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I’ve asked for help before, but what can I do because 90% of the time I feel frustrated. I know I’m learning as I go, but being right out of school and thrown into this job, it feels like I’m supposed to know more than I do.

I get issues which are sometimes out of my league so to speak. I feel like I might be letting them down because this job requires more knowledge than what I have. I know I’m learning to the system of the company and how everything works, but lately (at least this week), I feel like all the issues are above me and it’s hard for me to troubleshoot and assess and resolve.

How can I resolve these issues as I am learning, so I do not take a excessive amount of time doing so?

@Microsoft

171 Spice ups
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Bring them here. We might not be able to solve them for you, but we can probably point you in the right direction.

133 Spice ups
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This is something I think everyone struggles with, my approach is to be very proactive and try to identify issues that will crop are going to intensive so that I can learn proactively instead of trying to be reactive.

24 Spice ups
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I wasn’t even out of high school before I started my first tech job. I can relate in so many ways. You just get thrown in and expected to know everything about everything that has lights or buttons. It comes with the territory, and I’m sure most of us would go bat-sh*t insane if it were for the Spiceworks Community. We are IT. We work together and help each other. Bring your confusions and your angers here(angers go in the watercooler rant thread). We got ya man. We know your pain.

37 Spice ups
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When you feel overwhelmed just roll back from your desk and breath. Sometime s you won’t be able to solve all the problems of the world. Use the community as an outlet because everyone within it has experienced this. One thing I did as a newbie was kept a calendar that was made by The Onion to keep my spirits high.

8 Spice ups
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Thanks guys. I really appreciate all your help. I am glad I was referred to this site because within a week of using it, I don’t know what I’d do with out you guys.

I really want to learn and understand everything in my job, so this way I can be productive and knowledgeable in resolving issues. I get very stressed some days when have everyone asking for everything at once and then knowing in which order to help everyone, aside from people coming to my cubicle and asking questions as well.

21 Spice ups
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You will never know everything there is to know. As long as you know how to find out, you’ll be fine.

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You already know that you don’t know enough. So you are ahead of the game man!

Keep pushing, keep asking questions, keep searching google.

And for the love of god, NEVER be afraid to say “I don’t know” just be sure to follow it with " But i will find out."

Sounds to me like you want to do your best, therefore you will.

51 Spice ups
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No doubt. Sometimes I feel like I never know how to fix some things. But I know how to find out. Welcome to Spiceworks! This place has saved my tail on many occasions.

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Yeah, I want to show I am more than capable of doing my job. Not only that I want to show them I am confident, because some days I feel like I want to crawl under a rock and hide. I am grateful for you guys here and I feel that as I keep progressing in my job, we will get to know each other more.

Again, Thanks. I appreciate all the help. You guys are the best.

8 Spice ups
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I am two years on the job and still want to hide most days.

37 Spice ups
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Imagine that, a graduate that has realistic expectations! Most grads think they should be making 100K out of college with little or no knowledge…just book learning.

Go slow, prioritize problems and read everything you can. Google-Fu is your friend as well grasshopper, just learn to weed through the crap to find the pearls of wisdom and add them to your documentation.

Use SW to create a knowledge base as well. No one knows everything and if they say they do they are lying.

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Also document as much as possible when you do figure something out, so you won’t have to learn it over again.

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Use Spiceworks to create tickets if you don’t already, even if you do not give access to your users for it you will have a detailed list of requests and issues to work on that you can prioritize. Other than that understand that you are just one person. This means that you can only do so much. There are lots of IT jobs still out there so don’t worry if this one does not pan out. IT is all about learning on the job, you break it, you fix it and you learn from it. People are always going to want things “right now” but they are not going to get that, it’s impossible. Don’t even try cause you will end up frustrated. In my opinion IT is not always about knowing the answer but rather being able to find the answer. There is too much in this field to possibly know everything. You pick up what you can and the rest you research. Just do your best and us the Spiceworks Community to your advantage. You will always run into things where you are unsure what to do but there is almost always someone on here that has run into it before too and many times they have the answer to your issue or can point you in the right direction.

11 Spice ups
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Can I coordinate with tickets from the outside help desk. Not link them, but use the ticket numbers and input into spiceworks?

1 Spice up
16

First off, CONGRATULATIONS on the job! You are one of the lucky ones that got a decent job just out of college. This doesn’t happen for everyone. It took me years to get a good full time IT job.

Story time and some words of encouragement, because I have been there, and recently:

Man, I know how you feel, and I think I’ve probably posted this same sort of response at least 5-6 times now to people in your shoes. About 2 years ago I went from being part time home IT guy / pizza delivery guy to full time Systems Administrator for a public library system. I had recently gotten my A+ cert, but as most will tell you, and you probably know, A+ is pretty minimal. It shows that you know how to troubleshoot and fix basic desktops and related peripherals. I had started watching a few videos on AD, Group Policy, DNS, DHCP, etc, but what I had mainly was a very basic “theory” of how they worked, with no actual experience.

So, through blind luck or an act of God (I did actually pray to get this job, and if you asked me when I sent in my resume if I thought I would be getting it, I would have said I had about a 5% chance), I got the systems admin job. Now, I’ve always been a very “learn as you go” and self taught kind of guy. I taught myself how to play guitar, and I am pretty damn good for never having a lesson. Now that I am learning more advanced playing techniques through online videos, I have made leaps and bounds, but still, quite an achievement.

I am going to be 100% honest: The first few months I was in so far over my head… I didn’t even know where to start. I had never used any type of remote desktop. Now it was an every day thing. I had never actually touched a DHCP, DNS, or AD server. I knew, vaguely, what these things did. I knew vaguely that a domain controller “controls the network and makes things run correctly”. I knew what a firewall was (we use pfSense, and the first time I looked at it, it was basically gibberish), but never used a full blown hardware firewall. Virtual Private Network was something that I had heard of, but really had no grasp of.

I did have a great knowledge of how to troubleshoot and fix most computer issues, having done tons of that in my part time business. I was also decent at troubleshooting network issues. Walking into a server room with thousands of wires interconnecting 24 and 48 port switches, multiple servers, and spanning multiple rooms, however, was waaay beyond me. Also, the website was self hosted on an ancient dell poweredge running linux. I had exactly zero experience with Linux. What I knew about Linux could be summed up as: that cool / difficult OS that really nerdy people use for really important servers. Just how the hell did I get this job anyway? And that’s only the hardware end of things. Libraries use tons of customized software, of which I had zero knowledge, and now I am expected to troubleshoot it all. Custom label making, printing, and ILS systems… it was a nightmare.

So, how did I get through? One day at a time man. There were so many mistakes, so many trial and error moments, so many doubts, so many “I don’t know if I can do this” moments, but I got through, and so will you. Now, it turns out that the basic stuff like remoting into a Windows server and managing things like AD, DHCP, DNS, etc, those are all pretty damn easy. Gotta love windows. Honestly, I found everything about our windows server setups to be really intuitive. DNS took some time to understand completely, but I finally have a good grasp of it. Group Policy is another tricky area, but luckily for me the previous IT guy had really good, airtight group policy set up for me.

In the early days I remember having issues like, not being able to map the network share on a new computer. I struggled with that issue for a good 3 days before e-mailing the previous IT guy who told me to try the IP address instead of the share name. Boom, it worked. “That’s an indication that something with DNS is failing” he told me. Greeeeat. Something I know next to nothing about is failing. Other issues followed, and for the most part I was able to do my job pretty well - basic IT troubleshooting stuff was no big deal. But the custom software, and some of the in depth issues took a LONG time to figure out.

What I have learned in 2.5 years of being a systems admin:

  • Have faith in yourself. IT may take you longer than someone else to figure it out, but you are probably being paid considerably less than a more experienced person. You WILL figure out the issue.
  • Sometimes, IT just sucks. I spent the past 3 months trying to figure out why our website has been crashing intermittently. I knew that our server was old, and I tried about 10 different things trying to create a new server and move out multisite wordpress installation onto it. Did I mention I knew nothing about wordpress or Linux before I started here? And here I am, expected to do pretty advanced stuff with it. So after many trials, and MANY errors, I finally moved our website by doing a physical to virtual conversion on our new esxi host (another technology I knew nothing about before we got a server and I virtualized it earlier this year). After tons and tons of frustration, I finally found the thing that has been causing our site to spike up to use literally the entire CPU of our new server: There was about 640 MB of trash data in our wp_options table in MySQL. Close to 1 Million Transient entries, which are supposed to expire after a given amount of time. They hadn’t been expiring. After running an SQL “Search and delete” command to get rid of these, my database went from 650+ MB down to less than 20 MB. Did I mention, most of those entries were set to autoload, meaning that EVERY page of the website loaded all of those transients automatically on every page of the site? No wonder the site was slow and crashing. This is just one example, but there have been numerous things like this that have happened over the past 2 years. You just can’t know this stuff unless you become an expert at this stuff. And an expert you WILL become.
  • Many times, the issue will not be as it seems. I spent so much time troubleshooting the files of the actual site. The .htaccess file, the plugins, the server itself, but it never occured to me that it could be the database causing the issue. I randomly stumbled upon an ancient post suggesting that I take a look at the database and look for any tables that had more than 2 MB size. Bingo, 640 MB table. You’ll never find the problem if you are looking in the wrong place, so just remember to explore ALL possible options.
  • Start learning. It hasn’t been easy, but the knowledge I have been “forced” to accumulate in order to effectively do my job over the last 2.5 years has been astonishing. What I learned on the job doesn’t even begin to compare to what I learned in college. When you have down time, do all the research you can on the systems that you need to support. Read manuals, google stuff.

Most IT people get mentored into a position. I was not. I was thrown into the deep end of the pool without a life jacket and basically told “sink or swim”. It sounds like you are in a similar position. I can’t tell you that it will be easy. It will probably take some time for you to adjust and get “good” at what you are doing. Will there be a time in the future where you will be able to solve more than 50% of the issues that face you without doing extensive research and learning? Yes. But it doesn’t happen overnight, and by the time it does happen, you won’t even realize it. Being a one man IT shop for an organization with very diverse and specialized needs has been one of the most difficult, but most rewarding things I have done. When I started, I couldn’t believe how much money I was making (compared to being freelance IT / pizza delivery). Now I know. I earn every damn penny of it through hours upon hours of frustration, research, learning, and stress.

Last thing:

When in doubt, ask Spiceworks. Man, you have no idea how many times they have gotten me through things. Upgrading from 2003 domain controller to 2012, transferring FSMO and all other roles, then demoting / retiring an old server? Spiceworks people pointed me in the right direction. Virtualization? 100% Spiceworks. How to change a server from thick provisioning to thin (because I provisioned our new Windows 2012 server as thick like an idiot because it is the default)? Spiceworks again. The previous IT guy had Spiceworks installed on a server for me, and basically was using it to create his own tickets and document his work. That was an absolute treasure trove of information for me, and I have tried to follow suit. And then I found the Spiceworks community. Honestly, this community is made for guys like us that have been thrown in the deep end.

I wish you the best of luck. Don’t give up. It’s natural to be frustrated. This is part of breaking into a new IT job without any experience. This is the reason why EVERYONE wants someone with experience. And sorry for writing a damn book, but for the moment, everything in my little IT world is working like it should, so I had some time on my hands.

91 Spice ups
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Anthony, I’ve been in IT for almost 20 years, and I still get days like that. IT is an evolving adventure, take it a step at a time, relax, remember to breath and enjoy the journey. There are people here far more knowledgeable than I, make use of them, Us and google (betting your going to get a spiceworks answer even via google). Do not be afraid to ask questions, we’ve all been there (even SAM), and we’re all here to help each other.

G

11 Spice ups
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Learning by my definition often feels like someone is ripping apart your brain. Smashing it up and then hopefully reforming it.

I cant tell you how badly I feel I am under qualified for the job I have now. But I trust my own ability to resolve issues as they come. And know that the only way to fail is to give up. ( a little Dracula quote? :o)

You cannot really get rid of the issues that you feel are over your head. The best solution is not to try to take them alone. Spiceworks has a huge community as you can see obviously! But don’t forget to do some networking. There are Spicecorps here you can look for one near you. Don’t be afraid to reach out with questions to other IT professionals. Look for other groups local to you too.

I took a look at your previous post. You are only a few weeks into your job. Ive been at mine for over a year and I am still learning bits and pieces of how the company operates and how I should fit into it. As long as you keep trying and don’t give up you can succeed.

And dont forget to let yourself relax. Learning to relax and let go of stress early is more important than fixing that one dudes computer problem 2hours faster.

This link is a video I stumbled across by accident one day. I really love the message. Worth your 2:25 minutes of your life :D. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAVZ8LbIH7E

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Anthony, it sounds like you’re the only person in your position there at the library so everything in your company’s IT world is falling on you. Do you feel like you have a supportive manager? If so, I would take the advice of one of the previous posters and see if you can find a free/simple ticketing system for your end users to use to submit tickets to you(r department). Like SpiceWorks. Keeping track of all the work to be done is a huge first step but it’s an important one. Having all your changes/incidents tracked in one place will help you and your management figure out how to prioritize your work and establish reasonable turnaround times for certain types of tickets.

Honestly I’m pretty new to SpiceWorks but I really like the community here. I can say that I’ve vendors’ forums like the Cisco Support Forums really helpful as well so you might want to check those out when you run into issues. Heck, as long as we’re talking about vendors, you might want to take inventory of all the equipment you have and find out which items carry vendor support contracts on them too, and keep that info handy! I work primarily in the Cisco space and in addition to helping you fix broken things, Cisco TAC will also give you configuration assistance if you have a project coming up.

Thirdly, I’d suggest you find some local Meetups in your area for IT pros. I think SpiceWorks has meetings in most major geographies but there are also many vendor/product specific Meetups out there as well. Here in Cincinnati we have Sharepoint, Lync, Linux, and many programming where you can meet up with other guys like you, learn about new products, and maybe bounce some problems/ideas off some peers in a non-threatening environment.

Fourth, use Google heavily. And RTFM. IT people are generally super helpful as we’ve all been stuck before but try not to ask questions that can be solved with a Google search or two. I realize at this point you may be so lost you don’t even know what to ask Google for, but don’t worry - you’ll get there!

Lastly, as many posters have stated, just keep coming back here and people can at least get you pointed in the right direction. The challenge is why many of us are attracted to IT so we’re happy to help. Welcome to the club :slight_smile:

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Hang in there. Most of us can relate with your experience. I was also still in school when I started my first job and it was much the same experience. I recently switched jobs and am going through the same thing again to a certain extent.

You will never know everything in this job, its just not possible and tech is constantly changing.

This community is a great resource when you need to find something out or are stuck! So from that perspective Welcome to the Community and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Lots of questions. that is how you will learn.

Also it never hurts to bring in outside help from time to time for bigger projects or items you just don’t know. That isn’t a failing on your part, its just being smart!

Good Luck and hang in there

3 Spice ups