Was It the Last IT Guys Fault
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@momurda said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Management may have made decisions based on the input from the person they trusted to give them reliable information to make IT/business decisions(the last IT Guy), and wouldnt know any better if the information they are given is bad or not, due to them being managers and not technical people.
Then a critical question would be, why was management making any decision? That's why I point out the "who is the head of IT" problem. If someone who doesn't understand what they are doing is making decisions rather than entrusting the person who is tasked with understanding, that itself is an issue - either that the wrong person was hired or they are not empowered to do the job that needs to be done.
Sure, in many cases your example is true. But it's also very common to come in, be told that the last guy did crazy things, then immediately find out that the actual "last guy" is still there, as the boss.
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@momurda said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Repeat that cycle for a few years in a row, and that is the typical SMB IT environment.
I totally agree. Now, no hiring process is perfect, not even close. But who bears all responsibility for who is hired? If a failed process is being repeated over and over and the "IT guy" is the piece getting replaced, it's a pretty good assumption that the IT guy isn't the problem. They might be a problem, but not the root one.
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I wonder if I'd fall into this category... hopefully not. I document everything I do, and hand it out to the team members.
Leaving or getting hit by a bus, I wouldn't want to be in those shoes or leave someone in those shoes saying "WTF was he thinking. . . "
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@scottalanmiller said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@stess said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@scottalanmiller
I got to say that sometime your post is just too long to read. Thanks to translate.google with voice over text.... I'm able to follow through..You are listening to it translated and read? In what language? How well does that work?
English. There's a speaker button that read what you typed (in this case copy/paste) into the box. It's not perfect, but for someone whos English is not their primary language, it helps a lot.
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Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.
It is like moving house, only where you have to leave all your own, cool stuff in your old house and have to make do with whatever the previous tenants of your new house have left you. Even if they're relatively neat and tidy, you'll still be like "uugh, my new closet is full of brown cords, I miss my old blue jeans". And that's the best case. Worst case is they've left a half-eaten, three week old pizza under the sofa.
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@stess said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@scottalanmiller said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@stess said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@scottalanmiller
I got to say that sometime your post is just too long to read. Thanks to translate.google with voice over text.... I'm able to follow through..You are listening to it translated and read? In what language? How well does that work?
English. There's a speaker button that read what you typed (in this case copy/paste) into the box. It's not perfect, but for someone whos English is not their primary language, it helps a lot.
Oh, so you are hearing it in English, but listening is easier than reading. I get it now.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.
It is like moving house, only where you have to leave all your own, cool stuff in your old house and have to make do with whatever the previous tenants of your new house have left you. Even if they're relatively neat and tidy, you'll still be like "uugh, my new closet is full of brown cords, I miss my old blue jeans". And that's the best case. Worst case is they've left a half-eaten, three week old pizza under the sofa.
I came into role that was half documented, with everything all over the places. Took me 2 months just to grasp what is going on, and another 6 months to sort things just to keep it afloat.
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Was it the last IT guy's fault? You can be the judge.
When I first started with my current company, I was suppose to meet the last IT guy so he can show me things, it never happened, he never showed up! After a day and a half of waiting, my boss gave me the last IT guy's credential and I logged into the IT computer, I found he had his google account logged in, I can see his "google hangouts" buddies, I can see his gmails, I can see he was chatting real time with his buddies and when he was going to start playing games with them. I reported the finding to my boss and let it be. When I looked for documents, they were 7 months behind, just so happen the last IT guy was here 7 months.
During the first week, three physical servers froze, two were DC servers. During the second week, virtual email server ran out of disk space, I had to come in on a Saturday to fix it. Even though the email server is a virtual server, I found the email data volume is spanned across three drives. I think my heart skipped a beat or 10. I had to add another drives to the spanned volume just to get the email server working. I fixed the spanned volume the week after, by enlarging the main drive, defragging the volume and removing the additional drives.
VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, (over $5,000) was purchased, yet, the company servers are only setup to use VMware vSphere Essentials Kits (slightly over $500) worth of functions (backup API and vCenter). Company could have chosen HyperV and saved over $5,000 and will not make a difference in daily operations! Only two ESXi virtual server were setup. vCenter was also installed on a physical server running windows server, I replace it with a vCenter appliance running on one of the the ESXi host and saved a server license.
In the third week, I proposed and got approval to buy a few used HP DL380G6 and use them as virtual server host, buy more RAM, and new 2TB harddrives to refresh the current virtual host servers as well as converting all physical servers to virtual. DL380G6 was $50 each, RAM and harddrives were the main expense, total was maybe $5,000. A week or two after I have got three HP DL380G6 servers with new harddrives and RAM hosting the virtual servers and running happily and couple spare HP DL380G6 shells/RAM/harddrives for DR.
At one point of time, the physical windows file server was running out of space, but instead of buying more harddrives for the server, a decision was made to buy QNAP NAS, set to RAID 5, established an iSCSI connection to the server, then the server shared out the files. Result was a unstable file server that would forget permission of files when the server is restarted. There was an old HP server on the IT desk, the document left behind by two IT guy ago said this would make a good file server, but he didn't think he has time to setup up the server. During the first week there, I plug the kvm and power to that server, server will not even boot!!
Two months in, the physical windows file server finally crashed. File system was in a read only mode and would not allow any write until the CHKDSK was done. I saw this as an opportunity to get rid of the physical server and QNAP at the same time. I gave my boss two options: I can attempt to repair the current physical file server or I can spend time and energy to build a new virtual file server and then copy everything over. Boss chose the latter and I had the new virtual server up and sharing its files by the next morning. I set it up so quickly, I wondered why the two IT guy ago even bother to write the document stating he didn't have the time.
So, by the start of the third month, I had all virtual servers on fresh harddrives running RAID10, I have three virtual hosts and no other physical servers, I had cold server shells with RAM and harddrives for DR, no more QNAP running RAID5, plenty of disk space for all the virtual servers, all virtual servers were backed up, no more frozen servers since the virtual conversion and I can sleep better.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.
That is definitely true, but generally when moving jobs, the pay increase is significant. I haven't changed jobs for less than $10k and sometimes closer to $20k.
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@IRJ said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@Carnival-Boy said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.
That is definitely true, but generally when moving jobs, the pay increase is significant. I haven't changed jobs for less than $10k and sometimes closer to $20k.
There are jobs that are "net new roles" (Maybe a DBA for a new project) so you get to avoid some technical debt. Personally I didn't mind cleaning up crazy messes as long as I had the budget to do something about it (Joy of working for a MSP/Consulting company is you can tell people what it costs to fix, and if they balk you just go find someone else with money).
I"ve changed jobs for as little as 4K (but ended up being 8K after 90 day bump).
and I've changed jobs for 80K.The thing I've seen with changes is that they would advance my career and give me skills I needed to move up and on. I never took a pay raise for a job that would hold me back.
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@John-Nicholson said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
The thing I've seen with changes is that they would advance my career and give me skills I needed to move up and on. I never took a pay raise for a job that would hold me back.
Definitely
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@John-Nicholson said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
The thing I've seen with changes is that they would advance my career and give me skills I needed to move up and on. I never took a pay raise for a job that would hold me back.
Same here, I've always looked to new opportunities as a place to move up, not just for more money.
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@Carnival-Boy said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.
This is actually my favorite part.
If the new boss is open to upgrades and fixing everything up and implementing better documentation and records and stuff, it can be a lot of fun "restoring" the old thing, or "modernizing".
To me it has the same appeal as restoring a car or a run down house project or something. There is some enjoyment in tinkering everything back to life and putting on a fresh coat of paint and blowing out the dust. Plus there is just a lot of work to do, versus when everything is smooth and automated and you find yourself getting bored.
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@guyinpv said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
@Carnival-Boy said in Was It the Last IT Guys Fault:
Probably the main thing that puts me off moving jobs is that it means moving in to someone else's shit, which you then have to spend months, or even years, sorting out.
This is actually my favorite part.
If the new boss is open to upgrades and fixing everything up and implementing better documentation and records and stuff, it can be a lot of fun "restoring" the old thing, or "modernizing".
To me it has the same appeal as restoring a car or a run down house project or something. There is some enjoyment in tinkering everything back to life and putting on a fresh coat of paint and blowing out the dust. Plus there is just a lot of work to do, versus when everything is smooth and automated and you find yourself getting bored.
I agree, the "fixing it" is one of the best parts.
