TL,DR: I’ve been in IT for 3 years and it’s hard to know if the company I currently work for is moving in the right direction. 6 months ago I was the only person in the department, today I’m supposed to be working part time from home, but am actually working nights upgrading the network. Just had my first kid. Should I be moving on?
It was 10:39 when I started this post and now it’s 11:22. I’m drinking a beer after doing an after hours upgrade. I guess I just want to rant a little.
I’m not a network engineer, I honestly have no idea what I’m doing. We’re going to Meraki (at a consultants recommendation) from mostly Cisco asa 5505s and catalyst 3750s in all of our sites (14) because, well, we don’t have a network engineer. Just me. I’ve learned a lot over the last year, because I had to. An Asa would crash and I’d...figure out how to put in a new one. The meraki stuff is easy but I still had to learn what a vlan was because I had a mitel controller and a 2003 server doing dhcp on the same network.
I just passed 3 years in IT, and I’ve been at my current company for 1 1/2. For 2 months I was the whole IT department. We’ve got a real department now, manager/sr. Admin, 3 helpdesk people, and a second Jr. admin in addition to me. So things appear to be moving in the right direction, although the (non-IT) manager I followed from my previous job was just fired with no warning.
I’m sympathetic to the previous IT guys. The previous mandate was obviously “spend as little as possible” and we were purchased by a big time investment company shortly after I was hired which was the reason for everyone else being let go.
But these friggin network closets, man. We’ve got one with no patch panel, just wires hanging out of the ceiling. One normal sized guy can barely fit in the room. I cleaned an awful lot of mouse shit out of that one the first time I was in there. A bunch with no racks. When I first got hired I found at least one switch just sitting on its side on the floor, everything plugged into it. One location we purchased that I had to turn over while the only member of my department is behind a sliding door in someone’s office (think your moms closet in the 90s.) That one still has a rack full of another company’s equipment because...reasons?
Tonight’s takes the cake. My shiny new meraki stuff is on a shelf that is 5 inches too short about an inch from the ceiling. You have to go outside to access it. There’s no air conditioning, and it’s gotten up over 100 for at least a few days in the summer every year I’ve lived here. The wall is covered in old telephone lines, patch panels added seemingly at random, some lines hanging right out of the ceiling and not even terminated to a panel. Before we started tonight we tossed a dead rat out of a trap.
I want to believe we’re moving in the right direction. We went from one person (me) to 6 in 9 months. The Sr. Admin is tough to work with right now, but he knows his stuff and I know it’s because he is overwhelmed by the environment and hasn’t been a manager before. But I also have said, again and again for a year “why are we putting $10,000 worth of equipment in this facility where a rat is going to chew through a cable?”
Am I the crazy one? Were they right to fire my boss because she must not have been bringing these concerns to the rest of upper management? (I genuinely believe she was, although an inexperienced IT guy communicating to a non IT person may have led to loss of urgency.) Am I wrong to think this company is moving in the right direction when even with a new, seasoned manager they still show no interest in addressing these concerns?
I just had my first kid, and while my partner was pregnant I applied and was offered two radically different jobs. One was as an admin at a non profit that sounded like it wouldve been a lot like where I work now, although with the mental benefit of being for an organization whose mission I believe in. The other was a part time helpdesk job for a government organization where I would’ve taken a major pay cut in exchange for a team of people who had been in IT for 10+ years. I was convinced by the new manager and the C-level boss I followed to stay, and wound up stepping down to part time from home work. As soon as I was back from leave, I was put on this after hours network upgrade project for the 9 remaining sites, and the boss I followed was fired.
Did I fuck up by not taking those jobs? Should I be applying again? (I updated my resume and LinkedIn and have already applied to the first attractive job i saw on indeed in a fit of passion.) is this just what it’s like? Do I have a sweet deal working mostly part time, mostly from home that I should ride? All of the above? I was so happy to move into IT and get out of retail a few years ago, and I want to make this my career, but I’m truly exhausted.
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