I'm in a team of 4 Network admins. I'm the most senior Network admin there with only 6 years in the field. I've been working for this company for all of my 6 years
Size is around 3000 users + Public web services to somewhat large audience
70 remote sites
We have a large inventory of products to cover:
Fortigate
ASA
Pulse Secur
Nexus
load balancers
Catalyst switch
ISE
MSE
WLC
Physical infrastructure
I've inherited a clean network originally by people who knew what they were doing. The network was much smaller at the time and had a lot less features. Now, it feels like it's slowly getting worst everyday.
I've always told management we needed to split the work so each of us is responsible for certain types of equipment. This way I believe there would be a sense of responsibility and I wouldn't be responsible for other people fuck-ups.
I've often been responsible for cleaning other people fuck-ups.
When shit hit's the fan, they know who's going to solve the issue quickly. It takes quite some time to know all these different platform well, and honestly it's very hard, almost impossible to keep up to date with all of them.
New comers are often against the idea of being constrained to a certain area of work or expertise, they like to get their hands on everything. This tend to create a messy environment, lack of care, and yes... problems.
New admins get the key to the kingdom really early on. Management thinks we should all be able to solve the issues efficiently on all these equipment (So they have redundancy if somebody leaves). In reality this dream never get's achieved.
We've never found someone in the job market that had experience other than Cisco Catalyst, and routers. Newbie just want to learn, but they often, are not very productive, most often do not follow internal documented guidelines (this create havoc in firewall). I always feel like I've got to clean up behind them, because I'm going to be the one that get's asked to tshoot when things go sideways.
One of the guys has been practicing for is CCNP doing GNS3 75% of is job shift for the last year and a half. After the dude got told he wasn't hired to do GNS3 and seen is admin right to is computer removed, he proceeded to do his labs on the production environment. Recently, he crashed all vpns doing some kind of labs on the production environment. The guy still has trouble configuring an access switch properly...
I told management I wanted him gone, I wasn't going to deal with his shit again. But the guy is still there after a week. They seem to think there's a way they'll be able to recoup this guy.
FYI we have a full physical lab he didn't use, and there's plenty of jobs to be done. It's just that it seems like nobody want's to do what need's to get done, they just want to learn for their personal knowledge.
When there's a project like replacing a core switch, everybody want's to get their hands on the device, nobody want's to the cabling inventory, physical planning, upgrade planning and documentation.
I've recently seen one of big projects I've initiated, done all the justifications and administrative work for , being pulled from under me from a newcomer without anyone letting me know. I'm making a decent pay there, I'm not sure I could something similar if I went somewhere else, but the environment I'm working in is very frustrating.
Management is quite deaf, I've spoken with them many times about this, They might tell me they are going to change things to hold me from leaving, but I doubt they will execute.
I've always been a team player, I've been in the army, people who were not pulling their own weight would get smoked. But at this place, very often, it seems like it's only going one way, no consequences, no hierarchy outside of management.
I plan on finalizing a couple of projects and start looking for something else, I'd like to avoid this type of environment in the future.
Any advice ? Have you lived something similar ?
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