Back story. Old Sr. Network Admin. left. He was essentially sitting on butt and letting things go to heck. Not that he knew what he was doing to begin with as the poor and pitiful network that needs to be put down is a testament to. I’ve taken on his job full time at significantly less pay. Plus the projects I was already working on. My boss had told me that when that day came I could expect an organizational change to my benefit plus higher pay. That day came and went, the old admin nuked his hard drive, essentially flipped us all the bird (zero documentation, zero assistance or heads up on anything), and bailed.
I’m going to have to rip the network out, take several hundred systems offline, and re-provision everything – it’s that bad (all network hardware running different levels of firmware/OS, end of life hardware, Windows machines of every conceivable OS version without any updates, 15 different models of PCs, random and disparate software applications running all over God’s green infrastructure).
So, here’s the sanity check bit. My boss told me in early November that I would be receiving a promotion and a pay raise “soon” pending action by so-and-so. I didn’t hear anything afterwards so right before Christmas I asked casually for an update. I received a, I’m sure they will announce it at the beginning of the new year. Nothing. Today, sensing probably that I’m a bit curious about it, tells me exactly the same thing he told me in early November - Pending action by so-and-so and such-and-such. Meanwhile my job stress has tripled and I’m constantly bombarded with requests from users plus questions from my boss about network design related stuff.
Is it too early to be calling b.s.? I’m not really familiar with how this company works with stuff like this being fairly new (~ 6 months), but I know they are cheap because their hiring-on offer was low. The problem is, it’s a small area without a lot of jobs, the economy sucks, and I’d have to move to a larger city for a job that paid a “fair” wage.
15 Spice ups
Tough call; and I’ve been there myself.
There’s two ways to look at this; the negative is that they are trying to keep you on as low a pay rate as they can for as long as they can. They know that they can get away with paying less because of the local situation. I’m betting that all of the promises were verbal, which mean diddlysquat; unless it’s in writing, you don’t have a leg to stand on.
I’d try to force the hand of your boss; ask for a meeting and get him to put any comments down on paper with a copy to you and one to HR. Highlight that you have taken on the more responsible role, are doing the work above the pay grade etc. If that doesn’t produce a satisfactory response, then time to look for somewhere else.
Now the positive; you are in a pretty good situation believe it or not. You have the opportunity to show them (and a potential future employer) just what you can do. You have a lot of issues there, and if you can resolve those without spending a lot of money and causing major disruption, that will be a major point with which to demonstrate your true value; and if the company don’t value your performance, someone else will.
It’s always easier to get another job, when you are already in a job. You don’t have the pressure of no income and recruiters do seem to favour those that are already employed.
3 Spice ups
I’ve been around for “admins gone rogue” (even ones who’ve ended up in jail/fled to Canada etc). The sad thing is generally management fell into two camps on them.
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Unreachable expectations. Not enough resources, and so they built kingdoms of chewing gum and duck tape.
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Generally underpaid for what the job required. They started out with a hero complex (I’m going to fix this!) but because of the lack of pay/resources often were horribly under skilled to accomplish anything. They made some marginal improvements over the old guy. This leads to the next phase…
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They don’t get help, they don’t get raises. They get baited along for a bit but eventually they hit burn out and they hit it hard…
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Management turns up the pressure post burnout. Hey you worked 20 hours days hand installing this app last year why don’t you give up your weekends and do it again!
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This is where things fork. Normal people realize this is a waste and simply ghost out and move on. Some (and its not really easy to predict which ones will do it) blow things up. They nuke switch configs, they turn the heat up i the data center, they delete Hyper-V VM config files. In some cases its hard to tell what is sabotage and what is the result of a duct tape jungle.
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Management hires a new guy. Some dumb kid, and promise him he can have all of this kingdom as his domain (For less money than the last guy).
Might I suggest finding a nice MSP or large company to work for where you have a team to work for, real shift hours, and opportunities for advancement and mentors?
4 Spice ups
Why not migrate to something that will manage this mess for you. Something like Mirage, or Horizon to manage PC and application stack imaging, or VDI to replace all the end points with dumb clients that can be phased out and centralize image management.
I used to work at a MSP and we did projects like this. Why not bring in some professionals to do this and knock it all out on a long weekend, or during clear maintenance windows after hours?
Why does an in house person need to do this much patching and EUC support?
2 Spice ups
That looks like the road we’ll likely be taking. The problem is we have zero project management, no meetings (in the ~6 months I’ve been there) and communication are drive-bys with coffee in hand Lumberg style. Just organizing the project and getting it all up and running will cost $$$ (I’ve been on the solution-provider side and our need is muy grande).
Oh &#$@&#. I’m # 6; the dumb kid.
I have 10 years in IT (mostly business side, or solutions provider side) but would love mentoring, especially in fixing the “un-fixable”.
All the more reason to outsource it. In house projects without clear project management end up taking forever, waste internal resources.
If your boss can’t give you a weekly meeting (30 minutes 1:1 if needed) and a departmental 1 hour meeting I would also “just leave”. Live is to short to work for managers you don’t respect (and shouldn’t).
1 Spice up
There are a million problems with being a 1 person IT dept, and why when your in this situation you should look to outsource quite a bit of day to day stuff.
“one is none” When ever someone leaves they take with them all the knowledge of the department. Until you have 3 you can’t expect anyone to have time/resources to do proper cross training.
vacation coverage is non-existent. Hero culture prevails This leads to the dark side (burnout).
Anytime your in a small department like this, and quarterly check where you are on this list.
We had a saying when I worked in consulting. Some will, some won’t. Move On. There comes a point where its like doing CPR on a headless corpse…
1 Spice up
Storageninja stole all my fire, but I do have one question, and it ties in with one of the things he said. Do you think that the guy that left was always like that, or did they make him like that? I’m looking.
2 Spice ups
LEAVE or make it clear without being obvious that you are looking to leave. Force their hand to make you stay, you will soon see if they actually want your expertise or if they are stringing you along for cheap labour. No IT person in their right mind would take on your position without documentation and assistance and/or a big salary. You were unlucky and inherited it so take your stand and they either pay you what your worth or lose you.
2 Spice ups
I’m a lone wolf, I hope don’t end like that.
Nobody cares as much about you as you do. Time to talk to your boss again explain that the new duties are not what you were hired for and you need action on the new position and its compensation.
1 Spice up
///\ That!! as@snufykat says time to talk with your boss again. I would advise however do this in writing that way you can take the time to think properly about what you want to say. By doing this in writing you have a record of both your own and your bosses response. End of the day you are not there for a hobby!! Your time costs money and your skill even more so,
Dukat
(Dukat)
14
If you like where you are, I’d tell them that you are fine with doing your job but will not take on the additional responsibilities without an appropriate increase in pay and title reflecting your position.
If they offer it to you, get it in writing.
Otherwise, polish your resume and start looking.
Actually might want to polish it regardless and start putting an ear to the ground.
3 Spice ups
These are all great points. We do have two help-desk people and a business systems manager, but there’s not a lot of cross-training currently and there’s no understanding of who does what. I’m going to give it until the end of the month and then start looking elsewhere and have a really formal sit down regarding all of this. I’m starting to think my boss doesn’t have the power to do some of the stuff he’s mentioned and I’m afraid he’s actually just “mentioned” that the company “should” increase my pay and change my title.
Even then, without some serious changes in the way our tiny department operates we are really in bad shape.
Some of the things I took for granted at other larger corporations are beginning to haunt me. If I do a formal sit down I think it will comprise of two parts – a sort of “state of the union” (think Idiocracy, president Commancho’s speech “$&@#! I know $%^#'s real bad right now…”) and a talk about my compensation. It’s impossible to get people with my experience and education in this area. You might get a few guys with associates or bachelor’s in information systems or computer science, but knowing the material and knowing how to apply it are two very different things.
I think it’s a little of both. I think guy was a bit unhinged, but the state of things definitely couldn’t have helped.
Its almost always A little of both.
My favorite example of someone I warned bad management about and they ignored was This guy.
Oh wow! You knew that guy? I’ve read that article before and this line scares me every time “essentially eliminating access to all the company’s data and applications for its eastern United States operations.”
As a general rule consultants don’t talk about their work, but given that I understand my report ended up in the hands of the FBI after this mess blew up (I wasn’t around for the fireworks, but know people who were) so since my NDA is nullified here lets discuss…
I believe my report said “professional malpractice” was what everyone got all uppity about and we got thrown out by the CIO as being excessively alarmist.
92 disk RAID 5 with SATA drives to run an ERP system that needed to handle 40K TPS.
Backups failing for weeks. recovered unquieced snapshots from a SAN on VMware so he had VMFS volumes with corruption. He though SAN snapshots were a replacement for backups.
Finally one of the junior guys caught him in the logs sabotaging the switching and then fixing it so he could be the hero.
Questionably intelligent Interim CIO talked to HR over email about firing him (They guy was a domain admin…) and used MDM to track the CIO to WV to fire him. I heard he got a txt when his plane landed, something to the effect of “your not here to fire me are you!”
He factory reset the EqualLogics, nuked the call manager config, turned on heat in the data center to cook gear, took out cabling. The guy had a lot of vendors recommending him (Cisco among others) possibly because he had unnecessarily bought a lot of their gear (He deployed Nexus switching to make their 92 disk RAID 5 storage faster!).
1 Spice up
Man, that sounds tough. You definitely should be compensated correctly for the amount of work that you’re doing.
But hey, just remember, you’re #1.
1 Spice up
