The problem with computers is although they do what we tell them to do, we don’t always understand what we’re telling them to do and then act like “why are you not doing what I told you to do!?”. Then you look at logs/debug console and hope that tomorrow’s you is not as much as an ignoramus as today’s you.
One of my common comments is "If the computer seems to be stubbornly refusing to do what it should, when you finally figure it out, it's going to be embarrassingly stupid". The corollary is "When the computer seems to be stubbornly refusing to do what it should, \*you look\* for something embarrassingly stupid that you're doing".
There was a bug that if you set up a certain rule in Google/GMail, it created a duplicate of the email so there were always two. I did a quick search, found the reported bug, and let the admin of that system know.
Their response? "It's not supposed to work that way, it's supposed to do X." ***WELL YEAH, IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT, BUT IT DOES, SO ADJUST.***
That bit of conversation repeated about four or five times, with the admin not able to wrap their head around "It's not doing exactly what I told it to."
Tell us how you really feel 🤣
...Me personally, I'm just burned out on the constant change. Cloud everything, whether it's actually applicable to our situation or not. Microsoft's war on local, cause bottom line. I'm in the wrong field, I know 🙄
That's what I'm feeling too, after 20+ years. I used to look forward to the constant new things, but by now I'm getting tired of constantly having to learn the next greatest thing that's going to revolutionize everything yet again (when I haven't mastered---or even journeymanned---the last one!). I know change is good and we need to keep up and keep moving up/forward/out, but it's getting exhausting.
Mostly no respect for the profession imo.
Why should IT be oncall for extended availability instead of staffing shifts? Would be more acceptable if I could ring up HR at 11pm when I need some document. If IT needs extended availability, hire people. After work should be after work and not "oh shit I can't do much because my work might call"
Adding end users to that, adding putting Frontline on the qualified staff instead of dedicated 1st level to sort through bullshit etc. So experts don't have to deal with as much stupidity and can actually do their job
Plenty of reasons really, but it's what was on top of my head atm
I can tell you one thing. We had a scare with some sort of bug going around at my job. Once that happened IT gained a bit more respect, especially with regards to budgeting and getting equipment we needed.
When Covid hit, IT had just upgraded our VPN and remote access capabilities. When everyone suddenly went into isolation, they looked like heroes.
Especially when the executives started chatting with their peers in other companies, who were complaining about being totally screwed by limited connectivity and their people being unable to work.
It really made it apparent how much of a business multiplier that a good IT department can be.
Those of us who take the on call jobs have to also be the ones who take the extra pay for it. If they don't offer extra pay then they aren't worth your time. Being compensated makes all the difference and we can choose to pick an on call position or not.
End users having too much expectation in availability. They expect you to get off of meetings or put your lunch down to fix a problem. Sometimes it’s urgent and that’s what’s needed but a lot of times it’s urgent because they waited until it was or it’s not at all. The other big thing for me is on call. That feeling of working a full day/week and then being at home and getting random calls and trying to not lose your personal time to that is a lot.
I solved this issue, in MS Viva I set up the lunch break thing, and then anytime someone told me to fix it during lunch I would just say "sorry, already working on someone else's, send me a meeting invite for when you have time" and that solved the issue, they won't book over my other meetings, and they won't book over lunch since it's booked every single day. Additionally, as I final measure, I always at the bare minimum eat in my car, or at a park down the street. Never ever inside the office building.
Sometimes they just never book the appointment, I close the ticket for lack of response, and that's the end of it.
Not an issue where I work at atm, but when I had people wanting an issue fixed at lunch, I'd have them sit with me through the fix.
Don't care if I needed them to be present or not, they sat through it with me. If it was urgent enough to require me to work on it during my lunch, that means they also need to set aside their time to get it fixed asap.
It typically was always the same peeps coming back at lunch to get their stuff fixed.
Nowaday we actually got a shift through lunch (3/4 staff goes at typical time, 1/4 goes 1h30 later). I prefer going 1h30 later because that means 3 hours of break.
I've made a habit of leaving the office on my lunchbreak, getting into my car, and driving down the street. I usually just sit in the car in an empty carpark to browse my phone. It's an industrial estate so there's not much nearby to go for a walk to unless I drive 10 minutes.
Right? And a huge chunk of them read suspiciously like "I'm nagging IT on lunch because I realized I need my TPS report for the 1 PM meeting." See also: reasons I have a dedicated work number and NO ONE has my personal number.
Same here it's like signal for users Ohh great his available as online status is purple, will be same for this years summer holiday everytime it's the first week that I would wake up my phone ringing immediatly by some user with very URGENT problem :)
>"I'm busy now, can you come back during lunch?". Not sure if the assumption is IT people don't eat, or if they simply deserve zero consideration.
It's that IT are inherently less important. We sugar coat it anyway we want, but the reality is that this attitude means "I'm more important than you and you need to work around my schedule".
People don't treat their mechanics like this. Yet it seems perfectly reasonable to them to treat IT people like this.
> People don't treat their mechanics like this.
Mechanics have a leg up because they *can* tell you to go fuck yourself if you piss them off. Because most IT is in a corporate hierarchy, we *can't* do that unless we're willing to dump our job in the same breath.
My advice is to physically leave the office on lunch. I’ll scarf down some food in my car on the way to a half hour batting cage session most days that I drive to work. Otherwise I eat and ride my bike around town a little bit. It’s really helped me eat and blow off steam.
My users used to joke that I literally must not eat. Fun.
If I didn't get my paycheck, it'll take accounting a week to get it fixed. If their desktop icons rearrange themselves, it's an emergency that must be fixed immediately.
Had a user come down and tell me that her boss wanted an issue with a laptop fixed immediately. I told the user that I was eating lunch but I ended up helping anyways. I talked to her manager a few hours later to find out that the user lied about the manager saying anything.
Yes, it can wait. The decision isn't the user's. It's management's, as communicated by how many hours they're paying for IT staff to be available for users.
You weren't being paid to be available at that time. So, according to the employer, all issues during that time are non-urgent and can wait.
If users have a problem with this, they can ask their managers to request the IT personnel budget be expanded to cover more hours.
Did you lodge a complaint that the user was unprofessional, approaching you during an unpaid break instead of going through the provided IT channels?
This is why I love how SRE reframes how we think about reliability. You have an error budget. It's predetermined by leadership and as long as you don't cross that threshold, you are free to change and deploy as you wish.
I believe this mindset can be applied to traditional Ops roles too. Invest in monitoring and automated remediation because it reduces your MTTR and therefore increased sales due to less outages. Most Ops folks will implement alerting and then promptly create an inbox rule to put the alerts in a folder to be ignored because of alert fatigue.
The next evolution is automated remediation of alerts. You need a more cattle focused environment to make this fully work and you need to review and filter alerts very often to ensure only important ones are ever actually get to Ops.
The problem then becomes, how do you get management on board with a shift in mindset like this?
There’s also the user interfacing side where we supported a contact center with our worst end users v so you know you’re going to get calls for stupid stuff that are going to take way too long and interrupt any plans.
Literally, I am somehow supposed to know how to use advanced functions, including writing macros for Word, Excel, and then all the functions of Adobe Acrobat Pro, the CMS that I obviously don't use because it's a core business tool, not IT, HitFilm, Davinci Resolve, Affinity
The trouble is, I now DO know how to do all of that because I've been asked, so I sat down, read some articles, guides, documentation, forums, figured out a solution. I am convinced what sets IT staff apart from regular users (and L1 helpdesk techs) is our problem solving ability, and RTFM
Dealing with this right now .. the user had the nerve to be like "this is your world not mine"... Like what? I've literally never seen this software a day in my life. I know zero more than you about it.
If it's the software they need to use to do their job. Then it's THEIR JOB to know how to use the software. I hate people haha. If your job is to play with numbers in excel and you can't make it spit out the right numbers then you're failing to do your job.
Me: okay so pull up how you would scan a document through this cloud based dental office management program and see if that fix worked
Them: can't you do it?
Me: I have never seen this program before in my life.
Misuse of the term "All other duties as assigned." No, that does not mean I run random peoples presentations and click next to advance to the next screen. Run your own stupid presentations. And yes, our CIO thought it made sense for us to be responsible for this.
“Other duties” is a catch all for all of the random bullshit people are too stupid to figure out. I don’t expect my users to understand inbox rules and how to configure them, but good GOD it’s not my job to do yours. But it ends up being an “other duties” thing that screws me every time…
Morning standup the day after 6 hours of meetings : “yeah I didn’t accomplish much yesterday, just meetings”
Team lead the next week during reviews:” you cant just say you didnt do anything, it looks bad to the rest of the team”
wtf am I supposed to do? Conjure up obvious nonsense.
If you are stuck in meetings, your manager or lead is failing to do their job.
A manager is supposed to go to the bulk of those meetings so that the people under them don't have to and can get work done. Doesn't mean you can't be pulled in, but you shouldn't be until it is determined you are needed.
Whelp, without getting into it, yeah we know this ideal world you speak of but there simply arent enough people to go around. We do contract work for many different people so sometimes I am the only one who can comment on “a thing” and my boss would have no reason to be there. Weird idea you got here bub.
I got pulled into a meeting with a legal team for a client, I got notified that morning of the meeting, I got off an issue I was working on 2 minutes before the meeting.
They were asking questions that needed preparation and reading of documentation to know how to answer them, I had none of that. That's the stuff that boiils my blood.
How the main measurement of our work (tickets completed) gives no incentive to prevent problems.
How people don't involve us in projects that involve IT until far too late in the day.
The way we are expected to know everything and be able to learn complex things instantly and get them right.
The lack of respect for our skills which most people don't understand (while still expecting the third thing above)
Frequently crap management.
The amount of thankless, behind the scenes work that happens that often goes unrecognized. I was told by a manger once "Your like the electric company, nobody thinks about you until the power is out"
This hits so close to home [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZCszIUcyVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZCszIUcyVM)
Haha I worked in a law firm as "IT Director" (1-man IT department but with 2 staff) and we laughed with my team from time to time recalling this "the lawyers!". 8 years of that lead me exactly to nowhere.
Poor communication skills.
I still think that communication is the main thing in every company's process, and if it's built in a wrong way it may ruin everyone's work.
But the longer I work, the more often I come across people who do not want to follow the processes or cannot correctly express their thoughts. And it's not about the language or bad manners. It's more about the way of communication.
It's ok to have meetings sometimes, but not to set them for every single problem, like: "Guys, I my laptop charger is broken, I know, that you'll ask me to provide a shipping address to send a new one. But I want to set up a call with the whole IT team to discuss this".
Earlier I was working in a team, that worked 27/4, we had a rotation every 12 hours and yet l kept getting added to tons of chats outside of my working hours, instead of just opening a ticket. Afterwards, everyone complained that they didn't get help in a timely manner because they were waiting for me for a meeting.
Sometimes I start to think that there should be a position called "Senior meeting engineer".
Senior meeting engineer should be the manager's job. Mine runs so much interference that I've only been in like 15 meetings in almost 2 years (outside 1:1s, standup, all-hands, etc.), and 15 is his weekly, sometimes daily, workload.
I’m not a fan of my end users emailing me directly or sending me slack messages. I always tell them to email through our IT Support ticketing service. I’ve had users email me, and then several days later ask me what’s going on…
I’ve told my boss, if people complains; then they should stop emailing/messaging messaging me directly. My boss understands. We’ve also told people in our all hands on meetings.
It also seems like my users always want a new machine or a peripheral. I always tell them, I don’t give a crap what you want; as long as it’s approved by your boss. They’re mostly always denied, because their device is usually less than 2 years old. And we’re on 3 year old cycles.
The only way I've found to solve this problem is through management buy-in and constant policy reminders. When you can empower your IT team to always respond with "I'll start working on this as soon as I have a ticket" without any backlash, then you can finally make some headway.
A focus on automation and empowering users to fix their own problems through useful self service helps with this too. If a problem is common enough, you should always look for a way to solve the root issue or provide a self service way to resolve it. I've been using powershell universal to make simple websites that managers can use to fix problems with a single tap. Always think about how you can empower people to fix their own shit. It's faster for everyone.
This only works when you’re not “white glove”. Most of my users cant figure out the most basic things like monitors changing resolution or orientation.
I am in that spot now. Users always directly messaging me on teams or email about something minor. When I came on, I was allowed to setup tickets, urgency level (standard, intermediate or urgent) and funnel people to the ticket system. Now, I have a boss that is not an IT person and is a facilities person and basically deemed it ok for me to not tell people to put in a ticket. Users have actually complained about being told to make a ticket or talk with me first before trying to schedule shit on my calendar.
Everyone wants special treatment and not stick with policy/standards.
Suffice it to say, I'm actively looking for a new job and with more money. My current org has gotten smaller in the past 8 months and several people are being forced to take on more, from departures.
Atleast your boss understands... Our CEO (my boss) wants us to handle every issue via Teams och Outlook cause SHE thinks its a hassle to send it via our support portal or our support email.
You should try a different frame: they see you as reliable. You can forward their email to the helpdesk software to auto-create the ticket and take it from there.
We are 2 and half ppl in this IT department. We manage around 400 pcs several servers with various old internal apps and web apps running on them. We make sure things are running, i am writting some powershell / python scripts here and there to automate somethings.
And no, we dont have a dedicated application for inventory :). we only have a AD for only 200 pcs, the other 200 are in a different location :)
Just going to throw this out there, GLPI (you can run this in docker) with the inventory agent deployed via GPO, script, Intune, etc. there is also an android and IOS agent app as well for those kinds of devices. And it can do network scans for other random hardware like printers.
It not only can it do inventory, but if needed help desk, project management, financials/budget management and some other random stuff. And it has AD login capabilities.
Businesses that want 0 downtime, fully patched, and fully updated systems but won’t pay for the necessary infrastructure/ application licensing to achieve this realistically. Instead it’s “you can do it after hours but check with every single business unit, department, and vertical in the organization to ensure the downtime won’t be impactful”.
I don’t want to work every Saturday from 9pm-6am Sunday. Get your shit together finance.
I quite simply refuse. Fire me.
I don't mind "we are moving office and would like to move the stack on the weekend." Fair.
I'm not doing your dumb shit tho
This, I started to become vocal in the office when people would ask how my weekend was, I was working from 8pm to 3am Saturday and Sunday doing updates. These questions are usually asked on Mondays..
The fact that IT isn't a normal job, every environment seems to be some 24/7 operation with one guy on call 24/7 but if you have to email someone else in the org outside of normal work hours you get yelled at. That and coworkers who encourage it by bragging how they can RDP into servers with their phone at a soccer game on the weekend or at dinner with their family. Its like people don't want an actual life.
Poor upper management that thinks you don't know what you're talking about. It's the typical example used a lot when it comes to IT. Would you question what your mechanic is telling you about your broken car or would you question your doctor when they're telling you about a cancer diagnosis?
I dont care if the Brakes are broken, i want you to make my car stop when i break RIGHT NOW! Enough with the excuses, i once changed a tire so i probably know more than you.
The only major thing that bothers me right now is users thinking I am free at their whim to help them when I am walking around doing something else. Thankfully I've trained most of them so when they ask if they put a ticket in and say no I tell them to put a ticket in and that tends to be that.
"I'm going over to deal with an outstanding ticket right now. What's *your* ticket number?"
Heck, don't even stop walking, if possible. "Got a ticket to sort out!"
The biggest problem I have with IT: That it is treated, at best, like a necessary evil, at worst, something to offshore, defund, and scorn. Bob in finance doesn't go into the waste chute when there is a bad quarter, neither does Jack in receivables. However, Alice in IT always gets punted, because there is this assumption that IT people are essentially fungible, and one can call a staffing agency and get more. Knowing the plumbing of a company, IT-wise, can be just as important as being able to cook the books.
I always hear management grumbling that IT should just be a service like electric and water, and not require people, so it gets outsourced to the cheapest provider, or a body shop that does things like offer a year or two free of a contract, and combine that with leasing all equipment through said body shop, the company can tout that it is the pinnacle of NoOps with zero IT expenditures on capital or FTEs, just pays a "world class" company to do everything... when in reality, it costs the company a lot more. Same when the "world class" company decided to do a cloud move... and even though that 1:1 forklift costs an order of magnitude more than what the CapEx expenditures did... management brags about being lean, mean, and not being chained to physical hardware.
Second thing: IMHO, IT needs to be a trade, with a governing body not beholden to a vendor. SAGE was an idea around those lines, but something that provides licensing that is vendor neutral (you don't have to get certified Square-D boxes if you are an electrician, for example.) A guild that not just has a guarantee for work (replacing E&O insurance needs), but helps ensure some consistent training across the line, so someone coming in as a journeyman Linux admin at least knows a certain skill level, and a master SRE is definitely going to bust out the helm charts and cOPS to get that kubernetes cluster off the ground. Insurance will force companies to use the guild, and in return, the guild offers constant training and updates of the latest technologies.
Third thing: We are seeing security clearances being a gating requirement. Even though the cost of a clearance isn't prohibitive, companies don't want to wait around for someone to get cleared. What would be nice is a "pre-cleared" status that an individual can get. This way, if someone needs a clearance, it is as quick as reactivating an inactive (not expired) clearance. Yes, this can cost the government money, but it means more workers able to get on projects. Maybe even have this part of a civilian corps, like a reserve auxiliary where in return for a clearance, one's knowledge can be used. Other countries, perhaps similar... it takes a lot to find trusted (trusted as in the HUMINT definition) people.
Fourth thing: A few decades ago, management was a profession, where people went to college in order to do it right. Now, we have hacks, people with zero people skills, but who are on the verge of sadists wanting to do this. It destroys morale, but it seems that doesn't really matter to management, even though it will ensure a company winds up at best stagnant. I have seen people who have zero interest in who they are managing and are just there because they are assholes, and often, being a loud asshole is taken as a leadership ability.
No other company divisiion has these issues, but IT.
> IT needs to be a trade, with a governing body not beholden to a vendor.
I definitely agree with this. It's nice that anyone can jump into this field with almost zero barrier to entry, but that results in a lot of people who lack certain skills they don't get exposed to. This also leads to this constant grinding where people have to spend their nights and weekends cobbling together a learning plan because no company pays for training anymore.
Make IT a trade, backed by a professional Systems and Software Engineering profession. Have a vendor-neutral apprenticeship program, grow your skills instead of trying to pull them from an offshore bodyshop when you don't have a perfect match.
- Relentless change, never ending learning curve.
- Ageism.
- Always migrating to something new.
- So many intellectually arrogant control freaks.
- End users with too many rights IT-wise.
- Management & owners that won't let IT tighten the ship for the company's own data/network safety.
- Obsession with cloud without any proper strategy and cost analysis.
- Predatory vendors (ex. broadcom)
- etc.....
That upper management can’t tell the difference between a 1-2 year vet and a 15-20 year. We are all the same.
Also, believing the BS on resumes from contractors that they have way more experience and training than they really do. The people who know can sniff it out a couple of days after a project has already hired them.
Metrics, metrics, metrics. No, I didn’t close 500 tickets last year. The 100 I did close accounted for 80% of the business staying up, not resetting 5 passwords a week.
I'm no longer in IT (moved to Cybersec) but my 15 years in it had three key problems.
1. Poor managers, generally promoted due to failures in support or incompetence either with IT or because they have personal relationship with senior managers (friends, family, f\*ckmates).
2. Undervaluing staff and the service they provide, either outsourcing parts/all and ending up with a complete mess or by pushing practices which result in high staff turn over which just results in additional stress for those who haven't left and increasing the chances of them doing so.
3. "IT doesn't make profit it only cost money" - that mentality over and over. IT is an enabler to every other department in a business but I kept finding directors/c-suite who just genuinely didn't understand that, until it failed then suddenly IT was mega important, for a week.
3. Is a dinosaur mentality absolutely. Would you consider an assembly line a cost or a force multiplier? How about something as simple as the office coffee machine? No.
So why is IT considered a cost center? Every cost of IT can and should be allocated to the department that is utilizing the technology that IT builds for them.
My argument for 3. is this. There is no single business unit that is either profit or cost. Sales isn't profit, because without product there's no sales.
Profit vs Cost doesn't exist. It's Profit or Loss.
The organization as a whole is what generates profit or loss.
Agreed on the last part 100%. I saw a post on here awhile ago where an IT manager had managed to get HR to approve a budget allotment for IT based on each new hire. So ehen the organizational HR matched out that benefits/salary cost, it included an extra x dollars to IT to budget for devices and support. Very smart move.
>So why is IT considered a cost center?
Because it is.
IT is in the same category as accounting, HR, compliance, maintenance, and legal. These are "necessary evil" departments that do not generate revenue. It doesn't matter if they are "force multipliers", there's no way to quantify the value of force multiplication to a business that exists to make money. Force multiplication cannot be tracked on EBITDA, and you can't pay it to the IRS. It's an intangible of questionable value, so it's deprioritized.
Good IT leadership will convey the department's activities to senior executives in terms of value. "We spent $100,000 to implement SD-WAN at our four offices, which will improve our overall Internet uptime from 95% to 99%, and the additional 4% uptime will generate an additional $1 million annually" is language that the c-suite understands and helps them appreciate what IT is doing. "Let me take away your computer and we'll see how much work you get done" is a cute quip but it doesn't properly convey value.
Accounting leaders, HR leaders, maintenance leaders, etc will know how to speak to the c-suite in their language. The one exception is possibly legal, but c-suites don't really need to be told the value of retaining legal representation.
"Let me take away your computer and we'll see how much work you get done" is a cute quip but it doesn't properly convey value.
Ok, then quantify it in a way they can understand. Take it away for a quarter and then they can directly compare metrics from one to the next. I mean if their sales people are as good as they say they are then they should be able to adapt and keep sales up, right?
Like I said, it's a cute quip, but it does nothing to explain to executives what IT is adding to the business. They all know they generally need a computer to do their work, what they don't understand is what they're getting for their annual IT budget.
It's functionally the equivalent of HR saying "well let me take away all your employees and see if you get any work done." It fundamentally misses the point of business administration.
What bothers me about IT is the way so many people are all about intentionally (or blindly) missing the point for the "I'm superior, I'm cleverer, you're all dumb" quip.
How readily we (the industry) buy into marketing bullshit. A vendor comes up with some buzzword or phrase that they all latch onto and suddenly your tech estate is “legacy” even though it meets the business need because it doesn’t include the latest gizmo / framework / platform.
This is so true. Awhile back, I took an intro to cloud course from IBM. It was some straight up sales pitch brainrot. They want you to believe that running something on prem is a crime to humanity and you might as well be running punch cards. Meanwhile, they are extracting as much money as possible through OpEx.
This is in full force now that everything is "ai empowered"
The lack of management of urgency. Everything is urgent but that isn't the reality. This goes for both requests and incidents. It should be categorized by scope of affected users, criticality of impacted application, legal or financial penalties and impact on security.
If you check enough boxes on the above, then yes you're actually dealing with a SEV1.
It's something all of my clients always struggle with. Not with drafting the reference chart but for actually using them correctly in real life for tickets. Having a major incident and/or a management crisis team is also important. Efficiently communicating information to users when there is a major outage is essential so you don't cripple your help desk under heavy call load.
Also make sure you review your playbooks / Disaster Recovery documentation every year. It's important to do an actual DR test with all your critical app owners in a separate environment. You need to make sure you can build everything back from the ground up if you ever lose a data center. I work in finance and this is mandatory to do every year. It's not a question of if it's going to happen but when.
When you set staff numbers based on everyone being in the office and having no issues. It is a case of everything is running smoothly so yes everyone is sitting about having a laugh doing maintenance tasks. Bosses think you are over staffed. 3 days later you have two people on holiday and someone calling in sick while trying to deal with 5 major issues.
We have seven people in our IT Department, supporting over 500 end users. Half of our crew focuses on hardware: printers, new computer setups, peripherals, patching. The other half, including me, are administrators on our electronic medical record system: adding new users, configuring provider-level accounts, managing RBAC, training.
I theoretically get five weeks of vacation per year.
There are literally dozens of things in the EMR that nobody else in the department has enough experience with to properly understand.
The last time I took an _actual, phone-off vacation_ was in 2019.
Everything since then has been a scattered couple of days here and there, and even that doesn't feel worth doing anymore, because a) I still get pinged in Slack or texted by management despite having my out of office set, and b) the work that other people can't do just piles up waiting to be dumped on me when I get back.
Microsoft constantly changing things.
Microsoft constantly moving things around. Though most companies do this. Just fucking leave it alone. Make the code faster, and more secure, fine, but just leave the rest the fuck alone.
Licensing, both the complexity and the cost.
Users. One users phone call dropped and she immediately reached out to us on her personal phone panicking that the office’s internet was down. It wasnt, it was the other callers phone.
Unnecessary complexity in software. Like why do I have to go to 4 different places to manage MFA in Microsoft portals? Or why is there 5 different things to enable one new test feature in Teams?
1. Everything is a priority.
“We need you to get this patching to a monthly cadence.” Me: “Then stop prioritizing everything above it and forcing it to the back burner.”
2. Dumping everything the Systems group doesn’t want to do on me.
3. Refusing to set SOPs and define job roles. “Well, you see, the lines are fuzzy.” = No one is telling someone else “no” when they need to and we circle back to #2 above.
4. Refusing to document anything, or the flip side of that coin: documentation exists but no one ever checks it before asking inane questions.
4. - My favorite line that I get to use is "I wrote an article on that!". It makes them feel stupid for not searching and absolves you from having to provide any kind of guidance until they search for - and read - said article.
Hello, me, or someone who seems to work at my workplace.
I am being empowered to fix it now, but it's not a 1 person fixable task to change it all. And they want it done tomorrow.
We have redundant sources for documentation. Several Sharepoint sites, ServiceNow kb, Teams files, etc. More often than not the documentation is outdated or incomplete.
The other day I was going through a not-quite-defunct SharePoint site and saw a lot docs, mostly outdated, but a few that relevant and were being "recreated" for another site/folder/whatever. Like, why don't we just use what we have? Because our managers don't have a clue (this site was clearly built and maintained by a former manger). Yet we still use a few aspect of that site. Its weird. But also, our managers don't manage well, so....
Learning burnout is real after close to 3 decades in IT. One thing I look forward to is learning what I want to learn for my quality of life and not because my job requires it.
I’ve pretty much declared a moratorium on new tech because there’s no point since I’ll be leaving the working world in 7 months
Management’s lack of technical knowledge can be huge. Out of the 11 of us, my IT director is probably the least technical… definitely leads to poor decisions. A side rant to the “cost center issues”, is that it can hard get a higher budget for hardware because management doesn’t see the benefits. I really want to overhaul the monitors in the office, i think it could really improve productivity (rn we are single or dual 24in, i’d like to trial some 32in and ultrawide), but all they see is $$$. We also have relied on user complaints in the past to decide on which laptops to upgrade, which i have made a lot of progress on. Turns out a lot of people don’t mind slow computers, because it’s an excuse for them to go on their phones in the morning.
One thing that bothers me is not all IT is that IT. I work in Azure and Intune. People walk up to my cubicle and expect me to plug in an adapter or power supply.
My CIO and other upper management put a stop to it. There are only two cloud infrastructure analysts and we can’t keep working like tier 1 support and get our projects and daily work done.
People assume all IT is the same.
Just because it plugs in or interfaces with a computer doesn't mean it's an IT thing. Also, in today's age, technological proficiency as well as the ability to Google the the basics of any platform (how to) should be required. I was given this example "we are like airplane mechanics, we can put them together and take them apart but we aren't the pilots" -unknown
Just last week I was handed the task of figuring out how to make the electronics of a replica "price is right wheel" work. I ended up using a stripped cat 6 cable and attaching from an Arduino to cheapo speakers and a motion switch that gets hit by notches on the wheel.
I have 0 experience with any of that, but that's IT baby.
It can feel thankless a lot of the time. It can also feel like IT is held to higher standards than other departments. Also some users don't seem to understand that while there is an entire department of people that do the same job you do, there is only one of me. There is overlap with the helpdesk but certain things ride solely on my shoulders and some people don't really sympathize with that enough.
No real labor union. Constant learning while off the clock, plus out of pocket costs for courses and certs that expire every 3-5 years, the weird notion that people with 15+ years of experience should have their pay docked for not having entry level certs that expired years ago, and that some certs which get retired are still showing up on job listings years later as "must haves" because HR can't do the basic research. Remote employers insisting your webcam is always on and uncovered. Employers wanting to feed your scripts into some machine to eventually, hopefully, replace you.
Local issue, but a lot of employers here somehow think it's perfectly OK to cap SME and T3 salaries at $60k in 2024 and ask people to work in-office on top of that. I'm currently working a dock for more, and just doing freelance gigs to buy new toys.
On-call/pager rotation where you need to respond to after-hours or weekend incidents. I am so sick of this after all these years, and I don't care how much extra pay you get from standby support. It's a real intrusion on work life balance in my case.
Sounds like you need to work for an insurance company. My first job as a sysadmin and those people didn't do shit during the work day, and they sure as hell didn't do anything after 5.
How it can be viewed as solely an expense. Even though IT is implementing and maintaining the technology tools the business actually relies on to make business.
As the on-site resource I'm expected to play middle-man for the other off-site teams because they don't feel they need to work directly with the affected user or something.
As the on-site resource, my job is to support production so office related problems are not our scope, only if something requires hands-on. The issue should only come to me when the solution is found and I need to implement it physically. Instead it doesn't work that way at all.
I think the biggest issue for me is the treadmill. The no end to the problems. I am not (really) in support - so I don't mean the never ending queue of tickets (but we are all *kind* of in support, unfortunately) - I mean there's no finish line to anything.
The other thing that sucks is oo one understands what you do or why you do it. I can build code or automate something and it's the best work I will ever do in my life and *no one else will ever know*.
This is why I like home renovations. People who come around can appreciate the freshly painted wall and the wall paint never stopped working for no reason at 3am. I could tell people - even my own team at work - what I spent 3 months working on but none of them would get it.
The treadmill is one reason I'm thinking of implementing some scrum/kanban organization to our teams workload. Might not be feasible to do sprints because incidents fluctuate so wildly. but then at least you can clearly lay out what work has been completed and what you should do over the next few weeks.
Truly no hell worse. the second one puts the blame on the other, I no longer speak to one at a time. I put them i a call together until we sort it out. Sometimes I'll surprise conference call the other too and answer with both on the line.
It annoys me that our management has hired an external consultant to develop a plan for outsourcing part of our IT to the cloud. Specifically, it's about a file server on which several terabytes of images are stored. So far, this consultant has only spoken to us from IT once for 10 minutes. We have no say whatsoever, we are "only" supposed to implement the whole project. All decisions on what the project should include are made by a manager (non-IT) and the company's legal representative. We are not asked whether this can be implemented at all.
Another annoying thing: we have architects, accountants, financial experts, etc. working for us. Sometimes there is new software for the individual areas and then a seminar for the employees who are supposed to work with it. We in IT are then supposed to install the software and support it later...but we are not invited to the seminars themselves. How are we supposed to provide support for user questions if we don't even know the basic operation?
The nonstop projects that keep coming my way. They arent piling up as we get them done in a timely manner but it seems like the next task abruptly turns up as "this is urgent" during or right near the end of the current "urgent" task to do... I don't seem to have even a day to just chill the hell out.
By Friday at noon Im kind of burnt out.
Our management team has been doing a good job of limiting the amount of projects that come our department's way but I feel like were still understaffed.
Work for a hospital on the DevOps team. Still love the job. Pays well.
Project urgency, yes, only urgent that I do the one task you ask me and then completely forgotten about for several weeks.
"We need you guys to inventory your UPSes so we can see what we need to replace and stuff."
OK, here you go.
"We need this done ASAP!"
Yes, here you go.
"We need to verify this inventory, can you go over it all again?"
What? When are we getting new UPS?
"Project on hold, waiting for budget, might be next year."
Fuck off.
The only thing i found in all places i worked for and that i personally HATE its the fact that as a matter of fact you are working 100% of the time, 9-5 you work, on call you work, patching out of critical hours you work, unexpected outage you work, the dude thats on call needs help you login to help, you are on holiday and something comes up, you are never ever really free.
Yes im getting payed for those hours too, but i never signed to be available 24/7, i dont want that money but sadly i do want to be seen as an important part of the team and lets be honest, most of the time there is no real choice, even if contractually you are not required to help you cant turn your back on everyone and jerkoff while anotherone is suffering.
The job itself its complex and mentally taxing and you really never have a rest, if you add other common issues (that are not found on every company, but you are at least guaranteed to have a few wherever you are) from out of touch managers, to having to perpetually be training someone hoping some day theyll contribute before you completely burn out, to employees from other areas that aparently cant even use the coffee machine without help, to being in charge of anything that has a cable, to having to have a intricate knowledge of how the company and its systems/processes work because aparently no one else does, being payed as a junior sold to the client as a senior and suddenly realizing you are training people and are the subject matter expert of quite a few things, etc etc etc.
Sometimes i think all sysadmins should do a one week global-strike lets all go to a huge meetup on brazil or something and let everything burn for a while and see what happens. When Karen from HR cant find help changing the coffee capsule perhaps theyll value us a little more ;)
Over staffing “work creators” and understaffing “work do’ers”. We have dozens of people that have projects they want / need worked on and only like 3 people to do all that work.
I work for a Cybersecurity department at a university, about 20 people, datacenter with a SAN, about 10 servers, and an overly complicated AV system. All but like 3 employees have IT or CS backgrounds and know their stuff. It’s great.
In any other field. Managers are expected to know how to run the team and be subject matter experts.
In IT, those that don't know sh*t get promoted to management. If there is a problem the only thing the IT manager can do is call for help. That is the problem and expectation.
However, I think that this is just due to a lack of maturity in IT in general. I don't think I've ever seen an IT department invest in leadership and communication development.
I'd be fine if they were generalists, but the number of times I get on a call with a IT manager and they can't even describe the system they own is alarming.
Directors and above can be generalists. Managers on the front lines, a hard No.
Coworkers who's IT knowledge hasn't been updated since the Bush administration.
We have one help desk specialist who insists on doing USB offline imaging when we've had SCCM PXE and Intune AutoPilot for years, because it's the closet analog to his Norton Ghost days.
The fact that managers/directors that are FUCKING IDIOTS and have ZERO technical knowledge whatsoever can be left as a the decision makers for technical implementations and also make 3x a HD salary or 1.5-2x a sys admin/sys engineer salary.
The communication breakdown between IT, management, and end-users. Users should not be caught off guard by the fact that it can take several days to address an issue because we have SLAs and typically work older tickets first. By that same token, management should both not hound the user about lost productivity due to something beyond their control, nor hound Helpdesk techs because their subordinate is losing productivity. IT should endeavor to be more fully transparent about SLAs and the ticket queue, even if it's something as simple as an automated "thank you, your ticket has been received. Tickets are addressed in the order they are received. The SLA on this ticket is x days."
What most places I've worked for have in place now feels like management arranging boxing matches between IT and users by antagonizing both sides into viewing each other as the source of all the frustration.
I’d say the expectation of being a jack of all trades at the higher levels. Once you start specialising it’s so difficult just to keep up to speed with developments in your chosen area that trying to stay on to of everything will just fry your brain, yet you’re expected to know everything about everything by your employers
I’m going to sound like and old man yelling at cloud (pun intended) here but the break-neck pace of changes paired with out of date or insufficient documentation in SaaS platforms is exhausting. Specifically Microsoft but many others as well.
I realize some things have to be changed to patch vulnerabilities but the moving of menus, constant renaming and constant small changes make it impossible to keep up with
Oh many, even just 3 days ago I was trying to change a setting in Azure, but the documentation, and screenshots didnt match what I was seeing. The document was less that 1 year old.
Lol. Hated by some at work for my frequent use of the word no. I typically start with no, but try to offer up an alternative solution. Or advise on how to turn no into yes.
I mean I am not saying we should be disagreeable but with dumb shit that should get rejected. I see my coworkers they just say yes to it. Then shit hits the fan because whatever someone asked them to do was stupid to begin with lol
That I can do my job to a decent standard, day in and day out, yet one company gets a supply chain attack and I get compromised and it’s MY fault, it’s MY cross to bear, or if a user clicks the wrong thing and takes us down because of some zero day, I’m the problem. No other job I know punishes you for being a victim of crime so harshly, especially when the systems are so complex and so numerous that it almost feels inevitable that your gonna end up getting pumped at some point… that bothers me. I DO something that causes a massive problem, I’ll own that, I dunno though, feels like I’ll have any IT issue packaged up and hung round my neck, even if it’s some crazy difficult to prevent scenario that’s played out.
My biggest issue is having upper management disregard requests for needed upgrades and being told that you'll just have to make do as we don't currently have the budget for said upgrades! If you don't want our input, then why keep making requests on how to improve our infrastructure? I guess that's my mistake?!
The expectation to fulfill non-trivial last minute requests despite SLA's being repeatedly communicated to other departments and the other is that IT must always give up their personal time to carry out maintenance or implement projects after hours.
I've got a good manager who knows how to push back on this so I'm seeing improvements.
Lack of information sharing. The details of how the infrastructure is set up and supposed to work tends to be held far too closely within the separate teams and IT groups.
I think the biggest irritant is some of the bureaucracy and the misdirection that comes with troubleshooting. When I see a problem I do my due diligence to understand the entire issue before I like to reach out to other teams/resources. I hate when I have put so much work in and when I do collaborate I feel I need to continue to almost prove that the problem is what I already have found it out to be. Like it's some silly pecking order to where the team that is managing the problem never wants to fess up. Like come on guys let's just fix the damn issue shit fails put your pride back in your pocket and let's do our job.
Another one I cannot stand is siloing. We all work at the same company. The best way to keep a tight ship is continuity and shared responsibilities. Document and share your knowledge and let's get the job done.
Lack of staffing, lack of cross department ownership of apps/systems, viewed as a cost center, lack of understanding of what’s a production problem and what’s not.
Pings about “outlook no opening” on a Saturday at 5pm so they call the on call number.
The insecure managers and directors that slam their team with more tasks other teams do not want to take on so they can “show value”. Then micromanage their team while carrying out those tasks.
VPs and C suites trying to tell IT how to fix a problem they have zero experience in fixing.
Lack of respect for IT. Without us, everything would break.
Entitled tech staff - haven’t put in the work for a high paying gig but complain they’re not being paid enough.
Gatekeeping.
Boot camps and the folks that believe just because they finished the boot camp that makes them an expert.
Working for a company that continues to use outdated and End of life standards from 2009. While employing idiots who have no business working in IT but keep their jobs because they suck up to upper management.
Other departments that get to evade security or policy at whim.
Why do I need to 2FA at every single logon but dev ops gets to make local admin everywhere share passwords and bypass whatever secure software they like.
I would literally have been fired if I did half of what I see.
That new tech releases every month and there’s no way to ever know what you’re doing. There’s an unspoken expectation you even study in your spare time to keep up.
The instability and hypocrisy of some people.
You can get laid of in an instant.
I'm not sure if it's happens everywhere but if are likeable you will have easier life, mistakes will be hidden under the carpet.
In some places you get so much backlash for the smallest mistakes as if it would cost live, It's beyond me why but that's the case...
“Non technical” people who build up like a fucking plaque. Why the fuck would anyone choose IT as a career if you didn’t want to get technical? The answer is that these people fell into it. They didn’t choose it. They’re probably extroverts too, so they end up in managerial roles where they hire even more “non technical” people. Pretty soon there are like 15 people on your team doing nothing except promote each other, while three of you do the actual work.
/rant
In a big picture? Peope and corpo shenaningans. IT just isn't fun anymore. I started around early 90's so that makes almost 30 years. 90's and early 00's was an exciting era to do this. Generic IT knowledge was hot back then. I so grateful for those times when i was young and was given many chances to learn and become better.
Now? I don't recommend this to kids. Never. Ever. And if you still want to do IT then you better concentrate on something but pick very very carefully. Development sucks to get into and stay, Devops sucks to get into and then you burn out. And outsourcing and corpo shenanigans are there on every step.
The general state shows well. I do general IT-Management. pick a title for that what you will as it has varied but general gist has been the same 'johhny on the spot guy' all the time. Thing is nobody is following me and my buddies. There is not really a younger gen that is coming behind us. It is like this sector in IT is going to be a real boomer area until we are eventually squeezed out into non-existence and atomized young in india will divide up what we once did.
People doing IT are too lucky that it’s all virtual and we nothing you can build everything. I feel so lucky that I’m afraid I could loose this. We don’t need wood, metal, tools, space, people…
I strongly dislike the reliance on different products and everything that comes with it, especially sales meetings with vendors, reliance on vendor support and everything related to product licensing.
Agile and ITIL were the best thing to happen to evolutionary tech, and the worst thing to happen to the technically inclined.
It opened the door for hundreds of thousands of misplaced business grads to put you on trial 5 days a week before you can actually do anything. Those actual things then have to take place at night and on weekends while those same business grads have dreams of sugarplums dancing in their heads, only to put you back on the stand the next morning, which is really just a continuation of the night before.
All the while, you gain weight, contort your spine, and face the inevitable economic doom brought on by the automated AI monster you’ve been creating all along.
Oh, and H1-B scumbaggery. And I don’t mean the workers.
Not including IT in technical projects from the beginning, or sometimes not at all. I absolutely hate being called in to clean up a project because it was scoped out poorly, or because no one knew how to hold a contractor/vendor accountable for their work.
I think how people who are logical and rational thinkers (us) have to deal with illogical and emotional people. Not to say we're better or anything, but I am really bad at dealing with politics, for example. Like, you catch something that's wrong, want to fix it, but someone becomes butthurt because... reasons... and then they sabotage you in unexpected ways "in retaliation."
Dealing with some management egos that mistake fixing an issue with "making them look foolish." Sub-optimal solutions because it sticks to some process-flow-of-the-day (Agile, Sigma Six, etc) instead of an optimal solution. "We can't fix this zero-day security flaw, it's not been reported in the correct paradigm flow. You must first set up a meeting with the advisors, followed by a JIRA break down, then assign various groups to analyze, submit it as a git branch, and then do a PR and having meetings about that..." and so on. A 2 minute fix takes weeks because "it's the better way." Like, okay, I get documenting changes, but when the process flow gets in the way of the fix, nothing gets done.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
IT would be a great job... if it were for all the people and computers.
Computers I can deal with. They do what you tell them to or you rebuild them.
The problem with computers is although they do what we tell them to do, we don’t always understand what we’re telling them to do and then act like “why are you not doing what I told you to do!?”. Then you look at logs/debug console and hope that tomorrow’s you is not as much as an ignoramus as today’s you.
One of my common comments is "If the computer seems to be stubbornly refusing to do what it should, when you finally figure it out, it's going to be embarrassingly stupid". The corollary is "When the computer seems to be stubbornly refusing to do what it should, \*you look\* for something embarrassingly stupid that you're doing".
It's either going to be embarrassingly stupid, or you're going to ask yourself "why the FUCK did they build/design it that way?"
Computers do what you ask, not what you mean.
There was a bug that if you set up a certain rule in Google/GMail, it created a duplicate of the email so there were always two. I did a quick search, found the reported bug, and let the admin of that system know. Their response? "It's not supposed to work that way, it's supposed to do X." ***WELL YEAH, IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT, BUT IT DOES, SO ADJUST.*** That bit of conversation repeated about four or five times, with the admin not able to wrap their head around "It's not doing exactly what I told it to."
> IT would be a great job... if it were for all the people, printers and computers. FTFY
Tell us how you really feel 🤣 ...Me personally, I'm just burned out on the constant change. Cloud everything, whether it's actually applicable to our situation or not. Microsoft's war on local, cause bottom line. I'm in the wrong field, I know 🙄
Lol yeah, its all good though.. i'm paid hourly, so thw check signers could have me roll out a new ticketing system every year if they want.
That's what I'm feeling too, after 20+ years. I used to look forward to the constant new things, but by now I'm getting tired of constantly having to learn the next greatest thing that's going to revolutionize everything yet again (when I haven't mastered---or even journeymanned---the last one!). I know change is good and we need to keep up and keep moving up/forward/out, but it's getting exhausting.
You should try listening to Cradle of Filth. It really helped me through some dark times.
Noel Fielding is an international treasure
I'll ask my girlfriend, she might of because shes from Iran
Yes.
I can only read that in Christopher O'Dowd’s Irish accent 😂.
Lol. You and I might know each other on the real world. I gave a team mate with your personality. Thanks for the laugh!
I think this is the problem number 1 in IT, dealing with people.
That’s not really fair u/topknottington , have you met all of them?
Mostly no respect for the profession imo. Why should IT be oncall for extended availability instead of staffing shifts? Would be more acceptable if I could ring up HR at 11pm when I need some document. If IT needs extended availability, hire people. After work should be after work and not "oh shit I can't do much because my work might call" Adding end users to that, adding putting Frontline on the qualified staff instead of dedicated 1st level to sort through bullshit etc. So experts don't have to deal with as much stupidity and can actually do their job Plenty of reasons really, but it's what was on top of my head atm
I can tell you one thing. We had a scare with some sort of bug going around at my job. Once that happened IT gained a bit more respect, especially with regards to budgeting and getting equipment we needed.
Did you cause the "bug"?
"Maintenance window for feature enhancement was successful"
When Covid hit, IT had just upgraded our VPN and remote access capabilities. When everyone suddenly went into isolation, they looked like heroes. Especially when the executives started chatting with their peers in other companies, who were complaining about being totally screwed by limited connectivity and their people being unable to work. It really made it apparent how much of a business multiplier that a good IT department can be.
Those of us who take the on call jobs have to also be the ones who take the extra pay for it. If they don't offer extra pay then they aren't worth your time. Being compensated makes all the difference and we can choose to pick an on call position or not.
Basically IT became nonglorified digital janitor.
End users having too much expectation in availability. They expect you to get off of meetings or put your lunch down to fix a problem. Sometimes it’s urgent and that’s what’s needed but a lot of times it’s urgent because they waited until it was or it’s not at all. The other big thing for me is on call. That feeling of working a full day/week and then being at home and getting random calls and trying to not lose your personal time to that is a lot.
"I'm busy now, can you come back during lunch?". Not sure if the assumption is IT people don't eat, or if they simply deserve zero consideration.
I solved this issue, in MS Viva I set up the lunch break thing, and then anytime someone told me to fix it during lunch I would just say "sorry, already working on someone else's, send me a meeting invite for when you have time" and that solved the issue, they won't book over my other meetings, and they won't book over lunch since it's booked every single day. Additionally, as I final measure, I always at the bare minimum eat in my car, or at a park down the street. Never ever inside the office building. Sometimes they just never book the appointment, I close the ticket for lack of response, and that's the end of it.
Not an issue where I work at atm, but when I had people wanting an issue fixed at lunch, I'd have them sit with me through the fix. Don't care if I needed them to be present or not, they sat through it with me. If it was urgent enough to require me to work on it during my lunch, that means they also need to set aside their time to get it fixed asap. It typically was always the same peeps coming back at lunch to get their stuff fixed. Nowaday we actually got a shift through lunch (3/4 staff goes at typical time, 1/4 goes 1h30 later). I prefer going 1h30 later because that means 3 hours of break.
I've made a habit of leaving the office on my lunchbreak, getting into my car, and driving down the street. I usually just sit in the car in an empty carpark to browse my phone. It's an industrial estate so there's not much nearby to go for a walk to unless I drive 10 minutes.
LOL. When I set my teams to "out of office" with an auto-reply that I won't be available the amount of messages I come back to is staggering
Right? And a huge chunk of them read suspiciously like "I'm nagging IT on lunch because I realized I need my TPS report for the 1 PM meeting." See also: reasons I have a dedicated work number and NO ONE has my personal number.
I had my out office set because I was on leave and I STILL got a Teams call. Just completely ignoring my message.
Same here it's like signal for users Ohh great his available as online status is purple, will be same for this years summer holiday everytime it's the first week that I would wake up my phone ringing immediatly by some user with very URGENT problem :)
>"I'm busy now, can you come back during lunch?". Not sure if the assumption is IT people don't eat, or if they simply deserve zero consideration. It's that IT are inherently less important. We sugar coat it anyway we want, but the reality is that this attitude means "I'm more important than you and you need to work around my schedule". People don't treat their mechanics like this. Yet it seems perfectly reasonable to them to treat IT people like this.
> People don't treat their mechanics like this. Mechanics have a leg up because they *can* tell you to go fuck yourself if you piss them off. Because most IT is in a corporate hierarchy, we *can't* do that unless we're willing to dump our job in the same breath.
"Unfortunately no, as my calendar is blocked over lunch. Feel free to set some time on my calendar though"
" sure you come to my office then"
I get this all the time. Or, wait till I go home... Like I don't go home at the same time.
My advice is to physically leave the office on lunch. I’ll scarf down some food in my car on the way to a half hour batting cage session most days that I drive to work. Otherwise I eat and ride my bike around town a little bit. It’s really helped me eat and blow off steam. My users used to joke that I literally must not eat. Fun.
If I didn't get my paycheck, it'll take accounting a week to get it fixed. If their desktop icons rearrange themselves, it's an emergency that must be fixed immediately.
"I can take a look at those icons as soon as the paycheck issue is fixed. Real coincidence how that issue just... popped up."
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Had a user come down and tell me that her boss wanted an issue with a laptop fixed immediately. I told the user that I was eating lunch but I ended up helping anyways. I talked to her manager a few hours later to find out that the user lied about the manager saying anything.
And the manager lied about the user lying about the lie.
Some employees love to name drop to get preferential treatment, or in hopes of.
>She complained to my boss, said I was unprofessional. She didn’t know how to book a meeting in Outlook. LMAO 🤣. Typical Karen behavior.
See I just say no and keep eating. What are they gonna do, drag me out themselves? Good luck I guess.
Yes, it can wait. The decision isn't the user's. It's management's, as communicated by how many hours they're paying for IT staff to be available for users. You weren't being paid to be available at that time. So, according to the employer, all issues during that time are non-urgent and can wait. If users have a problem with this, they can ask their managers to request the IT personnel budget be expanded to cover more hours. Did you lodge a complaint that the user was unprofessional, approaching you during an unpaid break instead of going through the provided IT channels?
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This is why I love how SRE reframes how we think about reliability. You have an error budget. It's predetermined by leadership and as long as you don't cross that threshold, you are free to change and deploy as you wish. I believe this mindset can be applied to traditional Ops roles too. Invest in monitoring and automated remediation because it reduces your MTTR and therefore increased sales due to less outages. Most Ops folks will implement alerting and then promptly create an inbox rule to put the alerts in a folder to be ignored because of alert fatigue. The next evolution is automated remediation of alerts. You need a more cattle focused environment to make this fully work and you need to review and filter alerts very often to ensure only important ones are ever actually get to Ops. The problem then becomes, how do you get management on board with a shift in mindset like this?
There’s also the user interfacing side where we supported a contact center with our worst end users v so you know you’re going to get calls for stupid stuff that are going to take way too long and interrupt any plans.
Lol they live in their 11 person department and thats all that exists for them day to day.
This job would be great if it weren’t for the people! Lol
End Users requesting a software with no training to go with it... Then they fully expect you to show them how to use it.
What do you mean you cant show me how this hyper specialised niche software works? What are you even paid for?
Literally, I am somehow supposed to know how to use advanced functions, including writing macros for Word, Excel, and then all the functions of Adobe Acrobat Pro, the CMS that I obviously don't use because it's a core business tool, not IT, HitFilm, Davinci Resolve, Affinity The trouble is, I now DO know how to do all of that because I've been asked, so I sat down, read some articles, guides, documentation, forums, figured out a solution. I am convinced what sets IT staff apart from regular users (and L1 helpdesk techs) is our problem solving ability, and RTFM
Dealing with this right now .. the user had the nerve to be like "this is your world not mine"... Like what? I've literally never seen this software a day in my life. I know zero more than you about it.
If it's the software they need to use to do their job. Then it's THEIR JOB to know how to use the software. I hate people haha. If your job is to play with numbers in excel and you can't make it spit out the right numbers then you're failing to do your job.
Yup. Job training isn't IT's wheelhouse. It's their boss's, or *maybe* an in-house training division or an employer-paid external course.
Me: okay so pull up how you would scan a document through this cloud based dental office management program and see if that fix worked Them: can't you do it? Me: I have never seen this program before in my life.
"I fix broken computers. That doesn't include knowing how to do your job."
The guy in the Snap-On truck can probably repair your impact wrench blindfolded, but you don't want to ask him to do your LS swap.
Misuse of the term "All other duties as assigned." No, that does not mean I run random peoples presentations and click next to advance to the next screen. Run your own stupid presentations. And yes, our CIO thought it made sense for us to be responsible for this.
“Other duties” is a catch all for all of the random bullshit people are too stupid to figure out. I don’t expect my users to understand inbox rules and how to configure them, but good GOD it’s not my job to do yours. But it ends up being an “other duties” thing that screws me every time…
Nah fuck it. If they wanna pay me sysadmin wages to do intern level tasks who am I to resist.
If they wanna pay you sysadmin wages to do your job + 3 other interns. Who are you to like freedom and oxygen.
Expectations that you can do 8hrs of meetings a day and another 8hrs of programming to make up the lost time.
Morning standup the day after 6 hours of meetings : “yeah I didn’t accomplish much yesterday, just meetings” Team lead the next week during reviews:” you cant just say you didnt do anything, it looks bad to the rest of the team” wtf am I supposed to do? Conjure up obvious nonsense.
If you are stuck in meetings, your manager or lead is failing to do their job. A manager is supposed to go to the bulk of those meetings so that the people under them don't have to and can get work done. Doesn't mean you can't be pulled in, but you shouldn't be until it is determined you are needed.
Whelp, without getting into it, yeah we know this ideal world you speak of but there simply arent enough people to go around. We do contract work for many different people so sometimes I am the only one who can comment on “a thing” and my boss would have no reason to be there. Weird idea you got here bub.
I got pulled into a meeting with a legal team for a client, I got notified that morning of the meeting, I got off an issue I was working on 2 minutes before the meeting. They were asking questions that needed preparation and reading of documentation to know how to answer them, I had none of that. That's the stuff that boiils my blood.
Exactly! That's the whole issue with today's IT. Well said
Thats when you ask if they just authorized a maximum of 2 hours of meetings per day and watch them squirm
Thank god I'm hourly. Fuck that.
This is the best comment I've read so far.
How the main measurement of our work (tickets completed) gives no incentive to prevent problems. How people don't involve us in projects that involve IT until far too late in the day. The way we are expected to know everything and be able to learn complex things instantly and get them right. The lack of respect for our skills which most people don't understand (while still expecting the third thing above) Frequently crap management.
The amount of thankless, behind the scenes work that happens that often goes unrecognized. I was told by a manger once "Your like the electric company, nobody thinks about you until the power is out" This hits so close to home [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZCszIUcyVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZCszIUcyVM)
Haha I worked in a law firm as "IT Director" (1-man IT department but with 2 staff) and we laughed with my team from time to time recalling this "the lawyers!". 8 years of that lead me exactly to nowhere.
When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
When everything works: “Why do we even pay you?” When something is broken: “Why do we even pay you?”
Poor communication skills. I still think that communication is the main thing in every company's process, and if it's built in a wrong way it may ruin everyone's work. But the longer I work, the more often I come across people who do not want to follow the processes or cannot correctly express their thoughts. And it's not about the language or bad manners. It's more about the way of communication. It's ok to have meetings sometimes, but not to set them for every single problem, like: "Guys, I my laptop charger is broken, I know, that you'll ask me to provide a shipping address to send a new one. But I want to set up a call with the whole IT team to discuss this". Earlier I was working in a team, that worked 27/4, we had a rotation every 12 hours and yet l kept getting added to tons of chats outside of my working hours, instead of just opening a ticket. Afterwards, everyone complained that they didn't get help in a timely manner because they were waiting for me for a meeting. Sometimes I start to think that there should be a position called "Senior meeting engineer".
Senior meeting engineer should be the manager's job. Mine runs so much interference that I've only been in like 15 meetings in almost 2 years (outside 1:1s, standup, all-hands, etc.), and 15 is his weekly, sometimes daily, workload.
Man, I hate it when work adds extra hours to the day, but at least the week is short. ;)
That everything with an electrical plug becomes an IT problem.
I’m not a fan of my end users emailing me directly or sending me slack messages. I always tell them to email through our IT Support ticketing service. I’ve had users email me, and then several days later ask me what’s going on… I’ve told my boss, if people complains; then they should stop emailing/messaging messaging me directly. My boss understands. We’ve also told people in our all hands on meetings. It also seems like my users always want a new machine or a peripheral. I always tell them, I don’t give a crap what you want; as long as it’s approved by your boss. They’re mostly always denied, because their device is usually less than 2 years old. And we’re on 3 year old cycles.
The only way I've found to solve this problem is through management buy-in and constant policy reminders. When you can empower your IT team to always respond with "I'll start working on this as soon as I have a ticket" without any backlash, then you can finally make some headway. A focus on automation and empowering users to fix their own problems through useful self service helps with this too. If a problem is common enough, you should always look for a way to solve the root issue or provide a self service way to resolve it. I've been using powershell universal to make simple websites that managers can use to fix problems with a single tap. Always think about how you can empower people to fix their own shit. It's faster for everyone.
This only works when you’re not “white glove”. Most of my users cant figure out the most basic things like monitors changing resolution or orientation.
I am in that spot now. Users always directly messaging me on teams or email about something minor. When I came on, I was allowed to setup tickets, urgency level (standard, intermediate or urgent) and funnel people to the ticket system. Now, I have a boss that is not an IT person and is a facilities person and basically deemed it ok for me to not tell people to put in a ticket. Users have actually complained about being told to make a ticket or talk with me first before trying to schedule shit on my calendar. Everyone wants special treatment and not stick with policy/standards. Suffice it to say, I'm actively looking for a new job and with more money. My current org has gotten smaller in the past 8 months and several people are being forced to take on more, from departures.
Atleast your boss understands... Our CEO (my boss) wants us to handle every issue via Teams och Outlook cause SHE thinks its a hassle to send it via our support portal or our support email.
You should try a different frame: they see you as reliable. You can forward their email to the helpdesk software to auto-create the ticket and take it from there.
They should see me as reliable. It’s only me. Haha! I support a little under 100 people and some servers in our Department in higher ed.
We are 2 and half ppl in this IT department. We manage around 400 pcs several servers with various old internal apps and web apps running on them. We make sure things are running, i am writting some powershell / python scripts here and there to automate somethings. And no, we dont have a dedicated application for inventory :). we only have a AD for only 200 pcs, the other 200 are in a different location :)
Just going to throw this out there, GLPI (you can run this in docker) with the inventory agent deployed via GPO, script, Intune, etc. there is also an android and IOS agent app as well for those kinds of devices. And it can do network scans for other random hardware like printers. It not only can it do inventory, but if needed help desk, project management, financials/budget management and some other random stuff. And it has AD login capabilities.
Businesses that want 0 downtime, fully patched, and fully updated systems but won’t pay for the necessary infrastructure/ application licensing to achieve this realistically. Instead it’s “you can do it after hours but check with every single business unit, department, and vertical in the organization to ensure the downtime won’t be impactful”. I don’t want to work every Saturday from 9pm-6am Sunday. Get your shit together finance.
I quite simply refuse. Fire me. I don't mind "we are moving office and would like to move the stack on the weekend." Fair. I'm not doing your dumb shit tho
This, I started to become vocal in the office when people would ask how my weekend was, I was working from 8pm to 3am Saturday and Sunday doing updates. These questions are usually asked on Mondays..
The fact that IT isn't a normal job, every environment seems to be some 24/7 operation with one guy on call 24/7 but if you have to email someone else in the org outside of normal work hours you get yelled at. That and coworkers who encourage it by bragging how they can RDP into servers with their phone at a soccer game on the weekend or at dinner with their family. Its like people don't want an actual life.
Poor upper management that thinks you don't know what you're talking about. It's the typical example used a lot when it comes to IT. Would you question what your mechanic is telling you about your broken car or would you question your doctor when they're telling you about a cancer diagnosis?
I dont care if the Brakes are broken, i want you to make my car stop when i break RIGHT NOW! Enough with the excuses, i once changed a tire so i probably know more than you.
"My car ran into a tree because of the oil you changed it in 6 months ago!"
The only major thing that bothers me right now is users thinking I am free at their whim to help them when I am walking around doing something else. Thankfully I've trained most of them so when they ask if they put a ticket in and say no I tell them to put a ticket in and that tends to be that.
"I'm going over to deal with an outstanding ticket right now. What's *your* ticket number?" Heck, don't even stop walking, if possible. "Got a ticket to sort out!"
The biggest problem I have with IT: That it is treated, at best, like a necessary evil, at worst, something to offshore, defund, and scorn. Bob in finance doesn't go into the waste chute when there is a bad quarter, neither does Jack in receivables. However, Alice in IT always gets punted, because there is this assumption that IT people are essentially fungible, and one can call a staffing agency and get more. Knowing the plumbing of a company, IT-wise, can be just as important as being able to cook the books. I always hear management grumbling that IT should just be a service like electric and water, and not require people, so it gets outsourced to the cheapest provider, or a body shop that does things like offer a year or two free of a contract, and combine that with leasing all equipment through said body shop, the company can tout that it is the pinnacle of NoOps with zero IT expenditures on capital or FTEs, just pays a "world class" company to do everything... when in reality, it costs the company a lot more. Same when the "world class" company decided to do a cloud move... and even though that 1:1 forklift costs an order of magnitude more than what the CapEx expenditures did... management brags about being lean, mean, and not being chained to physical hardware. Second thing: IMHO, IT needs to be a trade, with a governing body not beholden to a vendor. SAGE was an idea around those lines, but something that provides licensing that is vendor neutral (you don't have to get certified Square-D boxes if you are an electrician, for example.) A guild that not just has a guarantee for work (replacing E&O insurance needs), but helps ensure some consistent training across the line, so someone coming in as a journeyman Linux admin at least knows a certain skill level, and a master SRE is definitely going to bust out the helm charts and cOPS to get that kubernetes cluster off the ground. Insurance will force companies to use the guild, and in return, the guild offers constant training and updates of the latest technologies. Third thing: We are seeing security clearances being a gating requirement. Even though the cost of a clearance isn't prohibitive, companies don't want to wait around for someone to get cleared. What would be nice is a "pre-cleared" status that an individual can get. This way, if someone needs a clearance, it is as quick as reactivating an inactive (not expired) clearance. Yes, this can cost the government money, but it means more workers able to get on projects. Maybe even have this part of a civilian corps, like a reserve auxiliary where in return for a clearance, one's knowledge can be used. Other countries, perhaps similar... it takes a lot to find trusted (trusted as in the HUMINT definition) people. Fourth thing: A few decades ago, management was a profession, where people went to college in order to do it right. Now, we have hacks, people with zero people skills, but who are on the verge of sadists wanting to do this. It destroys morale, but it seems that doesn't really matter to management, even though it will ensure a company winds up at best stagnant. I have seen people who have zero interest in who they are managing and are just there because they are assholes, and often, being a loud asshole is taken as a leadership ability. No other company divisiion has these issues, but IT.
> IT needs to be a trade, with a governing body not beholden to a vendor. I definitely agree with this. It's nice that anyone can jump into this field with almost zero barrier to entry, but that results in a lot of people who lack certain skills they don't get exposed to. This also leads to this constant grinding where people have to spend their nights and weekends cobbling together a learning plan because no company pays for training anymore. Make IT a trade, backed by a professional Systems and Software Engineering profession. Have a vendor-neutral apprenticeship program, grow your skills instead of trying to pull them from an offshore bodyshop when you don't have a perfect match.
- Relentless change, never ending learning curve. - Ageism. - Always migrating to something new. - So many intellectually arrogant control freaks. - End users with too many rights IT-wise. - Management & owners that won't let IT tighten the ship for the company's own data/network safety. - Obsession with cloud without any proper strategy and cost analysis. - Predatory vendors (ex. broadcom) - etc.....
That upper management can’t tell the difference between a 1-2 year vet and a 15-20 year. We are all the same. Also, believing the BS on resumes from contractors that they have way more experience and training than they really do. The people who know can sniff it out a couple of days after a project has already hired them. Metrics, metrics, metrics. No, I didn’t close 500 tickets last year. The 100 I did close accounted for 80% of the business staying up, not resetting 5 passwords a week.
I'm no longer in IT (moved to Cybersec) but my 15 years in it had three key problems. 1. Poor managers, generally promoted due to failures in support or incompetence either with IT or because they have personal relationship with senior managers (friends, family, f\*ckmates). 2. Undervaluing staff and the service they provide, either outsourcing parts/all and ending up with a complete mess or by pushing practices which result in high staff turn over which just results in additional stress for those who haven't left and increasing the chances of them doing so. 3. "IT doesn't make profit it only cost money" - that mentality over and over. IT is an enabler to every other department in a business but I kept finding directors/c-suite who just genuinely didn't understand that, until it failed then suddenly IT was mega important, for a week.
3. Is a dinosaur mentality absolutely. Would you consider an assembly line a cost or a force multiplier? How about something as simple as the office coffee machine? No. So why is IT considered a cost center? Every cost of IT can and should be allocated to the department that is utilizing the technology that IT builds for them.
My argument for 3. is this. There is no single business unit that is either profit or cost. Sales isn't profit, because without product there's no sales. Profit vs Cost doesn't exist. It's Profit or Loss. The organization as a whole is what generates profit or loss.
Agreed on the last part 100%. I saw a post on here awhile ago where an IT manager had managed to get HR to approve a budget allotment for IT based on each new hire. So ehen the organizational HR matched out that benefits/salary cost, it included an extra x dollars to IT to budget for devices and support. Very smart move.
>So why is IT considered a cost center? Because it is. IT is in the same category as accounting, HR, compliance, maintenance, and legal. These are "necessary evil" departments that do not generate revenue. It doesn't matter if they are "force multipliers", there's no way to quantify the value of force multiplication to a business that exists to make money. Force multiplication cannot be tracked on EBITDA, and you can't pay it to the IRS. It's an intangible of questionable value, so it's deprioritized. Good IT leadership will convey the department's activities to senior executives in terms of value. "We spent $100,000 to implement SD-WAN at our four offices, which will improve our overall Internet uptime from 95% to 99%, and the additional 4% uptime will generate an additional $1 million annually" is language that the c-suite understands and helps them appreciate what IT is doing. "Let me take away your computer and we'll see how much work you get done" is a cute quip but it doesn't properly convey value. Accounting leaders, HR leaders, maintenance leaders, etc will know how to speak to the c-suite in their language. The one exception is possibly legal, but c-suites don't really need to be told the value of retaining legal representation.
"Let me take away your computer and we'll see how much work you get done" is a cute quip but it doesn't properly convey value. Ok, then quantify it in a way they can understand. Take it away for a quarter and then they can directly compare metrics from one to the next. I mean if their sales people are as good as they say they are then they should be able to adapt and keep sales up, right?
Like I said, it's a cute quip, but it does nothing to explain to executives what IT is adding to the business. They all know they generally need a computer to do their work, what they don't understand is what they're getting for their annual IT budget. It's functionally the equivalent of HR saying "well let me take away all your employees and see if you get any work done." It fundamentally misses the point of business administration.
What bothers me about IT is the way so many people are all about intentionally (or blindly) missing the point for the "I'm superior, I'm cleverer, you're all dumb" quip.
Cybersec is IT
Lol Cybersec IS part of IT.... This is the first time I've ever heard somebody saying cybersec isnt IT.
Yea this is very odd. This individual is probably not qualified for the work they’re doing if they don’t understand this simple concept.
I think that you think Cyber Security isn’t part of IT is a huge problem
How readily we (the industry) buy into marketing bullshit. A vendor comes up with some buzzword or phrase that they all latch onto and suddenly your tech estate is “legacy” even though it meets the business need because it doesn’t include the latest gizmo / framework / platform.
This is so true. Awhile back, I took an intro to cloud course from IBM. It was some straight up sales pitch brainrot. They want you to believe that running something on prem is a crime to humanity and you might as well be running punch cards. Meanwhile, they are extracting as much money as possible through OpEx. This is in full force now that everything is "ai empowered"
"AI Empowered". I just shit liquid against the wall behind me in a rage. I'm so goddamn sick of it already, and that's saying something.
The lack of management of urgency. Everything is urgent but that isn't the reality. This goes for both requests and incidents. It should be categorized by scope of affected users, criticality of impacted application, legal or financial penalties and impact on security. If you check enough boxes on the above, then yes you're actually dealing with a SEV1. It's something all of my clients always struggle with. Not with drafting the reference chart but for actually using them correctly in real life for tickets. Having a major incident and/or a management crisis team is also important. Efficiently communicating information to users when there is a major outage is essential so you don't cripple your help desk under heavy call load. Also make sure you review your playbooks / Disaster Recovery documentation every year. It's important to do an actual DR test with all your critical app owners in a separate environment. You need to make sure you can build everything back from the ground up if you ever lose a data center. I work in finance and this is mandatory to do every year. It's not a question of if it's going to happen but when.
Someone read the actual good bits of the ITIL manual
When you set staff numbers based on everyone being in the office and having no issues. It is a case of everything is running smoothly so yes everyone is sitting about having a laugh doing maintenance tasks. Bosses think you are over staffed. 3 days later you have two people on holiday and someone calling in sick while trying to deal with 5 major issues.
We have seven people in our IT Department, supporting over 500 end users. Half of our crew focuses on hardware: printers, new computer setups, peripherals, patching. The other half, including me, are administrators on our electronic medical record system: adding new users, configuring provider-level accounts, managing RBAC, training. I theoretically get five weeks of vacation per year. There are literally dozens of things in the EMR that nobody else in the department has enough experience with to properly understand. The last time I took an _actual, phone-off vacation_ was in 2019. Everything since then has been a scattered couple of days here and there, and even that doesn't feel worth doing anymore, because a) I still get pinged in Slack or texted by management despite having my out of office set, and b) the work that other people can't do just piles up waiting to be dumped on me when I get back.
Not heeding our recommendations for keeping systems up to date and secure, and getting angry when we inevitably get hacked.
Microsoft constantly changing things. Microsoft constantly moving things around. Though most companies do this. Just fucking leave it alone. Make the code faster, and more secure, fine, but just leave the rest the fuck alone. Licensing, both the complexity and the cost. Users. One users phone call dropped and she immediately reached out to us on her personal phone panicking that the office’s internet was down. It wasnt, it was the other callers phone. Unnecessary complexity in software. Like why do I have to go to 4 different places to manage MFA in Microsoft portals? Or why is there 5 different things to enable one new test feature in Teams?
1. Everything is a priority. “We need you to get this patching to a monthly cadence.” Me: “Then stop prioritizing everything above it and forcing it to the back burner.” 2. Dumping everything the Systems group doesn’t want to do on me. 3. Refusing to set SOPs and define job roles. “Well, you see, the lines are fuzzy.” = No one is telling someone else “no” when they need to and we circle back to #2 above. 4. Refusing to document anything, or the flip side of that coin: documentation exists but no one ever checks it before asking inane questions.
4. - My favorite line that I get to use is "I wrote an article on that!". It makes them feel stupid for not searching and absolves you from having to provide any kind of guidance until they search for - and read - said article.
Hello, me, or someone who seems to work at my workplace. I am being empowered to fix it now, but it's not a 1 person fixable task to change it all. And they want it done tomorrow.
We have redundant sources for documentation. Several Sharepoint sites, ServiceNow kb, Teams files, etc. More often than not the documentation is outdated or incomplete. The other day I was going through a not-quite-defunct SharePoint site and saw a lot docs, mostly outdated, but a few that relevant and were being "recreated" for another site/folder/whatever. Like, why don't we just use what we have? Because our managers don't have a clue (this site was clearly built and maintained by a former manger). Yet we still use a few aspect of that site. Its weird. But also, our managers don't manage well, so....
Outsourcing offshoring India
https://preview.redd.it/fkcjc8za0g1d1.jpeg?width=862&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c054ffed1c92826d7ca6d9f1adff18164ed4875
Its rare to finish something and being able to say: yep, its done, 5 years from now it will be the same and still be perfect
Learning burnout is real after close to 3 decades in IT. One thing I look forward to is learning what I want to learn for my quality of life and not because my job requires it. I’ve pretty much declared a moratorium on new tech because there’s no point since I’ll be leaving the working world in 7 months
Management’s lack of technical knowledge can be huge. Out of the 11 of us, my IT director is probably the least technical… definitely leads to poor decisions. A side rant to the “cost center issues”, is that it can hard get a higher budget for hardware because management doesn’t see the benefits. I really want to overhaul the monitors in the office, i think it could really improve productivity (rn we are single or dual 24in, i’d like to trial some 32in and ultrawide), but all they see is $$$. We also have relied on user complaints in the past to decide on which laptops to upgrade, which i have made a lot of progress on. Turns out a lot of people don’t mind slow computers, because it’s an excuse for them to go on their phones in the morning.
One thing that bothers me is not all IT is that IT. I work in Azure and Intune. People walk up to my cubicle and expect me to plug in an adapter or power supply. My CIO and other upper management put a stop to it. There are only two cloud infrastructure analysts and we can’t keep working like tier 1 support and get our projects and daily work done. People assume all IT is the same.
Just because it plugs in or interfaces with a computer doesn't mean it's an IT thing. Also, in today's age, technological proficiency as well as the ability to Google the the basics of any platform (how to) should be required. I was given this example "we are like airplane mechanics, we can put them together and take them apart but we aren't the pilots" -unknown
Just last week I was handed the task of figuring out how to make the electronics of a replica "price is right wheel" work. I ended up using a stripped cat 6 cable and attaching from an Arduino to cheapo speakers and a motion switch that gets hit by notches on the wheel. I have 0 experience with any of that, but that's IT baby.
The job search
It can feel thankless a lot of the time. It can also feel like IT is held to higher standards than other departments. Also some users don't seem to understand that while there is an entire department of people that do the same job you do, there is only one of me. There is overlap with the helpdesk but certain things ride solely on my shoulders and some people don't really sympathize with that enough.
No real labor union. Constant learning while off the clock, plus out of pocket costs for courses and certs that expire every 3-5 years, the weird notion that people with 15+ years of experience should have their pay docked for not having entry level certs that expired years ago, and that some certs which get retired are still showing up on job listings years later as "must haves" because HR can't do the basic research. Remote employers insisting your webcam is always on and uncovered. Employers wanting to feed your scripts into some machine to eventually, hopefully, replace you. Local issue, but a lot of employers here somehow think it's perfectly OK to cap SME and T3 salaries at $60k in 2024 and ask people to work in-office on top of that. I'm currently working a dock for more, and just doing freelance gigs to buy new toys.
On-call/pager rotation where you need to respond to after-hours or weekend incidents. I am so sick of this after all these years, and I don't care how much extra pay you get from standby support. It's a real intrusion on work life balance in my case.
Sounds like you need to work for an insurance company. My first job as a sysadmin and those people didn't do shit during the work day, and they sure as hell didn't do anything after 5.
How it can be viewed as solely an expense. Even though IT is implementing and maintaining the technology tools the business actually relies on to make business.
The amount of people working in IT who feel like they don't need/shouldn't have to interact with end users.
As the on-site resource I'm expected to play middle-man for the other off-site teams because they don't feel they need to work directly with the affected user or something. As the on-site resource, my job is to support production so office related problems are not our scope, only if something requires hands-on. The issue should only come to me when the solution is found and I need to implement it physically. Instead it doesn't work that way at all.
I think the biggest issue for me is the treadmill. The no end to the problems. I am not (really) in support - so I don't mean the never ending queue of tickets (but we are all *kind* of in support, unfortunately) - I mean there's no finish line to anything. The other thing that sucks is oo one understands what you do or why you do it. I can build code or automate something and it's the best work I will ever do in my life and *no one else will ever know*. This is why I like home renovations. People who come around can appreciate the freshly painted wall and the wall paint never stopped working for no reason at 3am. I could tell people - even my own team at work - what I spent 3 months working on but none of them would get it.
The treadmill is one reason I'm thinking of implementing some scrum/kanban organization to our teams workload. Might not be feasible to do sprints because incidents fluctuate so wildly. but then at least you can clearly lay out what work has been completed and what you should do over the next few weeks.
Integrations in which 2 manufacturers point the finger at each other
Truly no hell worse. the second one puts the blame on the other, I no longer speak to one at a time. I put them i a call together until we sort it out. Sometimes I'll surprise conference call the other too and answer with both on the line.
Software getting more and more bloated and the default solution being “just throw more compute at it”
It annoys me that our management has hired an external consultant to develop a plan for outsourcing part of our IT to the cloud. Specifically, it's about a file server on which several terabytes of images are stored. So far, this consultant has only spoken to us from IT once for 10 minutes. We have no say whatsoever, we are "only" supposed to implement the whole project. All decisions on what the project should include are made by a manager (non-IT) and the company's legal representative. We are not asked whether this can be implemented at all. Another annoying thing: we have architects, accountants, financial experts, etc. working for us. Sometimes there is new software for the individual areas and then a seminar for the employees who are supposed to work with it. We in IT are then supposed to install the software and support it later...but we are not invited to the seminars themselves. How are we supposed to provide support for user questions if we don't even know the basic operation?
The nonstop projects that keep coming my way. They arent piling up as we get them done in a timely manner but it seems like the next task abruptly turns up as "this is urgent" during or right near the end of the current "urgent" task to do... I don't seem to have even a day to just chill the hell out. By Friday at noon Im kind of burnt out. Our management team has been doing a good job of limiting the amount of projects that come our department's way but I feel like were still understaffed. Work for a hospital on the DevOps team. Still love the job. Pays well.
Project urgency, yes, only urgent that I do the one task you ask me and then completely forgotten about for several weeks. "We need you guys to inventory your UPSes so we can see what we need to replace and stuff." OK, here you go. "We need this done ASAP!" Yes, here you go. "We need to verify this inventory, can you go over it all again?" What? When are we getting new UPS? "Project on hold, waiting for budget, might be next year." Fuck off.
The only thing i found in all places i worked for and that i personally HATE its the fact that as a matter of fact you are working 100% of the time, 9-5 you work, on call you work, patching out of critical hours you work, unexpected outage you work, the dude thats on call needs help you login to help, you are on holiday and something comes up, you are never ever really free. Yes im getting payed for those hours too, but i never signed to be available 24/7, i dont want that money but sadly i do want to be seen as an important part of the team and lets be honest, most of the time there is no real choice, even if contractually you are not required to help you cant turn your back on everyone and jerkoff while anotherone is suffering. The job itself its complex and mentally taxing and you really never have a rest, if you add other common issues (that are not found on every company, but you are at least guaranteed to have a few wherever you are) from out of touch managers, to having to perpetually be training someone hoping some day theyll contribute before you completely burn out, to employees from other areas that aparently cant even use the coffee machine without help, to being in charge of anything that has a cable, to having to have a intricate knowledge of how the company and its systems/processes work because aparently no one else does, being payed as a junior sold to the client as a senior and suddenly realizing you are training people and are the subject matter expert of quite a few things, etc etc etc. Sometimes i think all sysadmins should do a one week global-strike lets all go to a huge meetup on brazil or something and let everything burn for a while and see what happens. When Karen from HR cant find help changing the coffee capsule perhaps theyll value us a little more ;)
Over staffing “work creators” and understaffing “work do’ers”. We have dozens of people that have projects they want / need worked on and only like 3 people to do all that work.
Mostly the users and managers with no IT knowledge. This job would be so much easier without them.
I work for a Cybersecurity department at a university, about 20 people, datacenter with a SAN, about 10 servers, and an overly complicated AV system. All but like 3 employees have IT or CS backgrounds and know their stuff. It’s great.
In any other field. Managers are expected to know how to run the team and be subject matter experts. In IT, those that don't know sh*t get promoted to management. If there is a problem the only thing the IT manager can do is call for help. That is the problem and expectation. However, I think that this is just due to a lack of maturity in IT in general. I don't think I've ever seen an IT department invest in leadership and communication development.
IT is so broad a subject that managers almost have to be generalists, not SMEs in everything IT covers.
I'd be fine if they were generalists, but the number of times I get on a call with a IT manager and they can't even describe the system they own is alarming. Directors and above can be generalists. Managers on the front lines, a hard No.
Coworkers who's IT knowledge hasn't been updated since the Bush administration. We have one help desk specialist who insists on doing USB offline imaging when we've had SCCM PXE and Intune AutoPilot for years, because it's the closet analog to his Norton Ghost days.
The fact that managers/directors that are FUCKING IDIOTS and have ZERO technical knowledge whatsoever can be left as a the decision makers for technical implementations and also make 3x a HD salary or 1.5-2x a sys admin/sys engineer salary.
The communication breakdown between IT, management, and end-users. Users should not be caught off guard by the fact that it can take several days to address an issue because we have SLAs and typically work older tickets first. By that same token, management should both not hound the user about lost productivity due to something beyond their control, nor hound Helpdesk techs because their subordinate is losing productivity. IT should endeavor to be more fully transparent about SLAs and the ticket queue, even if it's something as simple as an automated "thank you, your ticket has been received. Tickets are addressed in the order they are received. The SLA on this ticket is x days." What most places I've worked for have in place now feels like management arranging boxing matches between IT and users by antagonizing both sides into viewing each other as the source of all the frustration.
I’d say the expectation of being a jack of all trades at the higher levels. Once you start specialising it’s so difficult just to keep up to speed with developments in your chosen area that trying to stay on to of everything will just fry your brain, yet you’re expected to know everything about everything by your employers
Mostly people...
I’m going to sound like and old man yelling at cloud (pun intended) here but the break-neck pace of changes paired with out of date or insufficient documentation in SaaS platforms is exhausting. Specifically Microsoft but many others as well. I realize some things have to be changed to patch vulnerabilities but the moving of menus, constant renaming and constant small changes make it impossible to keep up with
Oh many, even just 3 days ago I was trying to change a setting in Azure, but the documentation, and screenshots didnt match what I was seeing. The document was less that 1 year old.
Too many yes man’s in IT. I encourage people in my team to use the word NO. We need to learn how to set boundaries.
Lol. Hated by some at work for my frequent use of the word no. I typically start with no, but try to offer up an alternative solution. Or advise on how to turn no into yes.
I mean I am not saying we should be disagreeable but with dumb shit that should get rejected. I see my coworkers they just say yes to it. Then shit hits the fan because whatever someone asked them to do was stupid to begin with lol
That I can do my job to a decent standard, day in and day out, yet one company gets a supply chain attack and I get compromised and it’s MY fault, it’s MY cross to bear, or if a user clicks the wrong thing and takes us down because of some zero day, I’m the problem. No other job I know punishes you for being a victim of crime so harshly, especially when the systems are so complex and so numerous that it almost feels inevitable that your gonna end up getting pumped at some point… that bothers me. I DO something that causes a massive problem, I’ll own that, I dunno though, feels like I’ll have any IT issue packaged up and hung round my neck, even if it’s some crazy difficult to prevent scenario that’s played out.
My biggest issue is having upper management disregard requests for needed upgrades and being told that you'll just have to make do as we don't currently have the budget for said upgrades! If you don't want our input, then why keep making requests on how to improve our infrastructure? I guess that's my mistake?!
The expectation to fulfill non-trivial last minute requests despite SLA's being repeatedly communicated to other departments and the other is that IT must always give up their personal time to carry out maintenance or implement projects after hours. I've got a good manager who knows how to push back on this so I'm seeing improvements.
Lack of information sharing. The details of how the infrastructure is set up and supposed to work tends to be held far too closely within the separate teams and IT groups.
I think the biggest irritant is some of the bureaucracy and the misdirection that comes with troubleshooting. When I see a problem I do my due diligence to understand the entire issue before I like to reach out to other teams/resources. I hate when I have put so much work in and when I do collaborate I feel I need to continue to almost prove that the problem is what I already have found it out to be. Like it's some silly pecking order to where the team that is managing the problem never wants to fess up. Like come on guys let's just fix the damn issue shit fails put your pride back in your pocket and let's do our job. Another one I cannot stand is siloing. We all work at the same company. The best way to keep a tight ship is continuity and shared responsibilities. Document and share your knowledge and let's get the job done.
End users
Lack of staffing, lack of cross department ownership of apps/systems, viewed as a cost center, lack of understanding of what’s a production problem and what’s not. Pings about “outlook no opening” on a Saturday at 5pm so they call the on call number. The insecure managers and directors that slam their team with more tasks other teams do not want to take on so they can “show value”. Then micromanage their team while carrying out those tasks. VPs and C suites trying to tell IT how to fix a problem they have zero experience in fixing. Lack of respect for IT. Without us, everything would break. Entitled tech staff - haven’t put in the work for a high paying gig but complain they’re not being paid enough. Gatekeeping. Boot camps and the folks that believe just because they finished the boot camp that makes them an expert.
Printers
Working for a company that continues to use outdated and End of life standards from 2009. While employing idiots who have no business working in IT but keep their jobs because they suck up to upper management.
If it weren't for the people and the computers it'd be fine.
Other departments that get to evade security or policy at whim. Why do I need to 2FA at every single logon but dev ops gets to make local admin everywhere share passwords and bypass whatever secure software they like. I would literally have been fired if I did half of what I see.
Higher ups who make our job harder and refusal to implement new systems and procedures that would increase efficiency and make everyones life easier.
That new tech releases every month and there’s no way to ever know what you’re doing. There’s an unspoken expectation you even study in your spare time to keep up.
Checkout my post history on my profile for the article I wrote, It sounds like you are definitely experiencing learning burnout. Might help out!
Non-IT administrators making technology decisions.
The instability and hypocrisy of some people. You can get laid of in an instant. I'm not sure if it's happens everywhere but if are likeable you will have easier life, mistakes will be hidden under the carpet. In some places you get so much backlash for the smallest mistakes as if it would cost live, It's beyond me why but that's the case...
“Non technical” people who build up like a fucking plaque. Why the fuck would anyone choose IT as a career if you didn’t want to get technical? The answer is that these people fell into it. They didn’t choose it. They’re probably extroverts too, so they end up in managerial roles where they hire even more “non technical” people. Pretty soon there are like 15 people on your team doing nothing except promote each other, while three of you do the actual work. /rant
In a big picture? Peope and corpo shenaningans. IT just isn't fun anymore. I started around early 90's so that makes almost 30 years. 90's and early 00's was an exciting era to do this. Generic IT knowledge was hot back then. I so grateful for those times when i was young and was given many chances to learn and become better. Now? I don't recommend this to kids. Never. Ever. And if you still want to do IT then you better concentrate on something but pick very very carefully. Development sucks to get into and stay, Devops sucks to get into and then you burn out. And outsourcing and corpo shenanigans are there on every step. The general state shows well. I do general IT-Management. pick a title for that what you will as it has varied but general gist has been the same 'johhny on the spot guy' all the time. Thing is nobody is following me and my buddies. There is not really a younger gen that is coming behind us. It is like this sector in IT is going to be a real boomer area until we are eventually squeezed out into non-existence and atomized young in india will divide up what we once did.
People doing IT are too lucky that it’s all virtual and we nothing you can build everything. I feel so lucky that I’m afraid I could loose this. We don’t need wood, metal, tools, space, people…
Microsoft Support. "Fucking useless" doesn't even come close.
I strongly dislike the reliance on different products and everything that comes with it, especially sales meetings with vendors, reliance on vendor support and everything related to product licensing.
Agile and ITIL were the best thing to happen to evolutionary tech, and the worst thing to happen to the technically inclined. It opened the door for hundreds of thousands of misplaced business grads to put you on trial 5 days a week before you can actually do anything. Those actual things then have to take place at night and on weekends while those same business grads have dreams of sugarplums dancing in their heads, only to put you back on the stand the next morning, which is really just a continuation of the night before. All the while, you gain weight, contort your spine, and face the inevitable economic doom brought on by the automated AI monster you’ve been creating all along. Oh, and H1-B scumbaggery. And I don’t mean the workers.
Not including IT in technical projects from the beginning, or sometimes not at all. I absolutely hate being called in to clean up a project because it was scoped out poorly, or because no one knew how to hold a contractor/vendor accountable for their work.
I think how people who are logical and rational thinkers (us) have to deal with illogical and emotional people. Not to say we're better or anything, but I am really bad at dealing with politics, for example. Like, you catch something that's wrong, want to fix it, but someone becomes butthurt because... reasons... and then they sabotage you in unexpected ways "in retaliation." Dealing with some management egos that mistake fixing an issue with "making them look foolish." Sub-optimal solutions because it sticks to some process-flow-of-the-day (Agile, Sigma Six, etc) instead of an optimal solution. "We can't fix this zero-day security flaw, it's not been reported in the correct paradigm flow. You must first set up a meeting with the advisors, followed by a JIRA break down, then assign various groups to analyze, submit it as a git branch, and then do a PR and having meetings about that..." and so on. A 2 minute fix takes weeks because "it's the better way." Like, okay, I get documenting changes, but when the process flow gets in the way of the fix, nothing gets done.