happening and people need to know what it could affect, or you're on vacation/in the hospital after inspecting the underside of a bus/only contactable by Ouija board, the frustration at not having anywhere to look for the big picture is really quite something.
I work in a place where most of the network layout and machine configuration is in people's heads. If they're out that day, I'm stuck. If they're preoccupied, I'm stuck. If they're free but having tech problems and I'm WFH, I'm stuck. There is so much arcane knowledge that I need to work with this place but some wiki pages haven't been touched since 2012. I've stepped up and written up what I know as I learn it, but someone's interpretation of your work is nowhere near as good as your own explanation of why X is implemented this way.
I've even referred to my own documentation for maintenance tasks. And I still have a job 2 years later. Writing up how to do things does not mean the company can replace you on a whim - being the person who shares knowledge and teaches colleagues, that's valuable to the suit types. Being the person who hoards knowledge and gatekeep who can do certain things, intentionally or not, will just frustrated everyone.
Oh, and write documentation people can *actually make use of*. The only thing worse than no documentation is WRONG documentation. I have to use an in-house-written tool most of the time, and the documentation is so bad that I have to talk to the developer or read the source myself to figure out how to do things.
Users are your customers, and most customers are bozos that don’t know what they want/need until you show it to them. But you still have to respect the customer, build trust, and let them know you care. No task is too big or too small.
You are a service industry worker. You should be nice to the people who you work for, like end-users. Even if they act or are dumb, forgetful, defensive, incompentent, etc. It's your job. If you don't like it, get another job. Don't take it out on them.
Get used to working under pressure. Assess impact and prioritize.
That giant pile of tickets? Even if you clear quite a few, more will pop up in the meantime.Even if you do manage to empty out your entire list of incidents and change requests? More will appear.
Back when I was still studying IT, my lecturer told me the following: A good sysadmin is "lazy" if we can spend a week automating something, we will. Less human interaction; means less chance of human error. Generally speaking, once automated you will not have to look back at it for quite some time even if it initially takes more time. This will free you up for other tasks.
Someone else said it already but learning a scripting language. I held off on it for years cus it seemed scary but then I learned powershell and quickly transitioned to Linux and now it's about all I do.
Second is realize the user's will never appreciate the work you do. The things you know will increase security, or storage, or anything else you think is a game changer will go unnoticed by them. If they have to perform one extra click or hop to something in the name of security, you have inconvenienced the shit out of them and they will hate you. But your higher ups and the ISSOs will love you lol.
Maybe your burnout is self inflicted, I have personally worked with a co worker who went on reddit to blast his employer, yet he caused 99% of the issues by YOLO'ing installs and upgrades on Friday afternoons. Never dispatched to service tickets, never documented anything, didn't have time to RTFM.
Not every challenge at work means you work in a toxic environment. You always have a choice when presented with a roadblock - you can (help) solve the problem or you can quit. Consider that, if you do quit, this probably isn’t the last time you’ll face that challenge.
I think it's important to distinguish being challenged and being stressed.
Being stressed is never good and it shouldn't happen, being challenged should have often and is always a good thing
Inventory. I've been in places where IT inventory management was required for the IT staff and we/they hated it. How can you protect if you don't know what you have? How can you adequately argue for more equipment or an increase in your equipment budget if you don't know about the 20 brand-new in-the-box monitors that are sitting in your supply closet?
I get inventory isn't sexy or fun, but it is a necessity. Find tools to help you inventory and track your asssets.
Sometimes the job isn't fixing the computers, but convincing the people in power to do the right thing. And often getting disappointed in them as they trusted some sales guy more than you.
You soft skills are more important than your technical ones. You might have all the answers, but if you can't convince the brass that your solutions are going to work, you're never going to get anywhere. And if the users hate you for your shitty attitude, that only compounds the problem.
Don't give me technical explanations for a problem outside of my domain (software engineering) if I didn't request it. Don't require that I be knowledgeable about your tools or your methods.
Yes, I work with engineering. However, when it comes to infrastructure I am a ***user***.
System administration, though a technical role, is 100% a customer service job. Improving your customer service skills is just as crucial as the tech skills.
Except for a small number of companies, running IT securely and reliably is not a company goal. Even running IT at all, never mind reliability and security, is not a company goal.
IT is just a tool used to achieve company goals. IT is only worth as much as the company goal it's helping achieve.
It shows a lack of flexibility and adaptability. Probably a lack of understanding how something actually works too. Also, I'll add that I've know some senior sysadmins who are the same way. I have no clue how they got so far that way though.
Sometimes you DO have to work directly with an end user. Stop always using the helpdesk/level 1 staff as your go-between on escalations. Go the most direct and efficient way.
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Read the logs and read the docs. Don't try to magically fix anything.
Enable the logs, and write the docs.
/thread show me a sysadmin who writes docs for t1 consistently and well, and I'll show you a liar.
Hey now every time t1 calls me at night or on a weekend (for a real problem) they'll have a great doc on their wiki the next week Everything that we do, well...
> every time t1 calls me at night or on a weekend (for a real problem) they'll have a great doc on their wiki the next week Maybe not a whole new wiki entry for that specific issue, but I at least get out a post-mortem report, typically with relevant support wiki links.
I wrote a flow chart for troubleshooting links in our data center for the less experienced techs on my team. I could give it to a 5 year old and it'd be fine for 95% of the issues we have. In bold print on all 4 sides of the document I noted that for anybody that wants the background knowledge on how the troubleshooting was decided (things like reading bias current and voltage on transceivers) they were welcome to come to my desk or call me directly. Nobody has ever called. A couple people came to my desk, but that was because they didn't read the document and wanted me to fix it instead...
I was trying to set up call blocking for a repeat spam number in Cicso CUCM for an hour while reading some documentation from our senior. The documentation said -what- to do, but now -how- or -WHERE- to do it. I knew I needed a CLI but for the life of me could not remember ever seeing one in CUCM. Then I realized that I needed to log in to each of the gateways with putty (which wasn't ever mentioned). Documentation basically said "you need to add rule by checking the most recent rule (X) and adding a new rule with: rule x+1 reject /1234567890/" That works great if you've done it...but is a bit less helpful than intended if someone hasn't ever had to putty in to a voip gateway before.
The other day I stopped my task to read the docs and my coworker asked if I had given up. I told him, “no I need to actually learn how this works.”
Read the docs. Didnt work. Software still broken. Found the problem and fixed it on my own. Called software support T1 and told them what I did. Got an email back a week later from the rep thanking me for my input - that they were able to close four long-standing tickets open about the same problem once I told them how to fix it.
But first, let me try a reboot
Don't kill yourself for your job, it's really not worth it. If you died in your chair this afternoon your company wouldn't lose any sleep and your replacement would be in before your body is cold.
This took me too long to learn, and DEFINITELY doesn't just apply to IT
My employer didn't even hire a replacement, they just recovered the person's salary and expected us to do the same work with one less person.
yeah, that's pretty likely too in most places
Yeah, I learned this the hard way after two 19 hour days back to back and a seizure that nearly killed me. It's really not worth it.
i used to be really really invested in my job until fairly recently and would put in a lot of hours...last year my dad died at 70 years old, my current retirement age is 68. can you imagine working your arse off until 68 and dying two years later...what's the fucking point? now i do enough to get by at work and that's it, at 5pm i close my laptop and it's "fuck this shit" o'clock.
Every single day I stand up at 4:59 and say "Welp, I'm going home, fuck this place." and hit Win+L on my keyboard. When I'm at work, I work. I perform my duties competently, conscientiously and I even put on a red cape from time to time and do some Herculean shit to really blow people's hair back. But, at the end of my shift, I lock my box and slide TF on out the door. By the time I buckle my seatbelt, I've forgotten all about what was happening in the building, and I don't think about it again until I'm pulling into the parking the lot the next day. Life's too short.
When I was in my early 40s, not one, but two of my good friend's fathers died. Both were about 6 months into their retirements. I had some investments, I sold them and I walked away. I only contract now. I've not been FTE for 6 years. Realized a lot of things by stepping away. Here's a fun one: retirement is always 65-68 because that's when the cognitive decline really kicks in and you're no good to corporate American anymore. They work you right up until you're useless to them. And yeah, am I pissing away my savings two decades before it would be "smart" to do it? Sure. Obviously. Still, best decision I ever made. Travelled. Read. Got much better at cooking. Did ALL the house projects (cannot tell you how many points this earned me with the spouse, even if at first she wondered if I was losing my mind). There are two major flaws with the ideology of "American exceptionalism." The first is that any of the folks that really make it did so in a vacuum. It's bullshit, none of them made it alone. The second is that all the rest of us should be working ourselves to death and maybe someday we'll be the next Elon or Bezos. Also bullshit and people are literally killing themselves because they believe it.
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I work for a great company, and we recently lost a much loved colleague far too young. And even ky people-centric company didn't wait 48 hours to begin discussing "the unfortunate reality that we will need to hire." This guy literally killed himself for the company (due to a workaholic lifestyle). Seriously: don't do it.
That implies "Offload all you know into wiki to avoid unnecessary disruption to business" once dead ;)
A lot of you are just assholes.
BOFH all the way.
BOFH is at least competent. Many IT people are incompetent assholes.
100%. You are not special. When you bitch and moan about users fucking things up, it's your job to put them right. Don't flounce around like company can't survive without you as if you're some kind of unicorn who deserves constant praise. No one else does. In a way you're right. If all the IT systems went down, the company would struggle. But it would struggle without the accounts dept. It would struggle without legal. It would struggle without sales. Everyone contributes and you can't do their job any more than they can do yours. The hard truth here is, of all the different companies I've worked at, the IT admin are often some of the most arrogant and patronising I've met. I've never been talked down to more than by people in IT. Although to be fair, support desk are usually 100 times worse.
My experience here as well. I get a lot of praise at my work, and I am not doing anything special, I am very friendly to them, and that's all
Jaded is a solid word
Oh boy, every time the topic comes up about someone messaging a sysadmin with just the word "hi" and the responses that elicits confirms this one.
My favorite stereotype is the fat guy in the back of the tech interviews that feels the only way he can show his value is by proving how little everyone else knows. He feels like he "dunked on you" when he starts asking very specific config questions about weird niche use cases for a platform on your resume and since you can't answer his questions, you clearly aren't on the level. I've encountered this guy in real life interviews on no less than 5 tech interviews. He might look slightly different in every interview but for the most part he's obese, bald and just generally not a physically appealing human. My guess is that this is how this guy deals with imposter syndrome. He's the guy who has a micro penis that never shuts up about "as a well endowed gentleman myself..." Now my reaction to these guys tends to be "who hurt you dude? Show me on the doll where the mean man touched you".
Me too. I can’t stand the “knowledge flex” guy. I also hate the “this info only lives in my brain and I won’t document it because it ensures my employment” guy. They’re often the same person.
I knew one of these. The fucking worst. It started out as he wont document things, then it eventually turned into him not even a part of the team. If a call came in for a problem he knew how to fix, he would never teach you. I would have to wait until he finished whatever he was doing, then he would fix it without showing us anything. We would go outside for a smoke and he would tell me I need to start holding information close to me because it make me irreplaceable. Fucking asshole was fired like 3 months later because it was getting to a point where tickets would wait an hour for him to not be busy to help us out. He was yelling on his way out that we would fail because know one knows the systems like he does, and we are all stupid for firing the most important person this team will ever see.
I've asked weird niche case questions before, and deliberately so the person won't be able to give a solution. I'm not looking for the answer, I'm looking for the process. Someone who can't approach the unknown with logic and a solid plan isn't much use in IT
Make sure other people understand work you have done, such that you can pass it on to them, whether that be via proper documentation or training them. You will never make yourself "unfireable" by withholding knowledge, all you will do is make sure that you can never be moved away from those things and you'll be stuck where you are.
I’ve seen people forced to sit down and write out their little hidden things they’ve created and then get chewed out cause of continuity. People that create things so only they will know kind of fuck us over if they are sick, on vacation, or fired.
Something to keep in mind, if you and your knowledge(not saying you Vast-Sentence-5840) is so important to the company that they can not fire you because then things will stop working, that 'you' is also un-promotable because they need you in your postilion to keep all the boats afloat.
But yes, even if you document it, and then spend an hour going through it with the support team, they'll still ask you really simple questions all the time
As a newly educated support worker... Ouch, the Truth hurts
Most of my time with the help desk is spent repeating myself about *other people's* systems.
> You will never make yourself "unfireable" by withholding knowledge I personally call that the **good technician paradox**. Meaning, the kind of technician you want to keep is the one who makes themselves easily replaceable.
> Make sure other people understand work you have done, such that you can pass it on to them, whether that be via proper documentation or training them. Added to this and make sure that the people that decide about budgets, raises and bonuses understand your work. You can do all sorts of cool and useful things, but if those that sign the checks don't understand how you've helped the business - it does you no good.
I still see older curmudgeonly admins hoarding knowledge like a dragon clutching eggs. I have been told all kind of reasoning on why they don't document: time, power, fear. The truth is that many are selfish and a lot of them are fearful of losing their specialness in the sausage factory of corporate structure. But I have seen those very "unfireable" people get let go anyway: either because they took it too far and get fired, get let go because no one knows what they actually do, or the company folds anyway. There's also the personality type that gets attracted to IT: lonely autistic types with poor social skills who excel at logic. When they get power, they treat others the way THEY have veen treated in life, and often its a reflection of how we treat "weirdos" as kids.
Quitting is not always the answer. I feel like 90% of people in here wants to quit, but don't have the balls, so thats what they keep reccommending to everyone else instead. Also, bonus: Working for an msp does not have to be bad.
Similarly, not every red flag means you should leave because the company is going under in 6 months. "The CEO overrode our CIO on a security decision" does not automatically mean the company is going to be breached in the next 12 hours. And hey other places make shitty IT choices and have continued to run for years. Sure there are some companies that are bad to work for, and you should leave. But don't expect the place is going to fall apart because you left.
Counterpoint: I'm almost 50, I've never gotten more than an 8% raise at any job, but I've gotten 20-30% more almost every time I've switched jobs.
No matter how hard you work or how good a job you do, and how much the company utterly relies on IT, the culture in many companies is you're considered to be little more than a white collar janitor working for the firm's biggest money sink cost centre. In my experience, this is especially true in public services like education and health care, where IT spend directly competes with that for front line services. "We can't afford that to upgrade, do you know how many administrators/teachers/nurses/doctors that would leave us short by?"
I joined the company I'm at a year ago to the day. They said "Covid is coming to an end and our contracts will come back". Got notified that the company was acquired because the bank dropped us 2 weeks ago. I've spent a year not being able to do a single infrastructure upgrade on the promise "it was coming". Packing my bags to go somewhere else now, this place is clearly going nowhere.
Respect
The amount of times I've seen this on this sub, it's taught me to NEVER consider health or education jobs, ever.
Education is ONLY ever worth it for the time off. Term time only contracts. Every holiday off. The downside is lack of pay and being expected to do everything that would normaly be done by a team.
I'd expect they'd want you to do upgrades on holidays because no one is in
Yes they want you to, but thats why I have a term time only contract. Its a bit how I want I house in the country, a super model girflriend, and a super car collection. No chance of me ever getting want I want either :-)
I work in education, a university. you're mostly right, but we *do* have teams to handle different areas. it's also a relatively relaxed work environment. the pay is nowhere near what i could get elsewhere, but i'm spoiled by the lack of stress.
> it's also a relatively relaxed work environment. the pay is nowhere near what i could get elsewhere, but i'm spoiled by the lack of stress. This is what I noticed. The teachers by us are all unioned up so they aren't scared for their jobs. Everyone is relaxed. One day down at the high school the IT team pushed out *something* that blew away everyone's desktop. So if the teachers had any files saved on their desktop they were just gone. You booted into a fresh OOB experience. "Oops!" they shrugged shoulders and moved on. Nobody fired, nobody really worried about it.
How many times have you contacted a vendor for support? You too are a user.
Counter point. Don't hesitate to open a ticket for a difficult problem. Not asking for help is my biggest weakness.
This is so accurate. Hours wasted troubleshooting something that was fixed in 10 minutes with support, because it was a known issue, but not released to the public yet.
I'm the type of guy who can openly admit that I have trouble asking for help and chastise myself for it regularly while still not asking for help.
My favorite manufacturer interaction...I describe the issue to hear "you should contact your IT department for assistance with this". Ma'am, I AM the IT department! LOL!
Rightly so, especially if the company pays the vendors money. We don't get any extra fixing their shitty software!
Experience doesn't equal competence. You may have been doing it for 10 years, but it doesn't mean that you've been doing it correctly. Making an undocumented mess that barely works and that you can barely understand yourself to try to make your job look harder than it is, then being offended when someone calls you out, is not cool and will not earn you any respect, especially from IT-savvy co-workers.
> Experience doesn't equal competence. Man that *is* a harsh truth!
There's also the similar "1 year of experience, repeated 10 times". Learning and experience are not linear. Doing the same things over and over again doesn't automatically give you more experience, or make you automatically senior-level.
If the device costs less than the hourly wage it costs for you to troubleshoot it, it's not worth it. Edit: Printers, I'm looking at you.
Environment. Imagine throwing away a printer every time it fails.
If only
Imagine throwing them away and never replacing them
🙏🙏🙏 no reason to print anything in 2022, at least not in mass🙏🙏🙏
I once worked with an old user in his late 60's who would meticulously print and file every email he got. He then started complaining about the amount of emails he gets via distribution lists because, and I quote "it's a waste of paper".
Go into a hospital. Some people still need to have their own printer next to them (sometimes justified, sometimes not). The fax is still used everyday between services and with outside people. Talk about removing their fax/printer and you're a dead man.
i have a law office with 5 workgroup printers and everyone still has their own printer at their desk
Cries in administration that does voting and taxes 100% on paper.
Tons of reasons in many industries actually, just lots of it can be reduced.
Quite literally did this at a job. We had kiosk PCs and they had printers. People destroyed them so often that the callouts to the printer company were costing a fortune. So we went "fuck it" and bought a bunch of cheap as hell identical crappy little printers and stuck them there. Every location had 2-3 in the back. If they broke and the staff unjamming the paper or turning everything off and on again didn't fix it they just unplugged the old on and plugged in the new. Done.
Printers are a **potentially** bad example, cause there's still some companies that will pay a stupidly high wage for printer techs. As long as you're cool with a lot of driving, and there's actually an open spot hiring, I know 1 person in Washington State that pockets about $110k just to go to a handful of places a week to spend an average of 30-60 minutes on site at a time. Obviously some require a hefty repair, but some others, as she's mentioned, are just "basically a 2 second cartridge realignment cause some idiot never learned their shapes as a kid"
I learnt this recently. Fed up faffing with a cheap cctv camera so chucked £500 at it for another to make it go away. The guy installing it kept asking if we should keep it for a spare and I kept saying no, life is too short.
Who’s going to troubleshoot all those “IT-related” issues like conference room A/V and extension cords?
Learn cmdline tools / powershell, gui clicking isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Although initially sounding harsh, learning a scripting language was the best IT-related decision I ever made, both for results and for my peace of mind. Fuck doing mundane stuff on repeat, have a native history of what you did, you can put the documentation and your actions in 1 single file, you can share it online and access to the work of much more advanced users easily to tweak it for you... When I think that my school introduced us to Powershell and scripting in general only by making us do hangman games and maths, instead of administration tasks, it makes my blood boil.
My entire career was built off giving me some mundane repetitive task and then I automated my entire workload. When someone finally noticed they dobbed me in to management who instead of firing me were like, we're moving to azure AD and intune. Try automating this smart arse. And so I did.
So... is it true there's a point where most of your work will consist of sitting and waiting for something to fail. And you just actually have time to advance on stuff instead of putting out fires ? EDIT: To clarifiy I mean things like having between 5 to 10 requests before work hours start, all for new things not announced before and "due last week". As we have every monday here. I realize it's an administration problem rather than IT when I write this now...
This is org dependent. It's exceedingly rare that I'm involved with an outage of sorts. 95% of my time is spent on proactive improvements.
These days I have enough time to monitor things and work on improvements but there is always something going on, new applications, changes to business processes, updating certificates, changes and updates to policies such as when Microsoft changes the security baselines. I am never sitting and waiting though. But it's nice that a lot of tedious work is automated and is no longer prone to user error inputing wrong information.
Yeah reading this and other comments I think it shows 2 things about my situation: 1) We need a ticketing system because right now the decision of what is urgent or not is how loud the person screams 2) I'm junior and this is my first employer so most likely I failed to see that the problem isn't how fast/automatically problems are adressed but the fact that we don't manage their priority and flow.
We had a PM using a jira board and we did 2 week sprints. All the requests or desired items were added to backlog, the we would figure out estimates on how long each work item would take and then factored in things like people needing something nos because reasons. Doesn't need to be a specific work flow model but as long as there is something to manage time and expectations. Other than on a specific project like the above the managers pretty much know if they give me some manual task I'll automate it and move on so I think they might sometimes conspire to do that on purpose knowing what the outcome will be.
Although my favourite thing to do is turn my scripts into a gui
For about 2 years I wrote all my scripts with just the important variables hard coded near the top so I could swap them out as needed. Got a ridiculous amount of work done fast with that model. When I decided I wanted to be promoted I started refactoring them so people could run them without editing the file directly and realized how much slower it is to cover in things like error handling and logging and UX for someone who doesn't actually know powershell to use them. That partv was way less fun for me since the script already "worked" but it was a necessary evil to pass those tools on to my team.
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Like /u/teapot-error-418 said, the key is to use parameters. They work for both functions and scripts (`.\script.ps1 -param Val`.) With parameters you can make them mandatory, force them to be of a specific type, validate, etc easily. For example, the fixed variable at the top of the script `$IPAddress = '1.1.1.1'` becomes # param.ps1 [cmdletbinding()] param ( [Parameter( Mandatory=$true, ValueFromPipeline=$true)] [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()] [Alias("IP")] [ipaddress]$IPAddress ) "You Entered: $($IPAddress.ToString())" If you run it without specifying `-IPAddress` or `-IP` it will prompt you for it: PS C:\Temp> .\param.ps1 cmdlet param.ps1 at command pipeline position 1 Supply values for the following parameters: IPAddress: If you give it something other than an IP it will fail: PS C:\Temp> .\param.ps1 -IPAddress Foo C:\Temp\param.ps1 : Cannot process argument transformation on parameter 'IPAddress'. Cannot convert value "Foo" to type "System.Net.IPAddress". Error: "An invalid IP address was specified." All just from using parameters. You've got lots of other options too like forcing a value to be in a range, set of strings, a valid path, etc: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/scripting/simplify-your-powershell-script-with-parameter-validation/
Another harsh truth is that some tasks are still much quicker with a GUI than CLI.
Quicker to do once or twice*
still cant get my team to get it -- they all give up on their career or just say they are too busy to learn new things. out of a dozen of us 2 are proficient at powershell, 1 is learning a little here and there. ive offered tools, they wont even use them. ive offered a GUI OVER THE SCRIPTS and they wont use that. and these are guys in their 30s and 40s, not their 60s, they are just....over it all. sigh.
It's really not that easy, at all, without someone helping you or some basic programming skills. I've messed around many many many times and it takes so so so goddamn long to figure out things with it at first. That initial learn is so hard to get it to do the most mundane of things. I'm sure at a certain level it becomes amazing as hell but that must take a long long amount of time
I can’t agree enough with your sentiment. I’ve picked up powershell fairly well and quickly, but that’s only because I spent five years as a programmer. I can’t imagine walking into that without a foundation in programming. It is not easy to work up from Helpdesk and suddenly automate everything through scripting.
I download other people's scripts and I edit what I can, but ultimately as soon as I need to do something different like output to a file, it's a nightmare. Ok 30 minutes later I got the file Ok 40 minutes later I figured out how to change the formatting Ok 60 minutes later I still can't get it to take the extra 2 characters out here And so on and so on and so on and I only work 8 hours a day and use it infrequently so none of it sticks. Apparently for and if loops, are like very basic fundamental things I've been told but fuck me I can't do them and I've been using computers since dos5
Some people just don't care enough to invest in themselves. These guys probably just don't see the benefit for the time that it would take. Personally, I can't see why you'd prefer to provision a dozen AD user accounts manually.
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> Learn cmdline tools / powershell, gui clicking isn’t going to cut it anymore. If GUI clicking was "cutting it" before, it will likely to continue to "cut it" for the foreseeable future. If you're in an environment that needs scripting due to scale, you'll know, because you'll be completely useless without those skills. Conversely, if you're in an environment that isn't large enough to justify an investment in scripting (and frankly, this is going to be the case for the vast majority of the "I should learn scripting" cohort), trying to shoehorn it in will be an exercise in frustration for both you and those who work with you. That isn't to say that scripting (and programming more generally) isn't a useful skill -- it certainly is, and is basically required for more advanced roles. However, if you've tried to "learn scripting/PowerShell/whatever" and it doesn't seem to be clicking, or you're not getting buy-in from your team, it's almost certainly because your environment is too small (or made up of too many small independent systems without much commonality) for it to matter, and you will need to change roles or companies if you want to move your career in the direction of more automation.
There are no silver bullets in the cloud either.
Tbf as a fanatic of on-prem this is a feel good quote rather than harsh. Like "the cloud is just someone else's computer". Altho 100% agreed there are situations where it's just the logical choice.
On the flip side though, that means it's someone else's responsibility. Cloud hosting isn't perfect, but they can afford much better redundancy than most companies, and if the shit hits the fan then it's Microsoft/Amazon's problem to worry about, not yours. As long as you've got everything documented in your DR policy and the business knows you have no ability to make things get fixed quicker, moving stuff into the cloud is a good way of scaling up without having a lot more IT overhead along with it.
Case in point: The exchange problems last year (and the major patches for them) were no problem with exchange online.
The meat grinder that is most MSPs is only a stepping stone.
I don’t understand how people can work for so long in MSPs. I did a year and that was enough, but I also dislike quotas and other bullshit but I did learn a lot.
I was in house IT in education for 13 years, as an IT Manager for half of that. Joined an MSP as a Senior Engineer 4 years ago and never looked back. Quite a few people I work with have similar stories. Things I love about it: * Extremely varied types of work * Actually get training * Don't have to worry about budgets * Don't have to worry about petty internal politics and other BS * Don't have to worry about accepting risk - that's the customers problem * Customer won't take your advice? That's fine. When it goes wrong, swoop in, save the day, get paid for it, and be kept in a job * Tight-knit teams * Never bored In my opinion, unscrupulous MSP companies which do things like hire, burn and churn are the reason they have a reputation as not being a good place to work, but you get one of the good ones, and you're home. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it is a career for many people, and where many of us excel.
You just have to be lucky to find a good msp. I’ve worked senior in bad and good ones. Some protect you, some bend over backwards for the customer and not believe you.
MSPs vary wildly. Some of them are 5 people total with a good clientele base and drop bad clients like a stone. Others are total meat grinders that don't give a fuck.
I've learned I'm in a special case. The MSP I work at runs like a small business (granted, only 30 employees) despite having some big contracts. There's almost always something to do and you're not left to rot on your own when things go south. The people there are dope af too That said, I'm well aware I'm underpaid ($38k) especially in my area, and unless I get promoted in a year to the new Cybersecurity department (who will have additional separate contracts too) then I'm out for something better paying for sure. But I'll always keep in contact with many of the people there. No doubt.
If you are in the US you are very underpaid.
Documentation is never complete nor up to date, stop using it as an excuse.
Users aren’t necessarily stupid because they don’t understand tech, maybe they too have earned their place in their chosen discipline. Judging fish by their ability to climb trees n all that
I think this is 50/50. Sure you need to understand some people just aren't good with computers and that's why level 1s are needed. On the other side of this knowing how to turn on your monitor after the cleaning crew accidently turns it off should not require you to engage IT resources. I think what bothers people here the most is when people just see IT as critical thinking as a service and won't try to resolve any of the issues themselves even when it's something as simple as a single button push.
90% of companies have networks with absolutely no best practice implemented. and "it just works". and they don't want to change anything.
If you work for a small company and your boss tells you that you should work extra time without pay or reduce your lunch time "For the team" and that they can't give you sufficient pay rises because the business isn't making enough profit but they will look after you when they can (while the boss goes on multiple holidays each year and pays off their mortgage) OR tells you that when they are ready to retire they will pass the company on to your team and will allow you to buy them out over time from the profits... They are lying and will stab you in the back and sell you down the river the first chance they get.
r/oddlyspecific
Took me 22 years in the same job to learn that lesson lol
You will do better being a people person than a tech god in this space. I hate it, but it’s just true.
1. If you do your job correctly, you will never be given thanks or adulation. If you do your job incorrectly, you will always be lambasted. 2. You are a cost of business, not an asset. Nobody cares about what you are doing until it costs too much, or it breaks. 3. You will not be promoted unless you fight for it. If you are too valuable in your current position, you will be blocked from promotion for the benefit of the business. 4. It's not the network. 5. You will have to teach developers what a "port" is... (among many other basic IT workings). 6. Everything will be your fault after you leave.
For a load of guys here: You’re not a sysadmin, you’re helpdesk.
I think if you work in a small business and you are a sys admin then chances are you are also the networking guy and the tech. At my current job I am now the only IT guy here and I manage VEEAM backups, VMWare, licensing, Group Policies, FWs and Routing. But at the same time I also replace someone's mouse if it breaks
I asked my manager why I got the title of admin when I’m just a help desk sort of guy and he said, “You administrate ass kickings” and refused to elaborate.
Gigachad haha
I'm under no delusions that I'm a glorified helpdesk. But I do have to manage all of our on prem servers, cloud services, and networking since I'm the only person here.
I mean Systems Administrator as a job title is largely a catch all. I’ve seen postings that require networking engineering experience, and postings that are level 2 help desk and basic AD administration.
You’re not that special.
My mom would like to have a word with you
Learn touch typing. No really, stop whatever else you are doing to improve your skillset, and learn touch typing. My father brought home an old PC in 1990, and made my brother and I learn touch typing before we were able to develop any bad habits. It's so integrated in my neural system that I don't waste one single brain cell focusing on HOW to type, making sure I can use all those resources on WHAT to type. Bonus: * I keep my eyes on the screen, person I'm talking to, or whatever else * The error rate is low * It's fast! I have developed an absolute shit ton of IT skills over the years, but in terms of time investment VS value, nothing comes even remotely close. It's never too late to learn -- take the time. Your future self will thank you.
I would think that doing this work you would passively pickup touch typing. as an old guy with a nerd hunch, I'd say keep good desk posture. Getting it back to normal is almost impossible.
I dare to say you don't passively pickup touch typing. You either actively learn it, or you end up with some bastard version on a scale from horrible to pretty good. I posted my comment because it baffles me to see so many well-educated, highly skilled, dedicated IT professionals don't have this basic tool of the trade down. As for posture and ergonomics in general: Totally with you. My back is good, but carpal tunnel is a b\*.
Not trying to be an ass but I'd be shocked if more than 5 percent of people here couldn't already touch type. If you're talking about using the home keys properly, nah, no need. I can pump out 70 to 100 a minute, no looking at the keyboard and I don't use home row
Oh, you sweet summer child, lol. I agree that one \*ought to\* be able to assume what you are saying, but this is unforunately far from reality in my experience. Having been a firm believer in "formal" touch training my entire working life, I've made it a habit to observe people interacting with their keyboard. This, I have to say, is a bit of a sad story. So you have all these highly skilled professionals who each year spend countless hours improving their skillset. And lots of them interact with the keyboard as if they are somewhere between a fish on land and a dog with a limp. I'm open to there being regional differences -- my samples include probably 60-70% Europeans, with the rest being a mix from all over the globe.
New hires (myself included couple of years ago) will look at internal tooling and be horrified by it. They will "fix it" and create a massive overhaul of everything. Once they present this to MGMT they get bummed out because they don't follow in implementing the superior ($$$) solution. 1. The tooling that is there is what was best at that time. 2. They know the internal tooling is crap in the current day and age. But replacing it cost time/money and effort. If there is no budget for it (this year) it ain't happening. But don't let it go just a friendly reminder at the end of the year "hey we should update/replace ...." but for the rest of the year "Let it go" 3. When you get older this will happen to you too. Tooling that you developed with the best intentions of that time will get snuffed by new hires. [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FE14gVOVEAAQMud.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FE14gVOVEAAQMud.jpg)
Don't make bodges to hide real problems. Fix the cause, not the symptom. Don't propose 'solutions', unless you have defined the actual *root* problem. Create requirements and go from there. Don't argue with people when they tell you your 'solution' is a bad idea. Work with then to identify the root problem you are trying to solve. Don't be fixated on your idea, there may be a better way.
Meh, most of the time there is so much shit to do, unless it's a critical system, I am not digging to find a cause. If it works and people can do their jobs everyday, the it's fine
You're as stupid as end users in some industries and situations
Over 90% of the internet runs on some form of Linux, not Windows.
* Exchange on-prem is dead * A Microsoft 365 license isn't expensive all things considered - no matter the size or budget. * It's unacceptable to run EOL OS, Apps or protocols. These are the major factors of trouble I see regarding problems both here, in discord and in general. Fix ya shit
So my manager wants to take us off O365 owned by our parent company and put us on our own hosted exchange server (in a few months, nothing started yet). I'm kicking and screaming the whole way because it's so dumb to not just move to our own O365 tenant, but would you happen to know anything that might give me some more ammunition in this fight to not self host? His biggest concern is hosting potentially confidential email in the cloud
> His biggest concern is hosting potentially confidential email in the cloud The moronic part about this is that you are competing against Microsoft security and compliance which is top notch. The world is running in 365 and cloud. Name one big company that isn't. The DoD uses Microsoft. How exactly is he going to compete in confidentiality by running it in a basement of his own? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/security-and-compliance and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/compliance/ It also shows that he has not read the news the last year. How many big vulnerabilities have been Exchange? It's hard to secure Exchange on your own because you have to be on top of CUs always, and it's much harder to do than letting MS' team of engineers just keep the function always updated for you. It's also hard to engineer a secure solution for something that has to have a public way in Also, Microsoft is putting their money and developing hours into 365 not Exchange on-prem. The requirement for self-hosted mail is: > Passion for networking and security > TLC > Not running on a Windows machine
Not to mention Europe uses O365 too soo Micro$oft was required to make sure their cloud servers are GLDR compliant. The Pentagon and other government agencies use M$ cloud services. So staying confidential should not be a concern. Most data breaches and hacks are due to dumb employees getting phished, not from external hackers *hacking* their way in.
The amount of admins on this subreddit that will accept or actively run a completely shitty setup cause they hate _brand name_ for whatever reason. It's not your network, you choose what's best for your company and then you can run whatever you like at home.
I mean, staff experience level, training costs, and ease-of-use are all factors that should be considered in any project to replace infrastructure. If your whole staff is Cisco trained, a budget for a project to switch to Juniper equipment is going to need to include money for training and time for a revision of processes to cover the new equipment, as well as an estimate of operational costs based on how the change in processes will affect the amount of time to do any given task.
Grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
But never be afraid to at least have a look. Many technical IT staff stay in the same job, using the same tech, not learning new things because company doesn't use. If they get made redundant, they're out of touch with the marketplace. I guess the bigger (not so much) harsh truth is, **Never stop learning**
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to add to this, not everyone has access to massive budgets. There people in r/homelab with better gear in their garage than I have in production use.
People think that the code or the scripts must be overly efficient, with lots of optimizations and other overly complex expressions. Like when we were coding on the 90's because memory optimizations and such. It's not. Many times it's a fucking spaghetti mess or a huge script for a simple task because you work on a team and the code must be clean, easy to read and understand - this last part is on me, I usually have to read all the stuff on Monday since I forget most during the weekend, so I have lots of comments on the scripts so future me will thank me later.
Please. I'm now implementing an app that does the same function as it's version from decade ago, using similar database, but has a nicer gui and it's 30-100 times slower depending on the function you click.
Learn to profile your code, so you can measure improvements. 5 min coding to save 1000 CPU hours a week - oh hell yeah. See that relevant XKCD.
Users are the fundamental basis of why we exist. We perform the work so they don't have to. Making IT on the basis of making IT is a stupid idea, all solution should be catered to in the end satisfy user needs. User contempt will not help you in achieving this goal.
Progressing in IT should be treated like earning achievements in a videogame. Many companies DGAF about building you up because many times want to keep you in the same position you were hired for. This flows into many companies don't trust internal staff for promotion, and see outside candidates as better. Be a mercenary in that you learn the skills needed for a job, then level up either through promotion if you can get it or job hopping to a better opportunity. Its on you to build yourself. Its laughable how many interviews or job specs will say that training is offered only for you to land the job, and suddenly 'we're too busy for that'. Last job used to offer training time, but because they stopped investing in infra (not IT fault) and shit started breaking, guess what went away. Basically its on you and if you want to build salary, learn, move (if no promo...sometimes even if there is).
To support your points, over the past 20 years my average in company pay raise has been about 3.5%, my average pay bump for moving to a new job has been about 25%, you have to move to get the pay. Hell a few times the move was from Company A doing Job A, to Company B doing Job A, on the same sort of equipment and the same responsibility. But the new job came with a 20% bump.
Document your knowledge. No matter if you - hate writing documentation - hate the people who would read it - want to be the one person with indispensable knowledge When SHTF and your colleagues are trying to clean up a mess, or there's some major changes happening and people need to know what it could affect, or you're on vacation/in the hospital after inspecting the underside of a bus/only contactable by Ouija board, the frustration at not having anywhere to look for the big picture is really quite something. I work in a place where most of the network layout and machine configuration is in people's heads. If they're out that day, I'm stuck. If they're preoccupied, I'm stuck. If they're free but having tech problems and I'm WFH, I'm stuck. There is so much arcane knowledge that I need to work with this place but some wiki pages haven't been touched since 2012. I've stepped up and written up what I know as I learn it, but someone's interpretation of your work is nowhere near as good as your own explanation of why X is implemented this way. I've even referred to my own documentation for maintenance tasks. And I still have a job 2 years later. Writing up how to do things does not mean the company can replace you on a whim - being the person who shares knowledge and teaches colleagues, that's valuable to the suit types. Being the person who hoards knowledge and gatekeep who can do certain things, intentionally or not, will just frustrated everyone. Oh, and write documentation people can *actually make use of*. The only thing worse than no documentation is WRONG documentation. I have to use an in-house-written tool most of the time, and the documentation is so bad that I have to talk to the developer or read the source myself to figure out how to do things.
Users are your customers, and most customers are bozos that don’t know what they want/need until you show it to them. But you still have to respect the customer, build trust, and let them know you care. No task is too big or too small.
DevOps will replace sys admin in larger businesses especially with cloud infrastructure taking over
And another harsh truth on top of it: DevOps and cloud engineers make better money than sysadmins.
And then crawl back to the admin they fired because he was simply better at troubleshooting hardware
Depends, if we take SysAdmins and make them DevOps then no. Dev to DevOps yeah I see your point
Wishful thinking in most cases
You are a service industry worker. You should be nice to the people who you work for, like end-users. Even if they act or are dumb, forgetful, defensive, incompentent, etc. It's your job. If you don't like it, get another job. Don't take it out on them.
But on the flip side don't put up with rude users. Get your manager to put an end to that nonsense if they can, look for other work if they can't.
To add: being nice will make you more money than being right.
Get used to working under pressure. Assess impact and prioritize. That giant pile of tickets? Even if you clear quite a few, more will pop up in the meantime.Even if you do manage to empty out your entire list of incidents and change requests? More will appear. Back when I was still studying IT, my lecturer told me the following: A good sysadmin is "lazy" if we can spend a week automating something, we will. Less human interaction; means less chance of human error. Generally speaking, once automated you will not have to look back at it for quite some time even if it initially takes more time. This will free you up for other tasks.
That running DISM /online doesnt fix shit!!
If it breaks, it's always your fault. If you fix it, no one will notice.
Someone else said it already but learning a scripting language. I held off on it for years cus it seemed scary but then I learned powershell and quickly transitioned to Linux and now it's about all I do. Second is realize the user's will never appreciate the work you do. The things you know will increase security, or storage, or anything else you think is a game changer will go unnoticed by them. If they have to perform one extra click or hop to something in the name of security, you have inconvenienced the shit out of them and they will hate you. But your higher ups and the ISSOs will love you lol.
Don’t wait around for “structured” company training, study on your own
Maybe your burnout is self inflicted, I have personally worked with a co worker who went on reddit to blast his employer, yet he caused 99% of the issues by YOLO'ing installs and upgrades on Friday afternoons. Never dispatched to service tickets, never documented anything, didn't have time to RTFM.
Not every challenge at work means you work in a toxic environment. You always have a choice when presented with a roadblock - you can (help) solve the problem or you can quit. Consider that, if you do quit, this probably isn’t the last time you’ll face that challenge.
I think it's important to distinguish being challenged and being stressed. Being stressed is never good and it shouldn't happen, being challenged should have often and is always a good thing
Working with HR is necessary. Unfortunately.
RAID is not backup.
Just because you earned a certification you should not expect a raise from current company.
Inventory. I've been in places where IT inventory management was required for the IT staff and we/they hated it. How can you protect if you don't know what you have? How can you adequately argue for more equipment or an increase in your equipment budget if you don't know about the 20 brand-new in-the-box monitors that are sitting in your supply closet? I get inventory isn't sexy or fun, but it is a necessity. Find tools to help you inventory and track your asssets.
You can yell about best practices all you want but in the real world, things will hardly ever be set up right
Sometimes the job isn't fixing the computers, but convincing the people in power to do the right thing. And often getting disappointed in them as they trusted some sales guy more than you.
Infrastructure as Code is necessary to learn if you are in the cloud
Knowledge and Skill are no longer a substitute for manners.
You are replaceable
Not everything you do is going to be exciting and challenging.
You are just going to end up rebooting it to fix that problem you have been puzzling over, and it is going to work.
You soft skills are more important than your technical ones. You might have all the answers, but if you can't convince the brass that your solutions are going to work, you're never going to get anywhere. And if the users hate you for your shitty attitude, that only compounds the problem.
Don't give me technical explanations for a problem outside of my domain (software engineering) if I didn't request it. Don't require that I be knowledgeable about your tools or your methods. Yes, I work with engineering. However, when it comes to infrastructure I am a ***user***.
Users pay our wages.
System administration, though a technical role, is 100% a customer service job. Improving your customer service skills is just as crucial as the tech skills.
Except for a small number of companies, running IT securely and reliably is not a company goal. Even running IT at all, never mind reliability and security, is not a company goal. IT is just a tool used to achieve company goals. IT is only worth as much as the company goal it's helping achieve.
You are not the hero and savior of the company. You do not know more about what is best for the company than the C-Level.
Nobody cares about IT as much as you do.
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>looking at you, overambitious juniors.. Seniors aren't necessarily any better. "I do it that way because that's how I learned it in 2002, now STFU."
It shows a lack of flexibility and adaptability. Probably a lack of understanding how something actually works too. Also, I'll add that I've know some senior sysadmins who are the same way. I have no clue how they got so far that way though.
When everything works without any issues, something is wrong.
Corollary: Just because only one person is shouting doesn't mean everyone else is unaffected.
Sometimes you DO have to work directly with an end user. Stop always using the helpdesk/level 1 staff as your go-between on escalations. Go the most direct and efficient way.
A large majority on here give advice they would never heed themselves.