AdminBenjamin

Do a good job and fix the problems at they pop up. When you've built up some trust start to suggest fixes on things and hope they go for it. It can be fun because in 5 years it'll be YOUR systems such.

I live that life today. It's great. Being a generalist doesn't pay as well though.

We've used them for a couple years and have been really happy with it. 4300 tickets or so, the biggest problem we've had is occasionally emails won't come through from AWS for a couple hours that auto update the tickets. And when I say occasionally mean like <1 hour delays maybe 3-4 times a year and longer delays of over an hour only twice that I can remember. Their support is fast & great. Small team though, it's almost always the same dude.

They bought us beer & cheese curds after. You missed out! :)

Yeah, we have some offices outside WI that they service too. But I think they subcontract people in those areas to do the work for them? That's the impression that I get. Most of our spots are up in the Sheboygan office, they took us out mini golfing in the summer so if you happen to be one of those guys we might have met! :)

>IT sounds to me like you definitely have the basics down. But how afraid are you to get in there and document and make changes? Not as afraid as I should be sometimes... :) Going from a 40000 endpoint company to 500 has taught me that I know a lot more than I'd previously given myself credit for. But still zero servers. At my new place we basically started out with 300 PCs from dell (and handful of Chromebooks) & an email accounts and we've built it up over the last 3 years into a proper system where we can remotely manage & monitor all the PCs and routers and such. I'm proud of the progress & all the systems and technologies I've deployed or helped deploy. And I think from last year to the next few we're tripling in size and I'll personally be a huge part of that growth as we expand in other states (but zero servers!). I like where I'm at and I'm not really looking for a job, I'm just not in the habit of hanging up on recruiters and was curious about that aspect of IT. I tend to compare myself to the best guy at one specific department that handled spinning up new servers worldwide or something.

Yeah, I'd bomb that question pretty fast. It was for a generalist IT guy to do everything at a factory that had the HQ in Japan & a few other facilities in the US. At my first place we had local people at all our facilities where you could call them at 10pm and say "x is offline" and they'd go in and fix it. But they never unboxed new servers and installed the stuff themselves, etc. So I kind of assume that's what the actual job was doing? But I can't say for sure. The recruiter asked me about it and I said my experience with servers was limited to whatever I was asked to do and there were specific people who did specialist things but other than that it looked good on paper. And he called me back the next day and said they already had a really strong candidate and weren't taking new ones. But I was curious anyway how big of a deal the server info would be. &#x200B; &#x200B; https://preview.redd.it/ez64upjz53ac1.png?width=521&format=png&auto=webp&s=f2c1c2492d36b02f1d56964b0e5a230dcfb9ebdc

You brew beer and use James Imaging? I feel like you must also be from Wisconsin.

Fair enough. I certainly wouldn't apply for jobs where it was the core duty. But being at only one place my whole career that wasn't cloud based is a pretty narrow window into what people mean when they say "proficient".

The one specific job listed like 10 things including in person desktop support. It was a pretty basic generalist role at a manufacturing facility and I had everything else nailed down. I'm happy where I'm at and enjoying life but a recruiter I know asks me sometimes about if I'm interested in specific jobs and the server question always plagues me in the past. I feel like I have to be able to walk into a job and do every single thing that my last employer had whole departments of specialists doing to call myself an expert.

Yeah, because we had maybe 20 different departments that we could page depending on what specifically went down so I'd have to figure out if it's hardware, software, network, dns, etc. I worked night shift and know the system at Company X well enough to not page the wrong guy at 11pm at home. But every company is different I feel...

We had a lady who was a secretary (It was 1999, we didn't call them admin assistants yet... heh) and going to school for IT. Finally she graduates with her associates and gets a job at the Help Desk, I train her all morning and then at lunch break she logged into her old bosses PC using the remote tool and read his emails while he was on lunch because she wanted to see if he was talking about her and why she left. She was fired by the end of her lunch break. We've been calling "do not remote into people's PCs without permission" the Trudy Rule for the last 25 years now.

A lot of people describe their day in different ways. Some might say I'm logged into Reddit to fix that one difficult ticket that has a hard to find resolution that nobody else knows about because I take the difficult problems and don't ignore them. Other people might say that I'm scrolling around on my phone being chill.

For my part I quite like being a small company IT guy. The variety of work you deal with is more stimulating and interesting to me than being a specialist. But the company has to be good too obviously. My last job was being locked in a server room and only having very narrow responsibilities which wasn't very fun.

He gave you a number 1 priority task and you did something else instead. Say "my bad" and apologize. Next job someone says to document user creation process say "roger that" and do it.

Money disappears into direct deposit and it's put into a huge pile of other money. Pizza is tangible.

I'm in the US and a lady in Canada I worked with to fix something mailed me two cuban cigars (illegal here) because I helped her with something. It was nice.

I have a wife of 25y, the house I want to live in the rest of my life, I'm a parent and foster parent to 8 kids currently, 4 goats, etc. I don't really have a lot of money but I'm comfortable, etc. The things that make me happy in life aren't my career/money. It's good to advance a career but what are you working FOR? I enjoy teaching the kids to ride a bike and taking a walk with my wife in the evening more than I'd enjoy the money I'd get by getting some certs and advancing my career. Maybe I'm lazy about my career? I don't care though...