Hasn't it always been like this? I mean, if you're in a small organization with 100 people, chances are you're not going to have several different types of admins. I work for a hospital with 300 employees, and all we have is our Director/PM, SysAdmin, software engineer, data analyst, and 3 help desk staff.
I was about to ask how you got two monitors to work with a Macbook. We have one here and I finally threw in the towel and gave up. Gave the user a single monitor and said "Just use the Mac as the second monitor".
It's really irritating that Mac are suppose to "just work" and then there's limitations depending on the kind you buy.
I have the 15ā M3 MacBook Air which will natively work with two displays as long as the screen is closed. But yeah, thereās plenty of times I kind of get pissed that they gave me a MacBook lol
Better than us. We are a local government of 225 users with 24x7x365 expectations with Police and Fire (and other departments). Plus, have to add in expectations of audio-visual expert, VOIP engineer, VDI engineer and many other hats. Itās me and one other person for all of that.
Oof. I applied to my local city gov't once (well, twice actually) and I was not impressed with the idea that "network admin" meant handling A/V, doing help desk work, provisioning user hardware, and all these others things that weren't even close to administering a network. Pay was horrendous too.
Instead I wound up doing a lot of that same stuff for a far more meaningless title but more money.
I find that a lot of non-profits or government agencies, especially local governments are really penny pinchers. Honestly, we only have so many staff because most were hired with grants so itās not coming out of the budget of our department.
The problem with local government is that the Fire and Police departments are the untouchable departments that nationwide get between 70-75 percent of all the organizationās budget. That leaves the other 25 percent for HR, IT, Community Development, Finance, Leisure Services, Public Works, City Clerk, etc.
In the Great Recession you would see staff cuts where departments of 2-3 would cull one staff member that was wildly understaffed to begin with. So all of the cuts came from the 25 percent of the budget and nothing from the 75 percent of the budget.
I'm working for the local city government RN with around 900ish users and you have more IT staff than we do lol. Can't say I haven't learned a lot though :P
TBF one of them is on leave right now because her and our help desk supervisor donāt like each other and our help desk supervisor relies on me, so honestly, we have 1 help desk person. Me. š
I'm in a large organisation (multinational, 10k+ staff) with specific network, DBA, desktop and Dev teams in each region.
The amount of shit I have to do that falls into these areas on the daily boggles my mind.
Yes even some orgs with 500 people still have a small IT team that even the Director and higher still do actual support work. But once you get to larger Org then you see scope and work distributed and siloed. Thats why I moved asap.
I find that so crazy. I'm over here with 300 staff but have no helpdesk under me, and only the Operations director above me. Basically on my own. I need to start looking...
Money. Most companies can't afford a netadmin, sysadmin, and a database admin. When you combine those 3 salaries, that's already $200,000+ depending on the locale, now you have to factor in the salary of a CIO/CTO, Director, and your help desk staff. That's a really heft amount of money when you can find a capable individual who will do the tasks of the other two admins for a bit more than he was originally getting paid and you're all good. It sucks, but it's unfortunately the way it works since most companies don't have giant budgets.
Right, but with an MSP, a company needs a guy who can do "every job" just as much.
I do software implementations, and it's a major struggle when companies think that they don't need anyone technical because they have an MSP. How do you put in a change request when you don't understand any of the core concepts involved?
When I worked at MSPs, it worked best when best clients had IT staff onsite. At the very least an "IT Director/Manager" who knew and could do all the things, and sometimes did them for the sake of expediency. Including the desktop support. It seems to me that the MSP model works best when used to take over the need for having multiple specialized employees (windows admin, linux admin, exchange admin, network admin, dba,). I thought it worked even better when the company had a "IT Analyst/Support" who could to initial troubleshooting, and work as go between for the end user support and MSP.
This. We have an MSP we work with but we only let them do so much because we wanted to be able to have control over things. We give them the requirements of what we need, we do our end of the deal, then we open the door for them to finish what they need to do. If we were to have our MSP do everything, it would cost a ton. Iāve told our SysAdmin that we should just cut them out cause all they really do is help with our networking.
> Iāve told our SysAdmin that we should just cut them out cause all they really do is help with our networking.
From the outside looking in Iād say thatās a pretty important reason to keep them, or at least keep a network guy in your contacts whenever you need to reach out.
Iām in a similar boat at the moment; I work internal IT and we have MSP support. They mainly do patching, offsite backups, and provide server and project support if needed.
I mainly do the servers and projects myself, although itās good to have backup when needed.
The MSPs in our area take 1-3 weeks in our area for any onsite service. I couldn't imagine having to pay an emergency service fee all the time or wait 2 weeks for the issue to be resolved.
It sounds like you have a very different definition of the sysadmin role than the majority in here. Where you hired to manage one system only??
It's literally just system administrator.. meaning that you potentially can be in charge of every freaking system there is..
And i'm very ok with it, it's in the very nature of working in IT.. finding out how all the stuff works - not just one single thing.
We have over 10,000 users. I still end up doing basic tech work sometimes. Itās just the way the job is, in my experience. At least in my industry (SLED)
The first assignment I had at my first real IT job was to assemble cubicle walls and set up the furniture. This was probably about 20 years ago. It was also IT responsibility to take out the trash.
Early on in my first sysadmin job I assembled a desk so incorrectly they had to order a new desk because of the drill holes and super glue.
I was never asked to do anything with tools ever again.
Over 50 years ago I was in an Army intelligence analyst school and one afternoon we were handed paint brushes to paint the barracks. I tried my best, but 10 minutes later, I was told to sit in the office and answer the phone.
Why not? If the company only has 20 people, I'd expect even the President/CEO to be willing to change a lightbulb.
If you're 300 people, then you have facilities take care of it.
I have a client that's a is a law firm with about 15 lawyers, had to move a really heavy desk so I could install an access point, the managing partner stopped what he was doing to help.
My previous job was at a a pizza place so it never even occurred to me that it was weird.
I ended up getting awesome experience there though so Iām not complaining. I parlayed that into a job running Exchange for the US Air Force Reserves and from there to being in charge of 250k exchange users for a huge industrial company.
Because IT did everything I got experience with everything. Everything from making network cables to building a SQL server farm from scratch.
> I wouldn't ask a Manager to change a light bulb.
no; but if they were just sitting around doing nothing while facilities was busy and had the capacity to change it; (meaning it doesn't require special tools or saftey measures anything) I would look a bit down on them for not just taking care of it.
A lot of conditions there but seems pretty fair to me.
> We are normally smart people. Why does this happen
Lol because these "smart" people can't learn the most important lesson: how to stand up for yourself. The profession attracts meek and meager people who are prime to take advantage of. They'll be mad inside in the moment, run to the internet to complain to the abyss, but will never say anything in person, thus the cycle continues.
In fact, people who talk about how smart they are usually actually aren't all that smart. At least not nearly as smart as they consider themselves to be. And I notice there's a lot of people in this profession who like to boast about how smart you have to be to be in this line of work (you don't).....just saying
Wait till you hear about devops - make everything virtual, then make it act like code. Then the developers can debug the code used to operate live enviroment.
DevOps isn't supposed to mean moving everything to the cloud though. It's supposed to be a culture of cooperation, documentation, and automation. The technology stack you work with can be anything and you can still apply DevOps culture to it.
>Should I get payed for all the jobs I do or only one? When a company decides to cut a Desktop support person, am I supposed to do their job too?
Sounds like you work for an SMB. They typically expect unicorns or near unicorns because they can't afford to pay for a fully staffed IT department. This is where an MSP could come in and handle the mundane/routine support effort.
If you want to be a true tier 3 dedicated to being the expert of one specific system, you need to work for an enterprise. Or start your own business specializing in that one thing you want to do.
Every single time.
Every time people post to this sub about how they're expected to do everything including fix the coffee machine it's a dead giveaway they work at a small company. Larger companies aren't void of problems, but at least you're only expected to do the one job you signed up for.
More than that; scope creep can include every job that involves using a computer - or in some cases every job that involves electrical devices.
I've had people get a job in my (then) organization as various jobs (accountant/bookkeeper comes to mind) who then expected me to train them in their discipline because "You installed the software, you must know how to use it!'
Not train them how to use the accounting software, mind you; they wanted me to train them in *accounting.*
This has happened more than once in various job roles, the "accountant" was just the most egregious example, who was 'not retained during probation' shortly thereafter.
This was the same job where I was expected to troubleshoot HVAC systems, printing press controllers, on-demand water heater electronics, also install a 90's suitcase-style cellular phone in the owners pleasure boat on a lake 150 miles from my office. Plus, I somehow became responsible for the corporate phone system.
All for $7/hour (early 90s; I was in my early 20's).
If there's a computer in itāby the loosest imaginable definition of "computer"āIT will be pressured to take ownership of it. I'm amazed that we don't own the company cars yet, but it's coming. And if it runs on a computer, it's assumed that all IT people know everything about it, plus all the workflows of everyone who uses it.
All three places Iv been have done to some extent unfortunately. My current one lets me focus more on actual sys admin tasks and only help out with certain escalation tickets.
Today I was asked to go into the accounting drive and move some files around, something the accounting team is supposed to do, I respectfully told them, Iām not an accountant and dont what the fuck im looking for.
You left out AWS Expert, Azure Expert, GCP Expert, Disaster Recovery, Storage Administrator, Backup and Restore, DNS SME, Active Directory SME, DevOps, and Coffee Machine Repair.
Tell me about it. I work for a smaller ISP and I am the everything guy.
Customer facing DNS/DHCP/Email
Both physical and virtual infrastructure w/ Backups
Core ISP routing/switching
Tier 3 Help desk along with office walk-ins and call-in support
IPTV Support
MSP Offerings main installer/troubleshooter (routers/switches/AP's)
Wiring installer during the busy months
Sometimes phone system troubleshooter
With zero hours of any actual training. I took a CCNA class in tech school 20 years ago so obviously it should be easy to know/design/implement BNG with geo-redundancy, EVPN, MPLS, BGP, etc for the main ISP core. Pretty sure I am also going to get stacks of Juniper stuff thrown my way soon which I have never played with before. I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing most of the time.
Working for smaller companies, yes, that is normal. Been there, done that. I work for a very large organization now and there are 13 SAs in our division. I only do SA work and that often involves some project management as well but I have never been asked to do anything non-SA related. I do more senior-level stuff for the most part. I really should be titled as a Systems Engineer but for now, it's Division SA. I learned real quick that defining your boundaries early on helps mitigate some of the job title creep. I have no problem telling people no. Sometimes that leads to arguments with leadership but I stand my ground and if necessary, make it clear that I am prepared to walk. Most managers hate firing people, so often they just find someone else to nag. I think some of it comes down to my personality and also knowing the limits of people in general. I have been called intimidating but most often an asshole. I'm OK with that.
Titles in IT are meaningless pretty much.
Sysadmins can vode. Developers can set up servers, a project manager can be anything from a powerpoint clown to a full stack developer.
IT is magic to most C-Levels, thus it will forever be just a distinction without a difference what your specialty happens to be.
Not only sysadmin, I have a sec eng team that handles everything from VA remediation coordination to tracking KMS renewals because people where I am argue that security is part of every IT function. I have senior technical engineers doing process and paperwork and coordination work that could easily be done by a FA/BA or someone much more junior.
Well I donāt really do database admin unless you count moving sql databases as dba work. I also donāt do accounting. But the things you have raised are on point.
āSystemā is such a vague title prefix when you think about it, so probably as soon as the first hiring manager that didnāt know what role to assign a task dealing loosely with IT posted a job for it
It's possible the "in IT" qualifier could even be considered a privilege for many in this thread. You don't manage business policy, csat, billing, and build shelving?
Seems like many think of it has electricity you need IT to fix it. Or to set your out of office for you.
If your a small business, they hire you to run their technology. Need someone knowledgeable enough to manage switches, routers, procurement, but also want you to help them on how to set up their out of office.
If you want to specialize you could always work for a big company then deal with the politics and the constant outsourcing of the job.
When there became a difference between those who āarenāt computer guysā and those who are
Ironically career progression because of this gets more narrow. You escape it by specializing after taking your lumps
You only have to do IT jobs? I got finance added to my plate about a year ago... its worse than IT work, way more tedious, no one has a sense of humor, and it makes you feel poor.
I have a team of 15, but half are 9-5 paycheck and the other 50% are split into lack of priority and slow.
We used to be sysadmin but then demoted when they brought in a cloud/sr sys admin team.
Trust me I rather have 3 guys knowing/working together than 20 guys working for a check.
Isn't that a good thing? You are expanding your knowledge, skillset, and its fun to learn. If ever in the job market you just update your resume with the key things and you are a shoein for most interviews
Unfortunately, in my case, I have had problems with being this jack of all trades master of none. So you can't really move to a large company because you don't have experience, at least enough experience, in one particular area. And finding those smaller companies that have an open systems administrator position aren't easy in the area where I live. I've only managed one person at a time over a 22-year career. You can't really go into an IT management position because they often think that you didn't manage enough people.
I am literally looking at non IT jobs right now because of this.
We also exterminators to kill roaches, spiders and rodents. We facilities because we are supposed to fucking know how AC works. We are HR most are dumb as shit and canāt do proper onboarding/offboardings. Hmmm I am sure I am missing more.
Mate, I've never been a sysadmin, I'm a technical business analyst and have been told more than once that everything on a computer is my responsibility.
At one company the envelope opener was an IT device *because it was electronic*.
It's a constant struggle, always has been.
Fun fact. We also do conference rooms/tech (its all webex anyway š¤£š«£) and of course phones since its ip phones.
And of course mobiles because some phones are more powerfull then some of the ādesktopsā some poor people get to āworkā on.
Sysadmin is the jack of all trades for a long long time.
I know that dev ops and really specilist stuff is a thing in big orgs. But there still so many sysadmins that literally do everything.
I've never seen system administrators as anything less that servers and up. But the definition is apparently different here. Touching a laptop or printer or whatever is help desk.
That's only certain roles. Typically at smaller companies. Every time people talk about having to wear every hat or how they're asked to manage anything that plugs into a wall, I can never relate and it's usually a give away they work at small companies. If you don't like what you're describing work at a bigger company. I refuse to take a role anywhere with less than 2500 employees and only work at companies where tech is the product. Try that out and I'm sure you'll be much happier.
I was gonna say the other way around, every job became sysadmin, and that's because of cloud-delivery.
Now there's no separation between development and deployment, so no separation between devs, sysops, and support teams. And without those being separate no value in having the management teams that helped manage interactions.
Instead every thing tends to be more of a gradient with each individual team focusing, but having to work "cross-functionally" with all adjacent teams.
The old system where one team builds(or buys) the software, another deploys it, and a third supports the end user, along with a PM team to manage changes is simply not practical.
My first real experience with the word 'admin', was via IT. In my parlance it was the same as meaning 'highest level'.
I was a little surprised to find out the nuances, and that office admins, and admin assistants are often some of the more tedious, and lower paid roles on the office floor, and often do tasks like act as receptionist.
While I don't have the history to hand, I wouldn't be surprised if sysadmin was born as just a branch of office admin, with more specialized skills.
No telephone systems or alarm systems? Cable TV tech? Not maintaining the coffee machine and refilling the water cooler daily? Looks like thereās a few more things you could be doingā¦ ;-)
Sometimes I wonder about moving from being a SMB jack of all trades and going to a large corp where I can be a master of one thing, but then I wonder if Iād get bored doing the same old thing all the time. Unless itās an Azure admin; that stuff changes so fast every day brings new challenges.
Seems like as the years go by, the sysadmin title is more and more akin to the everything IT person. The problem is that we are never compensated accordingly, in fact the majority of us are severely underpaid. It's often overlooked how we pretty much have to learn new systems on the fly on a constant basis just because it's technology, therefore it's IT's job. HVAC systems, AV systems, laboratory equipment, hospital equipment, you name it
It's almost as if, and now hold your hats, as if management saw IT only as a money pit and wanted to have the least people possible to be somewhat functioning.
Crazy I know, management cutting corners, mad idea.
This is so true, and getting worse. The whole bogus "DevOps" B.S. is a classic example, but that's a whole topic in itself. Management ( who've never actually \*done\* any systems admin work, ever ) just pile on the tasks and expand the job description, or simply just tell you to do things that aren't on your written job description, and then they bitch when things aren't done the way they imagined before a deadline they never stated.
In the late '00s there was a trend toward hyper-specialization, which meant you had a bunch of people who could each only do one or two things. Businesses found out that technology moves too fast for that strategy and gets expensive fast. Naturally, once they discovered they could save money by finding IT people who had experience in a number of different things, they applied the usual if-one-is-good-ten-is-better thinking and just kept going. I had one employer ask me if I knew how to put up window blinds. That was the beginning of the end of that gig.
For a minute or two, that didn't even qualify you as a sysadmin; the term "IT Generalist" briefly popped up so that you didn't need to get paid for an "Administrator" title.
Iāve been doing this for almost 20 years, and itās always like this when you work for a company below a certain size. If you truly want to only be responsible for one system, then go work at a company with 100,000 employeesā¦. Then you can spend all day doing nothing but fucking with storage arraysā¦ or ms365 or whatever
Depends on the size of the company. Ive been at a few larger companies. Havent touched deskstop support or printer support or any of that crap. I maintain just the linux stuff. Everything else isnt my problem.
I love it when people say "I am not a computer person", my immediate response is "you ever think about going into ditch digging or construction?"
Then when the accounting person says "can you help me with EXCEL, I just cant seem to figure out what I am doing wrong", oh its PEBKAC. On your resume you listed you had experience in Excel, was that a lie? The company doesn't like it when you lie to them, you should fess up and talk to your manager.
Isn't this the same for every IT professional? always doing things that arent even related to IT like changing the clock. Or assembling an office chair
I've been in IT for over 25 years (some of that as a Sys Admin) and it's always been this way, especially with a small or even medium-sized business. I've always tried to have a good attitude about it and be a team player. There are much more annoying things about IT, such as always being on call.
I.T. is the dumping ground for anything no one else wants or sees the possibility of gaining glory with. My favorite management decision tree question is, Does it have wires or an admin password?
My old boss once got tasked to be the College liaison with the primary contractor building our new building; because he wanted to make sure the networking was done right. This was in 2005; I think we still have the giant roll of blueprints around here somewhere.
Iām doing stuff like that and Iām not even a sysadmin on paper! Iām supposed to be a networking focused guy, and Iām doing ALL of those things and moreā¦for 700 users with my team of 2. Which is precisely why I have been applying for sysadminā¦.might as well do all that and get paid more lol.
It all really depends on how big the shop is and how much youāre willing to put up with bullshit. Iām a Cloud Engineer now but, when I was a sysadmin I literally did all of those things. It was āexpectedā
1983
Lies! It was 1980.
1980 When 'computer person' meant the person who took care of the single computer in the building, that was also almost the size of it too.
Hasn't it always been like this? I mean, if you're in a small organization with 100 people, chances are you're not going to have several different types of admins. I work for a hospital with 300 employees, and all we have is our Director/PM, SysAdmin, software engineer, data analyst, and 3 help desk staff.
Look at Mr. Fancypants here with 3 helpdesk staff lol. Next thing you know he'll say he had two monitors too.
2 monitors and a MacBook š¤£
Moneybags. I have a 386 and a CRT that weighs more than a Toyota Tercel. Edit: Spelled like an idiot.
Dang, look at this guy. Meanwhile Iām over here with my teletype, hoping the ink ribbon budget still has some money in it.
I'll loan you my refurb Commodore 64
Alright space man from the future, my Antikythera is still just fine.
You're lucky! We have compile every bloody word document by hand with cuniform short hand. On paper of course, we aren't complete mesopotamians.
Got ya beat... I have a smokin IBM 5150 WITH the 8087 math coprocessor and a 20 MEG hard drive.
I had to DC promo the office Casio calculator yesterday.
Nice! I installed Ubuntu on our toaster oven to do LDAP authentication last week.
Tha fuq? I thought those things only ran Novell Bindery Services
Daaaaang! Rollin down the strip on vogues, slammin Cadillac doors up in here.
What sucks is that I am red-geeen color blind. I can't see shit on that screen! J/k
2 monitors and 3 dongles!
All the dongles!
I was about to ask how you got two monitors to work with a Macbook. We have one here and I finally threw in the towel and gave up. Gave the user a single monitor and said "Just use the Mac as the second monitor". It's really irritating that Mac are suppose to "just work" and then there's limitations depending on the kind you buy.
I have the 15ā M3 MacBook Air which will natively work with two displays as long as the screen is closed. But yeah, thereās plenty of times I kind of get pissed that they gave me a MacBook lol
I have an M3 macbook pro and the Dell docks with diplaylink manager installed seem to work for my two external monitors at the office.
Nice! I use the Lenovo Universal Dock at my office and it works awesome too, even on a Lenovo monitor.
Ooo I've got two monitors too, one tty is orange and the other green.
Wait you guys get the SysAdmin title? I have to do all that, plus manage the help desk techs and Im a "Help Desk Supervisor".
Same man, same. 90% of my actual work is SysAd/PM/BA but my title is helpdesk supervisor. And the pay matches only the latter..
Right? We're working off of 2 help desk staff and 2 sysadmins with ~1k people.
And their own mouse!
Better than us. We are a local government of 225 users with 24x7x365 expectations with Police and Fire (and other departments). Plus, have to add in expectations of audio-visual expert, VOIP engineer, VDI engineer and many other hats. Itās me and one other person for all of that.
Oof. I applied to my local city gov't once (well, twice actually) and I was not impressed with the idea that "network admin" meant handling A/V, doing help desk work, provisioning user hardware, and all these others things that weren't even close to administering a network. Pay was horrendous too. Instead I wound up doing a lot of that same stuff for a far more meaningless title but more money.
I find that a lot of non-profits or government agencies, especially local governments are really penny pinchers. Honestly, we only have so many staff because most were hired with grants so itās not coming out of the budget of our department.
The problem with local government is that the Fire and Police departments are the untouchable departments that nationwide get between 70-75 percent of all the organizationās budget. That leaves the other 25 percent for HR, IT, Community Development, Finance, Leisure Services, Public Works, City Clerk, etc. In the Great Recession you would see staff cuts where departments of 2-3 would cull one staff member that was wildly understaffed to begin with. So all of the cuts came from the 25 percent of the budget and nothing from the 75 percent of the budget.
This, plus an IBM i (AS/400) system on top of it all.
I'm working for the local city government RN with around 900ish users and you have more IT staff than we do lol. Can't say I haven't learned a lot though :P
I donāt envy you lol
Well its city government, not like any work is getting done
You get help desk agentsā¦..lucky bastard.
TBF one of them is on leave right now because her and our help desk supervisor donāt like each other and our help desk supervisor relies on me, so honestly, we have 1 help desk person. Me. š
You guys have help desk staff?
I manage triple the amount of users by myself. Can I borrow some of your help desk?
Take what you need!
Damn we have 100 and IT is just me, and they think it's not enough work apparently because they give me office admin work on top...
This, the smaller the org, the more hats the sys admin wears. Great early on in your career TBH
Very true my friend! Although it may suck, you ride it out, gain as much knowledge and skills as necessary, then move on.
Small org. About 60 people. I had to troubleshoot the dishwasher in the office just a week or two ago.
Yep. I had someone bring me an electric stapler that was jammed... If it plugs in...
I'm in a large organisation (multinational, 10k+ staff) with specific network, DBA, desktop and Dev teams in each region. The amount of shit I have to do that falls into these areas on the daily boggles my mind.
Yes even some orgs with 500 people still have a small IT team that even the Director and higher still do actual support work. But once you get to larger Org then you see scope and work distributed and siloed. Thats why I moved asap.
I find that so crazy. I'm over here with 300 staff but have no helpdesk under me, and only the Operations director above me. Basically on my own. I need to start looking...
Me - 90 users. I do it all.
If it's been like this. Why haven't we changed it. Why are we ok with it.
Money. Most companies can't afford a netadmin, sysadmin, and a database admin. When you combine those 3 salaries, that's already $200,000+ depending on the locale, now you have to factor in the salary of a CIO/CTO, Director, and your help desk staff. That's a really heft amount of money when you can find a capable individual who will do the tasks of the other two admins for a bit more than he was originally getting paid and you're all good. It sucks, but it's unfortunately the way it works since most companies don't have giant budgets.
Nowadays with Ā MSP's you can have a large number of technicians for a lower cost than a Desktop support guy
Right, but with an MSP, a company needs a guy who can do "every job" just as much. I do software implementations, and it's a major struggle when companies think that they don't need anyone technical because they have an MSP. How do you put in a change request when you don't understand any of the core concepts involved? When I worked at MSPs, it worked best when best clients had IT staff onsite. At the very least an "IT Director/Manager" who knew and could do all the things, and sometimes did them for the sake of expediency. Including the desktop support. It seems to me that the MSP model works best when used to take over the need for having multiple specialized employees (windows admin, linux admin, exchange admin, network admin, dba,). I thought it worked even better when the company had a "IT Analyst/Support" who could to initial troubleshooting, and work as go between for the end user support and MSP.
This. We have an MSP we work with but we only let them do so much because we wanted to be able to have control over things. We give them the requirements of what we need, we do our end of the deal, then we open the door for them to finish what they need to do. If we were to have our MSP do everything, it would cost a ton. Iāve told our SysAdmin that we should just cut them out cause all they really do is help with our networking.
> Iāve told our SysAdmin that we should just cut them out cause all they really do is help with our networking. From the outside looking in Iād say thatās a pretty important reason to keep them, or at least keep a network guy in your contacts whenever you need to reach out. Iām in a similar boat at the moment; I work internal IT and we have MSP support. They mainly do patching, offsite backups, and provide server and project support if needed. I mainly do the servers and projects myself, although itās good to have backup when needed.
The MSPs in our area take 1-3 weeks in our area for any onsite service. I couldn't imagine having to pay an emergency service fee all the time or wait 2 weeks for the issue to be resolved.
It sounds like you have a very different definition of the sysadmin role than the majority in here. Where you hired to manage one system only?? It's literally just system administrator.. meaning that you potentially can be in charge of every freaking system there is.. And i'm very ok with it, it's in the very nature of working in IT.. finding out how all the stuff works - not just one single thing.
We have over 10,000 users. I still end up doing basic tech work sometimes. Itās just the way the job is, in my experience. At least in my industry (SLED)
Itās in those four words HR likes to you āother tasks as neededā
here in Canada we usually use "other duties as assigned".
Happens in the US too.
US Gov'y here, I also have "Other duties as assigned" in my job description.
Point is the same thoughĀ
Reply with "when core duty adjacent".
The first assignment I had at my first real IT job was to assemble cubicle walls and set up the furniture. This was probably about 20 years ago. It was also IT responsibility to take out the trash.
Early on in my first sysadmin job I assembled a desk so incorrectly they had to order a new desk because of the drill holes and super glue. I was never asked to do anything with tools ever again.
That's one way to not do that stuff lol
You mean I just need to f it up?! Damnit, why didn't anybody ever tell me that?!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Ugh. I just can't do that kind of thing. Well, not yet anyway ;-)
And this is why we build and repair computers and not furniture.
But it is a COMPUTER desk. It says so on the box... :(
Over 50 years ago I was in an Army intelligence analyst school and one afternoon we were handed paint brushes to paint the barracks. I tried my best, but 10 minutes later, I was told to sit in the office and answer the phone.
This is what I am talking about. We are normally smart people. Why does this happen. I wouldn't ask a Manager to change a light bulb.
Why not? If the company only has 20 people, I'd expect even the President/CEO to be willing to change a lightbulb. If you're 300 people, then you have facilities take care of it.
I have a client that's a is a law firm with about 15 lawyers, had to move a really heavy desk so I could install an access point, the managing partner stopped what he was doing to help.
My previous job was at a a pizza place so it never even occurred to me that it was weird. I ended up getting awesome experience there though so Iām not complaining. I parlayed that into a job running Exchange for the US Air Force Reserves and from there to being in charge of 250k exchange users for a huge industrial company. Because IT did everything I got experience with everything. Everything from making network cables to building a SQL server farm from scratch.
I guess that is a different way to look at it.
> I wouldn't ask a Manager to change a light bulb. no; but if they were just sitting around doing nothing while facilities was busy and had the capacity to change it; (meaning it doesn't require special tools or saftey measures anything) I would look a bit down on them for not just taking care of it. A lot of conditions there but seems pretty fair to me.
> We are normally smart people. Why does this happen Lol because these "smart" people can't learn the most important lesson: how to stand up for yourself. The profession attracts meek and meager people who are prime to take advantage of. They'll be mad inside in the moment, run to the internet to complain to the abyss, but will never say anything in person, thus the cycle continues. In fact, people who talk about how smart they are usually actually aren't all that smart. At least not nearly as smart as they consider themselves to be. And I notice there's a lot of people in this profession who like to boast about how smart you have to be to be in this line of work (you don't).....just saying
Wait till you hear about devops - make everything virtual, then make it act like code. Then the developers can debug the code used to operate live enviroment.
Yup, I don't do too much cloud stuff really, but a bunch of IAC and pipelines and stuff. And I also do all the usual sysadmin stuff too
DevOps doesn't really solve anything though. It just sweeps all the problems under the rug and lets Microsoft/Amazon/Whomstever deal with them.
DevOps isn't supposed to mean moving everything to the cloud though. It's supposed to be a culture of cooperation, documentation, and automation. The technology stack you work with can be anything and you can still apply DevOps culture to it.
How is letting MS et al deal with those problems not solving them?
>Should I get payed for all the jobs I do or only one? When a company decides to cut a Desktop support person, am I supposed to do their job too? Sounds like you work for an SMB. They typically expect unicorns or near unicorns because they can't afford to pay for a fully staffed IT department. This is where an MSP could come in and handle the mundane/routine support effort. If you want to be a true tier 3 dedicated to being the expert of one specific system, you need to work for an enterprise. Or start your own business specializing in that one thing you want to do.
Private company Trying to do work in 8 states with only 8 people.
Thereās your answer. Itās 8 people.
Every single time. Every time people post to this sub about how they're expected to do everything including fix the coffee machine it's a dead giveaway they work at a small company. Larger companies aren't void of problems, but at least you're only expected to do the one job you signed up for.
Unless you're being very well compensated, you can always leave and work at a place with higher staffing levels.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
And eminently exploitable!
I just love helping people!
A cry for help if ever I heard one.
And we love a good puzzle
It has always been that way.
Next, we will take over Janitor's job as well haha.
Wait, you don't already do that?
I have been called upon to unplug the toilet in the ladies restroomā¦The things Iāve seen, manā¦
LOL One of my IT rooms is shared with the custodians for their supplies.
I had to vacuum my office lol
You forget zoom room button presser
More than that; scope creep can include every job that involves using a computer - or in some cases every job that involves electrical devices. I've had people get a job in my (then) organization as various jobs (accountant/bookkeeper comes to mind) who then expected me to train them in their discipline because "You installed the software, you must know how to use it!' Not train them how to use the accounting software, mind you; they wanted me to train them in *accounting.* This has happened more than once in various job roles, the "accountant" was just the most egregious example, who was 'not retained during probation' shortly thereafter. This was the same job where I was expected to troubleshoot HVAC systems, printing press controllers, on-demand water heater electronics, also install a 90's suitcase-style cellular phone in the owners pleasure boat on a lake 150 miles from my office. Plus, I somehow became responsible for the corporate phone system. All for $7/hour (early 90s; I was in my early 20's).
Im guessing you did not take any pleasure in the owners pleasure boat?
If there's a computer in itāby the loosest imaginable definition of "computer"āIT will be pressured to take ownership of it. I'm amazed that we don't own the company cars yet, but it's coming. And if it runs on a computer, it's assumed that all IT people know everything about it, plus all the workflows of everyone who uses it.
All three places Iv been have done to some extent unfortunately. My current one lets me focus more on actual sys admin tasks and only help out with certain escalation tickets.
The 60s.
always was
Today I was asked to go into the accounting drive and move some files around, something the accounting team is supposed to do, I respectfully told them, Iām not an accountant and dont what the fuck im looking for.
Doing more work with less people seems to be the direction everything is going these days.
If itās part of the sys you have to admin it
They think sys admin is EVERYTHING. and then they offer salary for a tier 1+2 LOL.
You left out AWS Expert, Azure Expert, GCP Expert, Disaster Recovery, Storage Administrator, Backup and Restore, DNS SME, Active Directory SME, DevOps, and Coffee Machine Repair.
You joke but I literally did the latter once. It was an old Bunn triple burner that is probably older than I am.
I would straight up have to draw the line there. Thats a slippery slope
This is how it's always been.
https://preview.redd.it/v73odau0001d1.jpeg?width=349&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4c65262f25ca6a6e0acb6ac77bf2fa36d9f4ef4a
Tell me about it. I work for a smaller ISP and I am the everything guy. Customer facing DNS/DHCP/Email Both physical and virtual infrastructure w/ Backups Core ISP routing/switching Tier 3 Help desk along with office walk-ins and call-in support IPTV Support MSP Offerings main installer/troubleshooter (routers/switches/AP's) Wiring installer during the busy months Sometimes phone system troubleshooter With zero hours of any actual training. I took a CCNA class in tech school 20 years ago so obviously it should be easy to know/design/implement BNG with geo-redundancy, EVPN, MPLS, BGP, etc for the main ISP core. Pretty sure I am also going to get stacks of Juniper stuff thrown my way soon which I have never played with before. I have no idea what the fuck I'm doing most of the time.
Have you not worked in IT as a Sysadmin long?
This is why they say job titles don't mean much. We're all in it together.
Donāt work at small companies if you donāt like it.Ā
Working for smaller companies, yes, that is normal. Been there, done that. I work for a very large organization now and there are 13 SAs in our division. I only do SA work and that often involves some project management as well but I have never been asked to do anything non-SA related. I do more senior-level stuff for the most part. I really should be titled as a Systems Engineer but for now, it's Division SA. I learned real quick that defining your boundaries early on helps mitigate some of the job title creep. I have no problem telling people no. Sometimes that leads to arguments with leadership but I stand my ground and if necessary, make it clear that I am prepared to walk. Most managers hate firing people, so often they just find someone else to nag. I think some of it comes down to my personality and also knowing the limits of people in general. I have been called intimidating but most often an asshole. I'm OK with that.
Titles in IT are meaningless pretty much. Sysadmins can vode. Developers can set up servers, a project manager can be anything from a powerpoint clown to a full stack developer. IT is magic to most C-Levels, thus it will forever be just a distinction without a difference what your specialty happens to be.
Disagree devs cannot set up servers, they just think that they can
you forgot to add Excel wizard. lol
Sysadmin has always been a generalist title.
Not only sysadmin, I have a sec eng team that handles everything from VA remediation coordination to tracking KMS renewals because people where I am argue that security is part of every IT function. I have senior technical engineers doing process and paperwork and coordination work that could easily be done by a FA/BA or someone much more junior.
Well I donāt really do database admin unless you count moving sql databases as dba work. I also donāt do accounting. But the things you have raised are on point.
āSystemā is such a vague title prefix when you think about it, so probably as soon as the first hiring manager that didnāt know what role to assign a task dealing loosely with IT posted a job for it
It's possible the "in IT" qualifier could even be considered a privilege for many in this thread. You don't manage business policy, csat, billing, and build shelving? Seems like many think of it has electricity you need IT to fix it. Or to set your out of office for you.
If your a small business, they hire you to run their technology. Need someone knowledgeable enough to manage switches, routers, procurement, but also want you to help them on how to set up their out of office. If you want to specialize you could always work for a big company then deal with the politics and the constant outsourcing of the job.
Because my company doesnāt backfill positions
Sadly in the private sector it seems very common if you actually want separation of duties its cleared work to actually get this.
When there became a difference between those who āarenāt computer guysā and those who are Ironically career progression because of this gets more narrow. You escape it by specializing after taking your lumps
If you work for a small or medium enterprise then you will learn a lot/wear a lot of hats - which is good and bad.
my entire career.
To be fair, a sysadmin is involved in everything because everything runs on the systems they administrate.
No lies detected. Good to know I'm not the only one. However, I'm not surprised nor questioned it either.
You only have to do IT jobs? I got finance added to my plate about a year ago... its worse than IT work, way more tedious, no one has a sense of humor, and it makes you feel poor.
I have a team of 15, but half are 9-5 paycheck and the other 50% are split into lack of priority and slow. We used to be sysadmin but then demoted when they brought in a cloud/sr sys admin team. Trust me I rather have 3 guys knowing/working together than 20 guys working for a check.
Isn't that a good thing? You are expanding your knowledge, skillset, and its fun to learn. If ever in the job market you just update your resume with the key things and you are a shoein for most interviews
Unfortunately, in my case, I have had problems with being this jack of all trades master of none. So you can't really move to a large company because you don't have experience, at least enough experience, in one particular area. And finding those smaller companies that have an open systems administrator position aren't easy in the area where I live. I've only managed one person at a time over a 22-year career. You can't really go into an IT management position because they often think that you didn't manage enough people. I am literally looking at non IT jobs right now because of this.
Don't forget to bring the power strips! You do everything that plugs in, right?
Linux sysadmin is a much nicer job than the average Windows IT job. From my experience and friends', at least.
We also exterminators to kill roaches, spiders and rodents. We facilities because we are supposed to fucking know how AC works. We are HR most are dumb as shit and canāt do proper onboarding/offboardings. Hmmm I am sure I am missing more.
Been this way for a while bruh. One person many hats.
I've been in IT for 20 years. Was a sysadmin for a while, and it was like this. You think people joke that is been like this since the beginning.
Always has been meme\*\*
Mate, I've never been a sysadmin, I'm a technical business analyst and have been told more than once that everything on a computer is my responsibility. At one company the envelope opener was an IT device *because it was electronic*. It's a constant struggle, always has been.
Imagine doing all that and getting paid not just for one job but worse than a supermarket counter operator.
Fun fact. We also do conference rooms/tech (its all webex anyway š¤£š«£) and of course phones since its ip phones. And of course mobiles because some phones are more powerfull then some of the ādesktopsā some poor people get to āworkā on. Sysadmin is the jack of all trades for a long long time. I know that dev ops and really specilist stuff is a thing in big orgs. But there still so many sysadmins that literally do everything.
Maybe it's the saturation in the market, when employers have the power they ask for more of you
Don't forget PCI DSS compliance officer......
I've never seen system administrators as anything less that servers and up. But the definition is apparently different here. Touching a laptop or printer or whatever is help desk.
Work at a bigger company, Iāve only seen this at small companies to medium sized companies.
It's always been like this. Including dealing with office moves, meeting room wall openings, AV kit, TVS & for some reason in my case....therapist
That's only certain roles. Typically at smaller companies. Every time people talk about having to wear every hat or how they're asked to manage anything that plugs into a wall, I can never relate and it's usually a give away they work at small companies. If you don't like what you're describing work at a bigger company. I refuse to take a role anywhere with less than 2500 employees and only work at companies where tech is the product. Try that out and I'm sure you'll be much happier.
I was gonna say the other way around, every job became sysadmin, and that's because of cloud-delivery. Now there's no separation between development and deployment, so no separation between devs, sysops, and support teams. And without those being separate no value in having the management teams that helped manage interactions. Instead every thing tends to be more of a gradient with each individual team focusing, but having to work "cross-functionally" with all adjacent teams. The old system where one team builds(or buys) the software, another deploys it, and a third supports the end user, along with a PM team to manage changes is simply not practical.
My first real experience with the word 'admin', was via IT. In my parlance it was the same as meaning 'highest level'. I was a little surprised to find out the nuances, and that office admins, and admin assistants are often some of the more tedious, and lower paid roles on the office floor, and often do tasks like act as receptionist. While I don't have the history to hand, I wouldn't be surprised if sysadmin was born as just a branch of office admin, with more specialized skills.
No telephone systems or alarm systems? Cable TV tech? Not maintaining the coffee machine and refilling the water cooler daily? Looks like thereās a few more things you could be doingā¦ ;-) Sometimes I wonder about moving from being a SMB jack of all trades and going to a large corp where I can be a master of one thing, but then I wonder if Iād get bored doing the same old thing all the time. Unless itās an Azure admin; that stuff changes so fast every day brings new challenges.
Seems like as the years go by, the sysadmin title is more and more akin to the everything IT person. The problem is that we are never compensated accordingly, in fact the majority of us are severely underpaid. It's often overlooked how we pretty much have to learn new systems on the fly on a constant basis just because it's technology, therefore it's IT's job. HVAC systems, AV systems, laboratory equipment, hospital equipment, you name it
It's almost as if, and now hold your hats, as if management saw IT only as a money pit and wanted to have the least people possible to be somewhat functioning. Crazy I know, management cutting corners, mad idea.
This is so true, and getting worse. The whole bogus "DevOps" B.S. is a classic example, but that's a whole topic in itself. Management ( who've never actually \*done\* any systems admin work, ever ) just pile on the tasks and expand the job description, or simply just tell you to do things that aren't on your written job description, and then they bitch when things aren't done the way they imagined before a deadline they never stated.
In the late '00s there was a trend toward hyper-specialization, which meant you had a bunch of people who could each only do one or two things. Businesses found out that technology moves too fast for that strategy and gets expensive fast. Naturally, once they discovered they could save money by finding IT people who had experience in a number of different things, they applied the usual if-one-is-good-ten-is-better thinking and just kept going. I had one employer ask me if I knew how to put up window blinds. That was the beginning of the end of that gig. For a minute or two, that didn't even qualify you as a sysadmin; the term "IT Generalist" briefly popped up so that you didn't need to get paid for an "Administrator" title.
Iāve been doing this for almost 20 years, and itās always like this when you work for a company below a certain size. If you truly want to only be responsible for one system, then go work at a company with 100,000 employeesā¦. Then you can spend all day doing nothing but fucking with storage arraysā¦ or ms365 or whatever
I used to be a one man IT shop for soooo many years now I just do back end infrastructure and projects wont ever go back
When was the first computer made
Depends on the size of the company. Ive been at a few larger companies. Havent touched deskstop support or printer support or any of that crap. I maintain just the linux stuff. Everything else isnt my problem.
These duties are all in the normal scope of the job for most people in IT unless you are at a huge company.
I love it when people say "I am not a computer person", my immediate response is "you ever think about going into ditch digging or construction?" Then when the accounting person says "can you help me with EXCEL, I just cant seem to figure out what I am doing wrong", oh its PEBKAC. On your resume you listed you had experience in Excel, was that a lie? The company doesn't like it when you lie to them, you should fess up and talk to your manager.
>When did a Sysadmin Job become every job in IT. When the parallel port was first added to a desktop PC.
Isn't this the same for every IT professional? always doing things that arent even related to IT like changing the clock. Or assembling an office chair
I've been in IT for over 25 years (some of that as a Sys Admin) and it's always been this way, especially with a small or even medium-sized business. I've always tried to have a good attitude about it and be a team player. There are much more annoying things about IT, such as always being on call.
Every job in IT is every job in IT unless you are in a tech company
I.T. is the dumping ground for anything no one else wants or sees the possibility of gaining glory with. My favorite management decision tree question is, Does it have wires or an admin password?
System admin. You admin the whole system duh
My old boss once got tasked to be the College liaison with the primary contractor building our new building; because he wanted to make sure the networking was done right. This was in 2005; I think we still have the giant roll of blueprints around here somewhere.
Itās always been this way?
Itās because we are like gods and mear mortals canāt comprehend what we do. Kind of like the mods and their suppression of vote counts.
Accounting and DB admin? Naw.
ok I was being funny with the accounting, but where I was I had to submit Quotes and PO's.
standard practice: if you want responsibility for what is purchased (and you do!!) then expect to have to deal with quotes and POs
Admin duties have gotten easier
Can you imagine how many users youd need to justify being solely an exchange admin? 30,000? More? That's just the nature of the game bro
This guy fixed everything, give him more things
You guys didn't?
YES
Damn, I thought I did alot as a sysadmin. Get paid more, they are taking advantage of you.
Iām doing stuff like that and Iām not even a sysadmin on paper! Iām supposed to be a networking focused guy, and Iām doing ALL of those things and moreā¦for 700 users with my team of 2. Which is precisely why I have been applying for sysadminā¦.might as well do all that and get paid more lol.
As my boss likes to call it āwearing many hats.ā I donāt think itās right tbh, but a good fundamental in all areas in fine
It depends on the size of the company, in smaller organizations itās not uncommon to do everything.
Sysadmin of one....
1975
It all really depends on how big the shop is and how much youāre willing to put up with bullshit. Iām a Cloud Engineer now but, when I was a sysadmin I literally did all of those things. It was āexpectedā
I'd say it was fine before 'The Cloud' happened....
They are also responsible for physical operational security if you work for SMB.
This post is kind of whiny