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 No.806064>>806245 [Watch Thread][Show All Posts]

Mainly wanted to thank the anons here and ask for a bit of advice.

I received a job offer about 6 months back after a few anons here gave me some educational material that helped me with preparing for the interview. I was officially hired on as an IT Generalist/Support, providing Tier 2 level support to employees at a non-profit with about 100 employees at various sites running Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows 10 on endpoints, and managing three cloud services. The tasks were fairly easy and due to the microshit environment, I began to study powershell during the downtime (which there was plenty of). Three months into the job though, my boss made the jump to IT Director at a University. I was given the position of IT Director at the non-profit two weeks after my boss left. I've been managing the IT Department as the sole employee in the IT Department for almost three months now.

So again thanks for helping out, but now I don't know how to properly take advantage of the situation or improve my status because I skipped the junior role and lacked a good mentor Had 1 year of T1 remote-troubleshooting for an ISP, 8 months as a cable tech, and an unrelated B.A. before getting this job. Most of the systems are managed remotely except for one Windows 2012 R2 Server running a training server onsite, relatively stable except for when update cycling, leaving the majority of my work days doing basic troubleshooting for the org's employees. Additionally, it's a small enough business where I don't feel the need to automate the fleet deployment process or anything along those lines due to at most only 5 new employees being hired on a busy month. But as the sole IT employee I'm finding it difficult to think of higher-level tasks or long-term innovation to help the organization like an IT Manager would. What do you think I should be focusing on now? Also, if any of you have gone through a similar situation I'd appreciate hearing your stories.

 No.806065

install gentoo


 No.806066

>What do you think I should be focusing on now?

Literally install gentoo on a single machine that you have many copies of that macine's hardware for. Then switch your whole infrastructure to gentoo by copy+pasting that one machine. You will save countless amounts of money on electricity and uptime in the future. You will have to retrain the m1cr0sh1t pajeets under you though.


 No.806069>>806094

File (hide): 7695b98764249e9⋯.png (49.94 KB, 550x550, 1:1, 1459300486643.png) (h) (u)

You're in a dream position.

That being said, there's much work to do. This job will look great on your resume in the future, but you need to hold it for a few years to build credibility.

Ignore the "Install Gentoo" comments. While you can research open source options to fill software requests and work to move from proprietary software, jumping straight off a Windows environment right away is a mistake. Unless you're a graybeard (and you're clearly not) you'll be in over your head trying to do custom Linux installs that will require tons of work to reach parity, and you'll end up making employees uncomfortable.

Instead, focus on automating the bulk of the tedious tasks. Write scripts to fix common problems users have. Write scripts to automate new employee set-up. Write scripts to automate employee terminations. Make it so that you can pull a string and the network will continue working.

Spend your time learning new certifications. Diversification is good. Do some courses on security and penetration testing. How secure is your network? How's your backup plan? How much of your network can utterly fail and how long will you be bent over? Your nightmare scenario is an utter failure of the network one day leading to your public firing or your organization being publicly shamed for the failure and taking a hit from it. You're also the sole employee in IT, which means you will take all the blame and also spend multiple sleepless days trying to string a fix together. You can never truly solve security and backup management, but you can do a lot to make sure you can avoid 90% of all nightmare-class scenarios and easily repair 90% of the ones that might actually get through.

Aside from that, continue to find new IT skillsets that are in demand. Browse job sites and see what other companies want experience with. A lot of it will, unfortunately, probably be cloud or virtualization, but you should still get familiar with these just so you can pad a resume at the very least. Look for trends and be sure to spend a little time each day learning them.

Final note: while I encourage you to optimize your network, automate the bulk of the work, and spend most of your time learning, you should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER forget to show your face to the other employees to remind them you exist. The bosses especially. Walk through the office to get your coffee. Take trips through populated areas. Leave to grab lunch. Stop and say hi to people. When they have problems, always listen and try to find a way to accomodate their needs without ruining your network. People like that. Your employers will like that. Becoming a hermit who virtualizes their network and does all support remotely is an amazing way to make everyone resent you and have nothing nice to say about you, but you'll still take the blame when something inevitably goes wrong, even if it's just their e-mail is slow to load.

Do not make the mistake of disappearing entirely. You can screw around all day as long as people see you rushing between offices now and then. They don't need to know why. You don't need to tell anyone what you're doing exactly. Just always prioritize users and get their stuff done in a reasonable amount of time and be sure they see you being active.

Your goal is to build an incredible resume with a great title and experience/certificates in all the major areas employers are looking for right now. In a couple of years you can apply to be the IT Director of a slightly larger firm and go from there. Or, if you're comfortable there, you can always push to have someone under you to handle menial tasks and help you in case of emergencies. If the organization expands this will become necessary. You may be able to use job offers to barter for a better salary and more benefits, too.

Do it right and within a few months the network will run itself, you'll have decent security in place, you'll have emergency plans drawn-up, your entire network should be fully documented with all the information anyone would ever need to manage it, and you should have an amazing resume to pass around. Nobody at any company will ever know you skipped ahead and don't have the same level of experience as others with your title, and they never need to know.

Good luck anon, and godspeed. Let me know if you have any further questions.


 No.806094

>>806069

>write scripts

Perl is your friend, leave Python back on reddit.


 No.806100

I envy you so fucking much.


 No.806245

>>806064 (OP)

<a full page of humblebrag later

>I'm finding it difficult to think of higher-level tasks

Congratulations, you've exhausted your legitimate work load and have been promoted to Obfuscated Obsolescence. This is the greatest and worst part of all IT workers' careers. Your job now is to maintain the constant illusion that you still provide value to the company beyond what a remote on-call service can provide. This is great because it's quite easy to do as a sole IT employee, and you can spend your time on any pet projects you want, so long as they provide some tangential or potential utility to your company. You're in the free and clear until they start asking you to log your hours and everything you do.




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