Large company culture

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Complete-Cricket-351@reddit

Mate this is pretty normal I've come in even as a highly paid contractor and the first couple of weeks they often don't have anything for you to do. What I would say is grab the docko and start learning how the text and business side of the this thing hangs together It's a brilliant opportunity because nowadays you have the robot so you can get the robot to quiz you. It's not as dry as chunking through a big doco pile used to be. And yes definitely ask your management about expectations don't say you're sitting there bored just ask about expectations because it's possible there is some urgent thing that they actually wanted you in the door for and the left hand hasn't spoken to the right

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Riptide7266@reddit

This is typical in many organizations. Eventually, though, they will begin to trust you with tasks. It has everything to do with the structure. This is a bad culture in many organizations.

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DistributionFickle65@reddit

You’re gonna have to prove yourself first, then your access will slowly expand. They’re not going to give you the keys to the kingdom after only a month.

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Enough_Pattern8875@reddit

At larger orgs it can take a few months to get your access fully provisioned. Use this time to burn through all of your mandatory HR orientation/training. Reach out to your manager and explicitly ask them what their expectations are of you for the first couple months, this will ensure you’re on the same page and also make them aware of any issues you’re having with getting access to infrastructure/accounts. What were you specifically hired for? I would be very surprised if an org that size hired a jack of all trades with no specific scope of work/responsibilities…

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d00ber@reddit

Can confirm. I worked for a very large north american data/telecommunications company and I didn't get my laptop until 2 weeks after I started. My login didn't work until a week after that and it took at least another week for apps to start working and permissions..etc You'd think this was 20+ years ago...

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d00ber@reddit

Can confirm. I worked for a very large north american data/telecommunications company

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

The job description was generalist but senior sysadmin and listed all kinds of usual stuff like windows server, vmware, nutanix, enterprise backup systems. On and on. All stuff im good with. But then its like yes we have all that ive seen it. Thousands of servers. Millions of dollars worth of enterprise backup solution. On and on. But you aren't really needing to work with it.... at least not yet.

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anarrowview@reddit

This happens in large orgs. They need to have a boiler plate job req but then everything moves like molasses, especially so if you come from a smaller org. Also, everyone is protecting their own little fiefdom so getting access can take forever but you can’t rightfully be blamed for it. It’s just working at a different pace, bunker down for many years or go find a smaller more nimble environment.

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Viharabiliben@reddit

I just started at a medium sized shop and the Sr Admin here is really protective of his kingdom. He’s been here awhile and at one time or another has installed most everything, but he’s hesitant to delegate a lot of things. Sometimes people stay too long at a job and it becomes their entire world. I’ve seen many long time admins that never married, no kids, no pets, work is their entire world. They live off junk food and video games when not at work. A good friend of mine was exactly that.

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ChromaLife@reddit

I am exactly what you speak about. I am happy. Let me be happy. It's not delusion I swear. <laughs nervously>

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Greed_Sucks@reddit

I’m happy for you. The joy of service is overlooked.

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WhatsInaName77@reddit

For real. I feel personally attacked. 😄

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Littleboof18@reddit

I started recently at a medium enterprise as well as a network engineer and the other network engineer on the team is like this. Been here for over 20 years, knows literally every single thing about the environment, gets here before anyone on the team, leaves after everyone, doesn’t eat, etc. His life is literally this place. Even when I’m on call he will sometimes already be on it, it’s wild. I would be kind of screwed if it weren’t for him due to all the weird systems and odd configurations lmao. I came from a MSP where I was the only network engineer, so I’m used to chaos most of the time, here, I feel like I’m doing nothing, but everyone says they’re super appreciative for my help and what not. It’s kind of strange but I’ll take it.

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nbs-of-74@reddit

Erm. I don't play video games, much .....

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TheLordB@reddit

My company had the IT head/sysadmin do the won’t delegate anything thing. It was 3 IT people total, probably smaller than yours, but at least 1 of the 2 other people were also very senior. The head ended up being fired. I felt bad for them because they were friendly/nice as a person, but they were just not willing to delegate anything while also setting silly high requirements on certain things. They were someone who was good as a consultant who could just be told what to do and they would get it done to a very high quality, but when they became in charge of everything, were setting the goals and needing to delegate to others they just really couldn’t do it.

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packet_weaver@reddit

It also just is helpful to have all that knowledge even if you work in a silo'd environment like this. It gives you the context you need when putting in requests with other teams or troubleshooting an issue to know which team to go to based on what you see. Without that knowledge, those bits, especially troubleshooting, become quite difficult.

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Geesle@reddit

U need to talk and communicate with these balloon heads. I was in similar position once, then realized these people sre so csught upnin their own world that they just cant be bothered to even think about or adapting the new guy, this is a management issue for sure but nothing changed until u bring it up.

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MBILC@reddit

They have been there a month... calm down with the looking for a new job stuff... Many larger orgs operate like this, they don't just bring on a new hire, give em DA/GA rights and say go nuts.. They often have compliance requirements, different teams to handle work and as a new person, you need to build trust in your role also. One client I worked with, it took them 3-4 months alone to get background checks done and give user access for projects due to the industry they were in (critical infra)

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MBILC@reddit

"at least not yet" is the key here.. Use this time to get to know everything you can and do have access to, learn about others you may be dealing with in future, talk to them to get to know the nuances of the role..

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CactusJ@reddit

I worked in a massive law firm for 18 months and it was exactly as you described. I did NOTHING for 18 months, except help build out a new office and move some files around. Zero access. Even though my job was described as needing all my senior skills my real job (getting paid very well) was “be available on the West Coast if we need you” I HATED it and left as soon as I realized it was not going to get better. I found a new place, and its great. I have tons of work, and I can work on what I am good at. In regards to access? Even at the new place I dont have access to systems I probably should. I just make note, or call it out in scrum and move on and work on useful things. One thing to know and it may be in this thread already is that large orgs often hire to fill head count. They have to have X # of people in a department or they lose funds. Usually people get in these roles and it takes a while to find out what they should do. DM me if you have more questions or want to chat.

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null640@reddit

Is it a rank and yank shop? I took a job at an aggressive rank and yank shop 15% gone each year. If you didn't get 20% bonus, you need to put out resumes. No one would even do as much as give you passwords, or show you any docs, or policies and procedures...

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

Definitely an issue. Someone I know at AWS mentioned that the bottom team member was fired every 6 months. Sabotage or at least not helping anyone is the norm in these environments...why would anyone stick their neck out for someone if they could end up getting them fired?

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fishy007@reddit

I had almost the exact same experience a few years ago. I went from sole sysadmin with 500 users to a larger company with about 9000 users. I wanted to quit that first month. I did nothing. It was boring and I was so concerned that I would be let go for not doing any work. Fast forward about 18 months and now I have too much work. Fast forward another few years and I'm a senior on the team and need to delegate some work. Now I make a point of guiding the new people through this. We have hired other people from smaller environments and I have a talk with each of them to explain the pace of the job. I'm sorry no one did that for you. Just hang in there. Things will even out and you'll likely be super busy in the new year.

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t0nality@reddit

You wanna do a little of it on the side? I could use a good pve/switch admin for a couple days, architecture-type work more fitting to your broader base. No pressure, I just have no idea how to get a good contractor for this kind of stuff and you sound like I did at my soul sucking corp job 😁. Anyway, if you're interested, hit me up.

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Enough_Pattern8875@reddit

It sounds like you need to schedule a one on one with your manager to set some short term expectations/goals.

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rodface@reddit

I echo this, my first few months at an F500 felt wasted just like this, I wanted to do a lot and was constantly being told to pump the brakes. 10 years later, and I do quite a lot and have a great deal of leeway to work on what I feel is important, but I suppose I had to put all of that time in.

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Dal90@reddit

Basically same...first month is twiddle your fingers. Remember folks -- enterprises don't make money by being efficient. Their profits come from spreading their costs over a mind boggling number of transactions. (Or the float on customer money and insurance companies love all those reserves they have to keep and invest in real estate and stocks.)

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dustojnikhummer@reddit

> At larger orgs it can take a few months to get your access fully provisioned. My country has a 3 month probation period. Unless there is a damn good reason, even new admin won't get full access everywhere within that probation period.

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tzigon@reddit

Take the small tasks and do a great job with them. Build trust. Make small suggestions for process improvement in your area. Look to build trust.

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Muddledlizard@reddit

Sounds like you and I work for the same company. Don't worry. Your lack of access will be held against you because you were not "performing" as expected. And yes, it will be your fault.

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Chance_Ad_9354@reddit

I worked for the Borg, AT&T for 20 years. When I first started, we were cradle to grave support. Order, rack, cable, OS and Citrix support. Over the years, countless layoffs and re-orgs, we eventually moved to silo support. Head down, just support your silo, mine happened to be Citrix. After 20 years, my job, along with over 1500 others, got our notice that we were being offshored. At first I was pissed, but these last 5 years have been so much better. I found a job in a smaller company, doing IR work for cyber security firm.

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fadeaway222@reddit

hmm. Keep good communication with your manager or director. Ensure you are meeting his/her requirement of you. Casually mention that you feel you could do more if permitted, but dont push hard on this point. They may have a policy that new hires dont get access to X,Y.Z until probation is over.

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StrongMarsupial4875@reddit

Enjoy having little to do man. I also am at a large company and every department has its own IT team, and permissions are locked down for so much stuff. My workload is so small, it stressed me out a first, and I pushed to get more to do, and now I’ve realized nobody cares and it makes for great work life balance if you can just chill and accept your small place in the machine. Good luck!

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I_Have_A_Chode@reddit

This is what it is like at large WELL run companies in my experience. My most recent gig, I'm a senior on my team and I wasn't do much of anything for the first 6 months. Just learning the company itself and how it operates. It's pretty normal

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Ill fully admit that this is my first time at a megacorp. If this is just how it goes and maybe in 6 months I can do some work then I'll stick it out. Its just mind blowing that they can waste me and my cost but then again they are a mega Corp so... I guess duh.

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FeralEnigma@reddit

At big corps they care more about holding on to talent than they do the cost.

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sryan2k1@reddit

A megacorp you need to add at least a zero to the employee count. You're just in a normal big business and it's just how things work.

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0zer0space0@reddit

My last megacorp job, I didn’t even have a company laptop for the first two months, and I still got paid full salary during that time. My salary was $75k/year. They didn’t have anything for me to do because without laptop and VPN, I couldn’t do anything anyway. I never imagined I’d spend 8 hours a day getting paid to play video games. I left after about a year for a better opportunity.

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VexingRaven@reddit

> My last megacorp job, I didn’t even have a company laptop for the first two months, and I still got paid full salary during that time. lol that's just a poorly run IT shop if it takes 2 months to onboard somebody properly.

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hutacars@reddit

For real… we are a fraction of the size of a megacorp and access is automatically granted/laptop shipped on day 1. It’s not hard.

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mattmccord@reddit

HR probably notified IT of the new hire on day 59.

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EnragedMoose@reddit

10k isn't even that big. Things get more pared down. One network team? I've had one team for one region's load balancers.

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Hotdog453@reddit

Yeah, I was going to say: 10k is like... not that big? I'm at a place with 50k now, and hearing stories and such about the super mega corps, like the Wells Fargos and such, make this place seem quick and nimble.

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thecstep@reddit

Ditto. OPs company is setup like mine but with 80% less users. That would be the dream.

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northstar57376@reddit

This is why I always wonder how some ppl job hop every year or 2. At medium to large corps, it takes good 6 months to 1 year to just become familiar with everything in the environment.

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insomnic@reddit

I had a coworker who loved being a contractor because they liked learning new environments but got tired of "the bullshit"... they said they usually do 3-4 years before looking for a new thing. Kinda fits.

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mxsifr@reddit

Money. You're right, it does take 6 months to get up to speed, especially in software. But there's no substitute for the massive leap in quality of life that comes with another $20~40,000/year. In my career of over two decades, I've never had a single raise. Ever. That's not an exaggeration. I *have* been let go five times, and every single time, the first words out of their mouths were "Your work is some of the highest quality we've ever seen". Until recently, no job had me for more than 2 years maximum. Every time I left (quit or fired or laid off), I would get minimum $20k more from the next job. After doing this enough times, I now make about $150k from my day job. You could say I'm a slacker, or you could say I act my wage. My coworkers have always been happy with me, so I don't think I'm doing anything wrong.

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SkiingAway@reddit

For the ones that aren't getting a particularly impressive pay increase out of it: That's why they job hop. It means they never really do much or have any responsibility.

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TheBeerdedVillain@reddit

I'm learning this, myself. I've been in the corp space for just over a year (well, almost 2 years if you count contract work), and it is a definite learning curve when it comes to the business itself. I came on as a contractor because of my firewall experience and now I'm finding myself doing more switching and routing maintenance, while also doing firewall work. With that said, I've also learned a lot about how some companies work and how to interact with the interested parties based on what needs to be done. I've also gotten to play with technologies that I hadn't even thought of doing in the past. I've learned more about routing and switching in the past few months than I wanted to know, and now I want to know more. Most of all, I've learned how to work with those that manage the sub-entities that our overall corp owns and built relationships with the people that I've interacted with. All of that was to say, being part of a corp/megacorp/etc. is worth it after some time. I'm still learning a lot about the business after being here for almost 2 years. It takes time, but I do jump in where I can help, as well as manage a small ticket load of the things I was able to grab from others.

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TheLastRaysFan@reddit

>I always wonder how some ppl job hop every year or 2. ![gif](giphy|GjB41rKHBnOkE)

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etzel1200@reddit

They hide from the fact they don’t/can’t do anything.

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insomnic@reddit

Part of that isn't "waste" because they get an allotment for positions and if they don't fill them they may lose them so they might not have had a direct and immediate need for a senior admin position workload but they did have an open slot they didn't want to lose and *will* need.... so there you are as they take several month to kinda slowly bring you into things. Big Corp moves SUPER slow - even when they think it's fast or immediate - particularly when compared to smaller environments. Even "this is an emergency" stuff can take 3 months or, unfortunately, will get ignored until 2 weeks before service cut-off and then flurry of activity. Silos are fiefdoms that people protect for ... things. Learn to interact on friendly with your similar level peers and you'll kinda sort it out over time. In your own team, just be present and available and interact with them. Particularly if you're mostly remote you'll want to be proactive. MS Teams setup in big orgs is like manager\leadership performative activity. They build these out for show and to seem productive but essentially it's the new "we have a Sharepoint site" thing (which you might not also be familiar with if new to big org but it's a performative visibility thing to tout but often not very productive or functional).

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sydpermres@reddit

It's not upto to worry about $$ unless that's your primary role. Do your job well and go home and enjoy time with the family.

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blosphere@reddit

I've been on this cycle of small/big/small/big... when you know your stuff big is better. In the end there's going to be an eye-watering level of tech debt and you know how to do it better due to the small company experience and the fingers in all pies. You'll be looking at the mountain of work sooner than later. And that's just the work that was found for you. Imagine when you put your ideas in front of competent tech lead/manager... :)

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Baljet@reddit

Faceroll your way through simple tickets you can get over the first few months and build some connections. Find people like Bill who are specialized and overloaded, you'll soon start to carve out your own niche.

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matroosoft@reddit

Cost of doing nothing vs cost of doing something wrong. The stakes are high with a large company and they want to test the waters first.

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kmoran1@reddit

sounds like chevron.

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RobotBaseball@reddit

Not every megacorp is like this, you probably picked a dinosaur company. Get the name recognition, pick up a few skills and learn how large systems work, and get out after a few years. There's no shortage of work and fires to be put out at less boomer companies.

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jupitaur9@reddit

This. A corporate shop can’t have cowboys and rockstars riding all over everyone else. Changes go through change control with documented and tested backout plans. The sooner you learn to work with those other teams, the better. You aren’t allowed to expand that database, but you can let the db team know, put in a ticket and let them do it. You can’t put that server on a different virtual yourself, but you can request it, and it’ll be done at a time that won’t disrupt production and it’ll be documented including the reason for it.

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Worried-Buffalo-908@reddit

If it is a mega corp your cost is less than pennies for it.

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etzel1200@reddit

Nearly all of your work will be getting approvals. That part sucks. The rest isn’t bad. It’s easy money.

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RedHal@reddit

When I bring a senior member on to my team I explicitly tell them that I do not expect them to be fully up to speed for six months. We have multiple interdependent systems that take a long time to fully understand. I would much rather that they use their initial period exploring, talking to system owners, walking through service flows and processes than trying to just jump in. Of course nothing is stopping them from diving right in, but in my experience that just leads to me having lots of "this is why" conversations taking up both their and my time. We have a (deliberate) backlog of projects that they can pick up and work on once they understand how that project will slot into the overall ecosystem, and sometimes this can be a useful entry point to greater understanding.

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RobotBaseball@reddit

They're large boomer companies that have budget and competent talent, but i wouldn't call it well run. It's a race towards standardization and mediocrity.

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primalchrome@reddit

No....they're not. They're companies with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line every second of the day. IT can't be run like the wild west like it can in a small and dynamic environment.   It gets tiring to read these 'I'm better than everyone on my team but they won't let me totally revamp the entire company to suit the shiny tech I know will fix everything' posts. Guys like that are the reasons that companies make you settle in for a few months (often they're vetting you)...have approval processes (there are a lot of entwined systems).....documentation (just because *you* know eveyrthing doesn't mean everyone does)....changelogs (just because you put a bandaid on it doesn't mean the next guy will know it).... Because everyone there has experience with downtime, working late, and massive losses because some 'brilliant' new lone gunman put in his pet 'fix' and fucked critical secondary or tertiary systems.   I've worked decades in both evironments....and I prefer smaller and dynamic. But I *understand* the why's and how's of large corporate IT and why they have to be so careful.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

I wonder how you vet someone when you dont allow them to do any work? You already did a background check and asked them questions in the interview.

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Klutzy_Possibility54@reddit

It's usually not so much vetting whether they're qualified for the job as it is vetting that they know the company's policies and procedures, because new people might not know them but they also might not yet be able to appreciate the consequences of violating them. Even my team, which is pretty lax in a lot of ways that would not fly elsewhere, requires new network engineers to shadow or submit changes through other engineers for at least a month or two before we will give them read/write access. It's not because we don't trust them to do the job we hired them for, it's because we want to make absolutely sure that they know the environment and know what things could have severe consequences before they run into them by accident. That doesn't mean they're just sitting around on their hands with nothing to do though.

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BatemansChainsaw@reddit

[This comment outlines that fairly well.](https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1pkd55q/large_company_culture/ntke23l/) Having worked for a large corp it takes a while.

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hmtk1976@reddit

When someone uses ´boomer´ in an argument... I laugh. Standardization is good. Mediocrity... not as much.

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RobotBaseball@reddit

Sorry if the term offends you but it refers to bloated companies that are weighed down by bureaucracy, empire builders, and mid talent. Cisco, IBM, Intel, etc… not great but not terrible

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FarmboyJustice@reddit

Um, no that's not what it refers to. Nobody thinks that's what it means but you.

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RobotBaseball@reddit

Maybe I’m the boomer and don’t know how to use these terms

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hmtk1976@reddit

It doesn´t offend me but it makes it rather difficult to take people seriously.

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RobotBaseball@reddit

how old are you?

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hmtk1976@reddit

Gen X old :-) You?

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RobotBaseball@reddit

Younger millennial. I think this is cultural

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Kreiger81@reddit

Standardization is great. I wish we had more of it.

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jkaczor@reddit

Very normal - the first 6-months at Microsoft as a roving support engineer were training, more training, shadowing other engineers and then several reverse shadows (where you handle the issue with a much more experienced engineer side-by-side to ensure you did things the right way)… of course this was many years ago, am sure it is not as good now, that whole org was gutted, offshored and outsourced…

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BatemansChainsaw@reddit

Working for Microsoft 15 years ago was like this. Same with Apple and Google. These days I can't say much but from my colleagues at all three it's... gotten a lot worse.

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FeralEnigma@reddit

Nope, welcome to a large enterprise. Establish yourself in the org, get Involved in as much as you can and you can slowly build up pieces of access to everything you need. Sometimes you may need to push with management and justify your need for access to different things. In large orgs they take least privilege very seriously.

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Pitiful-Act4792@reddit

Did you take the job from one of the recruiters that sends the job description last four social in email? Those jobs are placeholder jobs. Last one I took was a three month assignment, and what you discover later is you were back filling while a woman went out on harassment leave. Those jobs are all placeholder jobs - either waiting for the H1B to get their visa or someone to return to work for something they cannot discuss. Enjoy it, make the money, see how long it lasts, put up with the gatekeeping. Either that or go build your own company.

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coldazures@reddit

Do you work with me? It doesn’t get better at these places. You just learn to play the game. I’m happy to do whatever they ask of me. They just don’t ask very much of me and I am cool with that. One day I’ll probably jump ship and do something meaningful with my life but for now I take the inflated salary and chill.

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realflygq@reddit

Pay more, less works. So, STF. Not everyone can sit in your shoes.

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SpecialRespect7235@reddit

Was at a large Corp for 9 years and figured out how to get all of the access I could want...and some I didn't. Start doing people on the other teams favors, or try and help during an incident call and then be like, sorry looks like I dont have access. After a little time and patience (as long as they think you are competent), they will start giving you access to their teams stuff. It is even easier if you work midnights and have to keep waking them up to do stuff you are capable of. Just be like "It sucks I have to wake you guys up, isn't this really pretty basic stuff that I could do in less time than it takes to get you on a call". I wasnt even trying to manipulate the system for my ego, I just thought it was dumb we would wait for an oncall to join a bridge to do something like expand a drive, or live migrate a VM, etc.

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Public_Warthog3098@reddit

It's called teamwork and change management. It's called if you got hit by a bus, you'll be replaceable. Ppl go to bigger corps for bigger salaries and less work. It doesn't seem like your cup of tea. You should find a job makes you happier.

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AzBeerChef@reddit

Phss, a month. Chill out. Good luck adjusting.

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squishmike@reddit

Sounds great, what company, can i join?

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BlazeVenturaV2@reddit

bro, you landed a fat corp job that has very very little responsibilities and deliverables. Lap it up, pay off your debts, invest.. Make the most of this role while you have it.

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trapped_outta_town@reddit

Right? I don't understand OP's complaints - which essentially seems to be "Guys my job is siloed, and my employers aren't running me ragged, is this normal?"

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TheIntuneGoon@reddit

You have never been at a boring job, have you? I'd much rather be slammed than bored.

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hikik0_m@reddit

im guessing he gets paid big. a lot of the jobs you dont do a lot and just stand around dont pay well. if i was starting out and wanting to get experience, its understandable. but guy is is in a senior admin role and is working for a decent sized company. im sure if shit breaks or there are plans for upgrades or infra changes his time will come but if operations are running smoothly he should honestly just be grateful and take the time to upskill. i felt a lot like this when i just started at my job after graduating, i wanted to prove myself and honestly now its becoming pretty overwhelming taking on everything. im sure hes put in the years and earned the stripes to get into that senior admin role so he can afford to spend his time more freely.

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TheIntuneGoon@reddit

Sure. But, they don't *want* to be sitting around.

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NDaveT@reddit

I dislike both. Finding that happy middle range is the tricky part.

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PsychologicalRevenue@reddit

I feel this, when I worked in Compliance and you couldn't do anything on your work PC in the office other than work related tasks and you have a lull in the day or week then it is absolutely like nails on chalkboard. You can only read reddit on your phone for so many hours before you hit the last days posts. But If I can do trainings/courses related to the tools we use or something new I want to learn thats better. Or you can work on that side project you were coding up.

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Indrigis@reddit

It *really* depends on the amount of freedom that comes with the boredom. If you are not allowed to do anything besides *the job* and the job is not there, then sure, slammed might be preferable. But as long as you can read a book, start a small VM to check up on something new, or just, you know, go sit in a corner and catch up on some prime time TV, boredom is fun.

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litescript@reddit

the amount of weird little VMs i’d have doing funky little projects lol

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TheIntuneGoon@reddit

That's exactly how I started getting experience in System Administration while on helpdesk lol. I asked them if I could set up a retired NUC in the back as a sandbox and set up a server environment.

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litescript@reddit

hell yeah. for me, it’s the homelab, and i already have so many weird little machines haha

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TheIntuneGoon@reddit

True. I hadn't considered that aspect because I haven't had a job that didn't allow a great deal of autonomy in years.

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ImCaffeinated_Chris@reddit

100% agree. I can't stand being bored. This sounds like the perfect dream job for a lot of people, but I can assure you after a few months it blows. We are problem solvers. We need problems to solve.

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TheIntuneGoon@reddit

Yeah, I think its a combination of people not experiencing prolonged boredom (the grass is always greener) and being unhappy with their job or company. Personally, I like mine and enjoy when I have a list of things to take care of or unique issues to figure out. My main problem is waiting for approvals or someone else to do their part lol.

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doubled112@reddit

Thumb twiddling is fun...for the first day. It feels way different on day 30.

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Lady_Tano@reddit

Depends if you're WFH or not tbh. That makes or breaks it

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mb9023@reddit

I'm a fulltime thumb-twiddler (monitoring) and fully WFH since covid. I told my manager I'd likely quit if they tried to make me come back to the office.

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Lady_Tano@reddit

I'm jealous. Are you guys hiring? Lmao

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WhiteHelix@reddit

Absolutely, WFH is manageable. Still not great, but you get the time done. Had two days WFH and three days on-site, quit instantly after I found something better

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Lady_Tano@reddit

I don't blame you. Twiddling thumbs in an office is awful.

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WhiteHelix@reddit

Horrible, even more if you have to „look busy“ also.

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Odd-Consequence-3590@reddit

Be careful what you wish for.

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TheIntuneGoon@reddit

I'm coming off 8 straight months of being slammed and would gladly go back to that.

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MBILC@reddit

Not everyone likes to sit around doing very little, it sucks the life out of you, especially in a new job that you were hired to do something specific, mind you they have only been there a month.

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TwinkleTwinkie@reddit

Some people like being miserable....I am not one of them.

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gordonv@reddit

It's not being miserable. He has an extremely well developed work ethic that is results focused. He needs to refocus that energy into certs and making the next jump in his career.

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TwinkleTwinkie@reddit

I've got 20 years in this industry, tell OP not me.

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jaydizzleforshizzle@reddit

Honestly like yah that’s cool, but some of us would like to grow in our chosen careers, and these places drain souls. OP is absolutely right, all the people are more concerned with giving the perception they are busy then don’t get anything done. Things are always “coming down the pipeline”, but I don’t see it.

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blondasek1993@reddit

Sure. But OP here, if that is true, has the opportunity to grow whatever direction he feels. This is unique. He is not forced for now to embrace something. Clean slate. Especially as a senior, he can choose one thing and master it.

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jaydizzleforshizzle@reddit

I don’t know about you but I don’t enjoy becoming a SME on a random product my company won’t allow me to administrate. It’s the smb that allow an individual to gain experience.

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Dave_A480@reddit

SMBs let you gain experience in very basic things - 365, Exchange, AD, VMWare, maybe a few Linux VMs/instances to run the phone system or Oracle or something like that... Also an ever-shrinking footprint as the C-levels outsource everything to SaaS/MSPs/etc... Big orgs actually need things like k8s, applications that are backed by hundreds of AWS instances, and so on.... Having been on both sides, there was a lot more 'cool stuff' at Amazon & Continental Tire than there was at ye-olde-local-bank... Also less obnoxious people filing HR complaints for lack-of-a-belt (The local bank had an 'Office Clothes-crime Watch - If I don't call HR on you, the next cube will' sort of culture)....

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jaydizzleforshizzle@reddit

Sure if you go to the amazons, but there are just as many huge companies running off the same shit just with scale, and alot of times at those companies it’s not skills that surmount the scale, it’s more bodies doing more manual processes. Maybe this is just my gap, in the fact the SMB I’ve come from have been heavy tech startups an I went to an energy company.

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VexingRaven@reddit

SMB gets you experience a mile wide and an inch deep. That only takes you so far. Big orgs and silos give you the time and resources to become a true expert.

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Dry_Quality_6846@reddit

At the end of the day thats where the money is as well

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Kreiger81@reddit

Yeah, hes in a position now to, as long as hes checking in with his boss and staying above board, to start cracking into anything hes ever wanted to study. He also probably has internal documentation he can/should be reviewing for things that are custom-made for the enterprise environment. Knowledge in a specific subject, no matter how advanced, might not prepare you for the quirks/intricacies of specific environments. My current role, i've been there a year now but my first couple months they were keeping me away from most of the important shit so I spent the time reading and organizing all the documentation I could find.

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Hasuko@reddit

Nothing is stopping him from doing his own training/development while he gets paid to do nothing at his job.

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1esproc@reddit

So then become /r/overemployed

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PlumtasticPlums@reddit

I was at an org that was roughly 3000 people. We were merging and people wouldn't take things out of fear of not being able to solve it. So, I would take all the hard stuff because I didn't care if I couldn't just solve it. I'd look into it, figure out the issue, and talk to whoever I needed to. And I always ended up solving it. Meanwhile everyone else wouldn't take anything and would snatch the easy wins and act like they saved the business. Eventually you don't a lot of us don't care about growing. More so continuing to make money and more money until you retire. I'm 11 years in and I don't give a crap about my "career". I'm senior or principal wherever I go and that's all I want to be. I just want to stay employed until I'm 65 making more money each year. I've been the superhero - it's over-rated. Your credibility starts back at zero eventually.

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Ruminatingsoule@reddit

I also am at a large 10k+ employee company. I worry the large amount of downtime will lead to being laid off, but it seems like most teams here have a lot of downtime to begin with.

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No_Sun_3184@reddit

A carne caiu no prato do vegano hahahah

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Hattusili_III@reddit

If you're a driven person, getting paid a lot while doing menial work would be indeed frustrating. Some people actually enjoy work.

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rodface@reddit

I say I tell you huat this' some good shit right here, I'm at a company 3X this size, we have fewer teams and people are less able to gatekeep, I'd say I actually have to put the time in and get things done. OP sounds like they landed theyselves a dream job! :D

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ScienceofAll@reddit

I think it's a troll post, can't be otherwise explained, I also personally absolutely agree he isn't immediately given full trust in such a large organization (IF this is an actual post, again, i think he's trolling... unexplainable)..

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Toribor@reddit

No kidding. I'm at a small org where I'm expected to be an expert in technologies that didn't exist six months ago. I'm juggling ten million things and no one really understands what I do until something breaks. I'd love to just sit at my desk and quietly code all day on whatever I want while they pay me.

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turisto@reddit

almost reads like a humblebrag

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lev400@reddit

This

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Kraligor@reddit

1. It hurts, but it's the correct way of handling things. Zero trust is a good thing, especially in big companies where any mistake might be costly. 2. Again, zero trust, good thing. Protects the company, and ultimately protects you. 3. Not good. Talk to your line manager about it. 4. Again, zero trust, normal and good. Annoying, yes. Depending on how they're set up you might be able to be part of multiple teams eventually. 5. See 3. 6. See 3. They might be overwhelmed by work so there are no resources to properly integrate you. That's a management failure, you should have a coach or buddy or whatever assigned to you who is expected to take time off their day to day work to help you get going. 7. See 3. Tell your manager what you're good at and where you could really make an impact fast. 8. I'm a bit surprised that you're so surprised by what seems to be a regular zero trust environment. Have you only worked in small companies previously?

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swisseagle71@reddit

Welcome to silo IT. Can happen in medium to large orgs. You have a lot of free time, use it well. If you want to stay long term: get to know people. Etablish your niche. Then connect with the right people and you can do what you like most and be super fast because you have direct lines to the people who can do things for you. Silo IT: most of the work is done by people with direct lines to people in other silos.

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mh699@reddit

A megacorp that probably has regulatory obligations of some sort isn't going to just hand the keys to the kingdom to a new guy day 1, or even for the first few months as you're seeing. \> Im probably more experienced and capable at various things on my team yet im not allowed to even participate in any of it. This is a toxic mindset and I'd drop it. Don't assume you're smarter than everyone else in the room just because you're older.

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Mr_Jalapeno@reddit

![gif](giphy|eMu0803X2zkWY)

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

It isn't an age thing. My own team has people in their 50s on it. Its a wide range. Just based on the interactions ive had with people. For an example no one uses any form of automation or scripting.

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VulturE@reddit

Automation may either have a bad rep there because of a manager/supervisor/director/c-level, or it's managed by a team and/or method you wouldn't expect, like CSEC via some web interface product for compliance reasons. Either way, imagine you hired a kid fresh out of college. new hire coming in and saying "I can automate this, why aren't we using X product". You instinctually don't trust the young kid to not run a script that breaks the whole company, and look at any new solution they propose as being not thought out enough to mess up the stability of their quiet department. Start with documentation. Identity missing items and things you'd expect. They might be in a system you don't have access to, but it's likely that they'll give you access to documentation because it won't inherently break anything. Next look at standardization. Are their recurring processes documented? Are there items that are configured by Joe, and only Joe, because he does it right, but no document exists for how they get configured? What are their security baselines like? What's group policy/intune equivalent looking like? You can only get to talking about automation after you've examined their documentation and standardization. If they aren't documenting basic knowledge, or don't have standardized processes because Dave has them silo'd in a text doc he hasn't updated in 5 years because a previous manager only trusted him, then you aren't gonna make headway with automation. A larger company may be highly structured and have tasks assigned to specific people, instead of expecting everyone to be a generalist, But that does not mean that they are highly organized. Just realize that criticizing the current layout is akin to criticizing managerial decisions. Work towards identifying their shortages and making incremental improvements that will be noticed by management without stepping on their toes.

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graph_worlok@reddit

That you know of. There probably is, and it might be a whole team dealing with it, in a way different to what you expect.

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i_am_fear_itself@reddit

1000%. The cost of burning tens of thousands on labor that's just sitting around is pocket change next to the fines levied by agencies for mistakes.

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ADgurudude@reddit

Yeah he has no clue how things go on their system, a little arrogant yeah. But he’s senior? I assume he knows what he doesn’t know? Hopefully

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navr183@reddit

Insane post. Come swap jobs with me you'll make 95k and have x12 the workload.

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TupperwareConspiracy@reddit

**Welcome to Enterprise IT** This is normal, and yes expect and accept that a team exists for everything which can be exceptionally frustrating if you're used to IT roles where a small group handles networking, software, security, servers, appliances and so on. Given it's December you've lucked into the holiday dead zone which starts in Nov and ends in Jan. It will pick up. 1) Be EXCEPTIONALLY cognizant of that ticket queue. You're likely being measured on tickets and metrics matter! 2a) Be very mindful of your emails. You are judged by emails & teams. Do not come across rude, uncaring or indifferent and be especially mindful not come across as feeling your superior to everyone else. 2b) Do not try to be the person who knows everything in meetings. You probably know lots but the \`tude just gets on everyone else's nerves and it's a fast pass to a hard goodbye if you're a contractor. 3) Use the time to learn as much as you can about the env; go to meetings, take LinkedIn Courses if they offer it, get certs. Bosses LOVE when team members get certs. 4) Befriend as many folks as you can, you'll need them later on no matter what you think now.

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ayetipee@reddit

Are yall hiring entry-level candidates by chance?

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Ruminatingsoule@reddit

Im also at a 10k+ employee company. I sometimes worry about being laid off due to the downtime, but it seems most teams here have lots of downtime anyways, so...

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GetITDone37@reddit

Read tickets from the past 6 months and identify trends. See if there has ever been a fix or a change associated with any of the tickets both good and bad. Ask for access to the KB/Doc Repo and start going through their processes. Stack up what you are doing and then for the next 6 months dole it out as work. Stop thinking just because you've done it, you know how it should be done vs how they want it done. Came from a regulated industry where this was very commonly the pace and am in PE now. Miss the structure and the team size vs the deluge of crap that can come flying in a single day at our tiny team for one person to try and manage.

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MBILC@reddit

You have been there a month.... Give it time.. Larger orgs tend to have far more security requirements and more specific job roles. Until they know for sure you are a good fit, they don't just give out all access to anything you might be used to in some other companies.

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wrootlt@reddit

I have worked at a rather big company for some time and experience was somewhat similar (slowly getting access or any pointers to how do stuff). I had LOTS of mandatory BS training though, so it kept me busy for weeks. But eventually it started going, received a few meaningful tasks, etc. Now i started at a smaller local company in their MSP department. It was a shock at first. Nobody even knows how to get most accesses as they received it years ago and processes changed. I had to battle, dig, wine and beg and eventually got most of it and still find that i don't have access to x and y when a completely new ticket drops into my queue. It's a well established company here, so it was kind of surprising to find such disorganization and so much outdated and confusingly organized documentation. Probably MSP thing. So many clients, so little time to really grasp/learn how things work and especially document. You put out one fire and jump to the bunch of new tickets that just dropped.

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bobbywaz@reddit

Get your chops will give you more but appreciate that you don't have the weight of the world on your shoulders brother

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4tr3yv@reddit

I just read a story similar to mine, about three years at a giant financial institution where I can now tell you I lost everything... I hope the same doesn't happen to you. The only thing it's good for is saving money and building a nest egg. I can relate. Good luck with that, I wish you all the best. Just remember one thing: what happens there isn't your fault. It's all theirs. Good luck!

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malikto44@reddit

That is normal. One large company, it took me a month to finally get a laptop, and weeks after that before they sent a sub-sub-sub-contractor to un-shutdown a port for it to plug into. Many larger companies have a ton of small groups. All of them often run by an empire-building type of middle manager, and none of them will help you in any way. If you don't do anything, they will ask why you are there. If you ask them for info, they will CC storm managers saying that these requests are only done by underqualified people that need fired at once. If you just do it, and run into one of their numerous landmines, they will be calling meetings, saying how bad for the company, rash cowboying people are. In all cases you get reamed, so choose which way hurts the least. As for time, realistically, there are two types of company timekeeping. The first is the borderline sociopath who uses bossware and timekeeping software everywhere, down to how long you were in the restroom. The second is the philosophy of "you are an employee at this company; you know what you are doing, we don't need to babysit you." Expect everything to be gatekept. That's how people keep their jobs. For example, the internal apps team has two Git trees, their division's with actual documented code, and the second one where all code is compressed, obfuscated, and all comments made into nothing usuable or stripped out "for security reasons as we don't want an attacker knowing how this works". Those guys will always keep their jobs because they are too expensive to fire, while the devs who clearly document are the first who are stuffed out the airlock. The trick is, just do what you can, and when blocked, document it, and collect your paycheck, making sure to save some for a "fuck you" fund, so when you get laid off, you are not having to beg for the first job you find, and you can take some time off before looking.

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alpinist79@reddit

I’ve worked at very small and very large ( 100K+ headcount ) organisations and unless there is an absolute crisis, it’s pretty slow going. Things move slowly. That’s par for the course unless there’s a real calamity.

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Aggressive_Hall_3523@reddit

my high paying job is way too easy, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Makes sense why you don't have one.

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Aggressive_Hall_3523@reddit

cry more

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Mountain-One-811@reddit

enjoy it while you have it, if you are work from home. i am running my own IT department and i had your deal for 4 years, i barely did shit. now i run it all lmao... from DC migrations,365 migration to fixing mouses

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garrettthomasss@reddit

The fact that people here believe this is good are the same people bitching about getting a job in “cyber” This job sounds like ass. If you’re not growing as a tech you need to leave. This is caustic and will eventually kill your career

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NDaveT@reddit

I guess my advice would be to work those small easy tickets because it will help familiarize yourself with the systems (and some of the people), it will give you something to do, and it will (probably) demonstrate to your bosses that you are capable and can handle the stuff they actually hired you for.

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KennySuska@reddit

Sounds amazing to me.

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plaverty9@reddit

This sounds perfect. Can I have your job?

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Murhawk013@reddit

I’ll take a six figure paycheck to do nothing

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

It might sound nice but if you live it and you actually like being a sysadmin and fixing stuff and improving stuff... then trust me its a huge disappointment and shock.

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Last-Appointment6577@reddit

Yep, I just had a shift from corpo I.T. back into the MSP world and I'm already way more satisfied. Big corpo wanted me to implement a tool to take their big ball of garbage documentation and transfer it into a shiny new container without any project plan on how to sift through, verify and correct bad documentation, so I did and then started pointing out every garbage piece of data they wanted me to transfer in and told them I wasn't comfortable doing that until the team I joined actually contributed to verifying the data.

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neminat@reddit

\^\^\^ this could not be more true. Doing nothing when you are used to being able to contribute to something great takes your purpose away from you.

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Mammoth_War_9320@reddit

Yall are legit Stockholm’s with these large corporations man… getting paid 6 figures to do nothing is the dream.

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Bradddtheimpaler@reddit

Yeah, make it WFH and they would need to pry the job from my cold dead hands. I’d already be planning on retiring there in 15 years lol

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Mammoth_War_9320@reddit

Exactly. If you love tech so much, build out your own little side hussles while collecting checks from the dream job. Retire early, and do whatever you want after (Consulting, MSP, etc.) I’ll never understand this rich fuckers who whine about people giving them bucket loads of money to do fuck all, while the rest of us are drowning while being paid scraps.

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neminat@reddit

This attitude is why "they are rich". We actually work.

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Feisty-Leg3196@reddit

it's not really that good tbh. especially if you're in-office; there's constant stress someone is going to ask you what you've been up to, or you might have daily updates/stand ups that you've gotta BS through. I'm also early on in my career, so I need to be learning so I'm actually employable. You don't want to have one year of experience 6 times If you're WFH as a senior way later in your career, yeah, that's cushy

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Indrigis@reddit

> if you live it and you actually like being a sysadmin and fixing stuff and improving stuff I like knowing I *can* fix anything. I don't like having to fix *everything*. Working every waking hour of my life would pay better, probably, but I wouldn't be able to stop and smell the napalm in the morning.

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balt_alt@reddit

You’re ONE month in. Give it 6-12

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dweezil22@reddit

Figure out where you can push to improve things and where you can't. Get known as an absolute expert and top performer who always goes above and beyond. Do all that in 10 hours/week of real "work". Spend the rest of the time you want on work-like things on hobby projects or learning so that you stay engaged and are still employable if you go elsewhere. Keep close track on whether your hours and toil are worth the pay and whether your career feels safe, leave if appropriate. Source: Did this well for 15 years, eventually left (as dev, not sysadmin, but same diff). Saw some guys that didn't follow this playbook that were great until the day they got laid off and some have been unemployed since 2015.

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Murhawk013@reddit

I’m living it now but for a shitty paycheck lol but I get what you mean, I’m just like you love fixing stuff and have to constantly be solving things. I’m just saying a 6 figure paycheck would keep me happy for a bit lol

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vCentered@reddit

It's great until you're laid off and it is apparent to the people who are interviewing you that you've basically been doing nothing for ten years.

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CactusJ@reddit

Shit, after 18 months of doing nothing I was scrambling in Interviews

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HappipantsHappiness@reddit

This is me 100% and I'm embarrassingly inexperienced as a "senior" in my new job. Its not imposter syndrome.

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cyvaquero@reddit

Honestly this is OP's opportunity to carve out a niche for themself before one is picked for them. They should approach the manager and propose a project - I see they mention there is no automation.

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etzel1200@reddit

I’m so fucked, not really, but… 😅

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thatfrostyguy@reddit

Terrible lazy advice... someone should take pride in their work and want to actually... ya know.... do something cool with their job

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NaturalSelectorX@reddit

At the end of the day we are all seeking survival, stability, and fulfillment. That's great if you find fulfillment in your work. Sometimes work is just there to pay the bills and you find fulfillment elsewhere. I would love it if someone offered me a permanent salary with no expectations. I'd use it to pursue hobbies, learn things that interest me, try risky things and fail; it would make me very happy.

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Murhawk013@reddit

I agree but it’s better than being in that position for significantly less (me)

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Thirsty_Comment88@reddit

OP you have a dream job... Stop complaining.

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azzers214@reddit

Put in your 2-3 years and then seek a promotion elsewhere. Here's my quick guide: 1. The gatekeeping exists to protect someone else's job. 2. People who cooperate and do things are often quite easily cut if they stayed loyal. 3. What you're observing about senior management is true. They are frequently from "Big Schools" and "Big Consulting" or rode a particularly successful division and then camped out their spot. Occasionally you will find one humble enough to know what they don't know that it's rare. DON'T think the companies product matters, it doesn't. Don't think just because your boss and your bosses boss like you, you're safe. The dynamics of a large company mean you can be cut in situations where both had no choice.

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Bogus1989@reddit

it did get better. I wasnt went from a a big org to the biggest org in the country/probably world.... but what changed, was previously, we gave up completely on anyone who was not in our site or region. We didnt ask, our director did know though. Our former company was incompetent. My team stood up asset tracking, there was none before, I personally built mdm platform from scratch...one guy took over windows imaging...etc...we really did have a nice well oiled machine, like less than 10 guys ran 4 hospitals and 15 care sites all our own. Required zero input from anyone external, and between us could fix anything. but after wearing so many hats, and generally being nice, we found that we were expected to do others jobs at a point. For instance, my team does not and is not supposed to administer our print servers. The current admin works for a contracted company, after 6 months the director gave me access...it was just a windows update on the server....well we cared then. Ill be clear, we are very open and helping, doing what we could, trying to be nice, not overly taking something over. It would usually be the most polite way possible of saying "hey you look like you need some assistance". It really did end up being extremely cohesive later on. Really just a required management to enforce everything. Peopl;e just needed to understand the difference of a favor and our jobs scope. Ive got zero problem helping or hell even just talking, but i cant be expected to do my job and yours. When I am getting on call critical ticket because the datacenter admin wants me to go in just to read him a mac address for a dhcp reservation on a printer? oh fuck no. We kind internally let it burn for quite a bit....kept our heads down....worried about this merger....turns out the merger was the best thing that could ever happen. Their org had industry standards, and they were enforced. Not just that. they literally flew in like 50 guys and all these guys were awesome. I gained many friends. I was very surprised. They were very surprised though that we literally did about everything. Anyways, slowly things made sense. Stuff REALLY makes sense today, thats why I like working here. Listen from the guy who used to take everyones on call and was a workaholic, and do multiple projects at once? Be happy you are where you are. I will say, my team is good and even after some retired, and we got new guys...we simply shared our thought processes, and how we operate. We dont make up any stupid rules, thats the good part...everything has been well thought out and has policies. Theres also a dedicated documentation team. I can have never set something up and easily set it up now.....instead of in the past...just "winging it" Im not even kidding, there was so little oversight. I once got to a point where anything I ordered came, although I never ordered anything I didnt need.....it always just came. Also if I needed access to something I just asked requested for it with a ticket....and it was granted. Obviously I wasnt an idiot with my access.....but we all basically came to a point, we knew this place had to be hacked before theyd fully commit to a few holes in their security. So yeah that happened, it was the final piece in the puzzle, really bad. got in all our vmware hosts....now we dont have a choice, we must comply to standards, or our cyber insurance wont pay out. There were a few holes left they finally caught up to, Maybe your org is similar? If I were you, Id lookup your departments scope, then go on a quest requesting access for all you need it to, preferably having your AD account mirrored to "bills" access. No harm in requesting access. Take some initiative, ask for forgiveness later, which im betting you wont need to.

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sadmep@reddit

1. Yeah, as it should be. 2. See 1. 3. Expand a disk or add someone to a group then. 4. There's a theme here, welcome to how large orgs work. 5. Yes, you're a replaceable cog. 6. If the manager isn't giving you work, go back to item 3. 7. Everyone thinks this about themselves, doesn't make it true. 8. Quit complaining then, take your easy money.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Ok there boss.

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sadmep@reddit

I'm not sure which part bothers you the most, but as far as it taking a while to get access I can give you two things that are both true: 1. Unless an entire division spontaneously combusted over night, you should never be given keys to systems until you've been proven reliable. 2. The length of time it takes an organization to do anything is in proportion to the size of the organization. As for replaceable cog, maybe it's not the nicest way to say it but it's true. No one is irreplaceable. If a business has irreplaceable people, that's just a time bomb waiting to go off. As far as your estimation of your skills, I mean that's just that: your estimation. I can't trust people's estimations of themselves because there are way too many dunning-kruger afflicted people out there and without vetting someone who is full of shit about their abelites is indistinguishable from someone being honest about their abilities. 8 was mostly in a joking manner. You should keep following up with your manager, collect your paycheck, and if things don't change in the next few months start looking for a small-medium sized company which may be a closer personality/work culture match for you.

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mcponhl@reddit

“Zero trust”

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gordonv@reddit

This sounds like how government offices work, also. It's very different from small and medium business. You can't see or knock on the owner's door. Everything is clandestine and compartmentalized. I've found there are 3 kinds of businesses: - Profit oriented - Results oriented - Command oriented (This is what government is) Your job seems command oriented. Also, you may have been hired just to be fired in 6 months. Just to make the managers look like they are trimming the fat. (You were hired before they did an employee count, but the firing numbers will magically go up. It's a hack for managers to get bonuses.)

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techie1980@reddit

It does get better. But one important thing that I found is that you need to be assertive that you can help, and you're being blocked. Go to your boss with a list of "I can easily help with X,Y,Q but I need you to approve this" . If there's a status report, especially one that is visible, do it there, too. Be repsectful but factual. You ARE in a good place to update documentation, since you're the new person. However this may rustle some feathers, so be careful with commentary. Meanwhile push your coworkers to let you in. When they talk about things, push to say "I don't have much going on, can I jump in here?" Sometimes they'll say yes, sometimes no. Finally, when someone asks how things are going, bring this up. I struggled a lot with this, because when boss^3 greets you and you want to just get the convo over with, it's easy to make everyone look good. Frame it as no ones fault. "To be honest I'm struggling to get going here. I have no tickets, no projects, and no required access. <boss> is trying his best but we can't seem to figure out the way to get me unblocked". Don't wait much longer on this one, including positioning yourself to have the conversation soon. A month or two in doing nothing is expected for the new person, but a whole quarter is tough.

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shitpoop6969@reddit

I relate so hard to #6. I'm almost 6mo into a non-profit and my boss always says how busy we are/he is. I'm like uhhh *thats* busy to you? I came from a large investment firm, THAT got busy

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Humble-Plankton2217@reddit

There is an adjustment period and for big corps it's longer. What you describe is very typical of my experience with large orgs, especially those with global presence. More often than not, It all boils down to Office Politics. Sometimes it's hard for tech people to bring themselves to participate in Office Politics. I'm not saying you have to, but it would likely be to your benefit. I've worked at both huge orgs and medium sized businesses for years. I much prefer the experience at a medium sized business. They both have their pros and cons. But by and large, huge orgs have WAY more Office Politics to deal with, and inflated egos, and higher potential for high-needs/egotistical C-Suite.

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castertr0y357@reddit

What you might think is a curse is really a blessing. Use this time to skill up on something you haven't been able to before. Once you get access and start doing stuff, you'll likely not have the time to do any learning unless you do it on your own time.

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No_Sun_3184@reddit

Quanto maior a empresa, mais "times para cada coisinha" existem. Já trabalhei em uma empresa deste porte, e é horrível, hoje trabalho em uma empresa com 10x menos funcionários, nível de estresse é infinitamente menor, e ao mesmo tempo a sensação de produtividade também é bem maior.

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LaDev@reddit

Went through this exact scenario. I left the job where expectations were unreasonably high for a long time, I was constantly stressed, drained, and anxious. Then I went to fintech/big org and it felt like everyone & everything was in slow motion. Use the down time to learn the environment. Read over documentation (your team & partner teams), read current & past tickets, read change tickets, ask teammates to add you to meetings their in. You're going through a pretty significant change. It will feel weird. I'm not sure if you'll get used to it - I did. I remember not having any admin rights for the first month of joining big tech per the corp's policy. All I did was socialize & read docs.

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Jazzlike-Vacation230@reddit

That's the catch of larger companies, I'm still in Support but its the same. Got to a new place and I have even less access to Entra/Azure tools then before

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NovaRyen@reddit

Dude, you're living the dream. Sit back and study something to advance your skills/career while you collect a paycheck for doing nothing.

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signalpath_mapper@reddit

This is a pretty common shock when moving into very large orgs, especially ones that grew by layering process on top of process. A month in is still early, but the access gating and ticket starvation usually means the company optimizes for risk avoidance, not velocity. Senior roles there often turn into coordination and influence jobs instead of hands on fixing, which is frustrating if that is not what you signed up for. Sometimes it gets better once trust is built, sometimes it never does and people either adapt or leave. I have seen folks do well by carving out ownership of one neglected area and slowly expanding from there. It is also fair to decide that this style just is not for you.

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expressadmin@reddit

I started at a very large company (15K+) after running my own business for 15 years and then working at the acquisition company for 4 (100 so employees). It took about a year to get me ingrained in the team, and about 2 years for them to really start giving me stuff to do. We had a team meeting about 6 months after I started and I was sitting with other members of the team at breakfast. I said to one of them "I have been here 6 months and I have no idea why you guys hired me." Another member of the team looked at me and said "I have been here 6 years and I have no idea why they hired me."

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realslimcheney@reddit

I've worked in all sorts of places. I have found that working in a large corp with more silo'ed operations you really need to start buiding the relationships with your team. Create solid connections. It takes time, but its worth it. Also, if all that crap was set up well in the first place a senior level sys admin shouldn't have much work to do except think about upgrades and how things can be better.

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kiwininja@reddit

10k users is large? Maybe I've just been in this line of work for too long, but we've got ~16k users and the company I work for is tiny compared to most of the big fish in our sector. That being said, I've been in this exact scenario. Started my new position and my boss didn't really seem to know what to do with me. Take this time to work on certifications and figure out where you want to specialize. Don't worry, once they figure out what you're good at, they'll dump all the work on you that they can.

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WaldoOU812@reddit

For me, it absolutely did. I was an IT manager in the hotel industry for 14 years and was the guy for everything; Windows, networks, phones, PMS, POS, wireless... essentially everything that had a plug going to it. Then I moved on to an HR SaaS company and later to my current position. In both of my last two jobs (and especially at my current one), there's a different department for everything. Takes a bit to shift from that, "everything's burning down around my ears and I need to fix it NOW" mode to where you trust the other teams to do their piece and just ensure you're doing everything you're being counted on to do. Also, at my last company, I want to say it was probably a month or so before I got access to everything. At my current company, not so much; they were a lot faster to get me access to stuff, but even so, they asked me to hold off on things until that trust level was built up. Sounds like they just need time to onboard you.

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ubermonkey@reddit

I'm a software vendor now. My experience is that the bigger the company is, the worse the IT is. Organization is awful. Compartmentalization is paralyzing. People barely know their area. The number of times I've had to educate big-corp DBAs about basic SQL Server concepts is *horrifying*.

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greyaxe90@reddit

This is why after working at a 20k+ org, I will NEVER work for an org that has more than 5k employees ever again. You're not a person to them... you're an employee number. Red tape for EVERYTHING. Need a service account? In a small org, you can just make it and document it somewhere. Large org needs a ticket, then a meeting with the AD and security silos, then you need to draft up a project plan and meet with PMO, then you're going to have at least 5 status meetings with PMO about it, and then like 5 months later, someone in the AD silo will finally make your shiny new service account. Oh, it took so long that now you don't need it? Now you have to go through the same process to decom it. I love SMB. The smaller the company, the more enjoyable it is to work there. That's my opinion anyways.

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TheDisapprovingBrit@reddit

I've been at my current place for 20 years, when I started there were three people in IT. I had domain admin rights as soon as I logged in, and my training can be neatly summed up as "Oh, look, first call of the day - you're up!" Now, there's over 100 people in various roles in IT, and full onboarding currently takes three months. The first week you basically get scheduled for industry awareness training (no idea what that is, it didn't exist when I started) and read process documents/KB articles. Week two you're shadowing someone processing new tickets only. Depending on the system, you may get read only access to look around. By week three or four you can start handling tickets yourself, but you probably won't have any elevated access until your second month, when you also get your introduction to the soul sucking joy that is CAB. Access is gradually increased as your exposure to our processes increases, and by the end of month three, you *should* have full access and be ready to join the on-call rota. We're fully aware of your technical skills, you wouldn't be sitting here if we didn't think you had them. What we need you to get your head around are our change control processes, our documentation requirements, and the specifically annoying ways that we do things. Having gradually grown from having God access to everything to being gradually stripped down to more and more specialised roles, I'm fully aware of the frustration of having to deal with other teams for things that you're quite capable of doing if you only had the access to do it yourself, but past a certain size, separation of responsibility is a necessary evil.

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CantaloupeCamper@reddit

You have discovered the disadvantages, and advantages of big corp jobs.

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fh4pres@reddit

Give it at least 3 months, you’ll start to get involved. Plus, don’t knock silo’d work. It may be slow but there are a lot of benefits too. Least of which, you are actually allowed to take a damn vacation.

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n3rdyone@reddit

I get the complaints, but this is typical of a large org. There is a massive amount of work to be done, but it’s typically hidden under a pile of bureaucracy. Bill has probably been there 16 years and finally figured out the required process to do “x” without getting his hand slapped by the compliance.

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braytag@reddit

the bigger the team/cie, the less range you get to touch, otherwise it would get messy real fast.

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ItzMcShagNasty@reddit

I don't understand you or people like you. Go talk to a therapist man, please try and be happy. If you are bored skill up and study for certs. Your job is the goal for this career field, if you can't be happy at a company with good work life balance that pays well and doesn't drown you in work, you will never be happy again. If you want things to do, work on personal projects and collect the paycheck. Pick up tickets that you can even if they are easy. Also, that is just how large corporations work. There are enough people that no one is overworked and they can spend a ton of time onboarding. At my last Fortune 500 job, I didn't do real work for like 2 months, then it was a lot of work. If you want to be worked to death on day one, quit and find a business with 1 IT guy running everything.

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kiranravirocks@reddit

Might be this is your first time in big org. You are not alone this happens to everyone, specially for system admins. For me it took 6 months to get access to work on what I needed. Also every year I need to go through security clearance to keep my access. Don't worry use this time to understand your IT infrastructure and process. Tip: be active on whatever channel your it team in. Thin makes things lot easier

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jakgal04@reddit

That's pretty standard with larger organizations. The bigger the org, the more likely there is to be teams that handle individual tasks that a sysadmin at a small company would handle on their own. Least privilege is also more common at larger companies. There's a very real chance that you could be a 25 year senior IT admin and not have domain admin access.

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freemindjames@reddit

I've noticed that people tend to be more defensive of specific duties when there are a lot of layoffs happening. It's been a rough year.

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SikhGamer@reddit

This is normal. The larger the company, the slower everything. It's a mixture of by design and accident. I felt the same when our small tiny company got bought out by a global corp. There is a team for everything? Want something in Okta? It's Team 123 Want a mailbox in 365? It's Team ABC You want something in Entra and GitHub? You need to speak to team foo, person bob, and manager Steve to co-ordinate headless chickens. It's infuriating, but _eventually_ you learn to let go. Took me 4 years.

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ITGuyThrow07@reddit

> Given 0 projects. 0 tickets. Month in. Literally today someone told me I could grab a ticket if I wanted. The tickets I can actually do with the access I have would be stupid things like expand a disk or add someone to a group. So grow up and do them. They don't know you. They don't know your skillset or if they can trust you. Prove you can do the basics correctly and they'll give you more work.

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BatmobileOver9000@reddit

🎻 that's for you, go start your own MSP if you need more work.

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Rouxls__Kaard@reddit

That’s a gold mine if you’re OK with doing a lot less work than you’re used to.

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kerosene31@reddit

"We're super busy" manager is a common one. One of my first jobs was like this. Our manager would say no to so many projects, meanwhile me and another guy are sitting there looking for things to do. They want to look busy rather than being busy. Plus I'm sure there's tons of politics over what work gets through and not. We joked that we all did the George Costanza "always look annoyed" thing anytime someone brought up a project. Meanwhile, we took long lunches and ducked out early every day as we had little to do beyond some quick tickets. Most companies just sort of suck at bringing new people in too. Don't take it as a personal knock to you. Corporate bureaucracy can be weird. Just do your job and collect your pay. Work on your own development if you've got nothing else to do.

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owzleee@reddit

I’ve worked for a 250k+ employee company for nearly 25 years. I try to explain to new joiners that they will need to think completely differently in a company that size. A lot of things take time. You may be in Texas and provisioning may be in the Philippines. There are generally specialist teams for everything. Change control can feel very frustrating but it’s very necessary when 11 business groups are using your services. Some people settle into it (eg me - I just moan a lot to my colleagues :)), some people just can’t work that way and leave. You’ll find out within a year or so which one you are.

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ipreferanothername@reddit

the benefit to you here is - see what you can find to understand their systems, and possibly improve a system/process/document. maybe train up on a tech they use that you dont have specific experience in, or brush up on a skill you can leverage at the job. the first 6 months of a new job can give you so much independence and freedom before the work floods in. try to shadow your team, get to know them and their work and that of other teams you will work with regularly to get your name established.

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sydpermres@reddit

The initial feeling is always like this when you first start off. There are reasons why things run this way as well. Once you understand how big of an impact some changes are you will truly start appreciating all the processes and red tape in place. If you've always wanted to upskill while doing your job, this is the time. Use some free time to read up, spin up your own lab (of course on your own device and hotspot) and learn. I would kill for this kind of a job right now, but I'm also in a stage where I'm catching up on 10 years worth of quality work in a short span of few months, so the regret is lesser. Don't kill yourself over a job just because you want to do some ambitious things, which can still be a secondary job as a consultant.

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ciabattabing16@reddit

This also describes government contracting, for those who haven't had the pleasure.

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SevaraB@reddit

Sounds like you don’t feel like you’re being treated very senior. Which sucks. But flip it around: companies like this are 24/7. If you become “indispensable” at a corp like this, it comes at HUGE personal cost and no off button until you and the corp part ways. It comes with very little sleep, a wedge driven between you and your family and friends, and no moment of your time is respected enough for the corp to leave you alone. But it’s *Christmas*, you say? *Someone’s* got to be on call, and they’d rather it be the person who fixes stuff the fastest. It feels great professionally. But when it comes to your personal life, it’s absolute hell. Sounds to me like your manager actually has your back, and that’s worth its weight in gold.

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VulturE@reddit

1. Spend this time doing your HR/Safety trainings. 2. Learn what works in their stack and what doesn't. Don't worry about inefficiencies - instead identify what has security or downtime implications. Keep a list, don't present any of it to anyone yet 3. Crush the ticket queue you do have access to. Leave no room for doubt that you can do this work blindfolded. 4. Large companies like this will, by design, take months to provision access after they're sure you can work with the rest of the team and aren't a bad apple, but also HR might tell them to wait until after your 3 or 6 month evaluation. Do not bring up the list of problems at your evaluation, bring it up 1 month after that. 5. Obviously practice Read-Only Friday as much as possible, try not to be the reason behind an incident. Unless you're being underpaid, wait it out with the steps above, then be sure to ask at your 3 or 6 month eval "are there any projects I can work on". Showing initiative is important, but keeping framed as initiative towards THEIR projects is important, as opposed to "Dave just keeps complaining about our solutions and other workers, isn't aligned with our current roadmap and projects, and overall brings stress to the team". That's how you get let go at your 3-6 month eval. These companies are expecting someone that meshes with their stack and team, can close tickets, and wants to help. Until you have access after 3-6 months, they will brush off your requests for bigger and badder tickets like you're an overeager chipmunk. Only bring up the problems that can result in outages (either security related or dumb user related) about 1 month after your probationary 3 or 6 month eval is complete (unless you think there's obviously an active attack). Also remember, despite their size, they may not have formal access rollout methods and instead grant it based on projects that you work. So be sure to volunteer yourself, but also be careful to not get pigeonholed as to working in a specific subsection of tasks and nothing else, or it may take you a while to dig your way out of that.

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ErikTheEngineer@reddit

> Teams for every little thing. There is an o365 team. An iam/sso team. Phones team. Helpdesk line team. Desk side team. Network team. Security team. Ass wipe team. Piss team. You want to do anything nope... that's x team. I see this complaint a lot from people who've done time at some rinky-dink small business where the owner will only grudgingly hire one "computer guy", or MSPs where you're supporting hundreds of these people. It's normal to have teams. It's normal that people don't have access to the entire enterprise because they're 100% responsible for anything using electricity 24/7. Bigger companies move slower and the siloing can be annoying...but the pay is better and you at least have some hope of being able to go home at night. The thing you do want to avoid is getting too far into one of these silos so that becomes all you can do. If you are laid off and aren't enough of a generalist, it's going to be hard to find a replacement job if your only task is provisioning iOS devices in Intune.

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_Insightful@reddit

Bigger companies follow the IT separation of duties very heavily. My current company is a massive one and they have their cloud team separate as platform, applications, systems, networking, identity, and governance. They all collab together, but they separate every component because the new landscape is designed to hire SME-based positions.

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doolittledoolate@reddit

Some people enjoy email hockey, delegation, and talking it up in meetings. I'm not one of those people, but I've tried working in banks twice and both times left after 6 months.

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heubergen1@reddit

It will take years before you know enough people and have created enough systems to be fluent in this organization, either accept this now or find a new job in a smaller company where you're expected to work all the time and have no budget.

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bofh@reddit

Ok. 1& 2 are potentially quite normal for big business, especially in certain markets. There are regulatory reasons in my employer (and others like it) why if you’re in *x* role you cannot have access to *y* too. 3 sounds bad, grant you that 4 - see my answer to your points 1&2. 5 - you say that like it’s a bad thing. Go have your lunch. Enjoy uninterrupted vacation time. 6 again, could be ‘welcome to big business’ with a sprinkle of disorganisation 7 - even if it’s true (and you clearly seem bad at working with siloed teams in a larger org so I’m unsure), it still makes you sound like a massive cockbadger. 8. And i’m in my mid 50s and used to bigger businesses that work like this. Maybe your employer is *bad* at being a bigger business, they do seem disorganised, but it’s not that unusual from what you’ve said here.

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g00gleb00gle@reddit

Alot of it becomes a not your problem issue. You have only been in the business a month it will take time. Bigger the business the slower it moves.

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Standard-Minute-5466@reddit

so it's basically free money?

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comment_finder_bot@reddit

I've recently changed jobs from a smaller company to a giant corporation. It took a bit getting used to, barely got any work assigned in the first 2 months. Now after like half a year I feel like my time is well-utilized

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Claidheamhmor@reddit

I like it. Find a spot to specialise in, and become an expert in the processes - how to log changes, how to organise firewall rules, where to find things, etc.

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TheDawiWhisperer@reddit

>Gatekeeping team. "Oh, well only bill does that. If you get a ticket on it just re assign. No we cant give you access to x systems. i work at a place obsessed with siloing tech off to different teams, it's insane and kills productivity i remember when i first started i had track down some missing emails that never arrived and to get the mail logs from end to end i had to involve 3 different teams to get the mimecast logs, the m365 logs and finally the exchange logs god forbid one person be able to do something end to end

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nirach@reddit

I'm not six figure, but close, and € not Dollarydoos, so. My current responsibilities have somehow shifted to *dispatching tickets*. Feeling rather disrespected and patronised. Some companies grow their IT teams so big so fast that they have no structure to speak of, and it kind of sucks if you need any kind of structure.

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BronnOP@reddit

Welcome to the life at the mega corp. for what it’s worth, this is what the well run mega corps look like. It takes a while to get things provisioned because they’re going through proper processes. Everything will be logged, signed off, auditable. Access will be remapped slowly. They know you’re experienced but you aren’t experienced with the way *they* do things or the intricacies of *their* systems. They don’t want downtime or even the risk for it. So they start you off slow. I wasn’t fully in the swing of things at my mega corp until about a year and a half in, not through any fault of my own but because this company has been successfully run for like 100+ years and they’re not going to let me and my ego come in and bring it crashing down. It can feel like all eyes are on you to prove yourself and it can be frustrating feeling that your hands are tied behind your back during that phase. But, try to relax a little and get the lay of the land. Be personable and be seen around the office, continue to be the guy that says “can I help with that?” Even if you get knocked back 50 times before they let you and just enjoy getting paid to do very little but learn for now. You won’t get this opportunity again!!

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isthisyournacho@reddit

I work at a large company two, I had one major job change at the same place. The first job worked by butt off, the other didn’t. Both 3+ years, both took a year before I had all the access I needed and could actually do stuff. I am also a senior. At the more lax one I try to become more involved with projects to better my career. I work on certifications and general learning. Feels like my whole team is lost within the company. I too think of going back to a smaller company but it’s chill. There are definitely pros and cons…

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Obvious-Water569@reddit

With big orgs comes big beurocracy. Things take a long time, especially if you're used to the agile environment of a smaller business. Nothing you've described sounds particularly strange for a 10,000+ strong org. Just give it a couple more months and make sure you perform whatever duties you *do* have to the best of your ability.

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Aerdi@reddit

Dude. This isn’t your 3man shop where you need to take the reins from day one. This is literally enterprise, a company at this size needs to adhere to countless standards, what would be a small change in the technical sense might be a horror scenario for compliance or security. I’d be expecting to spend at least the first year learning the ins-and-outs of the company, who’s responsible for what and how those people actually structure their work so you can integrate in those processes.

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Lao_Shan_Lung@reddit

\>I hear some like and prefer this. I don't understand how you do? convenient conditions for overemployment

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magetrip@reddit

Every big Corp has me like this. Small business have me feel like superman. It's the weirdest thing ever. But once there's a project on the run, you'll be assigned. Just takes a time. Until then, just be a good guy with the fellows etc

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BonezOz@reddit

Larger businesses like to pigeon hole staff because they can afford to have a lot of them. SMEs can't, so you end up doing a bit of everything. If you really want variety, join an MSP that only supports SME's, one minute you'll be deploying a new server, the next resetting the CEOs password. After that, you'll be remoting into a miners laptop so that you can connect the VPN and the new kid can log into the domain remotely for the first time.

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ansibleloop@reddit

Yeah this sounds like a large company that siloes the work Can be good or bad depending on how you look at it The key here is inter-team networking - make yourself known and useful to multiple teams Being able to bridge gaps between teams and get shit done will pay off at a large org - plus there's opportunity to move around

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RevolutionFriendly56@reddit

I’ve been in a job that I needed to look busy, it was the slowest and most boring job I’ve ever been at. I applaud you trying to contribute.

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SirSmurfalot@reddit

Basically free money. I don't see a problem

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Chill_Squirrel@reddit

This is the reason I quit big corp jobs and will never go back. Yes it's low effort but with ADHD it's a fastlane to boreout and depression.

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ThreadParticipant@reddit

Did sysadmin for a 30k company… took ages to get access to all areas I was supposed to support… lots of fiefdom’s to overcome

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graph_worlok@reddit

Look at the org chart. Workday, whatever. You might be a plumber / cog in your section, but there will almost certainly be other teams that are touching on the things you find more “interesting” - It’s just driven differently. Look at where Architects, etc sit in the equation compared to your manager or managers manager. Go read through the policy and process documentation that relies on all of the hardware and software - especially backups. Ask some questions - What do they do? How many sites? Can they even answer that question? If you can actually prove yourself as being more than a digital janitor, you might find plenty of opportunities

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VexingRaven@reddit

> Keep being treated as if im new to IT. No access to half of the systems I need to work with. Yeah that's least privilege. Demonstrate a need to access it and you'll get it. > Gatekeeping team. "Oh, well only bill does that. If you get a ticket on it just re assign. No we cant give you access to x systems. Well my experience is that new people are in a great position to fix this. Talk to bill, get to know him, ask if he likes being the sole point of failure for that system and never getting a day off. He probably doesn't, but doesn't have time or energy to document what he needs to document to hand it off. Help him out. > Given 0 projects. 0 tickets. Month in. Literally today someone told me I could grab a ticket if I wanted. The tickets I can actually do with the access I have would be stupid things like expand a disk or add someone to a group. Take tickets, then request access. Now you have a need so you get access. > Teams for every little thing. There is an o365 team. An iam/sso team. Phones team. Helpdesk line team. Desk side team. Network team. Security team. Ass wipe team. Piss team. You want to do anything nope... that's x team. Yeah that's how it works. Having 100 people running around doing whatever they felt like doing today would be awful. So which one of these teams are you, because it sounds like your job is (or you think your job is) to do everything but that clearly doesn't fit in here? Whatever it is, I promise there's plenty of work to do and plenty of depth to be had within whatever silo you fall into. For example, IAM/SSO team? Yeah there's a *ton* to be done there and I'm entirely unsurprised that's a whole team unto itself, access management is a constant battle (as you yourself have discovered). > Manager keeps saying how there is sooooo much work. OK where the fuck is it? Then im told they will get it going this week. Nope.... People being too busy to delegate work is a thing at every size org. You just need to chip away where you can without taking up too much time getting set up to help and you'll get brought in to stuff eventually. A month really isn't that much time in a new company. > Im probably more experienced and capable at various things on my team yet im not allowed to even participate in any of it. Yeah I'm gonna be mashing that X to doubt on this one chief. Like others have said this is a really shitty attitude to have and I guarantee there's plenty you don't even know you don't know yet that other people on your team know.

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XanII@reddit

A bit same here. The 'no access' thing is constant. We now even do almost hourly MFA prompts on everything. I really dont even bother with passwords anymore as i constantly just fall off because MFA is king. As for efficiency. Dont worry about it, you will eventually get assignements directly from your bosses. Specific ones with specific access. Meanwhile, do what you do as a senior: poke your head into things but remember: Once you do you become owner. I became owner of too big things too early as i did what i have always done now 30yrs. But it gets you ahead even in these places that could be a inspiration to the Control games when it comes to bureaucratic things.

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Available-Visual-825@reddit

You cay embark on a crusade against corporate dumbassery Or you could relax and do your thing as a form of meditation. Let them chase their tails, don't say anything untrue or laugh at anything unfunny, but beyond that... just let people be themselves, you're not their mum. There's plenty of good books to read! The choice is yours, my friend

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aimidin@reddit

Hey OP, just take your time and learn Infrastructures, what programs they use, what workflow they have, who is doing what role and etc. Once you go over 6 months, you will eventually be pulled in projects and etc. Just be careful, once you show you can do something, everyone will push that thing to you. I made the mistake and was participating in most if not all projects, because i never said NO. Anyway it also depends how many IT guys there are in your company, this will also show how work is distributed. Right now i am at a spot where there are over 200+ IT personal for around 10k workers. I am Domain and Server Admin for the moment, but i can't get admin privileges on my own laptop, although i can literally delete the whole company. Some companies are just like that and it will take you looong time to rise up.

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johnwestnl@reddit

People have been hired just to make sure competitors don’t hire them.

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Mammoth_War_9320@reddit

I’m working at a MSP where everything is constantly burning to the fucking ground, I’m on call, making less than 60k a year, and this guy is bitching about his 6 figure job where he gets to chill. Fucking ridiculous…

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AnxiousHeadache42@reddit

Some people on here are just insane and can’t just take the damn money and chill out for a bit. Pure insanity

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i_am_fear_itself@reddit

Not even fucking close to fair. The dude worked at a smaller place where he was probably on point for fucking EVERYTHING or big chunks of it. Calls, emails, shoulder taps, planning, implementation, automating, documenting because he was "the guy", or one of them. When that's the environment you come from and you land in a place where you're conditioned to drop what you're doing to throw down and help out the team, but you're basically on easy street, it's a WHOLE DIFFERENT kind of culture shock and it does take an adjustment. He's not bitching about his circumstances. He's asking the only sub-reddit qualified to answer if this is normal and to help him reframe his approach.

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Sab159@reddit

Well if you are working remote make the best of it to work on personal projects be it IT related or not and do the minimum they pay you for.

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i_am_fear_itself@reddit

take a deep breath, man! This is how onboarding functions in MEGACORP, but it won't always be like this, trust me! There will be days in your future where you fucking DREAM of the days when no one gave a shit that you were at the Mexican restaurant down the street for 3 hours over lunch. then you'll look back at your first couple of months, maybe 6, and laugh. I went from a tiny place to one with 50k+. Very highly regulated industry. My first 2 months I spent reading a horribly incomplete, poorly authored, incredibly out of date wiki to familiarize myself with the env and practices. It took me a SOLID 18 months before I was so busy I didn't have time to take a leak. After 4 years, I know everything there is to know about what my teams responsibilities are and am one of a handful of people the manager relies on as a "tech lead" without the title. It'll change, but you have to get it into your head right now to relax and just "flow". I was absolutely as worked up as you are now at about the same spot. Onboarding at places that are blindingly busy is VERY difficult for the experienced hire who wants to dig in and actually earn the paycheck. The reason onboarding is so hard is because no one has time to iron out and make the onboarding process smoother or more streamlined. if they have time for *that*, there's too many staff. Stay the course. Be agreeable. Don't disrupt. Offer to do the little things. I'd be surprised if, in a year, you didn't BADLY need a vacation.

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tanzWestyy@reddit

Sounds like a dream. Gimme less access and more money pls.

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kidrob0tn1k@reddit

I’ll trade you! Lol

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Jdgregson@reddit

"Got a job at a big corp and turns out it's a big. Corp. GAAAAAAA"

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Dave_A480@reddit

It has to be this way..... When you have a local/regional business you can have 5 guys do a little of everything.... Maybe you have a DBA or a network guy, but usually everyone has access to everything and does everything. That doesn't scale. When you are large you have small teams with individual silos & nobody has access to everything.... It's more secure and it helps manage concurrency issues.... Your virtualization/private-cloud team does nothing else... Networking is its own thing.... And so on.... As opposed to everyone building whatever they want on whoever's systems they want to build it on.... And compromising one member of IT giving you keys to the entire kingdom....

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GrapefruitOne1648@reddit

Wait 'til you want to actually change something and find out they've confused change management with change prevention, causing everyone to just ignore impending doom because in order to make a change they either have to spend weeks wading through red tape or... just wait for it to break and do the work on an incident ticket Soak it up, you're being paid to sit around, check out /r/overemployed if you're bored

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crash90@reddit

In small companies you mostly get paid in learning experience (and sometimes equity if it's a startup.) There is a lot to do and the amount stress tends to be higher. In large companies you mostly get paid in high salaries with a slow, relaxed pace of work. For certain personality types this is actually more stressful than a busy job. Large orgs tend to be stratified such that work is spread widely among many different people. The kind of thing you would be responsible for completing in an afternoon at a smaller org winds up taking a dozen teams, many meetings, approvals, and an entire quarter to complete. It can be a relaxing change of pace though if you're burned out and want to rest. Choose the job that fits your personality. It's also fine to switch back and forth. The experience gained in smaller shops translates well to the larger roles. Many build up a skill set in smaller orgs and then "cash in" at larger ones. Then, go back to a smaller org again when / if they're ready to level up their skillset again.

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OrdyNZ@reddit

Sounds like i should do that. I have to know and do everything, and am busy the entire work week. Also lack of permissions for some new guy sounds like the best way to do it to me.

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A-New-Creation@reddit

ohhhh my six figure job is too easy 🙄 😂

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cyclonesworld@reddit

I had a similar deal when I was working with a big corp. I've been a sys admin for nearly 20 years, and took this position expecting to have high level access. Nothing. No remote access to servers, switches, nothing. Didn't even have admin on my laptop. Problems with Outlook? Got a team for that. Problems with AD? Got a team for that. Problems with cellphones? Got a team for that. Someone needs a new laptop though, well, gotta go through a team and blow a few people to get one ordered, but that would fall on me. It was very annoying though because vast majority of the people I did actually have to support, when I had something to do, were all remote. But I had to show up daily to our mostly empty 5 floors in a skyrise downtown. Meanwhile we'd have people who lived 2 miles away who would insist I ship them a fucking laptop because they didn't want to drive in. I was super close multiple times "I'll just drop it off at your house ffs". I couldn't handle it. I was bored as hell most of the time. I had zero access to do anything. My coworkers and manager sucked. The higher ups would just refuse to listen to me, and everything required red tape. I noped the hell out after a year. The real bummer though, it was an actual good company to work for. I had a ton of PTO and sick time, bonuses, stock options, pay was well, the building cafe fucking rocked, etc. It just did not work for me.

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HappipantsHappiness@reddit

I started my career in a company like this. 50k+ employees. Getting laid off after 13 years and going to a 3500 employee company has been a rough transition. It's opposite of your experience lol I'm shocked daily at the shit I'm expected/allowed to do.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Do you see yourself going back go a big place then?

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HappipantsHappiness@reddit

I would like to because its what I know. Having a bunch of gatekeepers and weeks worth of meetings for relatively minor things meant that no one felt accountable for shit. Its pathetic, but it was comfortable. I feel so inept at my new job. I basically grew up in the mega corp and it suited me well because Ive never been one to "grind" and work endless hours. I have no problem not finishing things and walking away from work. It didn't serve me well though. My new company moves so much faster. I'm embarrassingly inexperienced for someone at my level. More than I realized, and its humbling. But its about time i learn some shit and earn my paycheck. I think starting a career at a smaller org then moving to mega corp is probably better, at least in this context.

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xpxp2002@reddit

I feel this. I left a large 30+k company to one under 300, and I hate it. Especially with planning work. At my old job, we worked a ton of nights and weekends and on-call, but you basically knew exactly when and how long you’d be working off hours. This place I’m at now is just a free-for-all. > I basically grew up in the mega corp and it suited me well because Ive never been one to "grind" and work endless hours. I have no problem not finishing things and walking away from work. This is my dream job that I feel I’ll never find. I don’t care about more money. I just want some time back. Work my 9-5 for pay that matches those hours and be done when I’m done. Whatever isn’t done can wait until tomorrow. No on-call. No nights and weekends.

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ButtAsAVerb@reddit

You. Have. Been. There. A. Month. Steel your nuts or calm your tits or comb your hair. Then enjoy the fact that you are employed.

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Geminii27@reddit

Confirm your current access with your manager and that you're allowed to do tickets which only need that level of access. Make a list of all other tickets you run across which you *could* do if you had more access, sort them by number of tickets per access item, and ask your manager to get you access to one or more of those items so you can process X additional tickets. I've genuinely worked for a worldwide company before in an IT role where I had *no* access to anything other than to log on and read email. They had me alphabetically sorting *printed* forms for a year, still no access, before I found other work. The forms did not need sorting; they were all placed in storage boxes after passing over my desk, and would never be looked at again unless there was a company-wide audit.

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insufficient_funds@reddit

I’m at a large org that’s almost entirely a local presence. 15k-ish employees. Healthcare. What I’ve figured out the longer I’ve been here is that so long as I get the stuff assigned to me taken care of, and do it while following procedure - no one gives a shit what I’m doing. I think I’ve done less than 4 hours of actual work in the last 2 weeks. However end of calendar year (nov/dec) is always a bit slower… and we don’t usually get the budget funds released to start new stuff until Feb/march (despite that being q2 of the FY)… Yes there are silos- and there kinda has to be in a big org. You’re expected basically to be an expert on your thing, not a capable generalist. In an org that big you should 100% have a team for access management, network, server, vdi, NAS storage, virtualization, app support, DBA, Linux, win server, cloud, mobile device, video/telephone. Is it annoying waiting on others? Absofuckinglutely. But it’s part of the process that you have to learn to accept. Now silos within your specific team is an issue. You never want your ‘hit by a bus’ factor to be one person. That’s on the manager and the team to cross train others, and the teammates not to just go “oh bob is the expert on xyz send him anything to do with it”.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Yes. My very latest thought is that I can deal with silos between teams. But silo inside my own team feels extreme. Im going to bring this up to manager.

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insufficient_funds@reddit

Good luck! My team has been really good about sharing the knowledge and workload for things- but all of our higher level folks still have certain things that are pretty much just theirs, and it’s hard to pass it off when it’s a super complex config that rarely has to be touched so training someone is pointless bc ten months from now when it has to be touched again they won’t remember it - lol

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zanthius@reddit

Oh no, that's terrible... where? where is such a place... like specifically the hiring managers name and number???

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roboto404@reddit

At least you’re a senior. Imagine being in that same position, but you have a non-IT guy as your direct manager telling you to do non-IT shit and chooses the task priorities for you.

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RumRunnerx1@reddit

Lol yeah thats how it often is. I'm doing the same as you except im remote. I work about 1 hour per week, severely overpaid for what I do.

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chibihost@reddit

It can be a culture shock moving into a larger slower moving machine than you are used to. Use the time to your advantage, you only have this kind of freedom once, when its gone and you have actual deliverables to work on you'll look back at this time with 'if I only knew what to ask' Just some ideas off top of my head. * Learn the org structure not just what teams are around, but who is accountable for decision making. At some orgs this is at a specific Title / Rank / Job Band level * Learn the big players - setup introduction / informal meetings and get them talking about their daily work. You may only need to ask 1-3 probing questions to get them going and it will reveal a lot. "What's been your favorite project in last few years...oh that's interesting tell me how you handled xyz...." "In my previous role i had to do xyz and it was hard/fun/whatever, anything like that here?" Think about your last role, what would you want someone to ask you about if things were reversed, then ask those questions. You'll find some people who love to share, and some that its like pulling teeth. Find the ones who like to share and set up lunches, coffee chats, anything informal to just get perspective. Eventually you'll be able to reciprocate. * You're best bet for early days is to actively listen to everything, take notes on everything, read any policy/procedure you can get your hands on. Dive into whatever SharePoint / confluence / wiki you can find * If your manager isn't doing it already, get re-occurring time with them until you get a clear picture of what you should be doing for 30/60/90 days. * At many places relationship building is just as important than technical know how, keep a list of people, their remit, etc. * Is it a regulated industry? Do you have to deal with audits or certifications? That can dictate how much documentation you can expect to find, or are expected to create.

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sukmydingbat@reddit

Failing to see the downside here.

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graph_worlok@reddit

Your life now: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z51dABkfWBM

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gabacus_39@reddit

Having worked in large organizations, being siloed is very very common. It all sounds very normal except for actually not giving you something to do. It sounds like you think you should your fingers in every pie and that is definitely not how it works. Stay in your lane and do the work given to you well. That's really all their is to it.

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DueDisplay2185@reddit

You may have just discovered a perfect job for overemployment

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Salvidrim@reddit

Dude, just remain pleasant & unobtrusive and pile up your money. This isn't a problem, it's a frickin' dream.

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anon-stocks@reddit

Give it 6 months, you'll be busy. After a couple years you'll be swamped. It takes a while for people to learn who you are and what you do and for you to get the access randomly as you need it or find systems you may have learned about only in passing.

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Hasuko@reddit

Clock in. Opt out. Get your free paycheck while you do your own self training. It took me six months to get all the access I needed at my job.

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ctwg@reddit

In addition to the mandatory training begin compiling a report of all the improvements you can make to said systems within your scope (if you can get read access). Low hanging fruit, medium sized changes and things that need investment or projects. At least that's productive. Just ensure you dont put people's noses out of joint when you find all the SPF's 😂

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eat-the-cookiez@reddit

4. Is why I hated big corporate. Stuck in a tiny job with such limited scope and visibility. I love a smaller org, 3000- 4000 users.

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brokentr0jan@reddit

It sounds like you have a fantastic job at a good company that has things figured out

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badogski29@reddit

Man you have the dream job lol. Use the downtime to up skill, learn a new hobby, work on projects.

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bemenaker@reddit

Ok, wtf, chill the fuck out and stop bragging. Enjoy having an easy IT job that pays well.

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AmateurSysAdmin_1@reddit

Is this Accenture?

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denz262denz@reddit

Lucky 🍀 😆

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denz262denz@reddit

In all seriousness, give it more time. Big ships take time to turn and are hard to steer. Spend some time getting to know the other teams and figure out who the shotcallers are. It's time to develop your IT political skills. The work will come.

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Candid-Molasses-6204@reddit

Yeah man, it's a big ship and they don't need you to keep it moving. You're going to have to be patient to work your way into a position where they can trust you. Also it isn't going to be about you. It's gonna be what's best for the company and what they can support if you left.

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Big_Wet_Beefy_Boy@reddit

Man this kinda describes my situation. As others have said yeah it’s great to be making good money for not doing much but now that I’m 5 years in my skillset hasn’t advanced at all and I’m terrified of shit hits the fan I’ll be unable to get another gig due to skillset.

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sabre31@reddit

Welcome to enterprise large companies and 10k plus is peanuts. I work for 150k plus company and my previous one was 250k plus and the larger they are the slower to get anything done and politics is insane. So many roadblocks even for simple stuff.

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FiredFox@reddit

Do they have a stock plan and 401k match?

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Ragepower529@reddit

I worked at a mega corp for 5 years and was still getting access to stuff later… Now I work at a 300 person company. I learned more in 1 year then I did in almost 4-5

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Life-Cow-7945@reddit

I've never worked for a large org. I've been working on a project to help a large org figure out what they have and how it all works together. It is exactly like you describe. No one knows a thing outside of their application, and even then, you need to get 6 people in the room to get an answer to a simple question. Everyone goes to great pains to ensure they are the only one that knows something so they aren't the first to be let go.

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daxxo@reddit

Have you not been assigned to any of the teams?

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Zahrad70@reddit

If these are your complaints, get out. Generalists are anti-pattern for anyone actually touching the kb. Architect? Fine!

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Greenapplesguy@reddit

I've been in your shoes. Give it 6-8 months to get your bearings and for folks to get to know you.

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Ansible_noob4567@reddit

This reminds of something my old boss used to always tell me. I dont ever hire anyone that was previously employed at a large multinational. Their job responsibilities tend to be very specific and tailored and restricted to 1 thing. (ie) You are in the network team and are responsible for the ASA's and that is all you do. You become an expert at them, yes, but the lack of exposure to everything else hurts you more in the long run.

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NoNamesLeft600@reddit

Try working for a 500,000 employee comapny. Yikes. But yes, in large orgs like this everything is very siloed. The team you are assigned to might have an area of responsibility for a particular thing (mine was the Intranet) and that is all you are going to get access to. And it does take time to blend in. I feel for me it was about 6-months before I felt fully integrated in to the team and felt like I knew the systems well enough to contribute. By the time I left after 12-years I was the team lead for 3 or 4 different teams at once, scattered around the globe. Give it time.

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GwentMorty@reddit

My coworker who I caught sleeping at his desk this morning would love this job

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jtbis@reddit

Sounds about right. Pretty much all of the big orgs that I’ve worked at were like that. I work in government now and things are more efficient and straightforward here than at the worst of the large orgs I’ve worked at. Stick it out and be a yes man when new projects come up. Eventually you’ll start owning things and the work will pick up. Also do a little observation from time to time. A lot of the people who act like they’re super busy aren’t doing shit all day. Corporate workers at large orgs are experts at looking busy and doing nothing. Your sense of busy is probably a lot different than theirs.

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Own-Trainer-6996@reddit

Are they hiring?

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EscapeFacebook@reddit

Sounds pretty typical, it'll be 6 months before you're up to speed and actually getting into projects. At big corporations individual job duties can get pretty narrow. Enjoy the slow period and shadow anyone willing to let you. Big corporations are usually very locked down too and unless you need access to something for a specific task you're probably not going to get it outright. One reason is licensing, it cost a lot of money to give everyone admin access to everything especially if they don't need it for their daily assignments. As an intermarinary between teams and a team lead I have access to alot of systems my team memebers of the same level don't even though we perform the same duties. You wouldn't think of multibillion dollar multinational company would worry about licensing fees and nitpick them but they sure do.

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peakdecline@reddit

You need to maintain your drive to advance your career. The toughest obstacles you will face are figuring out how to interact with the politics and organizational culture in order to unlock opportunities. All of your observations are typical of large corporate IT structures. There's always high degree of "separation of duties" of every aspect of IT. There's always an initial apparent lack of work opportunities to go around. And a lot of these do have good reasons. They could be compliance and legal related. They could be because the organization needs to always keep operating even if you get hit by a bus (or your entire team does, frankly). Seek out the high performers on your team. Chances are very high that pareto rule is in effect here. That is 80% (likely more, frankly) is being done by 20% (likely less) of the team and there's tons of people on your team just coasting (just look at all the comments here suggesting you do the same... don't do that, you'll stagnate and one day end up laid off and in a really bad position). Getting to know the high performers is key, making it clear that you're wanting to take on the serious work, and establishing a mentor-mentee relationship is going to be key. And its also likely the quickest way to speed up your access because these are the people who are going to know who to ask to get your access requests moving. Its always going to be about who you know. Establish relationships that are meaningful. Find out who the stake holders are when you do get put on a real project. Do good work when those opportunities do come up. And keep an eye out for the positions opening up at your own organization. Pay attention to titles and what those people are actually doing. Frankly a lot of the work you probably want to do is actually being done by someone with an Engineer or Architect title. And you may even already be ready for those roles, you just didn't realize it when you applied. You should always be looking to move up.

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Exciting-498@reddit

Bro, enjoy the peace while it lasts.

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FarmboyJustice@reddit

Expecting to make a difference and have access to everything after only a month is pretty unrealistic. You're hung up on being given access to change things you don't fully understand, while ignoring an opportunity to spend months doing nothing but learning and training while being paid for it.

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DonPepppe@reddit

Well, they are doing the right thing. Usually a new hire will try to work fast all day, will make everyone else look bad. And when you finish your work fast guess what? You will get more work! Or the exec will think that there are too many of you .D

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amensista@reddit

I've been there. F500 - everything was segmented. That's how it goes. You've now seen it. The wheels turn slowly and processes are long. Your skillset will also silo. You can either change your mindset: You have an amazing thing going otherwise, secure job, low stress, great pay, a job is to pay the bills and you want your health and mental health stable OR leave and find a more demanding, exposure to many skills, jack of all trades, potentially high stress, "challenging" role..? Both have pros and cons. But I feel you. I think I died in that role at the F500. Cubicles, teams and their little fiefdoms, sooooo much $ waste. But you can cruise in what 10's of thousands of people would love to have. Or throw yourself in something else - that has major risks, trust me. Thats what I did in the end, an opportunity came up and I took it. Mainly because Im naturally ambitious and wanted to run IT, which I did at the place I left for. Anyway, if you are truly miserable in 6 months and you have the flexibility to take another role somewhere, do it. The job market sucks balls right now for tech so you may want to ride out the shitstorm that's the current job market. Thats my advice.

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DuckDuckBadger@reddit

This was my scenario as well, except the place I was at wasn’t F500. I left a small company to work there, experienced everything OP explained. At one point months in I was assigned a project to install windows on a bunch of pre-built virtual machines. Wasn’t asked to do anything else, just install windows and leave it for someone else. Reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, I could feel my skill set slipping and I was bored out of my mind. Left for an IT Manager position at a mid sized company. Much happier. OP - some people love it, some people hate it. It’s either for you or it isn’t. Give it some time. Talk to your manager. If you’re not happy, leave.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Thank you. How did you get the it manager job if you were not managing people in that role? Its something I've considered looking at but seems like it would be hard to break into.

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DuckDuckBadger@reddit

In my opinion the best managers are people who were good engineers with great soft skills. The position I’m in is a very technical manager of a small team. If you want to break into management I would structure your resume in a way that shows business impact more than technical achievement. I’m sure if you look back through your achievements, you can extract out of each a way in which it positively impacted the business by saving money, increasing productivity, or even improving cybersecurity (which improves productivity, usually). Networking also helps but it wasn’t required in my situation.

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graph_worlok@reddit

You might not be new to IT, but you are new to this environment, and there’s likely a whole lot of weird stuff you just haven’t encountered yet. Yes, things are siloed - in megacorp enterprise land, there’s a whole lot of background and processes you won’t yet be aware of. You are a sysadmin? Got access to the company structure? Go browse up past your boss, and their boss, then have a look at the structure from there…

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Kukri187@reddit

Well, I know you’re not at my company. I do incident management. I’d have your ass on a fucking TAhub outage call so fast. :D

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tilhow2reddit@reddit

This is 100% how big corps work. Give it time, nothing moves fast, even changes that you'll need to make will have layers of fucking change control and dependencies that cross multiple teams (because everything has a team) there will be things that rely on other things in ways you can't possibly know yet because you weren't there when they were built, and you haven't been there long enough to dig anything up. The only thing that will happen quickly is breakfix. And even that will move slower than you probably want. Eventually as you start peeling back the onion, you will get deeper and deeper into the muck, and if you're good at something eventually you'll be the guy that does Radius, or VPNs, or Firewalls and ACLs, or whatever it happens to be that you're better than everyone else at. And if you're good, you'll get the chance to go deeeeeep down that rabbit hole at some point. Some new dev will blow up the data base in the lab and no one will be able to test changes before things go to production and FUCKING EVERYTHING will come to a halt, and if you happen to be the data base guy who also understands file systems, RAIDs, and you've got some ideas about how to recover encrypted backups after someone lost the keys... You're about to have the chance to test that shit, RIGHT NOW with 100 people watching. But yeah, this is how big corporations work. You'll do tons of work just to do your actual job.

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placated@reddit

This is point in your career where you can learn how to grab a flag and lead others to make the changes you think need to happen - or just sit there and wait for someone to tell you what to do.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Im going to grab a flag and jam the pole down through one of the gatekeepers shoes. Lol

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njseajay@reddit

The quickest way to distinguish yourself in such a large org is to shine on troubleshooting calls. Once they know that you have a good head on your shoulders they will realize that they need to get you more access/responsibility ASAP. Name recognition is the name of the game, for better or worse.

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Background-Slip8205@reddit

It just takes time. I find large companies like that are run much better, with far fewer incidents, because everyone is a specialist and knows actually what they're doing. You don't have to worry about the Windows admin getting impatient, logging into the switch and adding his own vlan, and screwing up the port channel because the configuration is different than the literal only 1 way that he knows how to do something. Large companies if run properly, don't take outages because they don't just let you do whatever you want whenever you want. You have things like change control where others have to approve the change, so you don't do something like push a GPO to an OU without realizing there's a nested OU 3 levels below that has servers which will break if that GPO gets applied. They're treating you like your new, because it's a very large and complex environment. It takes a minimum of a year to get fully up to speed, and even then, you're not going to know everything. The more you know and they know you, the more work you'll get. You'll miss this downtime where you're getting a free paycheck to watch sportscenter on your phone all day. This is a big opportunity for you to pick a speciality and to be an SME, then you can make even more money, going pretty much anywhere you want.

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Yeah. One nice thing is when we have a product/software/system, we have millions worth of it. Like bigger setups of it then ive ever dreamed of. So it crossed my mind that if I wanted to go work for that actual company who makes that product, I can proudly say I set up/operated/maintained that at a level that few probably have. Of course that isn't true yet but in a couple years maybe.

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Background-Slip8205@reddit

Exactly. Don't neglect your vendor relations either. I'm a storage SME, and I know about a dozen SE and sales reps just from working at a F500 and doing business with them, going to their events, out for drinks, meetings at their office, ect. Some of them have been promoted over the years, some have gone to other storage companies. If I lost my job today, I'm a few phone calls away from having a list of 20 different companies on the entire East coast, looking for someone with my skill set, and I'd have multiple job offers by the end of the week. I've already taken advantage of these relationships twice. You meet high up people with a lot of influence, working at big companies. By far the best perk.

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Competitive_Guava_33@reddit

It sounds great Cash the checks

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worthlessgarby@reddit (OP)

Well so far I am doing that for sure. Lol

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halmcgee@reddit

We were acquired by ultimately a Fortune 100 corporation. We were constantly amazed at having to get a dozen or more people to make even a basic decision much less a change. They were amazed we were so broad. After a while though I learned that most of them got way deep in the weeds on their specialties. And as they took over security and AD, I lost a lot of access to various systems. Just stay up with your boss and make sure they are happy. Dig deep into your new specialty. Good luck

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WYWH25@reddit

This is what it's like at big companies. There are individual teams for absolutely everything.

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Netw1rk@reddit

Bill does one thing, of course he doesn’t need some cowboy coming in and doing it for him. Enjoy it, when Bill retires and everything blows up you’re going to be on the hook to fix it.

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hmtk1976@reddit

A month is nothing at a large company. Internal procedures, inertia and people who have been employees from before mankind learned to master fire make things go... slowly. It took me four months (4 !) at my current customer to get all the permissions I need to get my work done. And once in a while it turns out some permission is missing. If you want to get things done and have interesting things come your way, talk to colleagues. Tag along when they´re doing things, ask and give advice, ... Use your social skills firsr.

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unipanic@reddit

Yes, for a larger company it takes time to ramp up and get people to trust your expertise. Spend that time getting to know other dept pain points and pain points within the team. From there, you can take your time coming up with possible solutions to issues that have plagued the team/dept for a long time. With that, there is much you can do and will be called upon if you can prove your chops at that point. It's different than a small company but the payoff is much, much bigger. So bide your time. Get to know the politics and the pain points and how you could possibly provide solutions. Take your time providing those solutions because with a big company, the solutions needs to be much bigger than a smaller company and more well thought out. Like security and automation and usability and documentation and you will have to support that in front of many people to sell it. The pressure can feel like a lot sometimes cause you have hundred to thousands of people relying on your expertise.

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unipanic@reddit

I have been on my team for about 3 years and I'm hoping to be promoted this upcoming year from Senior to Principle. It's taken that long just to get to a point that people come to me for solutions (I've been in this game for almost 30 years and have worked for both small and big companies). It just takes longer than smaller places where you have to be everything for everyone at all times and work a bazillion hours and never get acknowledged for it beyond a "Oh, did you work over the weekend. Hope it went well.".

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Guilty_Cup385@reddit

I work for a large enterprise. It takes 6 months to get employees fully integrated and about a year to take on projects. Now permissions work a bit like this, I’ll request everything I think you need, you might run into access problems and we are going to have to open a ticket for it. during a security audit everyone gets their permission revoked and it can take a while to get it restore. Because info sec thinks they can just remove group policies or move accounts from OU.

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topher358@reddit

I think especially if you are coming from the MSP world to megacorps the mindset shift can be a bit jarring. Like others have said over time your skillset is going to get siloed into whatever you actually end up doing once you have access, since there are teams for everything. Nothing wrong with that, it's just a different style of work.

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gearcontrol@reddit

Same here... Went from working at startups to a large international company with 20k people. Took 6 to 9 months before the average person was really trusted and hands-on. Very complex and critical systems. Best to take the time to learn the culture, procedures, and review documentation for all the systems and applications you'll be touching, plus the big picture.

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Acceptable_Potato949@reddit

You're 100% missing the forest for the ~~trees~~ twigs. Fix your mindset.

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One-Pollution-3491@reddit

I work for a company that’s more than 10 times the size of your company. It’s a different world for sure. When something breaks it is really hard to figure out what team did what that might of broke what your responsible for. But the big companies pay more than anybody else.

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deanmass@reddit

Go Overemployed

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stewbadooba@reddit

I worked at a place (for 10months) as the senior linux sys admin, they didn't give me access to the systems until after 2 months, and that was only because I caused a fuss about not having access tot he system I was theoretically responsible for ... yes these kinds of places exist, and no they're not for me, I could have got away with doing nothing for ages, except they had a strict in the office policy, and I didn't want to travel an hour and a half each day to do nothing (I can do that at home) ... only you can decide whether its for you.

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PKZsarcasticMirror@reddit

Do you have any fields of work that you wanted to investigate before spending money to delve further into them? All IT research is explainable on company time ("if the company invests into this field, I'm just trying to get a leg up on the knowledge required to operate it beforehand...", etc).

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DJMagicHandz@reddit

Let's trade, I keep getting shit thrown my way that I already know won't work. Then I have to battle with the useron why it won't work. You ordered the server without embedded NICs so you're out of luck. One of my many quibbles on why users shouldn't be allowed to order a damn thing without my team's consent.

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REiiGN@reddit

I'll switch with you. Right now I got all the responsibilities

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juggy_11@reddit

That sounds like a dream job to me.

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jdanton14@reddit

I was on an architecture team at Comcast, it was badass because I was an enterprise and I could bypass a lot of those firewalls. Those jobs are rare. Enterprise is weird like that. Now I consult.

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davy_crockett_slayer@reddit

>Manager keeps saying how there is sooooo much work. OK where the fuck is it? Then im told they will get it going this week. Nope.... Either one or two people grab all the work, or your boss says that so people think his team is actually busy.

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p8ntballnxj@reddit

You don't realize it but you are in a pretty great spot. You'll eventually get work but for now, take the down time to learn skills. Trust me, this is a blessing...

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danguyf@reddit

By yourself a book of crosswords and try to keep your mind occupied while waiting for the mega corporation bureaucracy to catch up. Maybe start studying some new technology.

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BBizzmann@reddit

Be grateful for what you have dude. People are struggling out there and you have it made in the shade.

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GrandAffect@reddit

You should be absorbing interoffice politics and calculating moves to implement changes. You've been hired to do "stupid things like expand a disk or add someone to a group". If you want a seat at the big kid's table, you have to prove yourself.

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Lonely-Abalone-5104@reddit

Enjoy it while it lasts

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SpotlessCheetah@reddit

Yep..start trading stocks.

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