[thelist] NTWRK ADMNSTRTN: [OT] a desperate plea to all you network administrators, i need your advice!

[Sean G.]

Howdy,

I feel your pain!  Been there, done that.  At one point I was tech
support/network admin for offices in Boston and New York City, front line
customer tech support for two e-commerce web sites, CF developer, SQL dba,
SQA, and the always fun "any other job/assignment that has to do with
technology."

I generally worked 45-50 hrs per week 10-7 (but easily could of done more if
I wanted to).  What I didn't do for 3 years was take any personal days, sick
days, or extended vacations.  I did work most holidays.

A rough break down of duties would be 20% network admin, 20% internal
support, 10% external (phone) support, 25% web development, 25% sql
development.

Advice I would give--figure out exactly what you want to get out of this
position, and leave as soon as you aren't getting it.

You don't say if you're the only person working on the websites, if the
people you support are high-maintenance, or how much time the other
assignments take, but I can almost guarantee you're stretched too thin.

It's not just an issue of you being overworked, or not being to able to
devote the proper attention to a particular task, but you're probably
learning a lot of bad habits you'll have to unlearn if you ever move on to a
real IT organization.

I was young with little experience and was fortunate to be in a position to
get hands -on work with databases, email servers, e-commerce web
development, et al.  It was the type of company where we pulled all our
email from a single POP account until bossman dropped a (burned) copy of
Exchange on my desk, "Let's see if you can get his up and running."

I thought of it as grad school--Exchange one week, vpn the next, get MS-SQL
up and running, then update all the code for the websites...

And like grad school, the pay sucked, the benefits sucked, the hours sucked,
the Professor (bossman) got the lime light, undergrads (minimum wage boobs I
was supporting) did the partying, and I was stuck in the middle making sure
all the systems worked.

As long as I was learning new technologies and building the resume, I was
getting what I needed from the position.  But that doesn't last forever.
One day you just have turn in that thesis and move on.

Two things happened before I made my move.  First, the opportunities for
exposure to new technologies became fewer and fewer.  It wasn't, "let's
learn Cold Fusion."  It's was, "upgrade the servers from CF 4 to CF
4.5"--which while it is important to keep your skills current, it's not
something you sacrifice pay/vacation/job satisfaction for.

And second, I learned enough to know a lot of what I had learned was wrong,
but hadn't learned enough to make it right.  I learned how to build an
e-commerce web site, but I learned nothing about documenting the development
process, nothing about version control, nothing about a proper staging
environment.  Basically all the things I didn't know made the things I did
know almost worthless.

And that second point is key.  If you're one guy doing all the things you
list (I don't doubt you) then either you're the super stud keeping
everything running, or your bosses aren't running the organization properly,
and therefore are not good role models for you learn management techniques
from.  Not that I doubt your abilities, but the tenor of your questions
makes me think the later scenario is more likely than the former.  =)

To put it another way, if you're the 1-man team keeping the websites going,
you probably don't have the time or the experience to develop and document
proper procedures.  So you're the only one who can do what you do.  So 1)
you can never be promoted past that task, and 2) the website can never grow
past the size you can support.

The company I worked for was strictly e-commerce--our websites were our only
business.  One day I realized, as much as I had learned, and as good as I
was, we needed a larger development team to grow.  And only way we could do
that was to either recode everything from scratch or pay the new developers
for 6 months while they went through the existing spaghetti code before they
could start anything new.

Luckily, I reached this point just before the bubble burst and was able to
find a new job very quickly.  But I was in a great position--I wasn't a guru
in any area, but I had my choice of areas to pursue.  I had done enough
coding to take a full-time web development job.  I had enough sql to move to
a junior dba position.  I certainly had the network admin stuff down cold.
I had my degree.

So all-in-all it was good job.  I got my hands on a gaggle of new
technologies, got real-world front-line experience, got my dot com craze
stories for telling around the camp fire, got my resume together, and moved
on.

Okay, didn't mean to ramble on so, but the moral of the story is: all things
in moderation.  Know when to say when.  Friends don't let friends run IIS.

HTH,


Sean G.

> -----Original Message-----
>
> hi.
>
> i have a problem.