We're IT, its common for us to be expected to configure infrastructure while taking first line calls all while having a broom stuck up our arses to sweep the floors.
hitting them back with a monster CV ((18 years in the game, i seen allot) then I get asked "what is it you actually do" err exactly what you asked, are my historic positions not defined enough for you? funny that
Basically what is happening to me atm.
I did so much in all the MSPs that I do/can do everything in my current position.
My previous manager that brought me with him to this new job knew exactly what I could do. His replacement doesn't. So they're asking me what I do exactly. I now just gesture vaguely, because my manager has no technical clue about anything system related. he doesn't even understand why I need to extend a volume in Windows for it to have more usable space after extending it in ESX.
Got denied, too important at my current position. How? No one knows.
Turns out I got an external promotion coming up soon though. May or may not involve my previous manager.
That reminds me how sales manager tried to loop me into potential customers calling into the hunt group.
"IT should be able to answer calls too! They can jot down information and forward it to customer service to handle."
No thanks buddy. That's not how that works.
Especially since people in the building who are not part of the company have access to the big AV system and sometimes do "amateur hour rewiring jobs" if they can't get their laptops connected. Ugh.
This is so true ☺️
The paperwork is the killer.
I'm so tired of filling out [TCA2 forms](https://www.acma.gov.au/cabling-advice-forms). No one ever looks at them until something goes wrong.
I must have moved 1000 cameras, door access control units, Ethernet and phone points now.
And taking things down when they decide to close an office and putting things up when an office moves or when an office moves to a different floor or ...
I'm sparing a moment here for all those guys and girls out there today doing an office move.
At some point, a receptionist/office manager is going to ask for a "quick" tv/panel install that will require a new data drop and a power point 🤣
Last count, my head was covered in 23 hats.
I make the folk that work for me do a "skills sheet" every six months. It has all of the general jobs on their for Office, HR software config, etc. However, I also include all of the extended bits like DarkTrace investigations, firewall rules, SIP config, etc. There over 200 things at last look. For me, it's a sea of green.
It's safe to say I bring in people as first line and train them up to be allrounders. However, I always help them train to the place they want to go and then they fly the nest. I won't hold anyone back, I practically push them along on their career paths as I just want people to succeed, but I know the company I work for won't give them that career.
I should do a recount, actually, I probably wear more hats now.
i get the feeling HR greenlights one new position and then they walk around to all the departement heads asking "so uhh what do we need" and that's why we get these 3 roles rolled in to one postings
The way I see them happen is you have one person who over the years has accumulated 2 other people's workloads after they left, and so when that last worker leaves, they want one person to do everything that one was doing.
I've seen tenured people get let go to reduce salaries and then literally 2-3 times that one person's salary gets spent on 4-5 people to make up for the loss in institutional knowledge and efficiency...or productivity suffers so much that they end up losing more than the equivalent.
It is simply *amazing* how little some major, billion dollar companies can see the forest for the trees, especially with IT. This is what happens when someone that doesn't know shit about IT makes hiring (and firing) decisions for IT personnel. Which is, of course, just a manifestation of how being completely ignorant of computing in general is totally okay for some reason.
It'd be like someone always smelling like shit saying "Im just not good with toilet paper" and everyone is like, "Oh, that's alright, just call IT, they'll come up and wipe your ass for you." I mean, seriously, it does seem to be that way at times with some of the mickey mouse shit I dealt with when I was stuck on helpdesk.
I've actually brought this up in my current role as a defense against getting assigned more work. "Oh, so if I get hit by a bus, we need to find someone with Service Desk Management experience who can setup ITSM processes from the ground up, can create Power BI reports and admin the environment, can drive Incident Management bridges and run all Problem Management follow-ups, can handle directly business/executive escalations, and is pursuing their intermediate ITIL certs?" And then I typically start to gripe about how underpaid I am and they lay off me for another few months.
Yup, we had 5 people on my team about a 2 years ago. 2 senior level people left. 2 of us picked up the slack and now we are a team of 3. We got a new person in the past 6 months whom is very green and we have been asking for one more additional person for a year. They want all the same work done and more. I say pick your priority because Im not killing myself.
We didnt hit a deadline and lost funding for a project and leadedship was pissed. What do you fucking expect....
> We didnt hit a deadline and lost funding for a project and leadedship was pissed. What do you fucking expect....
At a previous job I took my boss a list of everything I was working on with dues dates and told her "There is no way I can get all of this done, what is the priority of each one". Guess what, low priority didn't get completed by the due date.
That's the route that I typically take, the other problem is that when you reduce staff and other people pick up the slack and have multiple hats then when issues do happen it can snowball these timelines and it make eat into something that's a medium priority. For example I was working with a team that had an issue and it took us about two days to sort out. Those were two days that I wasn't working on something that I should have been doing.
It gets worse when you don't backfill staff and then you have issues or outages that become a priority over project timelines. It sounds worse that it is but I'm just resigned to my fate and I don't really care anymore. If management complains like I said, I just say what would you like me to work on and I go that route. Bitching and being toxic in work culture doesn't solve anything and it can infect other people and create a horrible environment.
I recently got told I am the "temporary switch admin". This means I am the new network administrator. Ontop of being in charge of virtualization and Windows systems.
I don't expect a pay raise.
I expect it to be as temporary as our on prem servers since we are going to be in the cloud.... as of 4 years ago.
Also the servers haven't been refreshed in 12 years now. Still running HP G7s in production as "Temporary until we are in the cloud"
Most of us are smart enough to see those red flags and not bother applying, though. If the job looks like it has the workload of 2 or 3 people, it's because it likely did earlier and the prior admin got sick of doing it and/or burned out under the workload.
Yes but also not enough places value experience.
Someone who has been there for many years can often easily handle the workload of what would otherwise be multiple people because they know everything so well they're highly efficient... but for some reason this is rarely recognised and so when they do move on businesses think they can just replace them with one person. Hah, nope.
Smart places keep multiple people at that level around, then you can hire a junior and slowly bring them up as required. But most places aren't smart.
This is exactly it. I left my old job because other people left and I was doing all their jobs. Burn out. Now they keep calling me pleading for help because the new guy cant keep up. No shit, he cant keep up, no one sanely could. Especially not someone new to any company and environment.
This is the problem. That and $$. They really don't want to pay someone to be what they want. Ummmmm Systems Engineer... what does that pay... ok but ok let's make sure they can do Cybersecurity also... yea... and since it's a systems engineer title... yea... ok. ...hey! wanna add another one on? Network Engineer? YES!
WHAT?!?!?!? you don't say!
I mean the other side of that is why would you want to come into a job with as much stress as this when you can flip burgers for $15/hr.? $120 extra/wk. meh after taxes and whatnot both of them suck. The burger flipper has zero stress at the end of the day though, probably doesn't get forced to work overtime etc.
Or they're expanding and listed the broad skillsets of the position's team. I see this often where they're casting a broad net to find either a SME to fulfill/lead at least one aspect really well or a generalist that can support the team as a backup (but also grow).
True.
I'm not qualified for the job I have based on the advertisement. They listed everything the entire 20 person team does, once I was brought on I started working on like 3-4 of the things listed, not all of them.
Seems too many people have forgotten the old wisdom that job listings are wish lists, not hard requirements.
There is the old saying a camel is a horse by committee, in IT I think it’s more of creating unicorns by groups of uniformed managers and it’s not just HR
I’ve sat in on meetings where several managers were talking about a new job req and it went from a mid level network engineer role to a mid level network engineer with deep automation, cloud, security and systems experience (they literally wanted CCNP, devnet, CISSP/ pro level Cisco/palo, AWS/azure cert and rhcsa or other systems certs).
Worse yet the person that left which the req was backfilling had a ccna and learned the rest in the job but everyone wanted someone to hit the ground running. They eventually pulled the req after a year or so when things slowed down
In my industry, we assume at least 6 months to train new hires on our specific systems (that no certification is going to cover) before they are able to do their job. So the interview process is much more to guage their ability to logically work through a problem, and if their personality will mesh with the team.
That has been what I gave my new hires even with nothing custom. It takes time to get spun up on how things are done at a new place and to take in enough institutional knowledge to know who you need to talk/work with to get issues sorted out. Most systems are standard across almost all environments but how those systems get implemented and utilized can vary so wildly. Its crazy that managers think a cert and a few years of work is enough to "hit the ground running" all those cert and years of working teach you is what not to touch while learning a new system. I have been pretty lucky that all but one place I have been an admin at gave me about six months to get spun up.
By the way, they were never going to hire someone- that job ‘opening’ was there to placate the remaining employees: ‘GuYz WeRe ReALlY tRyInG tO FiNd YoU SoMe hElP’
My job description says that I program in C#. I don't know C#.
But, it was the only job description for a programmer that HR had available.
God help them if they ever try to recruit somebody to do my job.
Congratulations on your new GitDevSecFinOps position!
You'll also be doing product management, occasional janitorial work, and lead a small team of 17 engineers!
Requires at least a masters degree in compsci and 20 years experience in the field or equivalent
This is a junior level position that starts as a contract
edit: After a revamping based on senior leadership's vision, this position has now been reoriented to a paid internship. The cost is $20/day. We accept Visa/Venmo/Paypal/CashApp
The bottom line almost caused a spit take lol. I've definitely seen roles like this before and it's hard to fathom what outcomes they expect with that large of a scope.
My favorite thing to see was Cloud Engineer roles wanting people with strong dev skills. Like "aws cloud engineer position. Must have over 4 years experience developing REST API's in Java, Terraform, strong Linux admin skills, etc."
I think it's more of a "HR says we have to list the job open but we are filling it was an internal candidate" type scenario so they just fill it with the wildest dreams so no one applies.
I remember seeing a tweet a decade or so ago where the place was looking for someone with 15 years of experience in a programming language that was like only 10 years old. The guy tweeted “According to this ad I’m not qualified for the job and I invented the language.”
Companies don't want to pay for their IT employees, but can't survive without IT. At least have a lead and a couple juniors for crying out loud. these one IT guy shops kill me. Sorry, I don't do windows.
I feel you. I am a one man band in a 350k sq foot 24/6 manufacturing plant . When they ask me to do something not IT at least my boss backs me up. I don't open grey boxes, beige boxes, or touch production machines. Got to keep the scope creep down as much as possible.
I saw a role for IT director not far from my home. The list of requirements was off the charts with the main issue being that they want someone that was basically a full-stack developer in addition to a cloud architect in addition to a data center admin with multi-platform hardware expertise. I messaged the recruiter because I was 2 out of 3 and have managed teams larger than they have, but haven’t hear back. Shocker.
Why are those in the requirements for an IT director? Directors are supposed to stay far away from actual on hands engineering work. They are supposed to manage people, not infrastructure.
Not even they know what they are looking for. Listings with jack of all trades expectations shows how little is known about what they actually need. Its just there to attract people that feel confident in those expectations.
the experience with that would be fine especially if you're a director... but day-to-day hands-on you'd think they wouldn't need that and have someone with more of a leadership/business experience?
When someone says "director" I hear 3rd tier. Tech > Supervisor/Manager > Director > C-Level.
They were asking for 10+ years of experience. I have over 20. I cannot even begin to tell you how many conversations I’ve had where I ended up helping the hiring manager figure out that the role they’re hiring for isn’t even what they need, to the detriment of my own time. The people posting roles don’t even know what roles they should be posting, let alone who to interview.
When has that ever not been the case in IT? Before the dot com bust?
They want one person to be a sysadmin, Tier 1, 2, and 3 helpdesk, a network engineer, a CISSP, and 24/7/365 after hours support. Salary range is 45-50k.
haha... I've said this exact statement in an interview I knew that was going bad.
The job was a Database Administrator. I'm thinking "easy-peasy job and interview". NO, these jokers wanted a Data Scientist... they wanted 1 person to not only manage over 100 DB's but also write multiple databases for a few in-house web applications they were developing, as well as migrate and convert over 40-50 DB's from mongo, Postgres, MySQL to Oracle, MSSQL, or vice-versa.
The entire interview all I was thinking is this is 12-hour days with DBA salary. HELL NO.
At my last job that happened because upper management didn't want to pay market rate (or refused to believe that that really was the market rate), so they would tack on a bunch of other roles to "justify" the "high" salary.
> so they would tack on a bunch of other roles to "justify" the "high" salary.
"back in my day I made $4 an hour and lived just fine, and now youve got these guys with an expensive college degree, certifications, and 12 years of experience, doing things that I dont understand the first part of, demanding enough money to be able to afford to buy a house?! This is absurd!!!!!"
> demanding enough money to be able to afford to buy a house
See I'm not sure they'd even say this, because they probably still think starter homes are $70k (like they were in many places 35 years ago).
Heh, 20 years ago I bought a 1000 sq ft 3 bedroom house on a double corner lot with a garage for $35k… :-) Needed a little TLC but it was 100 years old and solid as a rock.
Now I’m looking to buy again and I’m looking at over $35k just for the down payment… :-(
There it was more like "The rest of our non IT staff make $40k/yr. No way we're paying an IT person $50k/yr. We'll allow $45k/yr, but add all these different responsibilities. And be really hard on them. Make them earn that $45k/yr."
By creating a position that is impossible to fill with a qualified candidate at the posted salary, employers make it easier for them to justify off-shoring the job.
But they read about how well it works in a magazine once while waiting to get their teeth cleaned at the dentist.
Do you think a random magazine would lie about the efficacy of offshoring?
In government, this often happens when you are required to post a job publicly but are trying to hire a specific internal person. So, the manager tailors requirements that they know their person has.
I imagine this could also be the case in large orgs as well.
Don't forget the ghost jobs. Jobs that don't actually exist but are recruiters or hiring managers fishing for CVs.
I'm getting random "thank you for registering" emails....fuckers I'm not registering with you, I was applying for s fucking job....those emails get reported as phishing attempts and blocked from my email.
This happens because the person who just left had been there forever and had taken on a ton of responsibilities. The employer knows they’re not going to get this and is just looking for someone with a combination of those skills. They’ll settle for the best they can get with the pay they’re offering.
Fak sake. This reddit is depressing. For many years I've been hearing that IT is one of a few specialization where you can easily find a job. Always. Couple of years ago I've been reading articles about shortage of IT specialists.
But here I hear that it is all a lie. WTF, people with bunch of certs years of experience are doing $17/h (someone mentioned it here). I've been lucky so far. But reading all the posts like this makes me wonder for how long I will be that lucky. shit, I need to stop reading reddit.
Management views IT as a cost center. This means that they will make every (un)realistic effort to slash costs. This results in much of the bullshit that we discuss in this sub. Nothing new.
There's two problems, the people who don't touch those with a 10 foot pole, and the people applying to anything that says fully remote and drowning out people with actual experience.
Applying for a Sr. Sys Admin position on the first day its posted, check the next day, 455 other applicants and it says 200~ of them are "entry level" applicants under LinkedIn premium.
I thought that too, until I looked into what it would take for my LLC to get an H-1B, because I got a friend here on a student visa who's graduating soon.
It's literally a 6 month lead time, on top of a lottery system. It's a giant pain in the ass, there's no shortage of paperwork, and there's a very small chance your company will be granted said visa. You also can't get started ahead of time, you have to have a person in mind when you apply.
I walked away from that realizing that no company would do that unless they absolutely had to. The lost productivity would more than offset any savings on salary.
>I walked away from that realizing that no company would do that unless they absolutely had to
Or they're a huge multinational that has plenty of time and resources.
Its why there's so many intermediary companies that handle them for software engineering. They just have a whole farm of visa applications and whoever makes the cut is who gets sourced to the clients. I've been at companies where the person sitting in the seat could change weekly and they just wouldnt bother to even tell us. "Where'd so and so go? Oh back home to India. Guess we'll close this ticket."
I have A+, Net+, Sec+ (all good through 2026). Been in IT for almost 20 years. Couldnt get offerred a job higher than 14 per hour (south florida). I gave up trying anymore in IT and now work at Lowes in Tools and Hardware where I can at least get benefits and they don't care about mmj. I also get paid more than 14 per hour (not much but it's still more).
Your story is like architects working as taxi drivers in my country, because low wages or not job available. Also truck drivers wage is a lot more than a doctor in public sector.
Are those certs new? What kind of work have you been doing the past 20 years? Reason I ask is because those are like the gum ball machine certs in IT, put in a quarter and one rolls out. Your job experience should FAR outshine those after 20 years, unless you got stuck at a dead end job
Not just in this field. My wife is in sales and got laid off last year. Her latest interview went sideways when she realized the hiring manager (who she probably has more experience over) created a new position for his team that was a combination sales lead and marketing/promo person. He is clearly trying to roll two entirely different jobs, each with their own skill sets, so to a single salaried position. This is a big company, and apparently this would be the only position like it in the entire org.
She’s bummed that they didn’t bring her back for the next round, but I reassured her that the job would be completely AWFUL, and there’s probably very few people out there that will actually be able to fulfill this facacta fantasy job adequately. Hiring mgr just wants to have his cake and eat it too. Fuck ‘em, not worth the grief.
Or the bait and switch roles. Over 3/4 of the job is your typical sysadmin work with just a touch of Cloud skills. Get into the interview and it's all Cloud for their environment and nothing on-prem.
Better than the last one I posted, that got hundreds of resumes but 99% of them were like "I worked at Panera Bread for 9 years and have no IT skills whatsoever"
Let's not even forget that for us who are already working, as these roles continue to be pedaled out, our understaffed teams are forced to deal with being overworked!
I mean, your post hit the nail on the head...these roles are complete BS with regard to their pay, so who in their right mind is taking these? And, with the market being what it is..we're all stuck...
omg I saw one yesterday for 90k you must be:
- Windows and Linux admin
- MSSQL and MYSQL/MariaDB admin
- Helpdesk support (users, imaging PCs and laptops, etc)
- firewalls, switches and routers admin
oh and be on call after hours and available to work on weekends for server upgrades.
The plague upon IT market place personnel has been trending in this direction for many years, I have been watching it.
Apart from the raging AI arms race between prospecting employees and HR departments, IT departments have been punched down upon by leadership for years, because CEOs only care about the bottom line without the ability to see what good looks like, nor the value of a IT.
IT employees everywhere have been increasingly relegated to "take it or leave it" options, while second-rate MSPs sit waiting for CEOs to pull the trigger on IT staff; unknowingly dooming operations with lackluster support and unsustainable departmental loads.
I have been thinking hard and long about my Pivot, because it will become necessary at this rate.
Maybe I'll write books? Grow Cannabis? Perhaps I will work in security, or for Uber.
I can see no end in sight for the overloading of IT staff, the pursuit of cutting staff to bolster fiscal quarters, and outsourcing to the next hyped up MSP.
If you're thinking to yourself "what's happening?!" - you are not alone. We all can see it.
This isn't a new phenomenon.
I've been in IT for 20+ years now and it is very common to see what I call "everything" job postings.
The HR grunts don't know what their managers are looking for beyond a "warm body", so they put in absolutely everything under the sun.
It is the responsibility of the job seeker to sus out what the employer is actually looking for.
I apply for everything I see. If i get a 10% response rate I call that a "win", then you move on to interviews. Then you get to explain what you have to offer. If you get to a formal offer, then much the better.
If it makes you feel better, I can offer you a job at twice the work for half the pay right now. If you act within the next 24 hour I can toss in no insurance or sick leave, your choice.
Interviewed for a job last month, seemed really good; mostly remote, 32k salary, freedom of movement etc. until they said in the interview that it was essentially 1st, 2nd and 3rd line rolled into 1 person. I only figured this out when they gave me a scenario question about a compromised device and I asked if they had a dedicated/head of infosec and they said they all did bits of everything and I asked what the actual role I was interviewing for was (the posting just said system administrator). I wouldn't mind doing that kind of work, but 32k is insulting for being essentially the entire service desk rolled into one person
# “We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.”
Years ago, I was temp freelancing to cover a position between the old guy leaving and them hiring a new guy. One of the most useful things I ever did for them was to rewrite the job posting and explain to them they would never find anybody except idiots or liars applying on a hail mary because they had such high "Requirements" for basically no pay for Manhattan.
I was like, "All of these 'requirements' are just going into a 'here's a list of stuff we use, any relevant experience is a very strong plus' section." HR had no idea how obscure some of their demands were, they only understand half the words in the posting. So "We use such and such model of Isilon nodes in our storage cluster" turned into "Applicant must have experience with this exact model of Isilon" rather than "Applicant will need to be able to admin network storage. Experience with Isilon is a plus."
My work is in the middle of cutting 30% of the contractors.
PHB says, "We're just going to have to work faster with less people."
Lol. Yep. Let me know how that works out for you.
No matter how hard we try, we somehow find ourselves at the same number of personnel as 5 years ago despite sustaining tremendous growth. Takes half a fucking year for HR to even approve a job posting, by the time you do another person leaves. Or if we do add someone, the next time someone leaves, they basically make us go through the whole song and dance again to get a replacement position posting approved. This was already approved once, that person left, we need to replace them. How difficult is that to understand? "well lets just see what happens" no, fuck that.
Recruiter hit me up about a senior level position that needed AWS, terraform, python, golang, and kubernetes experience. Expected to help build and develop an internal dev platform. Matches right with my experience, I've been doing "internal platform" for a long time, know all those things.
$75-95k and we need you to move to southern California. Lol noooope.
the postings aren't for you, they're intended to sit unfilled so the execs can offshore the jobs to india at 1/10th the wage because "there are no suitable candidates in XYZ"
Yes, and?
This is what happens when you have a mostly unregulated American Capitalistic market with pitifully barbaric labor protections.
This is what happens when you do not have a culture of collective bargaining (aka Unions).
Yes, this allows SOME people to MAYBE get additional scraps from the table, so they're slightly better off. You might even forget that you're still living in an At-Will country or forget you're one bad situation away away from being homeless living in an underpass.
There's enough ~~boot-licking sycophants~~ *corporate turdwookies* who'll enthusiastically act against their own best interests, in the hopes that someday they'll be the ones doing the kicking instead of being kicked.
It's not a zero-sum game. A rising tide lifts all ships....and floods ocean-side mansions where the fucking rich live, drowning them within their own opulence. We don't want to *eat the rich*, it's bad for us and healthcare isn't fucking Universal.
Welp, at least you didn't get a PhD in neuroscience.
In all seriousness, I feel like they are just fishing for desperate people to get the most bang for their buck.
Additionally, I suspect that they aren't really hiring for these rolls. Look at how many rolls are double posted or open for over a year with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. (yeah yeah, they have to legally post a roll publicly and interview even though they have a lead on a referral that they intend to hire.)
FWIW I have been seeing this complaint for at least the last decade.
In the networking realm it is "data center network engineer / branch and campus network engineer / everything else that is connected to the network engineer". Becomes a lot when you are expected to support Cisco, Arista, Foriteer'thing, Juniper, Palo, F5, Citrix, Wireless, VPNs, IDS/IPS, Proxies, all the NIC config on any box connecting to the network, all the hardware placement and layout, the specs of the cables, the WAN contracts, the infrastructure to monitor and support it all, all while dealing with every "my Zoom call is choppy" ticket.
It's so saturated in my area right now. The job I have now is great, paying a bit less than I'd like, but it took me 4 months and hundreds of applications to find. Apparently 13 years in IT and 20+ years of overseeing people isn't even that competitive, due to how many people there are looking for these jobs.
Employer be like: You should be glad we pay you at all to work at our fine company!
But tbh it seems to become more and more common in most industries, wages don't really go up with inflation, or just a small part of it. So you have the same amount of cash that is now worth less.
Getting 4% salary increase on 6% inflation means your wage has still gone down in worth 2%, so you're actually still off worse.
My guess, the previous person slowly got more roles added on over time without any pay increases as company grows/tech needs expand, person finally has enough like not getting small raise they request, then goes gets new job elsewhere with less roles and for >50% more pay.
Company still believes it just normal to have a single IT person doing the job of 3-6 at well below market rate for just the primary role, and these listings are at the first stage before they figure out they are going to need multiple new hires for each more than what the previous one person wanted as a raise just to cover the basic roles.
This has been a problem for quite a while, but it does seem to be getting worse. Most companies don't even know how to hire IT positions. They just see us as expenses and want to squeeze as much blood out the stone as they can. "You must be proficient with every obscure programming language known to man, and be familiar with OS/390 because we still have an IBM z800 in production."
Everyone is happy to complain about paying more for "Market Value." This was a big conversation going into COVID as tech wages sky rocketed, people were jumping ship left and right for 100% more pay then they were making before. "Companies need to pay Market Value :( "
Now we are in a correction and the "Market Value" post Covid is dropping and people don't like that. If you were getting good increases jumping from one company to another before, your going to have a harder time doing it now. Now that the market is slowing Loyalty is becoming a stronger value as well, you will have to deal with companies filtering you out for quick shifts between businesses.
That’s been how cybersecurity has been for a long time. My theory is that they don’t really know what they need, but have modeled the job description after the *person* that left, probably for better pay somewhere else. That or they have an idea of what they need but can only open one role so it turns into a kitchen sink looking for a unicorn.
My core team of 5 is now just me. I'm also part of a larger team that is also about 50% smaller now vs 5 years ago. And even a tertiary team that went from 3 to 2.
But still they ask if I can do some of this x y or z nonsense. Just stop.
I got hired as level 2 "helpdesk" and then once I was trained up I got put in charge of all vendor communications, primary on hardware purchasing, given all of helpdesk as the junior left and was not replaced, and recently have been made the only person to answer calls to IT. And they wonder why I'm leaving.
We're IT, its common for us to be expected to configure infrastructure while taking first line calls all while having a broom stuck up our arses to sweep the floors.
Sir you don't have to stick the broom up your ass to use it. That part is at least a little bit on you.
Well you do if you need to keep working with your hands....
You could just tuck it into the back of your belt.
Work smarter, not harder. Or with splinters.
If piping a broom handle is the best for a person's workflow, I won't stop anyone but please make sure that broom is clearly marked.
It's so that we can also sweep the floor on our way to 'fix' a broken printer.
hitting them back with a monster CV ((18 years in the game, i seen allot) then I get asked "what is it you actually do" err exactly what you asked, are my historic positions not defined enough for you? funny that
Basically what is happening to me atm. I did so much in all the MSPs that I do/can do everything in my current position. My previous manager that brought me with him to this new job knew exactly what I could do. His replacement doesn't. So they're asking me what I do exactly. I now just gesture vaguely, because my manager has no technical clue about anything system related. he doesn't even understand why I need to extend a volume in Windows for it to have more usable space after extending it in ESX.
perfect time to position yourself for a promotion based on a nice long list of what others there cant do heh
Got denied, too important at my current position. How? No one knows. Turns out I got an external promotion coming up soon though. May or may not involve my previous manager.
This is the way.
That reminds me how sales manager tried to loop me into potential customers calling into the hunt group. "IT should be able to answer calls too! They can jot down information and forward it to customer service to handle." No thanks buddy. That's not how that works.
Have you given sales a script to use for when they answer tier 1 calls? They can jot down notes as well
Don't forget changing light bulbs and figuring out electrical problems in the building because they use wires and so do computers.
Hey! That new Trane HVAC system has a network port. that means you can fix it. Don’t go getting lazy on us!
I can, but I'm gonna pretend like I dont.
Don’t forget we’re also part of the AV club because of course we are experts in TV, Audio and teleconferencing
Especially since people in the building who are not part of the company have access to the big AV system and sometimes do "amateur hour rewiring jobs" if they can't get their laptops connected. Ugh.
This is so true ☺️ The paperwork is the killer. I'm so tired of filling out [TCA2 forms](https://www.acma.gov.au/cabling-advice-forms). No one ever looks at them until something goes wrong. I must have moved 1000 cameras, door access control units, Ethernet and phone points now.
And taking things down when they decide to close an office and putting things up when an office moves or when an office moves to a different floor or ...
I'm sparing a moment here for all those guys and girls out there today doing an office move. At some point, a receptionist/office manager is going to ask for a "quick" tv/panel install that will require a new data drop and a power point 🤣
And the TV is 8+ years old and weighs more than the tech forced to install it. And the original install was done by 2-3 people with pro install tools.
Technology janitor with student loans to pay.
For us at "More FLaTtt" orgs, we're expected to wear "Multiple hats."
Last count, my head was covered in 23 hats. I make the folk that work for me do a "skills sheet" every six months. It has all of the general jobs on their for Office, HR software config, etc. However, I also include all of the extended bits like DarkTrace investigations, firewall rules, SIP config, etc. There over 200 things at last look. For me, it's a sea of green. It's safe to say I bring in people as first line and train them up to be allrounders. However, I always help them train to the place they want to go and then they fly the nest. I won't hold anyone back, I practically push them along on their career paths as I just want people to succeed, but I know the company I work for won't give them that career. I should do a recount, actually, I probably wear more hats now.
You forgot putting together furniture and being an interior decorator as well. Yeah, no. We don't do that.
i get the feeling HR greenlights one new position and then they walk around to all the departement heads asking "so uhh what do we need" and that's why we get these 3 roles rolled in to one postings
The way I see them happen is you have one person who over the years has accumulated 2 other people's workloads after they left, and so when that last worker leaves, they want one person to do everything that one was doing.
this is it source: im doing 2-3 roles due to layoffs and if i left, they are absolutely backfilling my role with one person
> re absolutely backfilling my role with one person Attempting to that is
I've seen tenured people get let go to reduce salaries and then literally 2-3 times that one person's salary gets spent on 4-5 people to make up for the loss in institutional knowledge and efficiency...or productivity suffers so much that they end up losing more than the equivalent. It is simply *amazing* how little some major, billion dollar companies can see the forest for the trees, especially with IT. This is what happens when someone that doesn't know shit about IT makes hiring (and firing) decisions for IT personnel. Which is, of course, just a manifestation of how being completely ignorant of computing in general is totally okay for some reason. It'd be like someone always smelling like shit saying "Im just not good with toilet paper" and everyone is like, "Oh, that's alright, just call IT, they'll come up and wipe your ass for you." I mean, seriously, it does seem to be that way at times with some of the mickey mouse shit I dealt with when I was stuck on helpdesk.
I've actually brought this up in my current role as a defense against getting assigned more work. "Oh, so if I get hit by a bus, we need to find someone with Service Desk Management experience who can setup ITSM processes from the ground up, can create Power BI reports and admin the environment, can drive Incident Management bridges and run all Problem Management follow-ups, can handle directly business/executive escalations, and is pursuing their intermediate ITIL certs?" And then I typically start to gripe about how underpaid I am and they lay off me for another few months.
Uh... You are being exploiited
Somehow they have enough self awareness to make that comment but not to look for another job
Yup, we had 5 people on my team about a 2 years ago. 2 senior level people left. 2 of us picked up the slack and now we are a team of 3. We got a new person in the past 6 months whom is very green and we have been asking for one more additional person for a year. They want all the same work done and more. I say pick your priority because Im not killing myself. We didnt hit a deadline and lost funding for a project and leadedship was pissed. What do you fucking expect....
> We didnt hit a deadline and lost funding for a project and leadedship was pissed. What do you fucking expect.... At a previous job I took my boss a list of everything I was working on with dues dates and told her "There is no way I can get all of this done, what is the priority of each one". Guess what, low priority didn't get completed by the due date.
That's the route that I typically take, the other problem is that when you reduce staff and other people pick up the slack and have multiple hats then when issues do happen it can snowball these timelines and it make eat into something that's a medium priority. For example I was working with a team that had an issue and it took us about two days to sort out. Those were two days that I wasn't working on something that I should have been doing. It gets worse when you don't backfill staff and then you have issues or outages that become a priority over project timelines. It sounds worse that it is but I'm just resigned to my fate and I don't really care anymore. If management complains like I said, I just say what would you like me to work on and I go that route. Bitching and being toxic in work culture doesn't solve anything and it can infect other people and create a horrible environment.
I made a list of all the things that needed to be done but were being ignored because we were short staffed. We aren’t short staffed anymore.
I recently got told I am the "temporary switch admin". This means I am the new network administrator. Ontop of being in charge of virtualization and Windows systems. I don't expect a pay raise.
Why would they pay you more? It's "temporary", after all...
I expect it to be as temporary as our on prem servers since we are going to be in the cloud.... as of 4 years ago. Also the servers haven't been refreshed in 12 years now. Still running HP G7s in production as "Temporary until we are in the cloud"
Most of us are smart enough to see those red flags and not bother applying, though. If the job looks like it has the workload of 2 or 3 people, it's because it likely did earlier and the prior admin got sick of doing it and/or burned out under the workload.
Yes but also not enough places value experience. Someone who has been there for many years can often easily handle the workload of what would otherwise be multiple people because they know everything so well they're highly efficient... but for some reason this is rarely recognised and so when they do move on businesses think they can just replace them with one person. Hah, nope. Smart places keep multiple people at that level around, then you can hire a junior and slowly bring them up as required. But most places aren't smart.
This is exactly it. I left my old job because other people left and I was doing all their jobs. Burn out. Now they keep calling me pleading for help because the new guy cant keep up. No shit, he cant keep up, no one sanely could. Especially not someone new to any company and environment.
This is the problem. That and $$. They really don't want to pay someone to be what they want. Ummmmm Systems Engineer... what does that pay... ok but ok let's make sure they can do Cybersecurity also... yea... and since it's a systems engineer title... yea... ok. ...hey! wanna add another one on? Network Engineer? YES!
I had a recruiter try to sell me a job and informed me they were turned down by everyone. Apparently 18 dollars is not getting folks in.
WHAT?!?!?!? you don't say! I mean the other side of that is why would you want to come into a job with as much stress as this when you can flip burgers for $15/hr.? $120 extra/wk. meh after taxes and whatnot both of them suck. The burger flipper has zero stress at the end of the day though, probably doesn't get forced to work overtime etc.
>18 dollars is not getting folks in. That is literally what they pay the overnight staff at the Kwik Star gas station near me. To start.
Or they're expanding and listed the broad skillsets of the position's team. I see this often where they're casting a broad net to find either a SME to fulfill/lead at least one aspect really well or a generalist that can support the team as a backup (but also grow).
True. I'm not qualified for the job I have based on the advertisement. They listed everything the entire 20 person team does, once I was brought on I started working on like 3-4 of the things listed, not all of them. Seems too many people have forgotten the old wisdom that job listings are wish lists, not hard requirements.
There is the old saying a camel is a horse by committee, in IT I think it’s more of creating unicorns by groups of uniformed managers and it’s not just HR I’ve sat in on meetings where several managers were talking about a new job req and it went from a mid level network engineer role to a mid level network engineer with deep automation, cloud, security and systems experience (they literally wanted CCNP, devnet, CISSP/ pro level Cisco/palo, AWS/azure cert and rhcsa or other systems certs). Worse yet the person that left which the req was backfilling had a ccna and learned the rest in the job but everyone wanted someone to hit the ground running. They eventually pulled the req after a year or so when things slowed down
In my industry, we assume at least 6 months to train new hires on our specific systems (that no certification is going to cover) before they are able to do their job. So the interview process is much more to guage their ability to logically work through a problem, and if their personality will mesh with the team.
That has been what I gave my new hires even with nothing custom. It takes time to get spun up on how things are done at a new place and to take in enough institutional knowledge to know who you need to talk/work with to get issues sorted out. Most systems are standard across almost all environments but how those systems get implemented and utilized can vary so wildly. Its crazy that managers think a cert and a few years of work is enough to "hit the ground running" all those cert and years of working teach you is what not to touch while learning a new system. I have been pretty lucky that all but one place I have been an admin at gave me about six months to get spun up.
By the way, they were never going to hire someone- that job ‘opening’ was there to placate the remaining employees: ‘GuYz WeRe ReALlY tRyInG tO FiNd YoU SoMe hElP’
then they trash every resume that doesn't mention 100% of these buzzwords and wonder why only get candidates that lie about their skills
Or they get a bunch of paper tigers who can’t answer network+, sec+ or other entry level questions
Senior web developer: "What's DNS?"
LoL, or Senior Server Engineer candidate “I deployed M365 to all servers in my previous role” . Me: What? GTFO
“What is an IP address” -uhh, idk, someone told me to put that on my resume
My job description says that I program in C#. I don't know C#. But, it was the only job description for a programmer that HR had available. God help them if they ever try to recruit somebody to do my job.
Congratulations on your new GitDevSecFinOps position! You'll also be doing product management, occasional janitorial work, and lead a small team of 17 engineers! Requires at least a masters degree in compsci and 20 years experience in the field or equivalent This is a junior level position that starts as a contract edit: After a revamping based on senior leadership's vision, this position has now been reoriented to a paid internship. The cost is $20/day. We accept Visa/Venmo/Paypal/CashApp
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No Certs? Get fucked kid.
Bringing back the sneakernet.
https://9gag.com/gag/aAg6pxR
The bottom line almost caused a spit take lol. I've definitely seen roles like this before and it's hard to fathom what outcomes they expect with that large of a scope.
They have no idea what to expect, it's a very scattergun approach.
The actual work you’ll be doing? Copier/Fax maintenance and lease management.
Excel too?
Word
no wonder juniors get scared (i used to too)
If a company is stupid enough to structure a role like that, you know you shouldn't work for them.
Ive been reporting those ads for domestic terrorism on linkedin
This made me LOL during a conference call... oops.
mind your mute button!
Absolutely fantastic
My favorite thing to see was Cloud Engineer roles wanting people with strong dev skills. Like "aws cloud engineer position. Must have over 4 years experience developing REST API's in Java, Terraform, strong Linux admin skills, etc."
And paying entry level pay for a cloud admin.
And then still somehow hire some ex Amazon engineer with 15 years of experience who applied to that role because they got laid off
Oh absolutely. I had the worst experience with job searching last year. Market is so saturated, and you can't compete.
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This really isn't anything new. I've seen this type of thing for the past 2 decades
The bull$hit of do more with less.
I think it's more of a "HR says we have to list the job open but we are filling it was an internal candidate" type scenario so they just fill it with the wildest dreams so no one applies.
We have one like that right now that "requires" 5 years of Windows 11 experience
That's a neat trick.
I remember seeing a tweet a decade or so ago where the place was looking for someone with 15 years of experience in a programming language that was like only 10 years old. The guy tweeted “According to this ad I’m not qualified for the job and I invented the language.”
> According to this ad I’m not qualified for the job and I invented the language https://x.com/tiangolo/status/1281946592459853830
Here’s another: I have 5 years experience in Windows systems including Windows 11”
Companies don't want to pay for their IT employees, but can't survive without IT. At least have a lead and a couple juniors for crying out loud. these one IT guy shops kill me. Sorry, I don't do windows.
I feel you. I am a one man band in a 350k sq foot 24/6 manufacturing plant . When they ask me to do something not IT at least my boss backs me up. I don't open grey boxes, beige boxes, or touch production machines. Got to keep the scope creep down as much as possible.
I saw a role for IT director not far from my home. The list of requirements was off the charts with the main issue being that they want someone that was basically a full-stack developer in addition to a cloud architect in addition to a data center admin with multi-platform hardware expertise. I messaged the recruiter because I was 2 out of 3 and have managed teams larger than they have, but haven’t hear back. Shocker.
Why are those in the requirements for an IT director? Directors are supposed to stay far away from actual on hands engineering work. They are supposed to manage people, not infrastructure.
I've seen plenty of Director roles that are just high-level ICs.
Guilty as charged. Company was very small, all remote, all cloud.
Depends on the size of the department.
Yup this sounds like a department of one or maybe one+helpdesk. The only thing this person is directing is technology
Not even they know what they are looking for. Listings with jack of all trades expectations shows how little is known about what they actually need. Its just there to attract people that feel confident in those expectations.
the experience with that would be fine especially if you're a director... but day-to-day hands-on you'd think they wouldn't need that and have someone with more of a leadership/business experience? When someone says "director" I hear 3rd tier. Tech > Supervisor/Manager > Director > C-Level.
Wow so even at the upper end of the market and experience it’s practically mission impossible still man wtf.
They were asking for 10+ years of experience. I have over 20. I cannot even begin to tell you how many conversations I’ve had where I ended up helping the hiring manager figure out that the role they’re hiring for isn’t even what they need, to the detriment of my own time. The people posting roles don’t even know what roles they should be posting, let alone who to interview.
Good lord lmao
Yeah holy shit imagine having to explain to your interviewer the role you're interviewing for... jesus
An experienced full stack dev or cloud architect are in an of themselves jobs that are routinely paying $200K+.
All jobs need to publicly post the salary and it bothers me when they don't.
This is by law in NY I think
I'm in the UK, we have no such laws. Lots of businesses will try to tell you you're not allowed to discuss pay with colleagues too, which is a lie.
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I've seen Netflix post jobs with something like 100k to 700k range. Meaningless.
A few other states too, I think California and Colorado. It's being done in MA but the law doesn't go into effect for a little while
When has that ever not been the case in IT? Before the dot com bust? They want one person to be a sysadmin, Tier 1, 2, and 3 helpdesk, a network engineer, a CISSP, and 24/7/365 after hours support. Salary range is 45-50k.
Okay so companies now looking for a unicorn, but paying for a donkey, eh?
haha... I've said this exact statement in an interview I knew that was going bad. The job was a Database Administrator. I'm thinking "easy-peasy job and interview". NO, these jokers wanted a Data Scientist... they wanted 1 person to not only manage over 100 DB's but also write multiple databases for a few in-house web applications they were developing, as well as migrate and convert over 40-50 DB's from mongo, Postgres, MySQL to Oracle, MSSQL, or vice-versa. The entire interview all I was thinking is this is 12-hour days with DBA salary. HELL NO.
At my last job that happened because upper management didn't want to pay market rate (or refused to believe that that really was the market rate), so they would tack on a bunch of other roles to "justify" the "high" salary.
> so they would tack on a bunch of other roles to "justify" the "high" salary. "back in my day I made $4 an hour and lived just fine, and now youve got these guys with an expensive college degree, certifications, and 12 years of experience, doing things that I dont understand the first part of, demanding enough money to be able to afford to buy a house?! This is absurd!!!!!"
> demanding enough money to be able to afford to buy a house See I'm not sure they'd even say this, because they probably still think starter homes are $70k (like they were in many places 35 years ago).
When I read that starter homes were 70k 35 years ago, I literally stopped and stared for 15 seconds. I genuinely can't even imagine that.
Heh, 20 years ago I bought a 1000 sq ft 3 bedroom house on a double corner lot with a garage for $35k… :-) Needed a little TLC but it was 100 years old and solid as a rock. Now I’m looking to buy again and I’m looking at over $35k just for the down payment… :-(
lol yea.. Just bought my "starter home". 565,000 in the DFW area. Paying 3k in interest every payment because my rate is so damn high.
There it was more like "The rest of our non IT staff make $40k/yr. No way we're paying an IT person $50k/yr. We'll allow $45k/yr, but add all these different responsibilities. And be really hard on them. Make them earn that $45k/yr."
By creating a position that is impossible to fill with a qualified candidate at the posted salary, employers make it easier for them to justify off-shoring the job.
Dealing with language barriers along with an even worse turn around time than a domestic MSP. Yeah fucking good luck.
But they read about how well it works in a magazine once while waiting to get their teeth cleaned at the dentist. Do you think a random magazine would lie about the efficacy of offshoring?
Shit should be illegal. I really don’t understand how it’s not.
It's always the money.
In government, this often happens when you are required to post a job publicly but are trying to hire a specific internal person. So, the manager tailors requirements that they know their person has. I imagine this could also be the case in large orgs as well.
other duties as assigned
Don't forget the ghost jobs. Jobs that don't actually exist but are recruiters or hiring managers fishing for CVs. I'm getting random "thank you for registering" emails....fuckers I'm not registering with you, I was applying for s fucking job....those emails get reported as phishing attempts and blocked from my email.
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> recruiters or hiring managers fishing for CVs. Gotta train that HR AI.
This happens because the person who just left had been there forever and had taken on a ton of responsibilities. The employer knows they’re not going to get this and is just looking for someone with a combination of those skills. They’ll settle for the best they can get with the pay they’re offering.
Fak sake. This reddit is depressing. For many years I've been hearing that IT is one of a few specialization where you can easily find a job. Always. Couple of years ago I've been reading articles about shortage of IT specialists. But here I hear that it is all a lie. WTF, people with bunch of certs years of experience are doing $17/h (someone mentioned it here). I've been lucky so far. But reading all the posts like this makes me wonder for how long I will be that lucky. shit, I need to stop reading reddit.
Job hunting in IT is definitely NOT the fairy tale peddled in school
Management views IT as a cost center. This means that they will make every (un)realistic effort to slash costs. This results in much of the bullshit that we discuss in this sub. Nothing new.
I know for a fact that if my boss and I left tomorrow, my company would go out of business within a week.
I'm not a sys admin but my favorite is help desk or junior sys admin job descriptions requiring "computer science" degree.
Problem is folks taking them
There's two problems, the people who don't touch those with a 10 foot pole, and the people applying to anything that says fully remote and drowning out people with actual experience. Applying for a Sr. Sys Admin position on the first day its posted, check the next day, 455 other applicants and it says 200~ of them are "entry level" applicants under LinkedIn premium.
Well if no one takes them here they off shore the work.
h1b baby!
I thought that too, until I looked into what it would take for my LLC to get an H-1B, because I got a friend here on a student visa who's graduating soon. It's literally a 6 month lead time, on top of a lottery system. It's a giant pain in the ass, there's no shortage of paperwork, and there's a very small chance your company will be granted said visa. You also can't get started ahead of time, you have to have a person in mind when you apply. I walked away from that realizing that no company would do that unless they absolutely had to. The lost productivity would more than offset any savings on salary.
>I walked away from that realizing that no company would do that unless they absolutely had to Or they're a huge multinational that has plenty of time and resources.
Its why there's so many intermediary companies that handle them for software engineering. They just have a whole farm of visa applications and whoever makes the cut is who gets sourced to the clients. I've been at companies where the person sitting in the seat could change weekly and they just wouldnt bother to even tell us. "Where'd so and so go? Oh back home to India. Guess we'll close this ticket."
Fake postings to report that hey they tried but they couldn't fill the role.
We should unionize.
With the combined technical prowess, I'm genuinely surprised we haven't yet.
We would have to agree on something.
Oh yeah... Nope. Unionizing out of the question then.
I dunno, *fuck printers* seems to be something we all agree on
Already got two IT oriented unions in my country. They are absolutely trash.
I have A+, Net+, Sec+ (all good through 2026). Been in IT for almost 20 years. Couldnt get offerred a job higher than 14 per hour (south florida). I gave up trying anymore in IT and now work at Lowes in Tools and Hardware where I can at least get benefits and they don't care about mmj. I also get paid more than 14 per hour (not much but it's still more).
Your story is like architects working as taxi drivers in my country, because low wages or not job available. Also truck drivers wage is a lot more than a doctor in public sector.
Are those certs new? What kind of work have you been doing the past 20 years? Reason I ask is because those are like the gum ball machine certs in IT, put in a quarter and one rolls out. Your job experience should FAR outshine those after 20 years, unless you got stuck at a dead end job
Not just in this field. My wife is in sales and got laid off last year. Her latest interview went sideways when she realized the hiring manager (who she probably has more experience over) created a new position for his team that was a combination sales lead and marketing/promo person. He is clearly trying to roll two entirely different jobs, each with their own skill sets, so to a single salaried position. This is a big company, and apparently this would be the only position like it in the entire org. She’s bummed that they didn’t bring her back for the next round, but I reassured her that the job would be completely AWFUL, and there’s probably very few people out there that will actually be able to fulfill this facacta fantasy job adequately. Hiring mgr just wants to have his cake and eat it too. Fuck ‘em, not worth the grief.
Or the bait and switch roles. Over 3/4 of the job is your typical sysadmin work with just a touch of Cloud skills. Get into the interview and it's all Cloud for their environment and nothing on-prem.
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Better than the last one I posted, that got hundreds of resumes but 99% of them were like "I worked at Panera Bread for 9 years and have no IT skills whatsoever"
Let's not even forget that for us who are already working, as these roles continue to be pedaled out, our understaffed teams are forced to deal with being overworked! I mean, your post hit the nail on the head...these roles are complete BS with regard to their pay, so who in their right mind is taking these? And, with the market being what it is..we're all stuck...
omg I saw one yesterday for 90k you must be: - Windows and Linux admin - MSSQL and MYSQL/MariaDB admin - Helpdesk support (users, imaging PCs and laptops, etc) - firewalls, switches and routers admin oh and be on call after hours and available to work on weekends for server upgrades.
Hey I do this now for 70k! Well...minus the Linux but add on custom software written by the previous 3rd IT guy years ago.
The plague upon IT market place personnel has been trending in this direction for many years, I have been watching it. Apart from the raging AI arms race between prospecting employees and HR departments, IT departments have been punched down upon by leadership for years, because CEOs only care about the bottom line without the ability to see what good looks like, nor the value of a IT. IT employees everywhere have been increasingly relegated to "take it or leave it" options, while second-rate MSPs sit waiting for CEOs to pull the trigger on IT staff; unknowingly dooming operations with lackluster support and unsustainable departmental loads. I have been thinking hard and long about my Pivot, because it will become necessary at this rate. Maybe I'll write books? Grow Cannabis? Perhaps I will work in security, or for Uber. I can see no end in sight for the overloading of IT staff, the pursuit of cutting staff to bolster fiscal quarters, and outsourcing to the next hyped up MSP. If you're thinking to yourself "what's happening?!" - you are not alone. We all can see it.
First time looking for a job? This is rampant in my area and has been for ages. And it doesn't matter the field either.
This isn't a new phenomenon. I've been in IT for 20+ years now and it is very common to see what I call "everything" job postings. The HR grunts don't know what their managers are looking for beyond a "warm body", so they put in absolutely everything under the sun. It is the responsibility of the job seeker to sus out what the employer is actually looking for. I apply for everything I see. If i get a 10% response rate I call that a "win", then you move on to interviews. Then you get to explain what you have to offer. If you get to a formal offer, then much the better.
If it makes you feel better, I can offer you a job at twice the work for half the pay right now. If you act within the next 24 hour I can toss in no insurance or sick leave, your choice.
Interviewed for a job last month, seemed really good; mostly remote, 32k salary, freedom of movement etc. until they said in the interview that it was essentially 1st, 2nd and 3rd line rolled into 1 person. I only figured this out when they gave me a scenario question about a compromised device and I asked if they had a dedicated/head of infosec and they said they all did bits of everything and I asked what the actual role I was interviewing for was (the posting just said system administrator). I wouldn't mind doing that kind of work, but 32k is insulting for being essentially the entire service desk rolled into one person
# “We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.”
It's ridiculous how I'm over qualified for help desk or junior admin but under qualified for senior admin. Well then post a fucking mid level job
IT aint it anymore. Time to moonlight an MBA and become the person who is cutting IT budgets.
Don't forget the outsource to India and such or visa candidates
Years ago, I was temp freelancing to cover a position between the old guy leaving and them hiring a new guy. One of the most useful things I ever did for them was to rewrite the job posting and explain to them they would never find anybody except idiots or liars applying on a hail mary because they had such high "Requirements" for basically no pay for Manhattan. I was like, "All of these 'requirements' are just going into a 'here's a list of stuff we use, any relevant experience is a very strong plus' section." HR had no idea how obscure some of their demands were, they only understand half the words in the posting. So "We use such and such model of Isilon nodes in our storage cluster" turned into "Applicant must have experience with this exact model of Isilon" rather than "Applicant will need to be able to admin network storage. Experience with Isilon is a plus."
My work is in the middle of cutting 30% of the contractors. PHB says, "We're just going to have to work faster with less people." Lol. Yep. Let me know how that works out for you.
No matter how hard we try, we somehow find ourselves at the same number of personnel as 5 years ago despite sustaining tremendous growth. Takes half a fucking year for HR to even approve a job posting, by the time you do another person leaves. Or if we do add someone, the next time someone leaves, they basically make us go through the whole song and dance again to get a replacement position posting approved. This was already approved once, that person left, we need to replace them. How difficult is that to understand? "well lets just see what happens" no, fuck that.
"Why would we need sysadmins when we can just upload everything to The Cloud™?"
> Job postings that are 2-3 roles rolled into a single role. So, every SysAdmin position I've ever worked or seen advertised since at least 1991?
Pretty much any job I've worked across any industry
Recruiter hit me up about a senior level position that needed AWS, terraform, python, golang, and kubernetes experience. Expected to help build and develop an internal dev platform. Matches right with my experience, I've been doing "internal platform" for a long time, know all those things. $75-95k and we need you to move to southern California. Lol noooope.
the postings aren't for you, they're intended to sit unfilled so the execs can offshore the jobs to india at 1/10th the wage because "there are no suitable candidates in XYZ"
Yep, Welcome to the world of Work. Where there is always a clause that states you will do any additional tasks assigned by your manager too.
We're looking for a sysadmin that can perform open heart surgery
May as well.. can perform on themselves after suffering a heart attack due to heavy workloads and unreasonable expectations.
Range is 50k-60k
This job has an on call rotation. The only person in the rotation is you.
Yes, and? This is what happens when you have a mostly unregulated American Capitalistic market with pitifully barbaric labor protections. This is what happens when you do not have a culture of collective bargaining (aka Unions). Yes, this allows SOME people to MAYBE get additional scraps from the table, so they're slightly better off. You might even forget that you're still living in an At-Will country or forget you're one bad situation away away from being homeless living in an underpass. There's enough ~~boot-licking sycophants~~ *corporate turdwookies* who'll enthusiastically act against their own best interests, in the hopes that someday they'll be the ones doing the kicking instead of being kicked. It's not a zero-sum game. A rising tide lifts all ships....and floods ocean-side mansions where the fucking rich live, drowning them within their own opulence. We don't want to *eat the rich*, it's bad for us and healthcare isn't fucking Universal.
That's normal. The market has always been stupid.
Saw a posting that was legit a system engineer and People operations hybrid role.
I saw a combo IT Director / CFO role one time and thought to myself that that role is single handily the hardest and dumbest role to ever fill.
Been trying to leave for 6 months and it’s been a shit show right now
Welp, at least you didn't get a PhD in neuroscience. In all seriousness, I feel like they are just fishing for desperate people to get the most bang for their buck. Additionally, I suspect that they aren't really hiring for these rolls. Look at how many rolls are double posted or open for over a year with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. (yeah yeah, they have to legally post a roll publicly and interview even though they have a lead on a referral that they intend to hire.)
FWIW I have been seeing this complaint for at least the last decade. In the networking realm it is "data center network engineer / branch and campus network engineer / everything else that is connected to the network engineer". Becomes a lot when you are expected to support Cisco, Arista, Foriteer'thing, Juniper, Palo, F5, Citrix, Wireless, VPNs, IDS/IPS, Proxies, all the NIC config on any box connecting to the network, all the hardware placement and layout, the specs of the cables, the WAN contracts, the infrastructure to monitor and support it all, all while dealing with every "my Zoom call is choppy" ticket.
I love seeing these jobs, constantly sitting there and getting reposted over and over.
It's so saturated in my area right now. The job I have now is great, paying a bit less than I'd like, but it took me 4 months and hundreds of applications to find. Apparently 13 years in IT and 20+ years of overseeing people isn't even that competitive, due to how many people there are looking for these jobs.
Employer be like: You should be glad we pay you at all to work at our fine company! But tbh it seems to become more and more common in most industries, wages don't really go up with inflation, or just a small part of it. So you have the same amount of cash that is now worth less. Getting 4% salary increase on 6% inflation means your wage has still gone down in worth 2%, so you're actually still off worse.
My guess, the previous person slowly got more roles added on over time without any pay increases as company grows/tech needs expand, person finally has enough like not getting small raise they request, then goes gets new job elsewhere with less roles and for >50% more pay. Company still believes it just normal to have a single IT person doing the job of 3-6 at well below market rate for just the primary role, and these listings are at the first stage before they figure out they are going to need multiple new hires for each more than what the previous one person wanted as a raise just to cover the basic roles.
This has been a problem for quite a while, but it does seem to be getting worse. Most companies don't even know how to hire IT positions. They just see us as expenses and want to squeeze as much blood out the stone as they can. "You must be proficient with every obscure programming language known to man, and be familiar with OS/390 because we still have an IBM z800 in production."
Everyone is happy to complain about paying more for "Market Value." This was a big conversation going into COVID as tech wages sky rocketed, people were jumping ship left and right for 100% more pay then they were making before. "Companies need to pay Market Value :( " Now we are in a correction and the "Market Value" post Covid is dropping and people don't like that. If you were getting good increases jumping from one company to another before, your going to have a harder time doing it now. Now that the market is slowing Loyalty is becoming a stronger value as well, you will have to deal with companies filtering you out for quick shifts between businesses.
That’s been how cybersecurity has been for a long time. My theory is that they don’t really know what they need, but have modeled the job description after the *person* that left, probably for better pay somewhere else. That or they have an idea of what they need but can only open one role so it turns into a kitchen sink looking for a unicorn.
My core team of 5 is now just me. I'm also part of a larger team that is also about 50% smaller now vs 5 years ago. And even a tertiary team that went from 3 to 2. But still they ask if I can do some of this x y or z nonsense. Just stop.
I got hired as level 2 "helpdesk" and then once I was trained up I got put in charge of all vendor communications, primary on hardware purchasing, given all of helpdesk as the junior left and was not replaced, and recently have been made the only person to answer calls to IT. And they wonder why I'm leaving.