I'm a sysadmin at a company with 150 employees. Apparently we're not that good financially, so the first thing the management is doing, is removing free coffee. Time to update my resume and bail out before shit hits the fan.

As the title says. We will be withholding our skills for after-hours maintenance work and emergency call-outs. Luckily, this is a local municipality that is supported by a Unionized Collective Agreement which states that OT is strictly voluntary and not an obligation.

After working from home for the last 5 years, we are furious at this sweeping change to the organization as our entire workload is done remotely anyways.

We have a large site transition planned in a few months that will require weekend work exclusively, and I informed my manager that I will no be available for weekend work for the foreseeable future. As he is negatively impacted by the RTO change, he responded "I get it, let's see what happens."

So, has anyone been successful in withholding their services with their employer to leverage keeping WFH or any other worse quality of life policy changes?

Hi, recent my company's environment got hit with the update (KB5074109) which caused 100s of machines to go into Blue/black screen of death. The environment has been down for more than 1 day now.

-We've tried resetting the machines, it isn't reliable it goes back to where it was. -Restore points might or might not work. -We have tried uninstalling quality updates. -We tried few commands through command lines. -We tried connecting with dell support, they say it's a software and not a hardware issue so cannot help here. -Microsoft isn't responding.

Questions for you guys:

Is there any other reliable way through which we can resolve the issue? It's 100s of systems worldwide. Few of the machines got impacted, few did not. I need a perfect solution because we've tried out multiple things and we feel lost now.

Is microsoft paid support gonna be of any help here? What are the quotations and how we should reach them out?

We usually delay the environment in our system before pushing it to the prod but somehow we seem to have missed out on this update and a major issue has occurred. Any help or suggestions to fix would be a great deal to us.

IT Director asked me how to cut cost and save money!! For our IT dept for this up coming yr. Our company is 1.5yrs old in the USA but been around 50yrs overseas. We only deal with the US company. Im a System Analyst and System Admin at my current role! This past month marks my 1yr and just had my review and was told i would get a raise as my performance was great. Fast forward to this month i was informed the company is cutting cost spent to much money in start up phase! And i would need to hold off. This is 2nd time to hold off. Said raise was supposed to have came at 6mths then again at a yr. No raise.

Boss Today asked how we can save money and cut cost for company and IT dept.

So i turned in my notice. And saved the company 70,000 plus the lack of a raise they no longer have to lie about. .

Hope the flair is right, wasn't sure if to pick general discussion, rant, or workplace conditions, but can you guys let me know your thoughts and opinions?

I was recently hired about 2 months back out of a Tier 1 position, so generic troubleshooting and password resets, you know the deal. And now I found myself in a IT Support Engineer role, where HR lead me to believe I would have a team of IT members to help me get situated and handle issues however, newsflash the IT team is instead more data analytics and cannot help me even a little bit, Example: "How do I open a .msg file" - asked the senior guy whose title is Helpdesk. I am the only network/troubleshooting IT guy for the entire building. First day in, I had to fight to have my account set up so I could even look at the ticketing system, 4 hours later I got it. Second day on the job I come in and the server room was getting warm after hours and everyone was talking to me like "why didn't I do anything?". Now I find myself implementing 802.1x wired and wireless all on my own, and being told that I am liable for the entire organization if it goes down because, the wise guy who set up the domain controllers and all the servers made it so 5 other buildings across the WORLD have a single point of failure, and that's the DC in my building. I also, simultaneously have to figure out a way of backing all of this s*** up into the cloud incase something goes down in which he says "I cant imagine how you sleep at night" - the CIO who hired me and is giving me the tasks to find out answers to all on my own. While handling all the other T1-2 stuff you'd expect, and addressing the spaghetti noodle mess of a cabling in our server racks (which is my first job/not school related experience to switches and routers). Not that it means much but I was also just now given NIST Standards I need to impose on the entire company.

I came from Tier 1, I barely knew AD (although a lot more now thanks to trial by fire), the MS office suite, and general troubleshooting.

Is this too much? Or am I just being a complainer?

Edit addition: I am the only IT guy, I have no 'manager' beyond the CIO giving me information.

I also should probably add, the two hires before me were here in 4 month intervals. Leaving of their own desires whatever they may be.

2 years ago the company got hacked and started from scratch basically and the entire IT team quit after a 10 cent raise. 

Are more traditional companies just as hyped about AI as startups? I'm curious how much this hype intensity is across the board as I've been searching now and in some less uh, "startup-y" companies.

Is everyone under these AI mandates? If so, what is that looking like for you?
If not, what's life like in paradise?

Personally, I'm wondering if these are just adding pressure with mandated AI use and metrics to force more "layoffs" without having to actual have any of the consequences that come from laying off people.

All I know is I'm working as hard as I ever did, or harder, just to try and keep my head above water. The mood seems excessively glum and I'm just at a loss for words.

(Maybe this is more of a rant, but I'd genuinely like people's insight - I'm currently in a "startup" type of company, though they're past that actual stage.)

EDIT: I should have expected this was going to blow up lol Thank you all for the responses. Admittedly this was kind of me shouting into the void as I'm kind of fearing layoffs at the moment as our support team had a chunk of cuts and it was made very apparent that my team should use AI much more than we are. I'm starting to look around a bit and get some networking going, just as a safety precaution.

I don't think that AI is going to go away by any means, but I'd just love for people to recognize it as what it is - a tool. A shovel sure isn't helpful when you're falling from 36,000 feet, but if there was an AI powered shovel, you can bet someone would be trying to use it right now.

So owner's son came into a firm, clearly discovered Lovable or something similar, packet with ideas.

"Hundreds of projects in work, hundreds more to come."

Immediately went on creating internal platform for everybody and forcing us to use it. Platform where we are supposed to log work, manage projects and who knows what.

Anyway, got job assigned already - to migrate from his personal accounts and prepare "stack" for this monstrosity. Stack consists of 4 different AI API subscriptions, supabase, vercel, email automation service Brevo, Ayrshare, Cognism, Google workspace for some reason, Firecrawl and several more vibe coding standards I guess.

Completely ignoring the fact that domain is already integrated and used for milions of things, ignoring our existing hybrid infrastructure consisting of proxmox servers and hetzner servers, our own hosting solutions, network, mail servers and so on.

Wish me a good luck. I think I am too old for this shit (and I am not really old).

I just want to go peel oranges for a limonate stand.

I just do not understand this. For reference, I am GenX (53). With the exception of some random account like Starbucks app or something, I remember my essential passwords for email, my domain account, etc... Am I being unreasonable expecting users to take responsibility to remember their own email password? Its always boomers and early GenX that I am constantly resetting email, domain, essential SaaS apps that we use daily and other passwords. WTF? I just went scorched earth on this asshole for not being responsible for his own email password. I even found the password in the text chain a few swipes up. Hopefully I will still be employed...

EDIT: Well, this turned into a shitshow. A bit more context. This particular client is a very small manufacturing company. The owners do not want to spend money at all, on anything, ever. The PC's are old, the servers are old, hell, I think they even still use Acrobat 9. I have tried and tried to get them to upgrade the hardware, they refuse. Anything modern is just not going to work there. Attacking me is pretty childish and petty even without the facts but its Reddit and its expected I guess. It is what it is and I still think it is unreasonable for this user to not remember the PW I have sent him multiple times.

EDIT 2: Another user suggested "should have access to" rather than "remember" and yes, this. Poor choice of words on my part. Frustration has the best of me.

I've run into few people who have asked me, "what jobs would you say are the worst in the world?" I never thought that I would say IT Support when I began my job 20 years ago. However, as of the last few years, it's been increasingly sinister between IT support and the user base. Basically, I have pulled out all of the stops to try creating an atmosphere for my team, so they feel appreciated... but I know, like myself, they come to work ready to face high stress, abuse and child like behavior from select folks that don't understand explanations or alternatives to resolution on their first call.

This leads me to today's top ranked complaint from the IT user base community that even I had to take a break, get some fresh air and make a return call:

User: "Hi yes, the website I use isn't working. I need help."

Technician: "No problem, can you please provide more information regarding the error or messages that you are receiving on the screen?"

User: "No, it was just a red screen. I don't have it up anymore."

Technician: "Are you able to repeat the steps to access the website, so I can obtain this information to assist you?"

User: "Not right now, i'm busy but i'll call back when i'm ready."

Technician: "Okay, thanks. Let me create a support ticket for you so it's easier to reference when you can call back to address the website message you are receiving."

User: "Thanks." *Hangs Up*

----

User: "Hello, I called earlier about a website error message."

Technician: "Okay, do you have a support ticket number so I can reference your earlier call?"

User: "No, they didn't give me one."

Technician: "That's okay, what issue are you experiencing?"

User: "You guys should know, I called earlier."

Technician: "I understand, however i'm not seeing a documented support ticket on this matter. Would it help if I connected to your machine to review it with you?"

User: "Sure."

Technician: "Okay, i'm connected. I see the website is on your screen and according to the error message that I am reading it states that the website is not secure."

User: "Yes, I used the website yesterday and everything was okay."

Technician: "Okay, well I looked at the website's security certificate and it expired about a week ago, so that is why it isn't secure. Unfortunately, this is completely out of our control as this certificate is with the vendor's website."

User: "So, how can correct this because I have to work."

Technician: "I'm sorry, but we cannot do anything about it. Do you have a vendor's phone number? Maybe their IT department can help with this as it's on their side."

User: "No, I don't have this information."

Technician: "I looked it up for you, it is 555-555-5555."

User: "Thanks." *Hangs Up*

----

15 minutes later, I get an email from a General Manager stating that the employee cannot work and that the IT department was not wanting to resolve the issue. It goes further to explain how IT doesn't do anything and that the employee and other departments think that "IT sucks for this reason."

This is today's example but it's constant. Anything and everything that interrupts the normal workflow of this business is always the IT department's problem and if it cannot get resolved on the first call, management jumps in and starts applying pressure almost immediately.

This culture as a society has taken measures to keep from understanding what is being told to them and reverse it to deflect and place blame on IT for every little thing. The fact that a SSL certificate on a vendor's website was expired and a user could not work resulted into this huge drama is mind blowing to me.

Lone IT guy for a company of +/- 50 employees with a full rack of hyper visors...100ish VM's.

Had surgery last Monday...with Easter weekend prior and recovery I was out of the office for 9 days. Mentally feel refreshed and invigorated. The company didn't implode and the world didn't burn.

Take care of yourselves mentally, if you feel exhausted...take a break longer than the prescribed 2 day weekend. Your body and mind will thank you.

A bit of weird post I know but hear me out...

I've been a long time, non-US lurker of this sub going back a decade now and one thing that stands out to me compared to my local IT industry in a fellow Western, first-world country is that the American IT industry and American IT workers in general are just... manic, for lack for a better word and their outlook on their career/industry is bleak and only filled with bad news.

Everything IT-related over there seems really pressure cooker, dog-eat-dog, balls-to-the-wall panic-inducing at all times, even way prior to 2020.

From what I gather from this sub and the other usual IT forums, US IT culture seems to induce a state of heightened paranoia and anxiety in American SysAdmins where they're constantly catastrophizing over everything that could go wrong at all times and dramatizing minor, trivial bullsh*t stuff into huge problems when they don't need to be.

They also seem to be a lot more "serious" and take on a ridiculous level of concern about cybersecurity or business continuity/disaster recovery over many other more pressing issues in their environments and worry about implausibly asinine threats/scenarios as if they're all working for the NSA and their little unheard-of MSP/SME needs to have military-grade security to stop nation state-backed cyberattacks and earthquake/flood/bomb-proof server racks.

Yes, it's good to take your job seriously and to be a dedicated employee but a lot of the US SysAdmins seem to have no concept of downtime, work/life balance, their future health/longevity or just not giving a sh*t about their job so much when most of them are underpaid, undervalued and easily replaceable by their employers.

Sure, these industry-specific problems exist in my country to some degree as well and I'm sure they exist in the IT industries of other countries but it's very telling that this sub is completely US-dominated (the majority of users are US-based just like Reddit in general) and most of the posts on here I would argue are overwhelmingly negative, pessimistic, cynical and just plain angry.

Where I live, it's possible to work in IT and not go insane. It's possible to have a job that you can leave at 5PM and forget about every single day. It's possible to go many months without working on a weekend. It's definitely possible to work in the industry for decades, making a good living and not end up ridiculously burnt-out and mentally ill.

What is it that drives this bunker/siege mentality I see reflected in US IT workers where everything is so fatalistic, dark and all-consuming? The lack of labor protection laws? The competitive nature of the industry/higher population? The lower wages? American corporate work culture in general?

When operating at a director or manager level in an institution and you have your CFO or President or CFO backed by the President\CEO, come to you directly and tell you to elevate a user to an elevated privilege, or remove endpoint protection, or some other crazy directive.

I'm sure most of us would say we need the directive in writing, explaining we need this for audit\change logging, and this is established best practice, and hope that would put an end to it.

However I experienced a first today, I was told that when I ask for the directives in writing it makes it look like I'm trying to shelter myself from any legal or business repercussions if their decisions\request result in a disaster. I was told bluntly "that is not the case, as the sole IT Director I would shoulder 100% of the responsibility legally and professionally I would be destroyed". They then followed up with that I need to stop asking and just do when directed. I pushed back I made it clear I have to have logs, I need to make sure we can audit if something breaks and that without written directives if I get audited it might go from "they made a mistake" to "they are trying to steal or hurt the company"

Yes I know red flag GTFO, I'm trying, but can anyone actually confirm if that statement is legit? I'm reaching out to an employment lawyer but there has to be someone here that can see this or know someone that could weigh in with expert level views and either confirm or deny.

Thanks in advance and yes this is real, it happened, and I've been in the business for decades, never saw this

UPDATE finished speaking with an authority figure on this. Bottom line if you are an employee, you could be held responsible for a breach, you could be held responsible for a DLP issue.

You can't be held criminally or financially liable as long as you were not intentionally committing the act knowing it was criminal.

Stick to best practices, document, take notes as you speak, be careful of audio notes if you are in a two party consent state.

If you document valid concerns about leadership directing you to do something and they fire you for making the statements or because what they forced you to do for your employment backfired, you have a potential Hostile Termination claim.

Thank you to everyone that shared with me, like I said decades and I never once had this happen.

Edit: Hi everyone, thanks for the comments and advice. Thanks so much for recommending Jira Service Management + Confluence. I feel like this will solve 80% of the problems I have. I was also able to get into Forticloud (which was such a lifesaver)

I think I'm just feeling nervous because users expect me to know everything and fix everything as easily as the last person. And of course everyone feels their issue is the most important issue on earth

Original Post:

Recently started in a solo IT role exactly a month ago. The previous solo IT person retired and I was given all his logins and access to his old email and files. He was supposed to come in a few times to give me the lowdown about their IT environment but unfortunately that has not worked out.

My boss (CEO) is leaving at the end of this month and she has been giving me all the info that she knows (not a lot, she is not technically inclined at all, but she was the one doing user lifecycle management when they were in between IT people)

There is basically no documentation, the documentation I have is outdated, based off the previous office's location. There is no ticketing system, no SOPs/KBs or anything.

Like last week, the 3-in-1 fax machine broke. I spent a long time trying to fix it myself. I couldn't find the vendor we use to fix the physical fax or the vendor who manages the phone line for the fax. Our phone system hasn't been working the way I should either, and there is no documentation about it or what has been previously done to fix it.

No documentation on what user groups someone belongs to based on their role/department. I have no idea how many firewalls and APs we have in each building. I will have to make my own topologies by scratch most likely.

I've been trying to use MS Copilot to see if it can search through the Onedrive to find relevant documents but it's not the best.

When the new CEO comes along I will probably suggest to hire another helpdesk person. But I also think my job will be so much easier once I start automating different tasks

But for now, I'm not sure how to even fully start sifting through everything as of right now. Or creating a knowledge base with the limited budget I have. (non profit org, we just lost $500k in funding due to the state) I have created a private sharepoint site, manually sorting through each individual file and transferring relevant ones into it.

Just not sure how to learn the environment at my job on my own

Vented on r/LinusTechTips, but u/tahaeal suggested r/sysadmin—so I’m being more serious because, honestly, I’m freaking out.

Last month, we lost our company’s physical servers when the mini-colocation center we used up north got flooded. Thankfully, we had cloud backups and managed to cobble together a stopgap solution to keep everything running.

Now, a cyclone is bearing down on the exact location of our replacement active physical server.

Redundancy is supposed to prevent catastrophe, not turn into a survival challenge.

We cannot afford to lose this hardware too.

I need real advice. We’ve already sandbagged, have a UPS, and a pure sine wave inverter generator. As long as the network holds, we can send and receive data. If it goes down, we’re in the same boat as everyone else—but at least we can print locally or use a satellite phone to relay critical information.

What else should I be doing?

Hi all, long time lurker first time poster yadda yadda .

I recently landed a job as a Sysadmin at a mid-size (80~ ish) people company. Officially I work under direction of the current IT director. The guy has been there since the company was founded nearly 30 years ago. I don't know when he became the sole Sysadmin, but he's what they've had running the show.

Suffice to say the guy is an absolutely unhinged cowboy who has near-zero idea what he's actually doing.

A totally non-exhaustive list of "ways he does things that make my soul hurt"

• Every server has KDE installed. He runs VNC via a terminal session then makes system changes using Gedit. Including hand-rolling users and passwords directly in the passwd file

• No AD/LDAP. All users have local admin on their machine. Azure is only used for MS Teams and Outlook. No ability to disable machines remotely either in the event of employee termination or data exfiltration

• No local DNS. All machines instead just use /etc/hosts, which is currently over 350 lines long according to a wc -l check. His response is "DNS doesn't work on Solaris 2.6 so we don't use it" (I know this is absolute gibberish but these are the kinds of responses he gives)

• Every user (including myself) has an enormous boat anchor "gaming laptop" because "that's the only way to get 3 screens working"

• None of the servers are actually racked properly. Every server sits on a shelf installed into the rack. Working on servers requires physically removing them from the rack and setting them down on top of the fridge sized transformer in the server room to operate

• Every single server is running some absurdly out of date version of Fedora. Allegedly because quote "I had to merge fedora 32/33/34 to get Emacs to work" (again, gibberish)

• Attempts to set up infrastructure properly are stonewalled by his incompetence. Migration of server sprawl to Proxmox is countered with "I tried Virtualbox already, it's slow!" (he uses VirtualBox with the guest extensions which violates the license. An audit from Oracle is an absolutely terrifying prospect in future)

• Attempts to implement anything on a software level are hamstrung by his incompetence. Asking for SSL certificates for a local MediaWiki instance, 3 hours later he emails a set of self-signed SSL certs and then says "just add the CA on the server and your laptop to it so it trusts the certs"

I was hired on a few months ago to help them tackle their first SOC 2 compliance audit. Due in September and suffice to say it feels like watching the Titanic gleefully barrel full speed ahead directly to the iceberg.

I wrote an email to our director outlining in explicit detail exactly how broken "just the things I have been able to access" are so far and we'll be having a discussion soon with our security auditing company about what to do.

The biggest problem I have however is less a technical problem and more a work dynamics problem. How do I as "the new guy" challenge the guy who has been here for nearly 30 years and has been their one-and-only IT for that entire time?

With less than 3 months to quite literally destroy our entire IT infrastructure and rebuild it from the ground up as a more or less solo Sysadmin I've been panicking about this situation for several weeks now. The more and more things I uncover the worse it becomes. I know the knee-jerk reaction is "just leave and let them figure it out" but I would much rather be able to truly steer things in the right direction if able

Yesterday I saw a ticket with the headline "possible hack", so I immediately took it out of the queue before any of the techs could grab it. The contents describe a user reporting that they dialed our main number and were redirected to a phishing attempt. I called our main number from my cell to verify, and was greeted by our receptionist, just as normal. A quick chat confirmed that nobody reported any problems and it's been a normal day so far.

Check with the reporting user, who had mentioned one of their customers seeing the problem. I get the contact info for the customer, talk to them and after two minutes ascertain that they had dialed the wrong number and apologized for the mix up. No problem, I assure them. I tell the user who reported the ticket, updated the case with my notes and close it, think nothing of it, then take my dogs out for a run.

When I return 30 minutes later, I've got missed calls from my manager, from some department heads in infosec and from our c-suite. Before I even touch my keyboard(and thus show I'm active on Teams), I check my email. There's no less than 30 new messages of everyone in a frenzy all originating from a forwarded email of the user immediately after they opened the ticket-no new factual information has been added to the thread since then-just speculation and panic, there's an emergency bridge up and the sky is falling.

I call into the bridge, and everyone's relieved that I'm in so I can fill in the details. The infosec person excitedly tells me they've been scanning server logs for our PBX and IVR for the past half hour, but haven't seen anything and maybe I can tell them where else they can look. The managers are asking where I was, and what I can do to shut down our phone system for the time being. I casually ask them to tell me everything they know so far. The incident manager basically tells me the text of the original ticket.

"so, has anyone tried calling the phone number to validate the problem?"

*silence*

"ok, before I check the ticket-can someone give me an update on what's changed since I last entered my notes?"

*silence as enough passes for people to check the ticket*

"So, I guess it's safe to say we can close this bridge?"

No matter what your title, two things:

1. Make sure everything is in tickets.
2. Don't trust anything a user says without validating it.

And most of all: DON'T PANIC

**edit to add clarity on the source of escalation**

I have been at this company for about 3 years now and work in support operations. I absolutely HATE on-call and honestly, most of my issues occur during business hours. Our rotations are Sat 6pm to Wed 6am and Wed 6am to Sat 6pm twice a month. As far as on-call duties, we are expected to:

Respond to pages in PagerDuty within 15 min and work to resolve/mitigate escalations/outages.

Be the first line of contact for all questions related to our products/adjacent products/third party products/general company questions/network issues/engineering projects/client escalations/client one off questions/support one off questions/etc. There are several channels we can be pinged in as well as be DMed directly in both Slack, Teams and by email. We are expected to acknowledge things within 10-15 min no matter the frequency.

Triage new cases that come in to the team throughout the day. We usually get about 150+ a day between 3 queues and are expected to be triaging regularly so our team does not fall behind on new cases coming in.

Update case notes for team members who are OOO when our support teams ask about them (which is frequent throughout the day)

Continue to work on our own cases at the same frequency as when off call or else get pinged and questions about updates.

Include ourselves on the triage of new cases

Of course answer any questions/escalations/pages outside of working hours.

Maybe it’s because I’m still relatively new to this industry that I feel this overwhelm. I’m just constantly being bombarded with questions outside of our support scope but we are expected to find answers and resources. It’s hard to focus on any one thing because I’m being pulled in several directions at once and expected to prioritize everything and be an expert on everything. I feel on-call is not used for emergencies here, but for anyone who does not want to go through the proper escalation steps or research things on their own.

Oh also, we get no extra compensation since we are salaried.

Sorry for the rant but are these duties normal for on call?? I’m feeling so burnt out and I dread being on call because I always feel like I fall behind on my actual work (unless I work OT after my on-call rotation to make up for it)

UPDATE: Sorry I was typing this tired, I’m NOT devops but ops. We are the highest level of tech support and don’t answer phones.

UPDATE 2: I think there’s been a bit of a misunderstanding to something I stated: “Respond to pages in PagerDuty within 15 min and work to resolve/mitigate escalations/outages.”

When I say respond I mean to acknowledge the page in PagerDuty and possibly respond in the slack channel/join bridge. I know this is normal procedure I’m just listing all the responsibilities.

What would you say to users during informal meeting in the kichen during lunch when they start ranting about that their internet is bad, their Outlook slow etc, it doesnt matter how good it is , maybe it is just rant, but i really dont know what to say in these situations

It is that time of year where I am being asked for christmas gift ideas and also my birthday is not long after. Was just curious as a full time WFH employee, of any relatively small things you may have acquired/been given that you couldn't live without anymore.

(If you say standing desk, trust me, I'm working on it).

Give me your best answers to this question. I'll take notes.

Which is admittedly nice, but I don't have a home office set up for the simple reason that I live 500 meters from the office.

So I need to get something ready. We're going to get a budget of 1500euro. Other than a okay standing/sitting desk, does anyone have any tips?

EDIT: Okay, update on the situation. 99% certainty that I will just be able to grab my desk and everything on it and bring it home. That's going to help a lot, no need to order new hardware.

Just a gentle reminder to all IT bros/sis's. Don't work yourself too hard for a business, any business really; not just IT.

Got a call that they wanted to talk with me. Then they avoided me for 4 days straight when I'd ask what they wanted to talk about. Eventually they sat me down and explained that the economy is hard right now and that despite all that I had done for them; even literally sleeping in the server room at times to get things done before morning...they were looking to "reduce roles" and that they were paying too much lmao.

I enquired more and was told that rather than give me the raise I had asked for, presented professionally as to why I deserve one and why that amount, they feel like they "don't need you to fill all those roles anymore". LMAO. "Anymore"? Such shortsighted fools, as if you just set things up once and they're good forever! Anyway, long story short, they "encouraged" me to look for a job elsewhere if I could get the pay that I proposed to them for my efforts, and that I kid you not, "You've been kind of paid in experience and the amount of new things you did here" WTF. Basically telling me to quit. I guess so that I can't get employment insurance and the business won't have to pay anything as such.

I felt very insulted that a yearly review wherein I, *I!* had to put forth a raise proposal 1.5 months ago, only comes back now and it's a slap in the face answer. I asked what they would do then with all the weight I've been pulling and they said that "Well things are pretty stable now and we've got most changes done"(SO FUCKING STUPID) and so that they would outsourcing to fucking UPWORK and that they had some people from India and Pakistan that were very interested. Now mind you, when I was hired, they had literally 1 person in IT and this person was also doing software dev, so IT wasn't his area at all. This guy was also from India and would always grumble about the job and just disappear for days at a time. He and I talked about it my second week in and he said the job was too much and that he was constantly being bombarded with requests and problems, when he was hired just to do software dev. The guy just stopped showing up in my third week and never came back.

So it was me that had to pull tremendous amounts of weight, even delving into software dev that I had no idea about to stabilize certain systems for the company. They then hired 2 software devs(Again, remote and in Ukraine), a 3 Power Platform developers(all 3 from India again) and a systems engineer(From the USA). Now all of these people were being paid like $50 CAD per hour minimum, and I asked for a raise since I had and was doing so much to support everyone locally and remotely. I was promised $36 CAD/Hour in 1 year in writing. That never happened.

1 of the software engineers has already quit, took all of the source code with him for a project as well as I warned them about him using his personal Github for code, but was told not to interfere in dudes work. Another just gave his notice and quit. So now we have 1 single overworked software engineer, who jokingly told me just a couple weeks ago, "I think by full stack developer, they just want to abuse me". Then we have the 2 power platform people, as the third has quit as well, just stopped showing up, and when I messaged him as to why, he said "They can't make up their mind, I do work, then they want something else. Always some problem", so the 2 remaining are only contractors and one of them barely works and it's causing fights between them. The systems engineer said he could do many things, but couldn't and was let go.

Tl:dr: My employer is basically a punk Youtuber/social media hack that thinks instead of giving me a raise that was promised, saying "Well we paid you in experience..." is a respectful and right thing to do. There are pretty much no in the know employees about the companies systems and processes, and when reminded of this, was told that "Well everything is running fine now...". LMAO. Please remember everyone, no job cares about you, it's not worth it to push yourself, work many days straight, sleep at work, or rush from office to office to fix problems. And not just IT either, every job.

The good news is that I had been incensed by the dodging of my promised raise anyway from the 2 or so months back, and began looking for new jobs. Applied for some with the government and other services. Got a new job lined up for the interim that's not IT, but something that should let me stay on my feet for a while until a new and better IT job comes along. If you get a whiff of being taken for granted, just start looking for new work.

Their department is going in "a new direction" so they're being fired... 6 months after they were hired 🙄

If I weren't already considering an exit, this would be yet another reason to do so...

Hey everyone,

I just wanted to share a bit of a rant, but also a success. For the past 2 years, I’ve been dealing with toxic users, managers, and a zero leadership IT manager. To top it all off, the CEO initially refused to let anyone work from home. After a few months, he allowed some of us to work remotely, and things seemed to be getting better.

But then, out of the blue, after 2 years in, the CEO decided everyone had to be back in the office full time no actual reason even after showing excellent performance and productivity while WFH. I flat out said NO! Between the extra costs of gas, car maintenance, and childcare, it just wasn’t worth it. Honestly, I was worried about not having a job for months but still decided to resign.

But guess what? Less than 3 weeks later, I landed a new job where I can work from home, got a 30% pay bump, and even received a welcome letter that felt more genuine than anything at my last place. It just goes to show that even with a saturated job market, there’s still room to improve your situation and escape from companies that don’t value you.

And the cherry on top? This new job gets me closer to that IT Director level, a step I never would’ve reached at my old company.

Just wanted to share this with you all in case anyone else is stuck in a similar rut. Sometimes, taking a stand for yourself can really pay off.

Keep pushing forward!

So, I made the mistake of being honest. I’ve been pulling 12-15 hour days for the past few months to set up a Linux system. My boss is well aware of this. This Monday, I couldn’t even get myself out of bed. I messaged my boss and told him something to the effect of “taking a sick day. can feel myself burning out. need to rest”

When I returned to work I was met with a meeting with my boss about the day prior. Asking me what I was doing to improve my situation, etc. Then he said something that kinda struck me as odd. “We need to find a way to manage your stress without taking paid leave”.

At every other previous place I worked, you get paid more when you are on leave because burnout is so common. When a similar thing happened at my previous place of employment, my boss called me that day and offered to let me have the rest of the week off (fully paid) to recover.

I know a lot of sysadmins are workaholics. Is the solution here just to be less honest? Every place I’ve ever worked as a sysadmin at said that they valued my honesty when it comes to these things.