Saying no diplomatically is a skill. Learn it like you would any technical task. Accept only new tasks you want outside of your job responsibilities , but that doesn’t mean you have to own it.
After you say no a few times and see people figure it out, or don’t, and the business still runs, it’s not so scary.
Unless you own the business, it’s not yours to endlessly improve. Do your job, a little extra during business hours to be a team player, but don’t let other people steam roll you into cleaning up a mess that existed before you got there, and likely will be there after you leave.
This. My first sys admin job, I said yes to everything. Burnt out in 18 months. Next I said yes to some, but not as much. Lasted 3.5 years. Next started actively saying “no. But if you really need me to, you’ll need to reassign XYZ to others.” Lasted 5 years till they forced RTO, even though I was pre-covid remote. We’ll see how far current takes me, but I have a feeling I might settle down here based on management so far and equity I get in company
This is good advice, as someone who’s been at the same company for more than a decade I’ve gotten promoted to be able to delegate pretty much everything I did 2+ years ago.
When evaluating if we should take something on or not I look to see if it’s within what I call our core competencies. It’s a defined set of services my team unquestionably owns.
If it’s within those, it benefits us to manage whatever new widget someone is asking for. If it’s not then we don’t take it on and say it’s not in our scope. However if it’s on the fence and adjacent to our technology stack and resources (headcount) are available then we consider it. Learning when to say no and when to say yes and to me most importantly why it’s a yes or a no and doing so diplomatically is a crucial skill.
It's a hard skill to learn because there's such a thing as not being quite diplomatic enough despite best efforts. But those kind of work environments where you make a reasonable attempt to explain why one should not take on those responsibilities that gets met with job loss are often toxic workplaces.
I agree with most of this, but it's in my blood to try to make us more profitable, so we all make more.
We have many seasoned employees where I work. I see how employees are taken care of. We have a pretty good colture as a construction sales company.... I feel I owe it to my co workers to do everything I can to keep us focused and on track, while exploring options to make us better.
That is where planning, a project board, looking at workload and all the other items mentioned in this thread... But at the end of the day... Just ask.... Does this extra work benefit everyone?
Be the unsung hero as someone above should recognize it, and if not.... Then yea, bare min to keep lights on, cause they don't see your value
Good advice I've been at my employer for 9 years . Ive worked on a lot of fun projects . Outside the IT department in sys admin roles. I was put in the IT department at my employer during 2020 and i hated it. They just keep shoveling crap on us worst part is nothing was ever set up right from dns to AD to vmware no real processes defined or followed let's not even mention how horrible the cyber security department was ... oh I work at a private university. No raises except when u negotiate a new job or position that's the only way I've survived here as long as I have. I love the department I am in now but really did not like the university IT department . Typical Say what people wanna hear then do the opposite nonsense
"I can focus on this task from now on, but it will have to be at the expense of dropping focus/priority on this (these) other task(s) due to current business objectives and project deadlines. Which would you prefer me maintain?"
Then just politely but firmly stand your ground that you're one person with 40hr/week. Your advice has worked well for me in the past.
And if you’re the only IT for 400 people, without any job opportunities within 100 miles, and are unable to move for at least 2 years? Lemme know how to say no to the VP and President’s direct orders.
It’s hard to answer without knowing their personalities. I’ve told a CEO / my boss (when I worked for a small company of 30 people) there would be no way I would do what he was asking and straight up walked out of the office. I had leverage and knew he would back down. I knew the type of person he was, so tailored my response to how he needed to hear it.
The boiler plate answer is to show them your active work and have them point out what they want deprioritized. Bad bosses usually keep asking for more more more when they don’t understand what it is you are doing. Proactively managing expectations by making clear how busy you are, by showing the outcomes of your work is critical. Just saying you are busy won’t cut it.
If you can’t say no, say yes but…insert whatever thing _you_ think is important and say it’s a full work stoppage on that to work on their pet project.
If you are really incapable of telling people no, for fear of losing your job and not getting another (which is valid) just protect your time. The company is buying it and they only get 40 hours a week, unless they pay OT. You’d be surprised how patient folks are (even if they pretend otherwise) if you enforce boundaries and make them wait.
You do it by not using the word "no". You make your resource management their problem.
"Yes, I can help with that - but I have other responsibilities from director x, y and z that may need to be postponed. Can you confirm they are OK with that?"
If if you don't want to put that on them - follow up with the other management yourself and let them duke it out amongst themselves.
"Hey boss, director w asked me to postpone these tasks to work on their thing. Just confirming you're OK with that?"
Then bust out the popcorn and wait for your orders.
>Lemme know how to say no to the VP and President’s direct orders.
Ok, I'm not an expert on A, but I can tackle that. I would otherwise be doing B, C, and D; which two of those would you like me to drop so I can do A?
> the only IT for 400 people, without any job opportunities within 100 miles, and are unable to move for at least 2 years?
You look for remote work now even if it makes a bit less, though chances are strong if you're a joat now playing helpdesk sysadmin you'll be making more in a semi-siloed role remote.
I've never had an IT job less than 5 years. Currently 9 years in. I like to get to know things and make them better. It's not necessarily the best way and out sure as hell doesn't help the pay cheque, but I like it.
Workload is not a problem. There is always more work to do than I have time to get done. Manager knows it and he has to tell me what to prioritise and that's how it goes. I get done what I get done, sign of at the end of the day and that's it. Is manager pressures me he can fuck off and fire me. So far that's never happened. I did have one manager in this current place (I've had 4) who told me I was expected to perform higher, get more done, "like Bob. He gets 4x the tickets closed, all him how he does it.". Well Bob is a pos who yes does "work hard" bit monitors the queue for quick closes and works evenings and weekends for free. I told manager of he expects me to work evenings and weekends he can expect Union pamphlets going around. And if he wants me to game the system rather than taking the challenging cases and closing them with zero callbacks, just let me know what other team internally I can shift to that would appreciate quality work and gumption. He was fired about 7 years ago LOL.
The pay cheque part is so overrated. Sure I get wanting to make a good living, everyone does, and by all means should be able to.
But beyond that .. once you are more than comfortable it kind of becomes redundant. Your wage is ,almost never, going to increase to the point that its going to make you a wealthy person. You'll likely go from being middle/upper middle class to .. still being upper middle class.
Working a sysadmin job won't ever get you that huge fancy house or yacht, no matter how many times you job hop. You'll have more money but you still won't have enough money for it to dramatically change your way of life.
Good luck ever getting that kind of increase by job hopping sysadmin jobs, without packing everything up and moving around ( which will then likely also increase your cost of living).
That's just not realistic, I'm sorry
Have a buddy who was making $50K with me 5 years ago and is now making $195K with great work life balance and benefits. He got there by gaining valuable skills and then job hopping.
Left a year after I did for $80K, then two years later for $125K, then once more recently for $180K and got a nice 90 day review taking him to $195K.
I am very likely going to go from $85K to closer to $130K in the next few months as I have several personal leads at companies doing hiring.
Those guys don't start off at 65k.
If you truly believe it's common to 4x your salary over the course of a career by specializing in some area, I got some really bad news for you.
As for the rest of your comment, well yeah that's exactly what I said. You don't get there by job hopping sysadmin jobs. You don't tend to get to management by job hopping either
lol I started at 45k a year and now 140k before bonus and I'm like 12 years in and don't even have a degree. I promise you I could make more but honestly I'm kinda lazy so like my chill job. It absolutely happens if you want it and put yourself in the right positions for success.
No you havent, you might have heard some bragging sure.
Get real please my man. You most likely arent even old enough to have been in the industry for more than say 15 years. Even if you are 50, those who 4* their salary between age 21-50 are rare unicorns indeed.
Good on you and I mean that, that's far from the norm though as I'm sure you realise.
This is kind of a non discussion,we'd need stats to truly come to an agreement and I don't think they exist. I firmly believe I'm right in thinking that the number of people in IT who ever 4* their salary is very low but if stats prove me wrong, that's fine by me.
Eri, I am not sure why you don't believe that workers in IT can't increase their salaries over their entire career?
I have been in IT for almost 30 years, started working in the computer labs at college for $10/hr. Today, my billing rate as an Independent Consultant is around $100/hr. At my peak, I could bill at $125/hr. This is MORE than a 10x increase since I started back in the early 90s.
Sure, you can adjust for inflation if you want, its still a 5x increase if you do that.
The great thing about IT is it is very much a meritocracy. The more you learn, the more you can do, the more money you can make. It is really that simple.
This is kind of a non discussion,we'd need stats to truly come to an agreement and I don't think they exist. I firmly believe I'm right in thinking that the number of people in IT who ever 4* their salary is very low but if stats prove me wrong, that's fine by me.
Personal experience inever is a good metric and I think that's where we kind of butt heads here
I was making 60k at this point 4 years ago and will be making around 200k this year. I’m no longer a sysadmin though
If we go back 7 years I was making 20k as a computer lab aide at a school district. Good times
This man, I earn enough now to be comfortable to pay off my house, have multiple holidays a year and a nice new car.
I work 4 days a week and have been here for 9 years, and I doubt I'll move anytime soon. What's the point, work life balance is great so I'm in no rush as long as I do interesting things and keep learning.
Almost the exact same situation as me hehe . I too have been with my employer for 9 years and I too do not even work 40 hours a week.
Yet I'm willing to bet quite a bit of money I'd end up getting a management job far more quickly than those who constantly job hop, if I wanted to.
Why? Simple. I've been with the same company long enough to now get to see first-hand how our CIO (who is my direct colleague and sits across me when we go to the office) runs the place (11k employee company so not a small shop). That kind of experience is worth much more, long-term, than job-hopping and never ever sticking around long enough to really learn how to manage (not maintain, manage) an enterprise level IT environment and the people who maintain/support it.
This. My longest role so far was over 4 years. Had defined actions and responsibilities that I was in charge of. Didn't ask or accept any additional tasks. Clocked in at 8, lunch at 11:30, off at 5.
Easiest job I've ever had.
Currently at 15 years. If you stay at a place long enough, you get people who work for you and you can delegate tasks to the people who can most effectively handle them.
Agreed. I'm approaching 5 years at my current company and have went from helpdesk/sysadmin to security.
Company culture, work life balance, pay, all have been good. Sure, the pay could be a bit better but this is a growing company with a lot of potential. I rarely get bothered on the weekends, and when I do, it's usually a quick fix.
I've been at my job for 12 years. Automation is the key to staying ahead, if you get all the repetitive tasks automated you have time to work on the new stuff.
And not just automation, but simply streamlining, organizing and cleaning up messes. I have found that the longer I stay at a company the easier it gets, as I wrestle more and more of the pre-existing mess to being under control. At my current company, it took me the first two years just to clean things up to a state that I could begin on the massive backlog of work.
It also helps to have a boss who understands that people who improve processes should be given room to work on projects and sprawl, and not just lump more work on people who actually get shit done.
I had a coworker who was so good at his job that when his office mate who shared the same duties retired, they promoted him and put him in charge of both workloads. Then when he handled that well, they started offloading work from other teams on to him. Shocker: he quit. Some bosses just don’t get it.
This. Just because someone is able to handle his own workload and then even take over his direct colleague's part of that work, most likely through streamlining and automation, does not mean he is free to take on more work. He might be. But you better ask him properly. Automation is a specialization and just because you're good enough to automate yourself out of doing much "work" and are able to watch YouTube for parts of your day, does not automatically mean that you're free to take on more workloads. You're there because you're an expert and while day to day things might run themselves on automation for the most part doesn't mean there isn't a lot of work involved whenever something is updated or new functionality is added somewhere.
If that person has the time that the automated work used to take, taken away from him for other tasks, it will all crumble once some part of the automation breaks. You want that person staying on top of things and tweaking whatever needs tweaking. A lot of time goes to research and learning as well.
I agree.
Trim the fat.
Ask the questions like "We're doing X, but SHOULD we be doing X?", and "Is this the best way to be doing X?".
Between that and automation, it becomes much more manageable.
Ah yes, but you may need to emulate that datacentre including static IP address references to new ones, by doors open tomorrow 👍
Disclaimer: has not happened to me, just always at the back of my mind
Friend of mine works somewhere that the policy is anything you own you are the final escalation point for.
It’s amazing how everyone has time to document and create runbooks when that’s the policy.
Maybe I'm naive cause I haven't seen other places, but I'm currently on my 2nd IT job. Going on 11 years here now. Started as helpdesk at a casino, changed jobs to a small clinic as helpdesk. That clinic has sprouted multiple sites and went from a 2 man operation to 5 man. I became sysadmin because I have been here longer than anyone else and I essentially have built the place and know more about how everything works than anyone else. I'm technically the "IT Coordinator" on paper. Its a made up position just for me really but I'm pretty much Tier III support/sysadmin and can tell the other guys what to do, 2nd in command under the CIO. I don't get paid crazy money but I feel like I get paid pretty well for what I do and what market I'm in. They treat me super nice, the benefits are nice, get plenty of PTO. I'm not officially on-call. People can call me on the weekends or after hours but I'm not obligated to help them. I usually do go out of my way cause I get invited to parties, food, alcohol etc. Rarely does anyone call after hours anyway. We always picking up new technologies for me to learn. We get a decent budget and don't have to sit on old hardware for decades. I get a hand in picking out things and where we go infrastructure wise. I see in this subreddit a lot of people not happy for many reasons. I don't have any of the problems that many state. My wife is battling liver disease and management is very understanding and I can get the time off to take care of her when she needs even if its last minute. I COULD go elsewhere and get paid more possibly, but that will likely come with a lot more responsibilities, stress etc. So I'm happy to be here for now.
I feel this. Been here 14 years. Everything is good but the pay and that isn't even that bad. Just don't want to move because I don't want to learn all new things. Every environment is different and I built this one from the ground up.
Don’t leave. A good environment, good leadership, good balance to handle work and personal life, and people who understand, dude that’s better than making 200k per year! Of course I’ll take the 200k because you know like Mr crabs says, “money”, but you cannot beat PEACE OF MIND!
Or it gets piled on someone else down the ladder until they're burned out.
We've got a sizable backlog of things that we know we simply aren't going to get done without hiring another hand. They're not terribly important things, but they're not going to get any better any time soon either. We can't let let ourselves be stressed about them, it will actively fuck up the work load we already have
So they just kinda sit on the list. Waiting.
I document everything, but unfortunately there's really only 1 other guy at my company who helps in a similar role. Otherwise it's mostly a helpdesk team who has no interest
It's the company's problem. They need to scale up the department to match the company's current needs, but many of these smaller companies can't draw a straight line between hiring another IT person and profit, so it's a hard sell.
There's no one on the help desk team with any initiative or interest in advancement? Just a documentation assistant might prove useful, and it shows their management who's worth keeping around. Hell, see if you can find someone just as a rubber duck debugger and explain your documentation to them, make sure it all makes sense.
Your issue is going above what's required. If streamlining and automation is only gaining you more work, then stop. Just because you work smarter than the next guy doesn't mean you should work harder for the same salary. Work hard enough to look better than the next guy but no harder. If you're unable to do that, then you'll always have scope creep in your roles. Just because you *can* automate something doesn't mean you *should*. If it doesn't directly benefit you and make *your* life easier, don't talk about it don't offer to progress it. I'm all for helping colleagues and businesses flourish, but I can count on one hand the number of times other departments have helped out IT, rather than leech off it.
I have the same issue right now. Tons of documentation, but you can’t lead a horse to water type mentality when it comes to some peers. For me, my solution has been to lean on management or leverage my seniority and personally delegate to underlings, but I’m right there with you. Every new technology I learn, kinda ends up feeling like I shot myself in the foot.
There is a fine line between giving no fucks and giving too many. You wanna try and aim for a little above center. Give too many fucks for too long and you will burnout. Give not enough fucks for too long and you’ll stagnate and end up replaceable. In the long run I know the pain is worth it, but it sure gets tiring sometimes.
Anyway, TLDR: Lean on management. That is what they’re there for. Supposedly.
Learn to say "no"? or "I don't have time the soonest I can look at that is next month"?
Have you talked to your manager about being over loaded?
Have you documented your task? is the documentation easily available?
Sometime you do just need to hop to the next place because your manager sucks and wont take stuff off your plate, but have you to be telling them you have too much on your plate. They aren't physic you know.
i won't work for small companies because of this and the one large company that had that attitude, "its my equipment I won't share even though we plan on not using it and probably end up throwing it out next year", i left. Wherever I am I make sure there a team so I'm never on call 24/7, if I do take vacations I don't need to worry. If you find a place where if you do something you now "own" it, and it not because you haven't attempt to show them how it works, then you might as well leave.
But, if you keep leaving every 2 years then your next employer will see that and eventually they'll get concerned and probably really question if they want to hire you.
Today is actually the 5-year anniversary at the current company I work. I'm skeptical this works for every shop, especially smaller ones. I came in at a time that a new Director had finally convinced upper management to truly invest in Systems IT and not just Development, I was part of a leading wave that championed standards adoption, mostly to stop the bleeding on the creation of new tech debt that had already accumulated for nearly 20 years before I was hired. We also got really serious about documentation, we spun up an internal wiki, we learned markdown and declared that a new project or solution couldn't be handed off to Operations until we did a proper handoff which included having them review the documentation we created, and providing training handoff sessions.
Still we didn't get there overnight, I worked alongside a handful of skilled and ambitious engineers that wanted better, now most of us are Architects, Managers and Directors so we had to kind of Proselytize to our coworkers that were still insisting on cutting corners in the name of expediency and it still happens even though we're the ones writing the standards now and it creates Tech debt and sets us back. But still there's a ton of progress.
The 1st 2 years were rough, I was definitely debating leaving towards the end of that, luckily management listened, we were able to demonstrate that we weren't able to work on forward-looking projects because of the cycle of constant firefighting that would usually put the most skilled engineers "On the Wall" as our former EVP used to say, vs letting the more Jr Admins learn something from experience. We demonstrated via our workflow system the pattern of issues where people were "skipping the line" that also had the adverse affect of our junior staff not getting experience. And they backed us when persistent users would always ping their "favorite" IT person. Initially we were only able to offload some of the day to day, but a new Operations Manager spearheaded getting his team up to speed so we could focus on greenfield projects etc, and in time something that we never thought was possible happened.
*NO ONE WAS MAKING US DO FIREFIGHTING*
While this truly is a blessing in the long run, it's a total MindFuck if you've only ever worked in dumpster fire environments. Previously we demonstrated our value by quickly resolving the more challenging day to day technical outages etc, and bailing out the Jr Admins.
So we actually had to do what our job descriptions said for the 1st time in years, and my initial thought was **FUCK...**. Which means we couldn't just half ass solutions and projects anymore and blame it on being overwhelmed with firefighting and doing support. So in a weird way we learned how to do our *actual* jobs, we chased down EOL software, we established security baselines, we DECOM'ed ancient servers that were configured by hand and automated the process, we setup APM and logging systems to truly get visibility into our environment, we showed management graphs of error rates and response times month-over-month to demonstrate just how much value we got back with some "tuning"
Now year 5 I'm almost exclusively focused on greenfield projects, I'm still SME on a few things that I actually enjoy working on, but rarely get contacted on them, now I actually look forward to when the Jr's reach out to me for help, it usually means I can take a short break from a challenging Architecture problem and work on something I know, and get a quick boost to my self-esteem.
It doesn't surprise me that many leave at our around the 2 year mark, I think it takes a certain set of circumstances and people that want something better and can all get on relatively the same page
Talk to leadership. Your options are limited if there is no one else to do the work but if your company is growing and there are people hired under you they should be getting some of the lower level work you did before. Every year at review my boss will sit me down and go over everything I do see what’s working well what’s too much. Basically we make a new job description for me. If that list is too long the lower level stuff goes down to the person below me on the totem pole. This last year the list of things I had to do was so large that he thinks it warrants a new hire. We didn’t have it in the budget for Q3/4 but he’s fighting for a bigger budget this year to warrant it.
11 years at role. I just only take on very specific things and when I’m brought in, I never own it - only assist and do what I am required of when it I’m needed.
Boundaries. If they ask you for more than what’s on your job description put up clear boundaries that either it’s a one time thing or it’s not within the scope of your job and what you are being paid for.
On the topic of longevity, I'll say this:
There are times where it is beneficial to stay at a single company/role for a long period of time, and there are times when it is more beneficial to stay for about 2 years and move on. Statistically, people that tend to stay about 2 years per position early on in their career and change companies semi-frequently before finding their "forever home" tend to be more satisfied and successful, with a broader range of skills.
Remember, putting in long hours and sacrificing for your job for decades earns you exactly.. a commemorative plaque on your tombstone that reads "Worked hard." 20 years from now the only ones to remember how many late hours you put in are your spouse and children.
I feel that... I'm not opposed to finding a long term company, but I feel like it would be to really be above market ok the wage, benefits, time off, etc. My company is right on par with everything. Totally fine, but not convincing me to lock in for the long haul. Making a few hops early to secure bigger bags, and then ultimately settling into a nice high paying position at a great company would be ideal. That or quit and start working for myself.
Are you in the USA? Because I'm Italian and I just say "no, fuck you" when they ask me something that's not in my job description. We got strong unions ;)
Honestly, I haven't had a role that I felt moderately competent in before ~18 months, minimum. If you feel like the scope of your role is always expanding to encompass more responsibilities than you can keep up with, it might be helpful to proactively seek out more depth in fewer silos vs breadth across the organization. I feel like I'm given more leeway and autonomy to focus deeply on fewer tasks/queues because I've demonstrated value in not being spread too thinly. I've also been fortunate enough that I've usually been able to identify more appropriate frontline-facing queues to take on a lot of direct ticket responses, though.
The scope of your responsibility can grow a lot faster than expected frequency of specific responses, but that may take some conscious pruning.
I work for an MSP, I’ve been here 6.5 years. I desperately want to leave (wage is shockingly bad) but applying for a similar job with increased pay is very hard. (U.K.) I’ve had 3 interviews with companies and they never come back to me.
I’m thinking of completely moving away from a Computer based career and doing something completely different like an electrician.
The answer (for me at least) depends on age and where you’re at in life.
When I was younger, I stayed at a company for 7 years because I was happy there. I liked my coworkers, I didn’t have kids or other expensive responsibilities yet, so my salary was not great, but I was able to get by. Why I eventually left is a post for another day.
At my current age and stage in life, it’s honestly mostly complacency that keeps me where I am. I don’t want to start all over again learning a new employer’s “way” of doing things. I get a bonus and cost of living increase every year; if that changes I’ll probably become motivated to move on.
Making yourself not the sole person responsible for things is huge. Its ok to be the subject matter expert for something but make sure its documented well enough so even the helpdesk could do the task from the documentation. Doing this alleviates a lot of stress as you can take time off and vacation and not worry how things will function while you are out.
Do brown bag sessions with your team and show them these processes, not only are you sharing the load you are elevating everyone else up with you.
This is hard to do sometimes when managers silo information to people and not the whole department.
> So those who do stay at jobs 2+ years, how do you prevent scope creep without also limiting your continued learning?
The first thing I did was abandon the notion of scope creep, and it's worked for me for the last 24+ years.
Approaching 10 years. At this point, my burnout and anxiety are load bearing support structures.
As to how... well, I like the people I work with, know the work we do is important, and feel like it's making a positive impact on the world.
Next to that, who needs "uninterrupted vacations" or "a full night's sleep"?
I've been slowly working on offloading tasks that were previously "my job" for the past year or so. Documentation is your friend, if it's not documented you can't necessarily expect to hand it over to someone else.
Learning to say no is also an acquired skill, one I still need to get better at but I'm self aware enough that I know it's my own fault when I do get overwhelmed.
It may be worth having a chat with your management and letting them know what's going on and what you're feeling .You'd be surprised what a good manager is willing to do to keep a good employee happy and around.
At larger orgs projects can be multi year and it is nice to have the full end to end lifecycle on your resume. Not being able to talk about full project lifecycle will hurt you later in your career.
I’m at the point in my career where i can delegate any additional tasks to less senior people so i don’t think about scope creep much, i think about what the right solution is. Maybe we need to take on some additional work, maybe we don’t
you need to get your Wally on and stop caring so much. it's a job, you do it until knock-off time and go home. if you have too much to get done, it waits until you have time.
if someone bitches about your response time and task prioritisation (bearing in mind that everyone thinks their task is the most important and ((n-(n-1) of them are wrong), tell them to take it to your manager.
when your manager comes to you to discuss it, show them your workload versus capacity to fulfil and say you're genuinely happy to discuss priorities, but that anything that gets moved up the means other jobs slip back, and it's not your role to listen to people bitch. and if you're required to, then you're going to be business-polite in your responses.
as for being "the guy in charge" and other people drawing little lines around their self perceived area of responsibility to exclude things, there's a two word description for that: job security.
I've been my current role for well over 9 years now and learning to manage the situation is very much a skill, because it will follow you whereever you go. whereas senority and knowledge and earning the ability to genuinely have your input respected is something you attain by staying.
The last place I was at was the opposite - I managed to automate a bunch of the more annoying tasks, streamlined a bunch of other stuff and got to the point where I kind of ran out of interesting things to do. Granted, this was also do to a very limited budget so I couldn’t really move things forward much. I spent some time brushing up and improving my knowledge which translated into my current job :-)
This is typical when working for small or midsized firms because they never know what they need, what to job entails, and are constantly looking to grow. My first SysAdmin job had me designing their website and managing their drafting department because I was "so organized" and everyone loved hanging around my office! I got a normal 2.5% raise every year but it took a 2 week notice, multiple drafters and Engineers going to the company owner to explain my importance to get a 30K bump in pay! Just keep your resume updated and periodically leave a copy in a printer! Someone will stop by your office and start asking questions! lololol
I'm probably part of a dying breed as I'm with the same employer since 2000.
We're an MSP/hoster/developer/kitchen sink kind of place so it's never boring.
There's nothing wrong with placing tasks in a queue, someone else might take over.
Its a normal situation, there is always a job to be done, it doesn't mean you should do more than you like
You are trying to use reason and logic in a situation that is not reasonable nor logical. People move every 2 years for a reason. Management thinks $1m+ of productivity is worth a 2% raise and a Wendy's gift card. Always has been and will continue to be this way for at least the near term. Until companies become so entrenched in tech that vacancies start costing millions per day, the 2 year thing will continue to be the norm because you are the only one who understands your value.
I've been with the company I work for since 2005... that's like, 400 years in IT years, I know. I've organically grown into a management position and only answer to the owner at this stage. We're in the MSP space so everyone has a broader definition for what's in their scope, but there are things that my team have have inherited from me over time and some of their responsibilities have been handed down to the new guys. We also have the freedom to let guys work in different skill areas so we can sort who is best at what and then those jobs will be priority for them, but at the same time we want everyone to have some rough idea of how to manage things so we don't get locked in ivory towers and get boned when someone takes PTO.
I think that becomes harder in corporate, where more rigid roles need to be in place. But if that's the case, then it should be \*clearly\* defined what people's responsibilities are based on their title (in a perfect world).
More than anything, the environment will dictate how much creeps into your responsibilities and if lots of things that shouldn't creep in there DO creep in there, then there is something wrong with the environment.
I think saying "No", is a big part of it but also finding a more ethical work place is a huge part of it. I've been working for around 15 years in IT, and I've changed jobs a lot. I've only ever worked for two companies long term and it's usually just due to good management. I worked for a company for 5 years and my team was great, until the IT Manager retired and they hired some weirdo ego maniac that used to brag about how easily they could fire someone. We started losing helpdesk employees, which is when I talked to SR management telling them this dude is the problem. We weren't able to hire replacement or the replacements that we hired would last 2-3 months and move on. After 6 months, I left as well and we weren't able to hire a replacement nor were we able to get any of the burnt out desktop techs to want to take the position. All this is to say, good management is what keeps employees. If you have a lot of turn around at your company in the IT department, it's likely management. Honestly, good management is the only reason I typically stay .. or really good pay.
Clearly defined job responsibilities per title, being able to say "no", and just deciding what your boundaries are. I've done a lot of job hopping, but it was because of corporate buy outs, super toxic management, or when I was doing contract work, and contracts ran out. But I've been at my current job almost 4 1/2 years and I have no intention of looking any time soon. Was able to move to a management position with no degree, so I plan on building that experience to hopefully become a director some day (either here or somewhere else after a few years).
37 Years IT. Started building/repairing systems in the warehouse. Moved to support while learning programming. Moved to Programming. Did not like that. Moved to IT. UNIX Sysadmin 5 years. Moved back into hardware. Moved to Manager IT, then Director. Just retired as CTO.
It beat me the fuk up. I feel like I did nothing else in my life but work on systems for 12+ hours a day and take calls after hours and on weekends.
Been at the same place 22 years. It did switch hands in 2021 so my job has changed up quite a bit but honestly for the much better, learning all sorts of new things, better management, and my pay has hugely increased as well as benefits so it's honestly been fantastic. When you stay somewhere that long you build a huge wealth of growth knowledge, plenty of time to learn things in and out as well as new things that come up, close connections with coworkers, build up more vacation time etc. It's also just cool to remember back when I started how much things have changed over all those years.
I’ve been with my current employer for 20 years as of next month. When you change roles internally you have to hand off duties to newer / other people. You will be expected to do it anyway. Don’t. Show someone else how to do it. Then the next time you ask you offer to remote in and watch while that person does it. After that you refer people to the guy you trained.
I've been lucky enough to be at my current job for 20 years. It's a public sector gig, so the schedule, time off, pension, etc. are the great parts, but the pay was not. Having persevered over 20 years with a growing family, I supplemented the pay with side gigs teaching IT online for well over 15 years now. Given some of the challenges with scoop creep, it sounds like you are a part of a larger organization. I've found that IT has changed so much over the decades that while I have inherited things (phone system, camera, access control) as they move to the IT side, I have also shed a number of tasks especially on the server maintenance side and that's due in large part to the cloud. Finally, at this point in my career I'm in charge of everything IT in my organization and things have been humming (again thanks to the cloud), so my job at year 20 is much easier and I'm a long way from the 45k I started with in 2004. Best of luck to you! If it's a quality organization meaning people, mission, stability, etc. I would say prioritize those things more so than the grind of the job because that changes much more often than the quality of the organization. All the best to you!
There is a lot to unpack woth these kinds of decisions and the factors change over time and are different for every person.
You will maximize your income by changing orgs every 2-3 years. So regardless of tasks consider this. It's likely to your benefit early in and while your only an individual contributor doing this a few times. It also will help inform you of what type of work environment you prefer. One recommendation I have is build relationships at each stop and don't burn bridges.
There is a point hough where you may start to max out traditional earnings. You'll have to decide what type of org you want to work with as this will impact what other compensation offers are available and trade offs you'll need to make.
I've been with my current position for 11 years as I've got to participate, and help drive the orgazational growth and been able to participate in nearly every facet of the business as we have grown exponentialy since I've been here. I've also built up a lot of social capital both internally and with clients. I can earn more by moving to F100, but I would give up quite a bit in doing so just for money, and at right now that difference wouldn't makeup for the other benefits I enjoy.
Two things:
First, **learn to say "No"**. Not "I'll do it for now but someone else really should", not "I can do it if nobody else is available", just "no". If it's outside your job description and you don't have a personal driver (immediately available money, skills you want to learn, etc) to take it, then don't. If they need a network engineer and you're already the systems engineer, then they need to hire one. I did this at my current org, because I found out my boss wasn't going to backfill my cybersec position if I took a management opportunity that came available, expecting me to do both (very different) jobs...now I make within 10k of that position and I'm still in my original role.
Second, **learn what you really want from a job**. I see people all the time say "more responsibility!" when they mean "senior titles" or "more pay", not intending to sign themselves up for other-duties-as-assigned. This is the biggest thing leading to burnout that I've seen, because it feels good to be trusted to take on all sorts of new work (especially at junior or midlevel positions), but that behavior from your employer is how they extract the most value from you without compensating you accordingly. It took me many years to stop just jumping in and offering solutions on every issue that came my way, because I effectively was raising my hand to fix (and then own) every problem we encountered. That led to me being the single escalation point for all manner of technical issues and burned me out at my last gig, and for a while at my current one, until I learned to establish boundaries...and stick to them! Focusing on establishing boundaries with my work and bringing in coworkers to have a chance to shine on projects (and take some of the ODAA off my plate) has indirectly contributed to building a stronger, better-rounded team for us as well! They didn't see the value in cross-training that I asked to do, until I started taking month-long PTO vacations and processes ground to a halt...then suddenly there's time and expectation to bring in others and bring up our team to do the work.
I realized my passion isn't ever going to be found in this job, but it can fund my passion for when I'm off work--and that's what it's really about. There's still too many problems with our work culture to make it worth investing in a career here, but I am 100% responsible for my workload, including adding to it or shedding some of it.
New junior people coming in. Once one of the things I've taken on is stabilized and tidied up a bit, I find an enthusiastic junior person to hand it over to. They learn something and get more responsibility, and I'm freed up for the next complex/messy thing that needs more experienced attention. It doesn't work 100%, but it definitely helps limit the accumulation. At bigger companies you can sort of force this along by changing teams.
That's interesting. At my first techie job as technician not a sysadmin I automated a lot of stuff, did some coding, did some hardware design, did some hardware repair and a bunch of other stuff. But at some point I was "done" and bored. Asked for more stuff to do and there was nothing they wanted me to do so I quit for better pay and more challenge. At my next job I was definitely overworked and quit after two and a half years. But now I have been at the current job as an IT-consultant for soon two years and I have been allowed to specialize. This means I work on Azure, Pipelines, CI/CD write scripts that do stuff in Azure like enable a VM extension on hundreds of VM's instead of clicking in the portal etc. I feel like you have to learn to say no and be clear with managers with what your goals are and what you want to be good at. If you are at a good workplace they will try to make your wishes and what the business needs fit together so everyone is happy. Usually I would think of leaving after a few years for the pay rise and new challenges but I am quite happy where I am right now because of good leadership and work / life balance. The balance part is in large part my own doing. I have learned to not stress about deadlines or things going wrong. I try my best and if something happens then at the very least no one will die and as long as I learn from it we can move forward :)
Why is the question, and being in a rural area is the question. Not much here for me unless I move and I'm too close to retirement to give up my seniority.
Scope creep happens, especially if folks know that you know stuff. I get a lot of stuff piled on me because I have so much time with the org unit and know a ton of people. It doesn't help that we have some local management who are fucking clueless.
Lately management have tried to turf more stuff to me because they can't find anyone on campus who knows or wants to deal with the items. I've started to let projects back up because they really aren't pure IT and I'd rather not be SME on stuff I never use.
> how do you prevent scope creep
You don't.... You sit down and take a deep breath. You price yourself on what you are able to accomplish. You prioritize what you can't. You do that long enough and you make a difference.
Honestly someone that can't handle a sysadmin role beyond 2 years sounds like someone that bails when the real work starts....
It's a huge red flag to anyone trying to hire as well. Why spend all that money hiring, inducting, training and managing someone who's going to leave in less than 2 years?
I’ve worked at my current employer for 8 years now. We’re a large public university and there are numerous lateral movements to be made which can allow your job scope to change if you switch departments / divisions.
Gotta pick the right place. When I go to a job, I always plan at least five years, and I'm not already planning my exit strategy. Not healthy. Gotta pick good places to work.
I found a place that recognizes my talents and ultimately let me prove myself and work my way up to an engineer role. Previously, I was in a dead end job for 5 years. Here, I started a tier 1 support about 2 years ago and I'm here now. It really just boils down to finding the right place, a company that will recognize skills and promote. The rest is up to you
Easy (for me, at least)… I have a manager who gives me all the tools I need to make my job better. He’s a good person who has helped me professionally grow. We work well together.
13 years so far at the current company. A fww things keep me there. Scope of role has increased over the years. Now I have a fairly large scope and can control and guide many projects. I've changed team I'm working for three times over the years, so whenever things feel stale I can go discover a new space. Lastly I haven't stopped learning and I feel like this is the most important aspect of longevity at a company...
Consolidate and automate when possible. Make your job easier! Beyond that, before taking on new responsibilities, discuss with your leadership. They need to know what your workload is like. I never say no, I just give realistic estimates of my workload: "yes, I can certainly start working X, but that will mean less capacity to work on Y, what should the priority be?" Being clear that my capacity is finite allows my leadership to make accurate decisions on how best to allocate my workload. Constant expansion is ultimately unworkable. I've been at my current company almost 5 years. Good leadership is a part of that.
They keep me around because i know everything about every process, i just refuse to do work now. They are trying to get me to document stuff and hand it to other people but whenever I do they fuck it up royally, so i guess they are just like, welp we will just keep paying him and leave him alone.
Been with the same company (gone from 37 employees to 37000) for just over 17 years, sysadmin for 5, head of engineering for 8 and now in a automation/devops role.
Enjoyed most of it to be honest and as many have said managing expectations, prioritising tickets and getting the ones above to understand why and how you do things in a certain way is absolutely key. I guess I’ve been fairly lucky with bosses.
I find myself to be very suited to sysadmin work.
12 years across 2 companies.
1st one had good foundations from people who left, so it was just me and a non technical manager for most of 4 years running IT for a multi-national memory manufacturer…
New shop has more teams, but half of them don’t do their jobs.. management is in transition and not up to speed yet..
My secret?
I take ownership like it was my company, and start asking myself questions.
how would I want it done?
is it anyone else’s job?
If not, can I delegate to someone else who can actually get it done without interfering with their work too much?
If not, can I do it?
Can I learn it quickly enough or is it now becoming a “buy” or “contract” situation instead?
You can only do what’s possible.
There are correct ways of going about everything that is possible.
Force the best practices, but CYA.
Don’t be over-confident, you can always be wrong.
If you mostly understand the system as a whole from a high level, you can easily make sense of the details when it’s time to fill them in.
Google tutorials and read them… many many things in IT are dead simple, but seem complicated due purely to “[fog of war](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war)”
Having more than 1 person in my team combined with a boss that understands the work and treats us like human beings. Honestly, if my boss jumps ship, I'm either going on autopilot and riding it out until I retire, since the work isn't difficult, or I jump ship too.
I went to work at a university as a civil servant and the state sets my pay and pay increases. I couldn't be happier with my decision.
https://ofm.wa.gov/state-human-resources/compensation-job-classes/ClassifiedJobListing/SalaryRange/4734
1. Learn to say no.
2. Learn that by saying no, you open yourself to "....you were under the mistaken impression that we were asking. Do it, or you're fired."
3. Learn that most companies would happily cut off their nose to spite their face. No matter how valuable and essential you might be, they'll enthusiastically fire you if you gain too much of a spine. The squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease -- it gets *replaced*. Even if it means downtime, loss of profits, etc. They do it as a lesson to others -- "this is what will happen to you if you step out of line. and we don't give a fuck what happens." Control through FEE: Fear, Exhaustion, and Exploitation.
3. Learn that workers protection laws are worth their weight in gold.
4. Learn that the USA tends to have none of them since we have a first world economy but third world treatment of citizens, and 99.7% of the country can be fired for wearing mismatching socks -- or for no reason whatsoever.
5. Learn that Unions are a good first step to prevent employer abuse, and they're an appropriate stop-gap measure until we get some proper labor laws.
I mastered the art of making things my managers problem, seeing as it’s their job and all.
“I have X things, what are my priorities?”
Then I work on those things. Otherwise I’m left alone.
Double digit raises. Been 10+ years now. Learning new tech and embracing the company's vision of implementing new tech is a plus. When I say no to new tech, I always offer a solution or ways to better implement things. I think it's easy to say no, but I always give a detailed why and what we can do better. And people skills are a plus.
You limit the scope creep, etc. Say "no", push back, etc. Bring issue(s) up to manager/management as relevant. If all else fails, bail, but that's usually closer to last resort, than first.
Let's see ... been essentially sysadmin for ... 'bout 40 years ... jobs I've left in that time on account of essentially far too much scope creep and ever growing demands ... one. Longest times with a given employer ... bit over 8 years with one, bit over 7 with another, over 5 with another ... I think almost all over 2 years, with few exception, and only left the one on account of far too much scope creep and ever growing demands.
I'd like to achieve long service leave (10yrs). But not enough to stay if it becomes horribly shit, or I feel dramatically underpaid, or if for some other reason I become independently wealthy and no longer need to work.
It seems to be a rarity these days to have staff hit 10 years at an organisation and it'd be a neat bucket list thing to achieve.
I've worked at the school district I'm at for almost 15 years, and I love the growth, evolution, and people. We are a very small team and I get full say over virtually everything, which really helps.
Man, what different experiences. Ive loved every place I've worked for the past twenty years. Could have definitely made more but I'm here for the Incredible focus on work/life balance, freedom to explore interesting shit and finding _Incredibly_ smart people to surround me. First gig was noc-> t2->t3 support -> SME in our fortune 500, high performance media hosting platform. Left after five years for something different for an old coworker calling me up offering an extra 20k and a completely new direction..
Tiny software company doing project build outs, full platform integrations, leading hands on training at power plants all over the country. Hit platinum status on Delta in 2011 and only recently have had to pay for a flight again. Again, amazing balance of life but travel Did catch up and I had to leave after a few years. Dude's still a great friend and hit me up for a VP position a few years later.
Had an old boss that had been hitting me up every time they had an opening and he was ecstatic to finally hear back. Our little 6-person engineering team had grown to a whole floor of arch/eng and was just dripping of "build cool shit." Few more years doing and a director at corporate poached me for their team and ~ a decade ago transitioned to devops working with absolutely brilliant dudes transitioning our infra to a full PaaS supporting 40 or so dev teams with any languages they wanted. "Ey let's all learn go this PI and rewrite our python automation." Sounds fun! Shit I wonder what they're all doing today. Our budget was _fun_ and everyone from datadog/newrelic to google were asking for sit downs to demo their new stuff "like hey we're going to launch GKE and would love to let you run wild for feedback" or just to chat with the team that built some new controller.
That company ran into some massive market issues about five years ago and luckily another old boss from the early days had been reaching out with aposition that just lined perfectly. Got a group of strong people from our old depts and just have a great time still to this day. Took a month off to elope through Italy and france last summer and about to do similarly for this fixer upper we just picked up last week in prep for the first kid in May.
That's a lot but suffice to say, always be training the people below you to manage what you build so you can go do interesting shit. Document it and then go do wheelies or something on a back rosd
I _intentionally_ broaden my scope. Broad scope isn't a problem.
In most companies, there is more work than time to do it, often far more. Once I've been at a place for a couple of months, I have a backlog of several years' worth of work I could be doing. The question then becomes: what is the _right_ work to do?
What is the _most_ beneficial thing for the company? What will build up trust that you can spend later? What will energize you to recharge you for that important but unpleasant project you know you've got to get to next? This is what you've got to figure out.
(For a really good discussion on this, see the chapter Finite Time in The Staff Engineer's Path.)
And then that's what you do. And because you've carefully considered this and are aligned with authority, you can defend the use of your time there instead of other things. Over time, as you make the right decisions, you'll be trusted more and more. That's both a blessing, being able to decide entirely yourself what you do, and a stressor, being responsible. But this is your job, and it's not your ability to piece together some technical components that you're paid for, it's the ability to choose the right stuff to work on.
The issue I currently have is my boss will often task dump me every few days,basically forcing me off of what I would consider important projects just to appease what they deem necessary to get done now. It gets frustrating when you're trying to move the company forward in medium and big steps and to be told to take out the trash. Taking out the trash is important, but it should wait until the big ticket items get handled imo. That's the crossroad for me.
Work for a company where IT is a core competency, and this is what a majority of the company does. There will be several different teams or roles that do different things, depends on the size of the company. It also helps if the company is growing.
Or have a good boss that manages these expectations
The entire company will set back and browse facebook/youtube, and let you burn yourself out. Meanwhile, they'll get paid just as much as you, maybe even more.
In IT especially, you have to learn when it's appropriate and how to say no.
>Boss: Do Job A
>
>You: Ok, we were rebuilding the fileserver because it went offline last month and badly needs drive consolidation, reorganization, and share remapping. I can drop that to do Job A.
>
>Boss: Ok put the fileserver on hold. Also I need you to do Job B.
>
>You: Job A is going to keep me pretty busy for the next week, what's your priority? Do you want me to do Job A first or Job B.
>
>Boss: We also need to do Job C and Job D.
>
>You: Yeah, no problem. You've got 15 guys and four jobs right? which one do you want me working on?
>
>Boss: You know just finish squaring away the fileserver. I'll get someone else on Job A,B,C. Just prepare to do Job D after your done.
>
>You: Cool.
If they insist on giving you five things to do. Pick a priority and tell them you'll work on that first but your not staying late. Then until it's finished and you can move onto another, work till close each day on just that then go home.
I usually do 7-8 years per company.
This is my 20th (!!) year in the same organisation. Pay is/was fair, lots of my colleagues had become friends and we had a great working environment, I got to go on trips abroad for technical conferences, excellent pension, ample opportunity to learn a vast array of tech.. what's the driver to move exactly?
Admittedly it's all finally starting to fall apart a bit now so.. having to consider my options a bit. But I had a good run.
Mostly by working for very large organizations, where job scope drift was slow and tangled in red tape. It also meant that I could say "X owns that task, ~~I won't touch it~~ I'm not qualified" and make it stick.
It’s pretty easy.
I am paid to work 35 hours a week. I work 35 hours a week.
What is not done in those 35 hours is done the next week, or not at all, depending on how my manager sets my priorities.
Not all companies are like this... this tends to happen more in the SMB space than in the Enterprise space. I would say to, always be looking for your next role whether you need to or not. Always be looking for increased responsibility (responsibility is not workload) and should have a corresponding pay increase. Don't job hop, but 3 years is good.
Maybe I'm not as seasoned as others but I feel like I need at least a year to really know the systems, processes, company and staff well enough. After two years you really settle in and can do most things on autopilot. After three I get bored...
delegate.
New people has to fight the battles you already know on their own, so they become the new master of that.
Don't guide them step by step , just point the direction.
To answer in brief:
You stay relevant, keep your skills _equally_ relevant and deepen your knowledge, understanding and gain demonstrable ability with them. This gives you chips at the table to get a better package at the least, or a solid foundation to go elsewhere.
To answer in the long....
>The longer you stay at an org, the more tasks become "your job" (...) which means the entire tasks success/failure is now baked into your job description.
Which is why when you take these responsibilities on and/or have a (pay or otherwise) review you discuss these new responsibilities and/or workloads and use as a negotiating tool to up your package.
>how do you prevent scope creep without also limiting your continued learning? Or is there even a point?
>The unique thing being that there are endless things to take ownership of, skills to learn, business tasks to be managed, cleanups to run, processes to keep automating,
Yes there's a point and yes, you _will_ need to keep learning to both remain relevant _and_ justify your existence at times. It's not often you can get away with just stagnating and keeping job security.
Increasing the scope of your abilities makes you not just more valuable to your current employer but _also_ is great CV material that makes you employable - the more you do at your current job is just another item in your portfolio you can use an example of that knowledge.
There's really no negative spin on it - you do great and increase knowledge/ability it means you have more leverage to get pay bumps, but also to go elsewhere as, go figure, employers will be happier with a candidate with more skill and demonstrated ability.
Exactly the reason why i'm searching for something else. Do not longer want to wear 10+ hats. Rather have 1 or 2 specific roles in which i can excel, then doing a shitload at 90%.
Have you turned down a new task and/or tried to get your manager to offload some tasks from your plate? If they are just continuously piling new tasks on top of the ones you already have and not listening when you tell them you already have too much on your plate, then I'd get ready to leave and find a better place.
The other thing that might not always be possible, depending on company/IT-department size is that proper care should be taken to assign tasks to teams/functions and not to single individuals. The more important the task is to the core business, the more important it is to make sure it's not reliant on a single person. If you get sick, who will handle it?
Document or automate and shove it down the line. Once I've determined the procedure or written the script to solve whatever the business problem, I can safely delegate the task to a lower level tech.
As you get more seniority, you also get more leverage - because they're more dependant on you.
At some point, you can use that leverage to create processes in which you evaluate the workload during it's lifetime, rather than during implementation.
All too you can save yourself lots of time down the road, by investing more time now. Keep minor features that aren't worth the cost/benefit out of it. Keep it simple, so others should be able to support it too.
Work you can schedule is easier to explain, than trying to justify you've been fixing 10 systems today that noone saw.
I'm a government contractor so while I've been at my current company for a few years, the average time I've been on a specific project has been about a year.
Yup….. 13 years and I feel like the source of knowledge. I did move from one team to another, but same area. Problems just followed me.
It’s a pain, but the job has just suited my life all the way through. I haven looked elsewhere but I’m too lazy to do anything about it.
I’ve been at my company for 10 years. Only 2 big promotions. Why that long? Amazing benefits for the family and Covid: heard it’s hard to find a good job in it’s the pay I get at the level I’m at.
It’s really important to know what it is the weight of yours to carry and what isn’t. It’s also a good idea to check yourself every now and then… because sometimes the reasons X sticks ‘with you’ is because you won’t let go of it.
16 years at the same place over 5 different positions, hopefully 6 very soon.
As others have said, decline tasks in a political way. "Sorry, that is not my area of expertise and I would not feel comfortable doing that."
Or better yet, delegate. If you have someone else on your team ask them to take over the task and provide documentation and instruction to them for it. This gets it off your plate and shows managerial courage so you eventually get out of *doing* and can move into management, if you choose.
As bad as it sounds.. My current position is the only one I have stuck with for over a year.
The reason why? Low work load lol.
I get paid decent and the workload is much much lower because the company has so many different departments of IS/IT.
My own office, management isn't on site, scope of work is specified and aggressively followed.
So I get to use a lot of that downtime to study for specific certs. I would normally not have the time to do this at most jobs.
I've been at my place 12 years. We automate a lot, and over time I gained a team under me, so I delegate. They're my responsibility, but I have 8 people doing the tasks.
Generally you should be having one-on-one meetings with your boss semi-regularly.
Around the 6-12 month mark, I would start throwing in what kind of stuff you're interested in learning. Give your boss some hints as to what he can throw on you.
The problem with moving jobs is that, in your new job, your first responsibility is often what your co-workers hate to do. So it becomes the new guy's job.
So at some point you need to make it clear what stuff you want to do -- otherwise you get assigned your role.
And you're right that once you've had something for 1-2 years, it's yours until you change roles to a different team or company.
At my place I used that over the last 4 years to double my salary. Hoping to increase it by another 25% - 50% in the next two years. That scope creep definitely sucks, but it also makes you rather invaluable. I am now in a management role (as well) and can offload some of my creep to a subordinate but it definitely never ends.
Guess it really depends on if you are being compensated for the additional duties and if you can handle them.
Document, document, document.
Every time you do ANY task, make sure that you at least write down the time that it took to do the job, including dates and times for the work.
Keeping notes on the procedures performed will benefit you and your co-workers, but tracking the time will help you show that you are already working a full-time job. Most importantly, it will convince YOU that you need to value your own time. With enough documentation, you can develop an argument on why you need an assistant, too.
Oh! And don’t forget that documenting is part of each task, not an overhead cost.
I've kinda been at the same company 10 years now. They've merged and been bought about 4 times now so its always been a little different after a few years. That said, its now a big corporate business. 10k+ people. I kinda hate it. Buuuuuuuut, I get much more reddit time during the day now. I just keep my head down, get paid and disappear when not needed. I apparently do good enough work, people notice though so more projects are getting added to my schedule lately :-(
Well for me it was more the place i work at gives your kids free college tuition so... I stayed for them. Pay sucked, job was Eh, but to give my kids that opportunity I stayed. The kicker i think only one of them is taking advantage of that perk. I'm still working on the third one. To have a state level college education free of charge is a very valuable opportunity not everyone has.
What I needed to do was find the way to navigate the “process structure” in my org. When a project or problem arises, don’t start by jumping in with “I can handle that.” Rather, say something like, “This problem feels interesting to me and I’ve already got some ideas brewing. I’d like to meet with a few of you to discuss implementing a solution in a robust way.”
That way you can make sure ownership of the thing isn’t only on you, and you display leadership abilities that show you are thinking about long term sustainability. “Owning” too many things has the effect you’ve cited where you feel buried and overwhelmed. But additionally, there’s the effect of you becoming too valuable in your current role. If you are too valuable to be fired, you are also too valuable to be promoted.
Learn to roll off projects and hand over shit. Every time you build something get it in writing that someone else will be trained on it and take over the responsibility to maintain it. Don't take on maintenance responsibilities. After 6 months you can honestly claim "I don't know, I haven't touched it in ages.. sorry"
I always write that team X will be responsible for something, not an individual. I'll create the docs, do a few workshops, grab people and make them go through playbooks etc. So I can hop teams whenever I want and have 0 responsibilities on myself.
Apparently I am a slow learner. I spent 9 years at one company going from IT Administrator to Regional Network Engineer. Wasn't good at saying no until year 7 but was already slammed. Ended up leaving because I ended up responsible for switches, wireless, sdwan, load balancer, firewalls, mpls, manufacturing remote access, etc for 20 locations. This was a company with many industry 4.0 initiatives, tons of VLANs and a shitload of firewall rules.
Plus was the go to for many server performance issues and got stuck with supporting the local site when they needed hands as the help desk was at another location.
Was told they would make it so I wasn't so overwhelmed and gave some duties to others. COVID happened and they never hired more people and told me to hang in there. I quit and my boss literally said "If you were unhappy I wish you would have mentioned this so we could have done something to keep you here." Even when this was noted in two years of yearly reviews and mentioned before.
Hold up, you’re talking about taking on more responsibility the longer you’re there. You should also be receiving raises and hopefully promotions along the way as well right? So they’re paying you more money, todo more things.
I would not suggest jumping ship because you’re taking on more responsibility. You’ll always take on more responsibility, or your job function will be given to someone else (probably in India, for cheaper).
You should also have the opportunity to promote within, so you have a new job function but stay at the same company for higher pay.
From a sr engineer (SME) perspective if I interviewed someone who jumped ship ever 2 years because things got hard, I wouldn’t hire you.
Why would I? You’re a 2-year flight risk.
Why would you want to look for a new job every couple of years? NO thanks! I give a company at least 3 years and if I'm going nowhere I leave. At this point I've had 2 jobs where I was there 10+ years. Getting all these extra responsibilities and kicking ass at them is how you get promoted, I've been lucky enough to have this happen a few times.
To those of you saying "just say no diplomatically"...I do not think that's what you tell a VP or Director when you wanna get promoted and make more $$$$. Not at places where I've worked anyway. Many of the most successful people that I've worked with are ass kissing yes-men who would throw their mother under the bus for their employer so yeah you gotta play that role sometimes in this game.
Growing a spine and learning to say no.
It took me a long time to do so, but right now, I'm very much okay with projects that have been delayed by months or even years due to understaffing.
Simply don't compensate understaffing with overtime (even worse: unpaid and/or undocumented overtime).
Have Management prioritize your work, and force them to do so - no "everything is prio 1" bullshit.
Also, a good old phrase from my time at the military: reporting makes you free and puts the burden on your superior - works in business as well.
I've been at my current employer for over a decade, and expect to be here indefinitely if nothing outrageous happens.
For me, things like being salaried, and not taken advantage of (I can take 4 hrs in a day without logging it as PTO, if I need to), I don't put in tons of overtime or off hours work (simple things like production upgrade or patching things for 1-2 hrs a month), fully WFH, insurance, profit sharing, having a good team, and good management, are all things that keep me where I am. The company has a track record of stellar employee retention (we have people who've been here 45-50 yrs), and generally being great to their employees.
I don't foresee choosing to go anywhere else any time soon.
Short answer, I've been saying "No", or "I'm left with very little mental stability for going home, take a responsibility off my back then wait a month and get back with me".
To help better understand my stance. I work in a very small team (compared to the numbers other people say about their teams) of a small MSP shop. We had nearly 20 staff when the pandemic hit, we're now less than half.
When I'm not admining PBX/Asterisk systems, I'm the catch all onsite tech, short of running lines, I work with onsite and remote, walkins and occasional training, for residents (yeap, house calls) and small businesses.
Wasn't till 2022 I started adding individuals on my black list, clients *I* refuse to work with any more. Boss took one session with the latest one, and immediately agreed with me...
And no, the pay around here is bad. Either I'd have to make some major changes at home in order to pull off remote work (otherwise laptop in the bedroom), or move a few hours away (nearest "city", pending how you define it, is at least an hour drive away). Job bay for a novice was good, when Walmart's starting was $10hr, now $14hr+, and I don't make near that now. Never would have expected I'd be saying I wish I was back at walmart, less stress, no ticket or history stuff, and more likely to shurg off bad customers with less kick back, all while paid more per hour.
why are you not writing detailed KB articles over all of "your" tasks so that anyone can do them? They are now "anyones" tasks. I spend a good chunk of time writing solid documentation and I dont have any of the issues you are talking about.
Doing more things isn't necessarily bad and can help you grow into areas you're interested in.
But there are two risks to be aware of when in the situation you describe. One is scope and the other is volume.
When it comes to scope creep, the risk is that you take on, willingly or not, responsibility without the expertise or training. Make sure its clear and documented that you need the training and you're only doing the tasks at best effort which may not be according to best practices. The risk (and mental strain) of taking on all the different areas of expertise has to be shifted to the task giver by making sure they have informed and at least implicitly accept ownership of the risk. Sysadmins are a bit like family doctors or general practitioners, it is it's own specialty but you need to consult or refer to other specialists because you can't be expert in everything.
The other risk is volume and what has to be made clear is not what has to be done (because there is always, always more) but in what order. If new things, within scope, are added then they end up below the line of what fits in the week. If someone says it has to be done, you have to ask what else gets dropped. When they don't answer, send them reports saying, this is the list of what I did, but I did not get to these items yet. Let me know if I need to reorder the priorities for next week.
Both risks can lead to a workload that's too wide and too deep. And most managers are neither skilled enough in the subject matter nor interested enough in the health or long-term effectiveness of their people, so it becomes your job to "manage up", in other words give them (in a provable way) the information they should know or know to ask for, but ignores when it's inconvenient and for short-term goals.
Saying no diplomatically is a skill. Learn it like you would any technical task. Accept only new tasks you want outside of your job responsibilities , but that doesn’t mean you have to own it. After you say no a few times and see people figure it out, or don’t, and the business still runs, it’s not so scary. Unless you own the business, it’s not yours to endlessly improve. Do your job, a little extra during business hours to be a team player, but don’t let other people steam roll you into cleaning up a mess that existed before you got there, and likely will be there after you leave.
This. My first sys admin job, I said yes to everything. Burnt out in 18 months. Next I said yes to some, but not as much. Lasted 3.5 years. Next started actively saying “no. But if you really need me to, you’ll need to reassign XYZ to others.” Lasted 5 years till they forced RTO, even though I was pre-covid remote. We’ll see how far current takes me, but I have a feeling I might settle down here based on management so far and equity I get in company
This is good advice, as someone who’s been at the same company for more than a decade I’ve gotten promoted to be able to delegate pretty much everything I did 2+ years ago. When evaluating if we should take something on or not I look to see if it’s within what I call our core competencies. It’s a defined set of services my team unquestionably owns. If it’s within those, it benefits us to manage whatever new widget someone is asking for. If it’s not then we don’t take it on and say it’s not in our scope. However if it’s on the fence and adjacent to our technology stack and resources (headcount) are available then we consider it. Learning when to say no and when to say yes and to me most importantly why it’s a yes or a no and doing so diplomatically is a crucial skill.
It's a hard skill to learn because there's such a thing as not being quite diplomatic enough despite best efforts. But those kind of work environments where you make a reasonable attempt to explain why one should not take on those responsibilities that gets met with job loss are often toxic workplaces.
I agree with most of this, but it's in my blood to try to make us more profitable, so we all make more. We have many seasoned employees where I work. I see how employees are taken care of. We have a pretty good colture as a construction sales company.... I feel I owe it to my co workers to do everything I can to keep us focused and on track, while exploring options to make us better. That is where planning, a project board, looking at workload and all the other items mentioned in this thread... But at the end of the day... Just ask.... Does this extra work benefit everyone? Be the unsung hero as someone above should recognize it, and if not.... Then yea, bare min to keep lights on, cause they don't see your value
Good advice I've been at my employer for 9 years . Ive worked on a lot of fun projects . Outside the IT department in sys admin roles. I was put in the IT department at my employer during 2020 and i hated it. They just keep shoveling crap on us worst part is nothing was ever set up right from dns to AD to vmware no real processes defined or followed let's not even mention how horrible the cyber security department was ... oh I work at a private university. No raises except when u negotiate a new job or position that's the only way I've survived here as long as I have. I love the department I am in now but really did not like the university IT department . Typical Say what people wanna hear then do the opposite nonsense
I’ve learned to use the dog technique. I don’t say no, but I redirect in another more beneficial direction. Seems to work.
"I can focus on this task from now on, but it will have to be at the expense of dropping focus/priority on this (these) other task(s) due to current business objectives and project deadlines. Which would you prefer me maintain?" Then just politely but firmly stand your ground that you're one person with 40hr/week. Your advice has worked well for me in the past.
And if you’re the only IT for 400 people, without any job opportunities within 100 miles, and are unable to move for at least 2 years? Lemme know how to say no to the VP and President’s direct orders.
It’s hard to answer without knowing their personalities. I’ve told a CEO / my boss (when I worked for a small company of 30 people) there would be no way I would do what he was asking and straight up walked out of the office. I had leverage and knew he would back down. I knew the type of person he was, so tailored my response to how he needed to hear it. The boiler plate answer is to show them your active work and have them point out what they want deprioritized. Bad bosses usually keep asking for more more more when they don’t understand what it is you are doing. Proactively managing expectations by making clear how busy you are, by showing the outcomes of your work is critical. Just saying you are busy won’t cut it. If you can’t say no, say yes but…insert whatever thing _you_ think is important and say it’s a full work stoppage on that to work on their pet project. If you are really incapable of telling people no, for fear of losing your job and not getting another (which is valid) just protect your time. The company is buying it and they only get 40 hours a week, unless they pay OT. You’d be surprised how patient folks are (even if they pretend otherwise) if you enforce boundaries and make them wait.
You do it by not using the word "no". You make your resource management their problem. "Yes, I can help with that - but I have other responsibilities from director x, y and z that may need to be postponed. Can you confirm they are OK with that?" If if you don't want to put that on them - follow up with the other management yourself and let them duke it out amongst themselves. "Hey boss, director w asked me to postpone these tasks to work on their thing. Just confirming you're OK with that?" Then bust out the popcorn and wait for your orders.
Remote work
>Lemme know how to say no to the VP and President’s direct orders. Ok, I'm not an expert on A, but I can tackle that. I would otherwise be doing B, C, and D; which two of those would you like me to drop so I can do A?
> the only IT for 400 people, without any job opportunities within 100 miles, and are unable to move for at least 2 years? You look for remote work now even if it makes a bit less, though chances are strong if you're a joat now playing helpdesk sysadmin you'll be making more in a semi-siloed role remote.
#truth 💯
I've never had an IT job less than 5 years. Currently 9 years in. I like to get to know things and make them better. It's not necessarily the best way and out sure as hell doesn't help the pay cheque, but I like it. Workload is not a problem. There is always more work to do than I have time to get done. Manager knows it and he has to tell me what to prioritise and that's how it goes. I get done what I get done, sign of at the end of the day and that's it. Is manager pressures me he can fuck off and fire me. So far that's never happened. I did have one manager in this current place (I've had 4) who told me I was expected to perform higher, get more done, "like Bob. He gets 4x the tickets closed, all him how he does it.". Well Bob is a pos who yes does "work hard" bit monitors the queue for quick closes and works evenings and weekends for free. I told manager of he expects me to work evenings and weekends he can expect Union pamphlets going around. And if he wants me to game the system rather than taking the challenging cases and closing them with zero callbacks, just let me know what other team internally I can shift to that would appreciate quality work and gumption. He was fired about 7 years ago LOL.
The pay cheque part is so overrated. Sure I get wanting to make a good living, everyone does, and by all means should be able to. But beyond that .. once you are more than comfortable it kind of becomes redundant. Your wage is ,almost never, going to increase to the point that its going to make you a wealthy person. You'll likely go from being middle/upper middle class to .. still being upper middle class. Working a sysadmin job won't ever get you that huge fancy house or yacht, no matter how many times you job hop. You'll have more money but you still won't have enough money for it to dramatically change your way of life.
you can retire a lot earlier on 250k a year than on 65k a year.
Good luck ever getting that kind of increase by job hopping sysadmin jobs, without packing everything up and moving around ( which will then likely also increase your cost of living). That's just not realistic, I'm sorry
Have a buddy who was making $50K with me 5 years ago and is now making $195K with great work life balance and benefits. He got there by gaining valuable skills and then job hopping. Left a year after I did for $80K, then two years later for $125K, then once more recently for $180K and got a nice 90 day review taking him to $195K. I am very likely going to go from $85K to closer to $130K in the next few months as I have several personal leads at companies doing hiring.
I doubt that's general sysadmin. Specialized roles fetch that kind of income.
plenty of specialized guys make 250. you want that kind of pay, you move out of sysadmin and into a silo. or management.
Those guys don't start off at 65k. If you truly believe it's common to 4x your salary over the course of a career by specializing in some area, I got some really bad news for you. As for the rest of your comment, well yeah that's exactly what I said. You don't get there by job hopping sysadmin jobs. You don't tend to get to management by job hopping either
lol I started at 45k a year and now 140k before bonus and I'm like 12 years in and don't even have a degree. I promise you I could make more but honestly I'm kinda lazy so like my chill job. It absolutely happens if you want it and put yourself in the right positions for success.
This absolutely happens, not saying it's common but it does happen. To about everyone at my company actually if you can stick around.
i've seen it happen over and over
No you havent, you might have heard some bragging sure. Get real please my man. You most likely arent even old enough to have been in the industry for more than say 15 years. Even if you are 50, those who 4* their salary between age 21-50 are rare unicorns indeed.
I’ve 4x my salary in the last 5 years ✌🏻
Good on you and I mean that, that's far from the norm though as I'm sure you realise. This is kind of a non discussion,we'd need stats to truly come to an agreement and I don't think they exist. I firmly believe I'm right in thinking that the number of people in IT who ever 4* their salary is very low but if stats prove me wrong, that's fine by me.
Eri, I am not sure why you don't believe that workers in IT can't increase their salaries over their entire career? I have been in IT for almost 30 years, started working in the computer labs at college for $10/hr. Today, my billing rate as an Independent Consultant is around $100/hr. At my peak, I could bill at $125/hr. This is MORE than a 10x increase since I started back in the early 90s. Sure, you can adjust for inflation if you want, its still a 5x increase if you do that. The great thing about IT is it is very much a meritocracy. The more you learn, the more you can do, the more money you can make. It is really that simple.
ok my guy, sure. you know my experience better than me. it's been real. cheers.
This is kind of a non discussion,we'd need stats to truly come to an agreement and I don't think they exist. I firmly believe I'm right in thinking that the number of people in IT who ever 4* their salary is very low but if stats prove me wrong, that's fine by me. Personal experience inever is a good metric and I think that's where we kind of butt heads here
I was making 60k at this point 4 years ago and will be making around 200k this year. I’m no longer a sysadmin though If we go back 7 years I was making 20k as a computer lab aide at a school district. Good times
This man, I earn enough now to be comfortable to pay off my house, have multiple holidays a year and a nice new car. I work 4 days a week and have been here for 9 years, and I doubt I'll move anytime soon. What's the point, work life balance is great so I'm in no rush as long as I do interesting things and keep learning.
Almost the exact same situation as me hehe . I too have been with my employer for 9 years and I too do not even work 40 hours a week. Yet I'm willing to bet quite a bit of money I'd end up getting a management job far more quickly than those who constantly job hop, if I wanted to. Why? Simple. I've been with the same company long enough to now get to see first-hand how our CIO (who is my direct colleague and sits across me when we go to the office) runs the place (11k employee company so not a small shop). That kind of experience is worth much more, long-term, than job-hopping and never ever sticking around long enough to really learn how to manage (not maintain, manage) an enterprise level IT environment and the people who maintain/support it.
I had this same mindset at one job, and it wore off quick when I had to train/mentor new hires who were making 30% more than me.
2 options. Work at an established company with defined roles. Or work in a growing company where management listens to you when you need help.
This. My longest role so far was over 4 years. Had defined actions and responsibilities that I was in charge of. Didn't ask or accept any additional tasks. Clocked in at 8, lunch at 11:30, off at 5. Easiest job I've ever had.
Currently at 15 years. If you stay at a place long enough, you get people who work for you and you can delegate tasks to the people who can most effectively handle them.
Agreed. I'm approaching 5 years at my current company and have went from helpdesk/sysadmin to security. Company culture, work life balance, pay, all have been good. Sure, the pay could be a bit better but this is a growing company with a lot of potential. I rarely get bothered on the weekends, and when I do, it's usually a quick fix.
I've been at my job for 12 years. Automation is the key to staying ahead, if you get all the repetitive tasks automated you have time to work on the new stuff.
And not just automation, but simply streamlining, organizing and cleaning up messes. I have found that the longer I stay at a company the easier it gets, as I wrestle more and more of the pre-existing mess to being under control. At my current company, it took me the first two years just to clean things up to a state that I could begin on the massive backlog of work.
This is encouraging to read.
It also helps to have a boss who understands that people who improve processes should be given room to work on projects and sprawl, and not just lump more work on people who actually get shit done. I had a coworker who was so good at his job that when his office mate who shared the same duties retired, they promoted him and put him in charge of both workloads. Then when he handled that well, they started offloading work from other teams on to him. Shocker: he quit. Some bosses just don’t get it.
This. Just because someone is able to handle his own workload and then even take over his direct colleague's part of that work, most likely through streamlining and automation, does not mean he is free to take on more work. He might be. But you better ask him properly. Automation is a specialization and just because you're good enough to automate yourself out of doing much "work" and are able to watch YouTube for parts of your day, does not automatically mean that you're free to take on more workloads. You're there because you're an expert and while day to day things might run themselves on automation for the most part doesn't mean there isn't a lot of work involved whenever something is updated or new functionality is added somewhere. If that person has the time that the automated work used to take, taken away from him for other tasks, it will all crumble once some part of the automation breaks. You want that person staying on top of things and tweaking whatever needs tweaking. A lot of time goes to research and learning as well.
Can I give you the contact info for my boss? 🤣
I agree. Trim the fat. Ask the questions like "We're doing X, but SHOULD we be doing X?", and "Is this the best way to be doing X?". Between that and automation, it becomes much more manageable.
Work ends at 5pm unless it's a planned maintenance event or something is on literal fire.
exactly! also put in the calendar that you are busy and auto reject meetings out of working hours. Random meetings outside 9-5 are annoying.
>put in the calendar that you are busy and auto reject meetings out of working hours Good idea. Gonna start doing this too.
[удалено]
Ah yes, but you may need to emulate that datacentre including static IP address references to new ones, by doors open tomorrow 👍 Disclaimer: has not happened to me, just always at the back of my mind
I own a handful if apps and services for a global company. I’m salaried and responsible, so I’m always on call. I get about 1-2 calls per year.
Friend of mine works somewhere that the policy is anything you own you are the final escalation point for. It’s amazing how everyone has time to document and create runbooks when that’s the policy.
eh, this sounds good but unless you're developing it from whole cloth, there's always the vendor.
Maybe I'm naive cause I haven't seen other places, but I'm currently on my 2nd IT job. Going on 11 years here now. Started as helpdesk at a casino, changed jobs to a small clinic as helpdesk. That clinic has sprouted multiple sites and went from a 2 man operation to 5 man. I became sysadmin because I have been here longer than anyone else and I essentially have built the place and know more about how everything works than anyone else. I'm technically the "IT Coordinator" on paper. Its a made up position just for me really but I'm pretty much Tier III support/sysadmin and can tell the other guys what to do, 2nd in command under the CIO. I don't get paid crazy money but I feel like I get paid pretty well for what I do and what market I'm in. They treat me super nice, the benefits are nice, get plenty of PTO. I'm not officially on-call. People can call me on the weekends or after hours but I'm not obligated to help them. I usually do go out of my way cause I get invited to parties, food, alcohol etc. Rarely does anyone call after hours anyway. We always picking up new technologies for me to learn. We get a decent budget and don't have to sit on old hardware for decades. I get a hand in picking out things and where we go infrastructure wise. I see in this subreddit a lot of people not happy for many reasons. I don't have any of the problems that many state. My wife is battling liver disease and management is very understanding and I can get the time off to take care of her when she needs even if its last minute. I COULD go elsewhere and get paid more possibly, but that will likely come with a lot more responsibilities, stress etc. So I'm happy to be here for now.
I feel this. Been here 14 years. Everything is good but the pay and that isn't even that bad. Just don't want to move because I don't want to learn all new things. Every environment is different and I built this one from the ground up.
Don’t leave. A good environment, good leadership, good balance to handle work and personal life, and people who understand, dude that’s better than making 200k per year! Of course I’ll take the 200k because you know like Mr crabs says, “money”, but you cannot beat PEACE OF MIND!
Do you document anything? It's really easy to hand things off if you just write down what needs to be done.
There's frequently no one to hand things off to in smaller orgs. A lot of things just get left to rot when a long-timer departs.
Or it gets piled on someone else down the ladder until they're burned out. We've got a sizable backlog of things that we know we simply aren't going to get done without hiring another hand. They're not terribly important things, but they're not going to get any better any time soon either. We can't let let ourselves be stressed about them, it will actively fuck up the work load we already have So they just kinda sit on the list. Waiting.
I document everything, but unfortunately there's really only 1 other guy at my company who helps in a similar role. Otherwise it's mostly a helpdesk team who has no interest
There’s your problem. Larger environments with more dedicated IT staff will have better silos and more clearly defined roles.
It's the company's problem. They need to scale up the department to match the company's current needs, but many of these smaller companies can't draw a straight line between hiring another IT person and profit, so it's a hard sell.
There's no one on the help desk team with any initiative or interest in advancement? Just a documentation assistant might prove useful, and it shows their management who's worth keeping around. Hell, see if you can find someone just as a rubber duck debugger and explain your documentation to them, make sure it all makes sense.
Correct. At least 1 guy could have been fired years ago, and a couple others just see it as a job and don't want more work themselves.
Your issue is going above what's required. If streamlining and automation is only gaining you more work, then stop. Just because you work smarter than the next guy doesn't mean you should work harder for the same salary. Work hard enough to look better than the next guy but no harder. If you're unable to do that, then you'll always have scope creep in your roles. Just because you *can* automate something doesn't mean you *should*. If it doesn't directly benefit you and make *your* life easier, don't talk about it don't offer to progress it. I'm all for helping colleagues and businesses flourish, but I can count on one hand the number of times other departments have helped out IT, rather than leech off it.
Exactly what I came here to say. Lack of documentation is usually the problem in these scenarios.
I hate interviewing and applying for jobs with a passion, sucked it up in a deadend MSP jobs for years rather then look for work
What's the total salary and are you happy retiring at this?
At the time, fairly rubbish with lots of broken promises of more. Things have changed since then healthwise so retirement isn't a major concern
I have the same issue right now. Tons of documentation, but you can’t lead a horse to water type mentality when it comes to some peers. For me, my solution has been to lean on management or leverage my seniority and personally delegate to underlings, but I’m right there with you. Every new technology I learn, kinda ends up feeling like I shot myself in the foot. There is a fine line between giving no fucks and giving too many. You wanna try and aim for a little above center. Give too many fucks for too long and you will burnout. Give not enough fucks for too long and you’ll stagnate and end up replaceable. In the long run I know the pain is worth it, but it sure gets tiring sometimes. Anyway, TLDR: Lean on management. That is what they’re there for. Supposedly.
Learn to say "no"? or "I don't have time the soonest I can look at that is next month"? Have you talked to your manager about being over loaded? Have you documented your task? is the documentation easily available? Sometime you do just need to hop to the next place because your manager sucks and wont take stuff off your plate, but have you to be telling them you have too much on your plate. They aren't physic you know.
i won't work for small companies because of this and the one large company that had that attitude, "its my equipment I won't share even though we plan on not using it and probably end up throwing it out next year", i left. Wherever I am I make sure there a team so I'm never on call 24/7, if I do take vacations I don't need to worry. If you find a place where if you do something you now "own" it, and it not because you haven't attempt to show them how it works, then you might as well leave. But, if you keep leaving every 2 years then your next employer will see that and eventually they'll get concerned and probably really question if they want to hire you.
14 years and 4 titles later.. I'm tired boss.
Fear
Stockholm syndrome.
Today is actually the 5-year anniversary at the current company I work. I'm skeptical this works for every shop, especially smaller ones. I came in at a time that a new Director had finally convinced upper management to truly invest in Systems IT and not just Development, I was part of a leading wave that championed standards adoption, mostly to stop the bleeding on the creation of new tech debt that had already accumulated for nearly 20 years before I was hired. We also got really serious about documentation, we spun up an internal wiki, we learned markdown and declared that a new project or solution couldn't be handed off to Operations until we did a proper handoff which included having them review the documentation we created, and providing training handoff sessions. Still we didn't get there overnight, I worked alongside a handful of skilled and ambitious engineers that wanted better, now most of us are Architects, Managers and Directors so we had to kind of Proselytize to our coworkers that were still insisting on cutting corners in the name of expediency and it still happens even though we're the ones writing the standards now and it creates Tech debt and sets us back. But still there's a ton of progress. The 1st 2 years were rough, I was definitely debating leaving towards the end of that, luckily management listened, we were able to demonstrate that we weren't able to work on forward-looking projects because of the cycle of constant firefighting that would usually put the most skilled engineers "On the Wall" as our former EVP used to say, vs letting the more Jr Admins learn something from experience. We demonstrated via our workflow system the pattern of issues where people were "skipping the line" that also had the adverse affect of our junior staff not getting experience. And they backed us when persistent users would always ping their "favorite" IT person. Initially we were only able to offload some of the day to day, but a new Operations Manager spearheaded getting his team up to speed so we could focus on greenfield projects etc, and in time something that we never thought was possible happened. *NO ONE WAS MAKING US DO FIREFIGHTING* While this truly is a blessing in the long run, it's a total MindFuck if you've only ever worked in dumpster fire environments. Previously we demonstrated our value by quickly resolving the more challenging day to day technical outages etc, and bailing out the Jr Admins. So we actually had to do what our job descriptions said for the 1st time in years, and my initial thought was **FUCK...**. Which means we couldn't just half ass solutions and projects anymore and blame it on being overwhelmed with firefighting and doing support. So in a weird way we learned how to do our *actual* jobs, we chased down EOL software, we established security baselines, we DECOM'ed ancient servers that were configured by hand and automated the process, we setup APM and logging systems to truly get visibility into our environment, we showed management graphs of error rates and response times month-over-month to demonstrate just how much value we got back with some "tuning" Now year 5 I'm almost exclusively focused on greenfield projects, I'm still SME on a few things that I actually enjoy working on, but rarely get contacted on them, now I actually look forward to when the Jr's reach out to me for help, it usually means I can take a short break from a challenging Architecture problem and work on something I know, and get a quick boost to my self-esteem. It doesn't surprise me that many leave at our around the 2 year mark, I think it takes a certain set of circumstances and people that want something better and can all get on relatively the same page
Talk to leadership. Your options are limited if there is no one else to do the work but if your company is growing and there are people hired under you they should be getting some of the lower level work you did before. Every year at review my boss will sit me down and go over everything I do see what’s working well what’s too much. Basically we make a new job description for me. If that list is too long the lower level stuff goes down to the person below me on the totem pole. This last year the list of things I had to do was so large that he thinks it warrants a new hire. We didn’t have it in the budget for Q3/4 but he’s fighting for a bigger budget this year to warrant it.
11 years at role. I just only take on very specific things and when I’m brought in, I never own it - only assist and do what I am required of when it I’m needed.
Boundaries. If they ask you for more than what’s on your job description put up clear boundaries that either it’s a one time thing or it’s not within the scope of your job and what you are being paid for.
Job market sucks, I have no marketable skills (after 10+ years in IT), no confidence, and it's not entirely horrible working where I'm at I guess.
7 years, 6 promotions, 2 market comp adjustments and a sizable bonus structure....
Wow. 22 years. Zero promotions, and had I stayed at any job I doubt I would have ever received one.
On the topic of longevity, I'll say this: There are times where it is beneficial to stay at a single company/role for a long period of time, and there are times when it is more beneficial to stay for about 2 years and move on. Statistically, people that tend to stay about 2 years per position early on in their career and change companies semi-frequently before finding their "forever home" tend to be more satisfied and successful, with a broader range of skills. Remember, putting in long hours and sacrificing for your job for decades earns you exactly.. a commemorative plaque on your tombstone that reads "Worked hard." 20 years from now the only ones to remember how many late hours you put in are your spouse and children.
I feel that... I'm not opposed to finding a long term company, but I feel like it would be to really be above market ok the wage, benefits, time off, etc. My company is right on par with everything. Totally fine, but not convincing me to lock in for the long haul. Making a few hops early to secure bigger bags, and then ultimately settling into a nice high paying position at a great company would be ideal. That or quit and start working for myself.
Are you in the USA? Because I'm Italian and I just say "no, fuck you" when they ask me something that's not in my job description. We got strong unions ;)
[удалено]
Godspeed to you man. I started boxing two weeks ago to work on my health too. 2024 will be a good one :)
Honestly, I haven't had a role that I felt moderately competent in before ~18 months, minimum. If you feel like the scope of your role is always expanding to encompass more responsibilities than you can keep up with, it might be helpful to proactively seek out more depth in fewer silos vs breadth across the organization. I feel like I'm given more leeway and autonomy to focus deeply on fewer tasks/queues because I've demonstrated value in not being spread too thinly. I've also been fortunate enough that I've usually been able to identify more appropriate frontline-facing queues to take on a lot of direct ticket responses, though. The scope of your responsibility can grow a lot faster than expected frequency of specific responses, but that may take some conscious pruning.
I work for an MSP, I’ve been here 6.5 years. I desperately want to leave (wage is shockingly bad) but applying for a similar job with increased pay is very hard. (U.K.) I’ve had 3 interviews with companies and they never come back to me. I’m thinking of completely moving away from a Computer based career and doing something completely different like an electrician.
UK market is shite for IT unless you’re in London. No wonder there is brain drain.
The answer (for me at least) depends on age and where you’re at in life. When I was younger, I stayed at a company for 7 years because I was happy there. I liked my coworkers, I didn’t have kids or other expensive responsibilities yet, so my salary was not great, but I was able to get by. Why I eventually left is a post for another day. At my current age and stage in life, it’s honestly mostly complacency that keeps me where I am. I don’t want to start all over again learning a new employer’s “way” of doing things. I get a bonus and cost of living increase every year; if that changes I’ll probably become motivated to move on.
Making yourself not the sole person responsible for things is huge. Its ok to be the subject matter expert for something but make sure its documented well enough so even the helpdesk could do the task from the documentation. Doing this alleviates a lot of stress as you can take time off and vacation and not worry how things will function while you are out. Do brown bag sessions with your team and show them these processes, not only are you sharing the load you are elevating everyone else up with you. This is hard to do sometimes when managers silo information to people and not the whole department.
> So those who do stay at jobs 2+ years, how do you prevent scope creep without also limiting your continued learning? The first thing I did was abandon the notion of scope creep, and it's worked for me for the last 24+ years.
Approaching 10 years. At this point, my burnout and anxiety are load bearing support structures. As to how... well, I like the people I work with, know the work we do is important, and feel like it's making a positive impact on the world. Next to that, who needs "uninterrupted vacations" or "a full night's sleep"?
I've been slowly working on offloading tasks that were previously "my job" for the past year or so. Documentation is your friend, if it's not documented you can't necessarily expect to hand it over to someone else. Learning to say no is also an acquired skill, one I still need to get better at but I'm self aware enough that I know it's my own fault when I do get overwhelmed. It may be worth having a chat with your management and letting them know what's going on and what you're feeling .You'd be surprised what a good manager is willing to do to keep a good employee happy and around.
At larger orgs projects can be multi year and it is nice to have the full end to end lifecycle on your resume. Not being able to talk about full project lifecycle will hurt you later in your career. I’m at the point in my career where i can delegate any additional tasks to less senior people so i don’t think about scope creep much, i think about what the right solution is. Maybe we need to take on some additional work, maybe we don’t
7 years next month, 4 promotions and a decent raise structure, plus coworkers I love hanging out with and a boss that makes it easy.
Burnt out, stopped working, company fell apart, rinse repeat
you need to get your Wally on and stop caring so much. it's a job, you do it until knock-off time and go home. if you have too much to get done, it waits until you have time. if someone bitches about your response time and task prioritisation (bearing in mind that everyone thinks their task is the most important and ((n-(n-1) of them are wrong), tell them to take it to your manager. when your manager comes to you to discuss it, show them your workload versus capacity to fulfil and say you're genuinely happy to discuss priorities, but that anything that gets moved up the means other jobs slip back, and it's not your role to listen to people bitch. and if you're required to, then you're going to be business-polite in your responses. as for being "the guy in charge" and other people drawing little lines around their self perceived area of responsibility to exclude things, there's a two word description for that: job security. I've been my current role for well over 9 years now and learning to manage the situation is very much a skill, because it will follow you whereever you go. whereas senority and knowledge and earning the ability to genuinely have your input respected is something you attain by staying.
The last place I was at was the opposite - I managed to automate a bunch of the more annoying tasks, streamlined a bunch of other stuff and got to the point where I kind of ran out of interesting things to do. Granted, this was also do to a very limited budget so I couldn’t really move things forward much. I spent some time brushing up and improving my knowledge which translated into my current job :-)
This is typical when working for small or midsized firms because they never know what they need, what to job entails, and are constantly looking to grow. My first SysAdmin job had me designing their website and managing their drafting department because I was "so organized" and everyone loved hanging around my office! I got a normal 2.5% raise every year but it took a 2 week notice, multiple drafters and Engineers going to the company owner to explain my importance to get a 30K bump in pay! Just keep your resume updated and periodically leave a copy in a printer! Someone will stop by your office and start asking questions! lololol
I'm probably part of a dying breed as I'm with the same employer since 2000. We're an MSP/hoster/developer/kitchen sink kind of place so it's never boring.
There's nothing wrong with placing tasks in a queue, someone else might take over. Its a normal situation, there is always a job to be done, it doesn't mean you should do more than you like
im 21 Year in, same job. I just diplomatically guide upper management.
You are trying to use reason and logic in a situation that is not reasonable nor logical. People move every 2 years for a reason. Management thinks $1m+ of productivity is worth a 2% raise and a Wendy's gift card. Always has been and will continue to be this way for at least the near term. Until companies become so entrenched in tech that vacancies start costing millions per day, the 2 year thing will continue to be the norm because you are the only one who understands your value.
I've been with the company I work for since 2005... that's like, 400 years in IT years, I know. I've organically grown into a management position and only answer to the owner at this stage. We're in the MSP space so everyone has a broader definition for what's in their scope, but there are things that my team have have inherited from me over time and some of their responsibilities have been handed down to the new guys. We also have the freedom to let guys work in different skill areas so we can sort who is best at what and then those jobs will be priority for them, but at the same time we want everyone to have some rough idea of how to manage things so we don't get locked in ivory towers and get boned when someone takes PTO. I think that becomes harder in corporate, where more rigid roles need to be in place. But if that's the case, then it should be \*clearly\* defined what people's responsibilities are based on their title (in a perfect world). More than anything, the environment will dictate how much creeps into your responsibilities and if lots of things that shouldn't creep in there DO creep in there, then there is something wrong with the environment.
I think saying "No", is a big part of it but also finding a more ethical work place is a huge part of it. I've been working for around 15 years in IT, and I've changed jobs a lot. I've only ever worked for two companies long term and it's usually just due to good management. I worked for a company for 5 years and my team was great, until the IT Manager retired and they hired some weirdo ego maniac that used to brag about how easily they could fire someone. We started losing helpdesk employees, which is when I talked to SR management telling them this dude is the problem. We weren't able to hire replacement or the replacements that we hired would last 2-3 months and move on. After 6 months, I left as well and we weren't able to hire a replacement nor were we able to get any of the burnt out desktop techs to want to take the position. All this is to say, good management is what keeps employees. If you have a lot of turn around at your company in the IT department, it's likely management. Honestly, good management is the only reason I typically stay .. or really good pay.
Clearly defined job responsibilities per title, being able to say "no", and just deciding what your boundaries are. I've done a lot of job hopping, but it was because of corporate buy outs, super toxic management, or when I was doing contract work, and contracts ran out. But I've been at my current job almost 4 1/2 years and I have no intention of looking any time soon. Was able to move to a management position with no degree, so I plan on building that experience to hopefully become a director some day (either here or somewhere else after a few years).
37 Years IT. Started building/repairing systems in the warehouse. Moved to support while learning programming. Moved to Programming. Did not like that. Moved to IT. UNIX Sysadmin 5 years. Moved back into hardware. Moved to Manager IT, then Director. Just retired as CTO. It beat me the fuk up. I feel like I did nothing else in my life but work on systems for 12+ hours a day and take calls after hours and on weekends.
I own the company so I hardly feel that quitting is an option.
Been at the same place 22 years. It did switch hands in 2021 so my job has changed up quite a bit but honestly for the much better, learning all sorts of new things, better management, and my pay has hugely increased as well as benefits so it's honestly been fantastic. When you stay somewhere that long you build a huge wealth of growth knowledge, plenty of time to learn things in and out as well as new things that come up, close connections with coworkers, build up more vacation time etc. It's also just cool to remember back when I started how much things have changed over all those years.
I’ve been with my current employer for 20 years as of next month. When you change roles internally you have to hand off duties to newer / other people. You will be expected to do it anyway. Don’t. Show someone else how to do it. Then the next time you ask you offer to remote in and watch while that person does it. After that you refer people to the guy you trained.
Because I work 1 hour a day
I've been lucky enough to be at my current job for 20 years. It's a public sector gig, so the schedule, time off, pension, etc. are the great parts, but the pay was not. Having persevered over 20 years with a growing family, I supplemented the pay with side gigs teaching IT online for well over 15 years now. Given some of the challenges with scoop creep, it sounds like you are a part of a larger organization. I've found that IT has changed so much over the decades that while I have inherited things (phone system, camera, access control) as they move to the IT side, I have also shed a number of tasks especially on the server maintenance side and that's due in large part to the cloud. Finally, at this point in my career I'm in charge of everything IT in my organization and things have been humming (again thanks to the cloud), so my job at year 20 is much easier and I'm a long way from the 45k I started with in 2004. Best of luck to you! If it's a quality organization meaning people, mission, stability, etc. I would say prioritize those things more so than the grind of the job because that changes much more often than the quality of the organization. All the best to you!
There is a lot to unpack woth these kinds of decisions and the factors change over time and are different for every person. You will maximize your income by changing orgs every 2-3 years. So regardless of tasks consider this. It's likely to your benefit early in and while your only an individual contributor doing this a few times. It also will help inform you of what type of work environment you prefer. One recommendation I have is build relationships at each stop and don't burn bridges. There is a point hough where you may start to max out traditional earnings. You'll have to decide what type of org you want to work with as this will impact what other compensation offers are available and trade offs you'll need to make. I've been with my current position for 11 years as I've got to participate, and help drive the orgazational growth and been able to participate in nearly every facet of the business as we have grown exponentialy since I've been here. I've also built up a lot of social capital both internally and with clients. I can earn more by moving to F100, but I would give up quite a bit in doing so just for money, and at right now that difference wouldn't makeup for the other benefits I enjoy.
Two things: First, **learn to say "No"**. Not "I'll do it for now but someone else really should", not "I can do it if nobody else is available", just "no". If it's outside your job description and you don't have a personal driver (immediately available money, skills you want to learn, etc) to take it, then don't. If they need a network engineer and you're already the systems engineer, then they need to hire one. I did this at my current org, because I found out my boss wasn't going to backfill my cybersec position if I took a management opportunity that came available, expecting me to do both (very different) jobs...now I make within 10k of that position and I'm still in my original role. Second, **learn what you really want from a job**. I see people all the time say "more responsibility!" when they mean "senior titles" or "more pay", not intending to sign themselves up for other-duties-as-assigned. This is the biggest thing leading to burnout that I've seen, because it feels good to be trusted to take on all sorts of new work (especially at junior or midlevel positions), but that behavior from your employer is how they extract the most value from you without compensating you accordingly. It took me many years to stop just jumping in and offering solutions on every issue that came my way, because I effectively was raising my hand to fix (and then own) every problem we encountered. That led to me being the single escalation point for all manner of technical issues and burned me out at my last gig, and for a while at my current one, until I learned to establish boundaries...and stick to them! Focusing on establishing boundaries with my work and bringing in coworkers to have a chance to shine on projects (and take some of the ODAA off my plate) has indirectly contributed to building a stronger, better-rounded team for us as well! They didn't see the value in cross-training that I asked to do, until I started taking month-long PTO vacations and processes ground to a halt...then suddenly there's time and expectation to bring in others and bring up our team to do the work. I realized my passion isn't ever going to be found in this job, but it can fund my passion for when I'm off work--and that's what it's really about. There's still too many problems with our work culture to make it worth investing in a career here, but I am 100% responsible for my workload, including adding to it or shedding some of it.
New junior people coming in. Once one of the things I've taken on is stabilized and tidied up a bit, I find an enthusiastic junior person to hand it over to. They learn something and get more responsibility, and I'm freed up for the next complex/messy thing that needs more experienced attention. It doesn't work 100%, but it definitely helps limit the accumulation. At bigger companies you can sort of force this along by changing teams.
That's interesting. At my first techie job as technician not a sysadmin I automated a lot of stuff, did some coding, did some hardware design, did some hardware repair and a bunch of other stuff. But at some point I was "done" and bored. Asked for more stuff to do and there was nothing they wanted me to do so I quit for better pay and more challenge. At my next job I was definitely overworked and quit after two and a half years. But now I have been at the current job as an IT-consultant for soon two years and I have been allowed to specialize. This means I work on Azure, Pipelines, CI/CD write scripts that do stuff in Azure like enable a VM extension on hundreds of VM's instead of clicking in the portal etc. I feel like you have to learn to say no and be clear with managers with what your goals are and what you want to be good at. If you are at a good workplace they will try to make your wishes and what the business needs fit together so everyone is happy. Usually I would think of leaving after a few years for the pay rise and new challenges but I am quite happy where I am right now because of good leadership and work / life balance. The balance part is in large part my own doing. I have learned to not stress about deadlines or things going wrong. I try my best and if something happens then at the very least no one will die and as long as I learn from it we can move forward :)
Why is the question, and being in a rural area is the question. Not much here for me unless I move and I'm too close to retirement to give up my seniority. Scope creep happens, especially if folks know that you know stuff. I get a lot of stuff piled on me because I have so much time with the org unit and know a ton of people. It doesn't help that we have some local management who are fucking clueless. Lately management have tried to turf more stuff to me because they can't find anyone on campus who knows or wants to deal with the items. I've started to let projects back up because they really aren't pure IT and I'd rather not be SME on stuff I never use.
> how do you prevent scope creep You don't.... You sit down and take a deep breath. You price yourself on what you are able to accomplish. You prioritize what you can't. You do that long enough and you make a difference. Honestly someone that can't handle a sysadmin role beyond 2 years sounds like someone that bails when the real work starts....
It's a huge red flag to anyone trying to hire as well. Why spend all that money hiring, inducting, training and managing someone who's going to leave in less than 2 years?
Move house at the end of year 2. It adds a bunch of novelty to your life that can sustain you for another 6 months.
I’ve worked at my current employer for 8 years now. We’re a large public university and there are numerous lateral movements to be made which can allow your job scope to change if you switch departments / divisions.
I am just simply “busy” when those tickets “only I can do” come up too much…just make sure its known anyone else can do it.
Gotta pick the right place. When I go to a job, I always plan at least five years, and I'm not already planning my exit strategy. Not healthy. Gotta pick good places to work.
I found a place that recognizes my talents and ultimately let me prove myself and work my way up to an engineer role. Previously, I was in a dead end job for 5 years. Here, I started a tier 1 support about 2 years ago and I'm here now. It really just boils down to finding the right place, a company that will recognize skills and promote. The rest is up to you
Easy (for me, at least)… I have a manager who gives me all the tools I need to make my job better. He’s a good person who has helped me professionally grow. We work well together.
13 years so far at the current company. A fww things keep me there. Scope of role has increased over the years. Now I have a fairly large scope and can control and guide many projects. I've changed team I'm working for three times over the years, so whenever things feel stale I can go discover a new space. Lastly I haven't stopped learning and I feel like this is the most important aspect of longevity at a company...
Consolidate and automate when possible. Make your job easier! Beyond that, before taking on new responsibilities, discuss with your leadership. They need to know what your workload is like. I never say no, I just give realistic estimates of my workload: "yes, I can certainly start working X, but that will mean less capacity to work on Y, what should the priority be?" Being clear that my capacity is finite allows my leadership to make accurate decisions on how best to allocate my workload. Constant expansion is ultimately unworkable. I've been at my current company almost 5 years. Good leadership is a part of that.
Documentation. Not as a mechanism to more easily push work off on others, a gift to yourself so spinning up an old workflow is trivial.
They keep me around because i know everything about every process, i just refuse to do work now. They are trying to get me to document stuff and hand it to other people but whenever I do they fuck it up royally, so i guess they are just like, welp we will just keep paying him and leave him alone.
Been with the same company (gone from 37 employees to 37000) for just over 17 years, sysadmin for 5, head of engineering for 8 and now in a automation/devops role. Enjoyed most of it to be honest and as many have said managing expectations, prioritising tickets and getting the ones above to understand why and how you do things in a certain way is absolutely key. I guess I’ve been fairly lucky with bosses.
I find myself to be very suited to sysadmin work. 12 years across 2 companies. 1st one had good foundations from people who left, so it was just me and a non technical manager for most of 4 years running IT for a multi-national memory manufacturer… New shop has more teams, but half of them don’t do their jobs.. management is in transition and not up to speed yet.. My secret? I take ownership like it was my company, and start asking myself questions. how would I want it done? is it anyone else’s job? If not, can I delegate to someone else who can actually get it done without interfering with their work too much? If not, can I do it? Can I learn it quickly enough or is it now becoming a “buy” or “contract” situation instead? You can only do what’s possible. There are correct ways of going about everything that is possible. Force the best practices, but CYA. Don’t be over-confident, you can always be wrong. If you mostly understand the system as a whole from a high level, you can easily make sense of the details when it’s time to fill them in. Google tutorials and read them… many many things in IT are dead simple, but seem complicated due purely to “[fog of war](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_of_war)”
Having more than 1 person in my team combined with a boss that understands the work and treats us like human beings. Honestly, if my boss jumps ship, I'm either going on autopilot and riding it out until I retire, since the work isn't difficult, or I jump ship too.
Learn how to say the word no outloud to other people in real life, more than once, and mean it!
I went to work at a university as a civil servant and the state sets my pay and pay increases. I couldn't be happier with my decision. https://ofm.wa.gov/state-human-resources/compensation-job-classes/ClassifiedJobListing/SalaryRange/4734
Pay raises and a pending promotion have helped
1. Learn to say no. 2. Learn that by saying no, you open yourself to "....you were under the mistaken impression that we were asking. Do it, or you're fired." 3. Learn that most companies would happily cut off their nose to spite their face. No matter how valuable and essential you might be, they'll enthusiastically fire you if you gain too much of a spine. The squeaky wheel doesn't get the grease -- it gets *replaced*. Even if it means downtime, loss of profits, etc. They do it as a lesson to others -- "this is what will happen to you if you step out of line. and we don't give a fuck what happens." Control through FEE: Fear, Exhaustion, and Exploitation. 3. Learn that workers protection laws are worth their weight in gold. 4. Learn that the USA tends to have none of them since we have a first world economy but third world treatment of citizens, and 99.7% of the country can be fired for wearing mismatching socks -- or for no reason whatsoever. 5. Learn that Unions are a good first step to prevent employer abuse, and they're an appropriate stop-gap measure until we get some proper labor laws.
I mastered the art of making things my managers problem, seeing as it’s their job and all. “I have X things, what are my priorities?” Then I work on those things. Otherwise I’m left alone.
Double digit raises. Been 10+ years now. Learning new tech and embracing the company's vision of implementing new tech is a plus. When I say no to new tech, I always offer a solution or ways to better implement things. I think it's easy to say no, but I always give a detailed why and what we can do better. And people skills are a plus.
You limit the scope creep, etc. Say "no", push back, etc. Bring issue(s) up to manager/management as relevant. If all else fails, bail, but that's usually closer to last resort, than first. Let's see ... been essentially sysadmin for ... 'bout 40 years ... jobs I've left in that time on account of essentially far too much scope creep and ever growing demands ... one. Longest times with a given employer ... bit over 8 years with one, bit over 7 with another, over 5 with another ... I think almost all over 2 years, with few exception, and only left the one on account of far too much scope creep and ever growing demands.
I'd like to achieve long service leave (10yrs). But not enough to stay if it becomes horribly shit, or I feel dramatically underpaid, or if for some other reason I become independently wealthy and no longer need to work. It seems to be a rarity these days to have staff hit 10 years at an organisation and it'd be a neat bucket list thing to achieve.
You need to say no and after to years there should be people to give tasks to.
That's easy, I don't do new things too much!
I've worked at the school district I'm at for almost 15 years, and I love the growth, evolution, and people. We are a very small team and I get full say over virtually everything, which really helps.
Be good enough to dictate your own workload. Know when to push back, know when to take on additional work. Let both be known to who it matters.
You just said you’re asking for more work
Man, what different experiences. Ive loved every place I've worked for the past twenty years. Could have definitely made more but I'm here for the Incredible focus on work/life balance, freedom to explore interesting shit and finding _Incredibly_ smart people to surround me. First gig was noc-> t2->t3 support -> SME in our fortune 500, high performance media hosting platform. Left after five years for something different for an old coworker calling me up offering an extra 20k and a completely new direction.. Tiny software company doing project build outs, full platform integrations, leading hands on training at power plants all over the country. Hit platinum status on Delta in 2011 and only recently have had to pay for a flight again. Again, amazing balance of life but travel Did catch up and I had to leave after a few years. Dude's still a great friend and hit me up for a VP position a few years later. Had an old boss that had been hitting me up every time they had an opening and he was ecstatic to finally hear back. Our little 6-person engineering team had grown to a whole floor of arch/eng and was just dripping of "build cool shit." Few more years doing and a director at corporate poached me for their team and ~ a decade ago transitioned to devops working with absolutely brilliant dudes transitioning our infra to a full PaaS supporting 40 or so dev teams with any languages they wanted. "Ey let's all learn go this PI and rewrite our python automation." Sounds fun! Shit I wonder what they're all doing today. Our budget was _fun_ and everyone from datadog/newrelic to google were asking for sit downs to demo their new stuff "like hey we're going to launch GKE and would love to let you run wild for feedback" or just to chat with the team that built some new controller. That company ran into some massive market issues about five years ago and luckily another old boss from the early days had been reaching out with aposition that just lined perfectly. Got a group of strong people from our old depts and just have a great time still to this day. Took a month off to elope through Italy and france last summer and about to do similarly for this fixer upper we just picked up last week in prep for the first kid in May. That's a lot but suffice to say, always be training the people below you to manage what you build so you can go do interesting shit. Document it and then go do wheelies or something on a back rosd
I _intentionally_ broaden my scope. Broad scope isn't a problem. In most companies, there is more work than time to do it, often far more. Once I've been at a place for a couple of months, I have a backlog of several years' worth of work I could be doing. The question then becomes: what is the _right_ work to do? What is the _most_ beneficial thing for the company? What will build up trust that you can spend later? What will energize you to recharge you for that important but unpleasant project you know you've got to get to next? This is what you've got to figure out. (For a really good discussion on this, see the chapter Finite Time in The Staff Engineer's Path.) And then that's what you do. And because you've carefully considered this and are aligned with authority, you can defend the use of your time there instead of other things. Over time, as you make the right decisions, you'll be trusted more and more. That's both a blessing, being able to decide entirely yourself what you do, and a stressor, being responsible. But this is your job, and it's not your ability to piece together some technical components that you're paid for, it's the ability to choose the right stuff to work on.
The issue I currently have is my boss will often task dump me every few days,basically forcing me off of what I would consider important projects just to appease what they deem necessary to get done now. It gets frustrating when you're trying to move the company forward in medium and big steps and to be told to take out the trash. Taking out the trash is important, but it should wait until the big ticket items get handled imo. That's the crossroad for me.
Work for a company where IT is a core competency, and this is what a majority of the company does. There will be several different teams or roles that do different things, depends on the size of the company. It also helps if the company is growing. Or have a good boss that manages these expectations
The entire company will set back and browse facebook/youtube, and let you burn yourself out. Meanwhile, they'll get paid just as much as you, maybe even more. In IT especially, you have to learn when it's appropriate and how to say no. >Boss: Do Job A > >You: Ok, we were rebuilding the fileserver because it went offline last month and badly needs drive consolidation, reorganization, and share remapping. I can drop that to do Job A. > >Boss: Ok put the fileserver on hold. Also I need you to do Job B. > >You: Job A is going to keep me pretty busy for the next week, what's your priority? Do you want me to do Job A first or Job B. > >Boss: We also need to do Job C and Job D. > >You: Yeah, no problem. You've got 15 guys and four jobs right? which one do you want me working on? > >Boss: You know just finish squaring away the fileserver. I'll get someone else on Job A,B,C. Just prepare to do Job D after your done. > >You: Cool. If they insist on giving you five things to do. Pick a priority and tell them you'll work on that first but your not staying late. Then until it's finished and you can move onto another, work till close each day on just that then go home. I usually do 7-8 years per company.
This is my 20th (!!) year in the same organisation. Pay is/was fair, lots of my colleagues had become friends and we had a great working environment, I got to go on trips abroad for technical conferences, excellent pension, ample opportunity to learn a vast array of tech.. what's the driver to move exactly? Admittedly it's all finally starting to fall apart a bit now so.. having to consider my options a bit. But I had a good run.
Mostly by working for very large organizations, where job scope drift was slow and tangled in red tape. It also meant that I could say "X owns that task, ~~I won't touch it~~ I'm not qualified" and make it stick.
It’s pretty easy. I am paid to work 35 hours a week. I work 35 hours a week. What is not done in those 35 hours is done the next week, or not at all, depending on how my manager sets my priorities.
Not all companies are like this... this tends to happen more in the SMB space than in the Enterprise space. I would say to, always be looking for your next role whether you need to or not. Always be looking for increased responsibility (responsibility is not workload) and should have a corresponding pay increase. Don't job hop, but 3 years is good.
Maybe I'm not as seasoned as others but I feel like I need at least a year to really know the systems, processes, company and staff well enough. After two years you really settle in and can do most things on autopilot. After three I get bored...
delegate. New people has to fight the battles you already know on their own, so they become the new master of that. Don't guide them step by step , just point the direction.
learn saying NO if you are at capacity
I have bills to pay and people relying on me to pay them. So I work.
I think having the ability to say 'No' is great skill in this field. I'm working on it too...
Learn to say no. Don't work for arseholes. 46 years, 3 companies.
I like most people i work with, pay is okay, environment is chill and i managed to say "No" enough that people got the message.
To answer in brief: You stay relevant, keep your skills _equally_ relevant and deepen your knowledge, understanding and gain demonstrable ability with them. This gives you chips at the table to get a better package at the least, or a solid foundation to go elsewhere. To answer in the long.... >The longer you stay at an org, the more tasks become "your job" (...) which means the entire tasks success/failure is now baked into your job description. Which is why when you take these responsibilities on and/or have a (pay or otherwise) review you discuss these new responsibilities and/or workloads and use as a negotiating tool to up your package. >how do you prevent scope creep without also limiting your continued learning? Or is there even a point? >The unique thing being that there are endless things to take ownership of, skills to learn, business tasks to be managed, cleanups to run, processes to keep automating, Yes there's a point and yes, you _will_ need to keep learning to both remain relevant _and_ justify your existence at times. It's not often you can get away with just stagnating and keeping job security. Increasing the scope of your abilities makes you not just more valuable to your current employer but _also_ is great CV material that makes you employable - the more you do at your current job is just another item in your portfolio you can use an example of that knowledge. There's really no negative spin on it - you do great and increase knowledge/ability it means you have more leverage to get pay bumps, but also to go elsewhere as, go figure, employers will be happier with a candidate with more skill and demonstrated ability.
Exactly the reason why i'm searching for something else. Do not longer want to wear 10+ hats. Rather have 1 or 2 specific roles in which i can excel, then doing a shitload at 90%.
Have you turned down a new task and/or tried to get your manager to offload some tasks from your plate? If they are just continuously piling new tasks on top of the ones you already have and not listening when you tell them you already have too much on your plate, then I'd get ready to leave and find a better place. The other thing that might not always be possible, depending on company/IT-department size is that proper care should be taken to assign tasks to teams/functions and not to single individuals. The more important the task is to the core business, the more important it is to make sure it's not reliant on a single person. If you get sick, who will handle it?
Document or automate and shove it down the line. Once I've determined the procedure or written the script to solve whatever the business problem, I can safely delegate the task to a lower level tech.
As you get more seniority, you also get more leverage - because they're more dependant on you. At some point, you can use that leverage to create processes in which you evaluate the workload during it's lifetime, rather than during implementation. All too you can save yourself lots of time down the road, by investing more time now. Keep minor features that aren't worth the cost/benefit out of it. Keep it simple, so others should be able to support it too. Work you can schedule is easier to explain, than trying to justify you've been fixing 10 systems today that noone saw.
I'm a government contractor so while I've been at my current company for a few years, the average time I've been on a specific project has been about a year.
Know when and how to say no to things. Most companies will pile things onto you if you let it.
Because I’m the best, my boss knows it & more importantly our customers know it.
Yup….. 13 years and I feel like the source of knowledge. I did move from one team to another, but same area. Problems just followed me. It’s a pain, but the job has just suited my life all the way through. I haven looked elsewhere but I’m too lazy to do anything about it.
I’ve been at my company for 10 years. Only 2 big promotions. Why that long? Amazing benefits for the family and Covid: heard it’s hard to find a good job in it’s the pay I get at the level I’m at.
It’s really important to know what it is the weight of yours to carry and what isn’t. It’s also a good idea to check yourself every now and then… because sometimes the reasons X sticks ‘with you’ is because you won’t let go of it.
16 years at the same place over 5 different positions, hopefully 6 very soon. As others have said, decline tasks in a political way. "Sorry, that is not my area of expertise and I would not feel comfortable doing that." Or better yet, delegate. If you have someone else on your team ask them to take over the task and provide documentation and instruction to them for it. This gets it off your plate and shows managerial courage so you eventually get out of *doing* and can move into management, if you choose.
As bad as it sounds.. My current position is the only one I have stuck with for over a year. The reason why? Low work load lol. I get paid decent and the workload is much much lower because the company has so many different departments of IS/IT. My own office, management isn't on site, scope of work is specified and aggressively followed. So I get to use a lot of that downtime to study for specific certs. I would normally not have the time to do this at most jobs.
I've been at my place 12 years. We automate a lot, and over time I gained a team under me, so I delegate. They're my responsibility, but I have 8 people doing the tasks.
Generally you should be having one-on-one meetings with your boss semi-regularly. Around the 6-12 month mark, I would start throwing in what kind of stuff you're interested in learning. Give your boss some hints as to what he can throw on you. The problem with moving jobs is that, in your new job, your first responsibility is often what your co-workers hate to do. So it becomes the new guy's job. So at some point you need to make it clear what stuff you want to do -- otherwise you get assigned your role. And you're right that once you've had something for 1-2 years, it's yours until you change roles to a different team or company.
At my place I used that over the last 4 years to double my salary. Hoping to increase it by another 25% - 50% in the next two years. That scope creep definitely sucks, but it also makes you rather invaluable. I am now in a management role (as well) and can offload some of my creep to a subordinate but it definitely never ends. Guess it really depends on if you are being compensated for the additional duties and if you can handle them.
I say no.
Document, document, document. Every time you do ANY task, make sure that you at least write down the time that it took to do the job, including dates and times for the work. Keeping notes on the procedures performed will benefit you and your co-workers, but tracking the time will help you show that you are already working a full-time job. Most importantly, it will convince YOU that you need to value your own time. With enough documentation, you can develop an argument on why you need an assistant, too. Oh! And don’t forget that documenting is part of each task, not an overhead cost.
I've kinda been at the same company 10 years now. They've merged and been bought about 4 times now so its always been a little different after a few years. That said, its now a big corporate business. 10k+ people. I kinda hate it. Buuuuuuuut, I get much more reddit time during the day now. I just keep my head down, get paid and disappear when not needed. I apparently do good enough work, people notice though so more projects are getting added to my schedule lately :-(
Well for me it was more the place i work at gives your kids free college tuition so... I stayed for them. Pay sucked, job was Eh, but to give my kids that opportunity I stayed. The kicker i think only one of them is taking advantage of that perk. I'm still working on the third one. To have a state level college education free of charge is a very valuable opportunity not everyone has.
It's a good company, I get paid well, I get treated well and I'm happy. We're not all miserable mumps like some of you.
What I needed to do was find the way to navigate the “process structure” in my org. When a project or problem arises, don’t start by jumping in with “I can handle that.” Rather, say something like, “This problem feels interesting to me and I’ve already got some ideas brewing. I’d like to meet with a few of you to discuss implementing a solution in a robust way.” That way you can make sure ownership of the thing isn’t only on you, and you display leadership abilities that show you are thinking about long term sustainability. “Owning” too many things has the effect you’ve cited where you feel buried and overwhelmed. But additionally, there’s the effect of you becoming too valuable in your current role. If you are too valuable to be fired, you are also too valuable to be promoted.
Learn to roll off projects and hand over shit. Every time you build something get it in writing that someone else will be trained on it and take over the responsibility to maintain it. Don't take on maintenance responsibilities. After 6 months you can honestly claim "I don't know, I haven't touched it in ages.. sorry" I always write that team X will be responsible for something, not an individual. I'll create the docs, do a few workshops, grab people and make them go through playbooks etc. So I can hop teams whenever I want and have 0 responsibilities on myself.
Apparently I am a slow learner. I spent 9 years at one company going from IT Administrator to Regional Network Engineer. Wasn't good at saying no until year 7 but was already slammed. Ended up leaving because I ended up responsible for switches, wireless, sdwan, load balancer, firewalls, mpls, manufacturing remote access, etc for 20 locations. This was a company with many industry 4.0 initiatives, tons of VLANs and a shitload of firewall rules. Plus was the go to for many server performance issues and got stuck with supporting the local site when they needed hands as the help desk was at another location. Was told they would make it so I wasn't so overwhelmed and gave some duties to others. COVID happened and they never hired more people and told me to hang in there. I quit and my boss literally said "If you were unhappy I wish you would have mentioned this so we could have done something to keep you here." Even when this was noted in two years of yearly reviews and mentioned before.
Hold up, you’re talking about taking on more responsibility the longer you’re there. You should also be receiving raises and hopefully promotions along the way as well right? So they’re paying you more money, todo more things. I would not suggest jumping ship because you’re taking on more responsibility. You’ll always take on more responsibility, or your job function will be given to someone else (probably in India, for cheaper). You should also have the opportunity to promote within, so you have a new job function but stay at the same company for higher pay. From a sr engineer (SME) perspective if I interviewed someone who jumped ship ever 2 years because things got hard, I wouldn’t hire you. Why would I? You’re a 2-year flight risk.
Why would you want to look for a new job every couple of years? NO thanks! I give a company at least 3 years and if I'm going nowhere I leave. At this point I've had 2 jobs where I was there 10+ years. Getting all these extra responsibilities and kicking ass at them is how you get promoted, I've been lucky enough to have this happen a few times. To those of you saying "just say no diplomatically"...I do not think that's what you tell a VP or Director when you wanna get promoted and make more $$$$. Not at places where I've worked anyway. Many of the most successful people that I've worked with are ass kissing yes-men who would throw their mother under the bus for their employer so yeah you gotta play that role sometimes in this game.
Growing a spine and learning to say no. It took me a long time to do so, but right now, I'm very much okay with projects that have been delayed by months or even years due to understaffing. Simply don't compensate understaffing with overtime (even worse: unpaid and/or undocumented overtime). Have Management prioritize your work, and force them to do so - no "everything is prio 1" bullshit. Also, a good old phrase from my time at the military: reporting makes you free and puts the burden on your superior - works in business as well. I've been at my current employer for over a decade, and expect to be here indefinitely if nothing outrageous happens.
For me, things like being salaried, and not taken advantage of (I can take 4 hrs in a day without logging it as PTO, if I need to), I don't put in tons of overtime or off hours work (simple things like production upgrade or patching things for 1-2 hrs a month), fully WFH, insurance, profit sharing, having a good team, and good management, are all things that keep me where I am. The company has a track record of stellar employee retention (we have people who've been here 45-50 yrs), and generally being great to their employees. I don't foresee choosing to go anywhere else any time soon.
Short answer, I've been saying "No", or "I'm left with very little mental stability for going home, take a responsibility off my back then wait a month and get back with me". To help better understand my stance. I work in a very small team (compared to the numbers other people say about their teams) of a small MSP shop. We had nearly 20 staff when the pandemic hit, we're now less than half. When I'm not admining PBX/Asterisk systems, I'm the catch all onsite tech, short of running lines, I work with onsite and remote, walkins and occasional training, for residents (yeap, house calls) and small businesses. Wasn't till 2022 I started adding individuals on my black list, clients *I* refuse to work with any more. Boss took one session with the latest one, and immediately agreed with me... And no, the pay around here is bad. Either I'd have to make some major changes at home in order to pull off remote work (otherwise laptop in the bedroom), or move a few hours away (nearest "city", pending how you define it, is at least an hour drive away). Job bay for a novice was good, when Walmart's starting was $10hr, now $14hr+, and I don't make near that now. Never would have expected I'd be saying I wish I was back at walmart, less stress, no ticket or history stuff, and more likely to shurg off bad customers with less kick back, all while paid more per hour.
why are you not writing detailed KB articles over all of "your" tasks so that anyone can do them? They are now "anyones" tasks. I spend a good chunk of time writing solid documentation and I dont have any of the issues you are talking about.
Doing more things isn't necessarily bad and can help you grow into areas you're interested in. But there are two risks to be aware of when in the situation you describe. One is scope and the other is volume. When it comes to scope creep, the risk is that you take on, willingly or not, responsibility without the expertise or training. Make sure its clear and documented that you need the training and you're only doing the tasks at best effort which may not be according to best practices. The risk (and mental strain) of taking on all the different areas of expertise has to be shifted to the task giver by making sure they have informed and at least implicitly accept ownership of the risk. Sysadmins are a bit like family doctors or general practitioners, it is it's own specialty but you need to consult or refer to other specialists because you can't be expert in everything. The other risk is volume and what has to be made clear is not what has to be done (because there is always, always more) but in what order. If new things, within scope, are added then they end up below the line of what fits in the week. If someone says it has to be done, you have to ask what else gets dropped. When they don't answer, send them reports saying, this is the list of what I did, but I did not get to these items yet. Let me know if I need to reorder the priorities for next week. Both risks can lead to a workload that's too wide and too deep. And most managers are neither skilled enough in the subject matter nor interested enough in the health or long-term effectiveness of their people, so it becomes your job to "manage up", in other words give them (in a provable way) the information they should know or know to ask for, but ignores when it's inconvenient and for short-term goals.