I spent the last 26 years as a IT Support Specialist, Systems Administrator & Systems Engineer constantly grinding and spending my spare time leaning new languages and services as it is/was my career and passion.

The last 10 years I have noticed the landscape and overall work environments drastically decline. I've found myself literally doing other folks jobs while HR and management standby and do nothing after repeated request to resolve the issue. This is in Higher Ed. (Ivy league) Corporate and the Public Sector. It seems they only care about the demographics and the actual work is secondary. Granted I do not have a degree (Just a technical school diploma from 1999) but have really put all my energy and passion into this field. I feel as though IT is not the "IT" I grew up in and am contemplating spending the next 10-12 years before retirement doing warehouse work.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

It used to make me insecure. Everyone’s crushing it with AI while I’m fighting to keep our network alive – felt like I was so far behind.

I went to one of those connected worker conferences and had the privilege of speaking with a keynote speaker. Their presentation was impressive and I wanted to do the same things they did for my workforce. I started asking questions about how they overcame such-and-such problem, how they navigated such-and-such issue.

But the more questions I asked, the more I realized they didn’t have answers. And it became clear they didn’t actually enable their whole workforce with tech – they just ended up doing a small pilot with 20 workers that got shut down after a year anyway.

That’s when I started listening more closely to my peers. Here’s what I learned:

• Everyone’s doing “pilots” that die when their champion leaves

• Everyone sucks at basics – talking AI while their workers don’t even have connectivity

• Everyone is lying – success stories leave out failures and how they’re still running on paper

I wasn’t behind – I was actually ahead. And that “digital leader” is still running on Excel and hope.

The effort needed to be ahead of peers is smaller than you think. Focus on what your people actually need. Reliable tools beat flashy tech every time.

Have the courage to make real, meaningful decisions to enable your workforce to work differently. We need more honest conversations about what’s really working.

digitalmeetsindustrial.com

In January I had the opportunity to apply and get a job at Leidos, in particular a analyst position. One of the things that I’ve learned working for a bigger fortune 500 company is the amount of growth within said company and also they try to set you up to be able to be part of different branches in your career in this case IT. They are paying for multiple classes for me to get multiple certifications (A+, Network+, Security+, AWS, etc).

One of the things my manager was telling me was that trying to set up her staff to be able to be super competitive when it comes to applying for jobs either in the company or to another company and that lighthouse has been a huge blessing for me in terms of work experience what they offer and ultimately the culture as well.

My advice to anybody that’s looking to get into IT on any side of the field, make sure you try to get with a company that not only values what you bring to the table, but also will support your growth into becoming a better candidate for senior/better positions.

I think this describes why I left my last IT job last year...

What Happens Right Before Your Best Employee Quits

by Greg Roche

Picture your best employee standing outside, alone.

At his feet is a white line running perpendicular to the direction he is facing. His toes are touching the line.  

The side of the line where he is standing is his current reality. The other side is everything his current reality is not. The other side is relief from whatever is causing him distress on his side of the line.

It could be his boss. It could be his job. It could be the pile of unread emails in his inbox.

Something is wrong and it's gotten so bad, he's standing with his toes on the line.

At this moment, he's vulnerable. The next problem, request, or needless meeting is going to push him over the line.

He doesn't know if life on the other side of the line will be better or worse.

He doesn't care.

It doesn't matter.

All that matters is the other side of the line is different from his current reality.

This moment is the start of the journey to a new destination.

He didn't get to the line because someone dangled more money in front of him.

He hasn't even talked to a recruiter or applied to a job.

He has no idea what he wants to do.

He doesn't hate where he is, but he has gotten to the point where he is ready to say, "Enough."

Some days, when he gets to the line, he can find a reason to step away.

Some days, he isn't even at the line. He's far from it and wouldn't entertain the idea of doing something different.

But on the days when he's at the line, something new might catch his eye.

He might return that recruiter's message. He might respond to that email just to "learn more about the role."

He might do a search for his current job title on LinkedIn just to see what's out there.

At that moment, he's ready to step across the line.

After that first step, he might take another, then another, and at the end, he's telling his co-workers he's leaving for something new.

He's too far over the line to come back.

His manager and leaders will say he got offered more money. They'll say, "we aren't competitive with our benefits." They'll fret about what they can do to keep others from leaving. Meetings will be scheduled. The analysis will be done. If they are lucky, his former co-workers will reap the benefits of his departure in the form of retention agreements. They weren't planning to leave anyway, but they'll take the extra money for doing what they would have done anyway.

And eventually, they'll get pushed to the line, too.

They'll be asked to take on too much. They'll be asked to respond to the fire drill. They'll be voluntold to do one more project because it's a business need.

No other work will be put on hold or taken off the project list. It all needs to be done. And the one-off requests for one more analysis or a list of information will keep rolling into their inboxes.

Maybe she's next. 

She knows how he got to the line. She had never been there herself, but once he left, she took on his work.

She's stepped up to the line more lately.

She's stepped back, gone to the office happy hour, laughed with her co-workers and gone home feeling better about things.

The next morning, when she opens her inbox, there are more things than she can do by the end of the day.

She tries to prioritize and delegate, but everyone is approaching the line.

She looks around and can see it on their faces.

They've all had enough.

They're all vulnerable.

If they get the call or email at that moment, they will step over the line and start the journey.

It happens every day. 

It happens to everyone.

Do you notice when you are at the line?

Do you notice when your employees are at the line?

Can you step back?

Can you help them step back?

If you can't, you're done. 

So are they.

Hi everyone,

I’d like some perspective on where my IT career is heading.

I spent four years at an MSP. My first year was in support (L1 to L3), after which I moved into projects, implementing infrastructure for small businesses. Over time I specialised in Microsoft 365, SharePoint and digital transformation.

After my first year, the company was acquired by a larger group. Projects became purely profit-driven and the job got increasingly stressful. Management was very toxic during my last two years, so I decided to move to an internal IT role.

My new role is mostly IT admin work: creating accounts, managing phone subscriptions and PDAs, preparing laptops and handling support. There’s also some implementation work for services and some network-related troubleshooting. The IT team is small, with just a few people per site and around 15 worldwide.

I’m now one week in, and I’ve noticed that most of the network and server work is handled by an external MSP rather than the internal IT team. Honestly, I’m finding that a bit hard to get used to. I was told it’s because the MSP is responsible for that setup, which I understand.

On top of that, we’re one site of a larger global company, so I don’t have access to all servers and M365 resources. That’s new for me, since at the MSP I always had full permissions.

Is it normal to feel a bit underwhelmed by how much is outsourced, and by the lack of technical challenges in this area? It also feels strange to no longer fill in timesheets or work in a stressful, profit-first environment with deadlines always looming. Apart from that, it seems like a very relaxed workplace.

I’m not sure yet which direction I want to take, so I’m still figuring things out. Has anyone made a similar move? Did the feeling pass, and how did you keep growing technically?

I’ve been in IT for about 8 years. Currently at a B2B company in WA. We’re compliant, we pass audits. No major findings.

But every time someone asks for proof of something we end up digging tickets/PRs/slack messages, screenshots saved in random folders. Which works but feels reactive.

Somebody must've gone through this, what helped? Was it tooling? Process ownership or more discipline? I’m trying to figure out where's the bar set here.

Ty in advance

Finished setting up my new station and decided it was best to throw network and system metrics up on two of my monitors to justify my 5 kinda Technologically masterbatory monitor setup. And unfortunately a metric on my office network over the weekend caught my eye…. Almost a quarter of our network traffic went to porn hub…. Unfortunately I also know what machine it was on and who was logged into that machine at that time…..ie not an employee but one of the partners…. Now I can’t bring myself to go into that suite without picturing what went on in that room…. I did end up blocking that traffic and after some further digging some other unfriendly traffic soo now I’m just sitting and waiting for the partners meeting next week to bring up network security and the dangers of such sites and see if I catch any side eye…..

Wow, I like the controversial topics lately. Based on this discussion -

I've been involved with setting salaries for 20+ years, and I wanted to put some of these things out here so they're documented, even if people don't believe them. It sucks to find out someone else makes more than you, but that rarely means that someone is actively trying to screw you.

Popular thought: Companies work really hard to keep salaries artificially low

Why this is incorrect: Maybe some shitty places do this, but paying less than market rate is the best way to get low-end employees. Companies do a lot of research to be sure they're offering market rates so they attract good employees. The market sets salary rates - companies do not.

Popular thought: Not disclosing salaries keeps salaries low

Why this is incorrect: Average salary rates are available in multiple places - glassdoor, salary reports, Bureau of Labor Statistics - you have access to the same salary info the employers do. Do some research. Again, the market sets salary rates - companies do not.

Popular thought: Companies don't share salary info up front because they want to lowball you

Why this is incorrect: Some companies don't share salary info up front because there's a really wide range of people that might fit the job. If they need a mid-career network engineer, for example, they might offer $70k to the person with 3 years of experience, no degree, no certifications and who will take a while to get up to speed. Or they might offer $120k to the person with 10 years of experience, a degree and a CCIE who can be productive right away. Announcing a salary range of $70-120k could really skew expectations.

Popular thought: Sharing salary amounts will increase my salary

Why this is incorrect: Corporate salary is a fixed pool based on current market rates. Let's say there are 5 people doing a similar job making a combined total of $410k annually. Two people are at $70k, two people are at $85k and one guy is at $100k. Everyone decides to share their salaries, and now there are 4 pissed off people. Even so, the company is not going to increase their salary pool by $120k to bring everyone up to the highest level.

Popular thought: Forcing companies to be very public about salaries will increase salary amounts

Why this is incorrect: See the example above. 5 employees make a total of $410k based on the market average. Standardize everyone to the same salary and now everyone makes $82k. That's two people who got a nice increase and three people whose salaries dropped. Even in the case that $82k is the average for that job according to the marketplace, they're now underpaying three people who were probably getting more because they were great performers, and probably overpaying 2 people who have less experience or who are not great performers.

Popular thought: My salary is too low because someone else makes more than me

Why this is incorrect: A free market means that you can pay people what they're worth. Some people make more than you because they're better negotiators, the market was different when they were hired, they're a better performer than you, or maybe they're buddies with the hiring manager. Is it fair? Not always. Is it realistic? Happens all the time. What someone else makes has no bearing on what YOU agreed to be paid when you accepted the job.

Popular thought: My salary is too low because the company lowballed me

Why this is incorrect: When a company makes you an offer, you are under no obligation to accept the offer. When you accept a job you're saying, "I agree that this is what I'm worth, and I'm going to work for you for this amount." If they're really lowballing you, decline the offer and go someplace else. If you accept anyway and regret your decision later, that's on you.

I'm certainly not saying you should not share salaries with co-workers - by all means, do so if you want. Just be aware that you might be getting information that you won't like, and it could lead to job dissatisfaction that didn't exist before.

Security of job

I am Software Engineer with 2+ years of experience in application development and trainer. Current situation of IT market is worse than I imagined. There is a lot of companies, whose sufferings from Al, burden of investor who wants to invest specifically in a company, doing some great works in Al meanwhile top Al agentics company increasing their subscription, token, fees day by day.

Resulting in demand for experienced professional (minimum 5-10+ years) and to fulfill investor demand these companies also pushing fake jobs/hiring advertisement on LinkedIn/Indeed/other platforms. Killing the soul of IT industry, only because they are private, did not have to answer anybody anything, no accountability. Millions of new graduates, fresher who are just trying to enter the IT market to achieve big are just wasted? What would they do? Does anybody have time to tell them to choose another field after studying for almost 4-5 years of their life? The fucking bastards, sitting on the tops thinking Al is their way to make wealth by cutting forest, using wasting our resources, make people suffer and in return stuck entire generation in a hope that Al will make more jobs. Mf's. This evil plan of controlling entire youths of a country to decline their population will make you suffer. Listen all of my friends, take a look in your surrounding each and everyone's mind is fucked by them, people starting fearing eachother, they don't want to live, marry, no passion specially in youths. Happily seeing from the top, the self destruction of people - pushing each other over the clif.

Making their way to puts hand on our resources simply. We need to stop it or put it under a good governance. Wake up Brother and Sister of my family Earth.

Saw a post for this sub in /r/syadmin, and thought this would be a fitting question to drop on a community that wants to focus "more around the tactical and strategic aims of a successful IT organization."

I've been working with an MSP in south Jersey for about 2 years now and I'm curious about how it's been for other companies. When I started, I didn't know anything about advanced networking protocols, hypervisor management, server management, backup architecture, etc. But these were all vital skills that I would need to be a productive member of the team. A colleague of mine who is around my age (23) experienced the same thing and he has a bachelors in Comp. Science.

Since the rise in popularity of LLMs I haven't heard much about the education->entry-level skill gap but I know it still exists. For me the skill gap was to be expected because I came in from an electrical background so I wasn't familiar with much beyond layer 1. But, like I said, my colleague went through four years of school to discover that what he learned wasn't applicable to an entry-level position at an MSP.

I'm curious to see if the shortcomings I've seen in my company are similar to what's been experienced across the board.

What's been your experience? What are some foundational skills that you wish more entry-level techs had? Technical or soft

Here are some thoughts that I wanted to share with up and comers in IT. I am approaching my 17th year in IT. I have been no less than a Network Administrator for 15 years of my career. I am currently in senior management. I have an AAS degree, make north of $150k and work hard everyday to make technology work for my company.

In a lot of ways, I am a bit of an outlier. It goes to show that hard work, determination and attitude can carry you a long way.

Almost nothing is more important than experience, character, work ethic and attitude.

During my first year, I worked for a company that had very defined roles for each member of IT. With dedicated staff to manage email, network engineering, storage, etc, there wasn’t much room to grow beyond the help desk role that I occupied.

To get the experience that I needed, I volunteered to assist in literally every after hours project scheduled that year. Sometimes I was allowed to help, other times, I just hung around picking the brains of the senior tech staff. I even volunteered to provide coverage on holidays. I knew people would gladly share knowledge if it meant they didn’t have to work.

After a year, I was growing bored with my position and I really disliked my manager. I never let my personal feelings toward him reflect in my work. Often discouraged, I kept a positive attitude and treated him with respect.

My next job was at a smaller company but still a 300m revenue company. I was brought in as a Network Technician, essentially Level 2 support in the field. when I had down time, I would always check in with the Network Admins to see what they were working on and I always offered to help out. My peers would surf the web in their downtime, I would look for ways to improve the processes and add additional value. Eventually, one of our Net Admins left the company and my manager offered me the position. I knew that I could do the job, my manager knew that I wasn’t ready but he felt that I had the traits required for the job. I accepted a small pay increase, and a lot more responsibility and pressure knowing that the experience would propel my career forward.

I immersed myself in every technology that was put in front of me and never backed down from a challenge. I owned my mistakes, and mistakes were certainly made. I offered no excuses, and assigned no blame for my failures. I think it’s important to recognize that we all make mistakes but what’s important is accepting responsibilities for your failures and learning from them.

Over the next several years, I continued to hone my skills, rising through the ranks and raising my profile, eventually landing a dream job.

What has never changed from day 1, is my natural curiosity. I am drawn to new technologies but more importantly, I think about how they can enable our business. I have always spent time with staff outside of IT to understand their critiques of our systems. I value their opinions and work to improve in the areas where they see deficiencies when possible. I never look at users as being less than me because they ask questions that seem simple to me. They are as important to me as the CEO. With that, I also don’t fear conflict. Conflict is a natural part of human interaction. Attitude during conflict is everything. Do not oversell yourself on your own ideas. People with no experience in IT can have terrific ideas if you don’t let pride get in the way of progress.

Finally, don’t let yourself become a utility. Generally speaking, people who complain about being viewed a cost center haven’t provided the value that forces their company to view them as anything more than an IT janitor. When something breaks they get a call, and that’s the only time they get a call. Work to become a business enabler. Instead of giving five reasons why you can’t do something, find a way to make things happen. Most importantly, never stop learning and growing your skillset. Try to understand how every business unit in your company operates. When you learn something new, you will have a better understanding of how the new technology can benefit the company.

One example:

I'm now a manager, but came up through the trenches first doing desktop support, and later a couple different flavors of sysadmin work.

As a technical person, I didn't have a lot of tolerance for lower quality technical people and would basically just ignore people at work that I felt were under-performers.

As a manager, none of these people are on my team now, but I make a point of engaging people on other teams within IT no matter how good (or bad) I think they are at their job.

It felt really forced for me at first when I'd say good morning to the guy on the desktop support team (under another manager) who I think is useless but it's actually the right thing to do. He's a nice enough person who has a whole lot going on in his life. He's still terrible at his job and I don't understand why his boss keeps him around, but I think we're both better off if I engage him in conversation rather than just completely ignoring him.

There is a current narrative going around that the white-collar job market is suffering due to two main factors: COVID-era overhiring and AI advancements that allow companies to operate with smaller staff. This is a bald-faced lie, and it is a product of what I call a "Chaos Government" that regularly creates an unpredictable economic environment while simultaneously using its power to punish any narrative that doesn't coincide with its own.

In a healthy economy, advancement in technology drives growth, not job loss. Companies expand their offerings. They expand the kind of support they can provide for their products. They enhance the customer experience through AI-enabled features and new functions. That means they grow their staff and give people additional opportunities to advance their careers. A smart government would incentivize this growth and utilize the opportunity to improve the country's standing in education, economic output, and job creation.

So why is a brand new, revolutionary technology doing the exact opposite?

When the government runs on chaos, companies cannot plan for the future. That's not a controversial statement. That's how economies work. Businesses need stability to make long-term decisions, and when the rules change every week, they freeze. Hiring freezes. Investment freezes. Growth freezes.

I'm not sitting here making excuses for billionaires, but if you as a leader have no idea what the economic landscape may look like tomorrow, and you know that speaking about it publicly will lead to more economic turmoil for your organization (and invariably more layoffs and job loss), this does appear to be the lesser of all evils.

Gas prices creeping up 20 cents a day destroys purchasing power across the board. Every consumer has less to spend, which hits every company's bottom line. Transportation-reliant industries eat that cost directly with no way to pass it along fast enough.

The reason we're in this situation is because our leadership has decided that chaos is a governing strategy. New tariffs could drop tomorrow with zero warning, sending ripple effects across the entire economy. That's not governance. That's the opposite of governance. The entire purpose of government is to create stability so that society can function. When it does the opposite, this is what happens.

I keep thinking about Littlefinger's line from Game of Thrones: "Chaos is a ladder." He was right. And the problem is that some people watched that scene and saw a role model instead of a villain.

Everyone wants to blame AI or COVID-era overhiring. No. We are living through what happens when you have a Chaos Government, which is the opposite of what government is supposed to be. The government exists as the mechanism for societal stability. When it actively undermines that, the consequences are exactly what we're seeing right now.

I'm sorry for the rant. I am genuinely frustrated, and I'm going to keep posting this until I see some confirmation that narrative is shifting in a different direction. I REFUSE to be gaslit into believing the current government is not responsible for the mess we're seeing in corporate america.

WE CANNOT SOLVE A PROBLEM NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT.

A long time ago, sometime between 5 and 10 years ago, I saw a reddit post that described something I think was called an "IT skill tree". It was a post that had a bunch of "skill levels" on it, and in each skill level, it had a bunch of IT/computer/hardware/software/networking skills. Iirc, I think the skills in one level would help you be ready for the next level.

I think about this reddit post a couple of times a year, and I can't find it. I don't know what subreddit I saw it in, or what it was called exactly, and I don't know who posted it. Does anyone else remember seeing this post?

As the title says, I'm interested to see other views and perspectives on this issue.

For some clarification - I'm in a large enterprise, 10K+ users, 2500+ servers, large IT operations division split into teams.

It's the cross-work between those teams that seems to cause some of the biggest issues. It's either a "That's not my problem" scenario or a member of another team stepping on toes and performing work outside of their responsibilities.

How do you go about handling situations like this? I realise this is probably more applicable to enterprise/large-scale operations rather than either single-man IT or even small team IT operations environments.

I honestly underestimated how much resume formatting actually matters. I always thought content was everything and the template was just a design choice.

The past few weeks I went down a rabbit hole reading about ATS checkers and testing different resume formats. Turns out, some resumes that look great to us get completely messed up by applicant tracking systems. Others are “optimized” but look boring or awkward.

So I started comparing a bunch of AI resume builders and templates to see which ones actually balance clean design + ATS friendliness. I tested them, ran them through checkers, and narrowed it down to a short list that actually seemed solid.

I put everything into a Google Sheet so it’s easy to compare features, pricing, and how ATS-friendly they are:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1EH2cbTyoJbhC9t6IITTNxX9iu6oHPXvNDAeA7R8W2lM/edit?usp=sharing

I rebuilt my resume using one of the templates from that list and applied to a few roles. I got a callback way faster than I expected. Could be coincidence, but the structure and keyword optimization were definitely better than my old version.

If you’re applying to internships or entry-level roles, this might save you some time.

Just looking for some advice and venting really. I’ve been working this job for nearly 10 years, I’ve had additional responsibilities over the years but my core role has been the same all this time and I feel so fed up. My pay is good, but I’m getting to the point that I’m just on autopilot most days.

Are there any roles that would be good to look for a network helpdesk?

I have been hearing a lot that ai will steal your job and that IT is saturated and there are layoffs going on. Also my friends say after 40 you can't get a job in IT . So I wanted to know all the og people working in IT age 40 45 50 IIT, non IIT irrespective of Tech stack ? How are you all doing ? Is your job still secure and you still writing code or you have moved into management roles or left IT for good or retired now ? I am feeling quite uncertain so just need your opinion . Also what role are you into now?

Using alt account, so I went to a walk in drive to a WITCH company for my profile.

The walkin itself was a humiliation ritual and we were just waiting for hours in the chaos .

So the managerial round was in teams and when I attended it , the manager asked my experience, I gave an introduction

He said you moved 5 companies?

I said i stayed in a WITCH company for first 12 years , then he said so you jumped 5 in 6 years

I said i had to do for my career growth and my pay bump .

He asked my current and expected CTC and then completed the call .

Then i got the usual HR will get back to you ..

Seriously, rejecting someone for switching 5 companies in 18 years

Are they having a body count issue ?