Mangers how do you deal with sloppy work sysadmins?

Not a manager but "fuckups happen" 🤷‍♂️ Provided they're not **consistently** making more busywork for you personally, or attempting to assign blame - Just try and remember that "you are not your job" Unless it's sufficiently bad to bring the firm to bankruptcy and threaten your financial stability - It's not worth getting worked up over; Especially not in your personal time and much less losing any sleep over it. Sysadmins commonly tend to get **overly** invested in the state of the system. Taking pride in your work is one thing and perfectly laudable; However many view it as "their baby" and so it becomes a personal affront if anything isn't just-so - Especially when due to someone else not matching up to your own standards. In reality the system was there before you, it will be there long after you're gone, with the vast majority of issues boiling down to either lack of either planning or budget. Breaking your back by working late nights and weekends to resolve a total production outage ensuring there's no business impact come SOB won't be remembered or appreciated - If anything it just becomes expected if you routinely entertain sacrificing your personal life for the firm's sake in a way no other department would even contemplate .... Your family meanwhile **will** remember all the times you weren't there, not to mention the personal toll from taking on all that extra stress. As such, my main advice is simply "don't sweat the day-job". I'm not saying that people shoulden't care entirely, nor aim to do good work they can take some pride in - Just try to remember that the companies problems aren't **your** problem, anymore so than they share in yours. An appropriate level of concern for the firm's wellbeing would be to reciprocate the degree to which they'd care about you being able to make rent the following month if they decided to make you redundant without warning. Aim to diligently fulfill the obligations of your employment contract - Anything more quite simply isn't your problem to worry about, much less overcompensate for. Going back to the topic at hand - It sounds like the guy is dubiously competent; Was he hired into this position, or just promoted to senior for time-served? If the latter, there's every chance his skillset wasn't properly developed but now isn't in a position to admit t. The Peter Principle is that people tend to rise through an organization until they exceed their competence, then stop. A slightly tongue in cheek riff on it is the Dilbert principle; Which is that incompetent people tend to get promoted to management in order to take them out of harms way - Which TBH short of getting rid of the guy, could well end up being a "solution". That is of course dependant on management A. noticing B. caring - Which if they themselves have been Dilbert'd into their own role, isn't a given. ... Not to mention they might just like the guy and be uninclined to make waves; If they were responsible for giving him the position, admitting he's incompetent could reflect poorly on them in turn and/or they might be guarding headcount if there's a hiring freeze etc. Finally, depending on what his other duties are - it's possable he has skills in other areas which make up for his lack in this one. I also think it's worth considering that you don't necessarily know what's happened behind closed doors. A decent manager will praise in public, but reproof in private. From skimming the thread you said the guy's presenting it as an intentional "test", which is a fairly thinly vailed attempt to defend himself. It's possible the manager bought it - It's also possible they saw through it, quietly dinged him about it but agreed not to make mountains of molehills - Being defensive suggests he knows damn well he fucked up and one would hope he's at least **trying** to learn from it. Short of going on the warpath other it, which risks either backfiring or creating enemies (if he's your senior there's a decent chance he'll get to provide input on your own promotion prospects) - you've no way of knowing. Overall i'd say it's best to let sleeping dogs lie - However if you want to embark on it, you could attempt to manage upwards by pushing for more CM as an effort unrelated to this (give it a month or two then start pitching) i.e you said >Yes, but I want to say, CM is there just for passing the SOX. People rarely follow the CM. That's something you can bang the drum about, without making any mention of the guy's behaviour - ITIL / COBIT / TOGAF ... Hell, maybe even PRINCE2 - Expanding any kind of systematized best-practice is your friend here. You can then present yourself as being enthusiastic to both expend your skillset and **help**, rather than being painted as a Jr wanting to point fingers - Aim to expand the CM from being a perfunctory checkbox exercise into something meaningful the firm lives and breathes by. Management generally loves accountability, process and metrics so there's every chance they'll lap it up and view you more positively rather than a troublemaker. It's not about a personal vendetta, it's about "what's best for the firm". If you're lucky there's a decent chance of getting the firm to put you through the certification for any/all of them which will only help your future prospects elsewhere. Likewise you can pivot out of jr sysadmin towards compliance, and from there into security or any number of other well paying gigs. Even if not - If **every** outage requires a post-mortem root cause analysis and SOP review, it becomes much harder for the guy's failing to be arm-waved away. Especially if subsequent follow-ups are forced to identify the root cause as being failure to properly address the issue last time round; It creates a paper-trail which eventually becomes unignorable and puts the guy on a pathway to either being retrained, having his duties changed removing his access, or ultimately let go. The how and why it ends up happening would be beyond your control, but you can gently force management's hand. The only thing i'd say to be wary of is that you don't end up creating a double-edged sword for yourself.