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

David Kaufman david at gigawatt.com
Wed Aug 14 22:51:01 CDT 2002


I was about to compose a reply to your original post offering some
suggestions about time management, managing priorities and user
requests, and so on, but then:

Chris W. Parker <cparker at swatgear.com> wrote:
> ... i did get a raise (about 2 months ago). but the
> reason i'm writing this post is because (recently, like last week)
> bossman has come to the near conclusion that i am possibly not "cost
> effective". therefore my job is almost on the line. he doesn't want
> to fire me because so he's given me the opportunity to try and
> restructure my job position and maybe move into the marketing
> department.
>
> all the things i listed are not daily job duties, however some of them
> are. and also, if anything goes wrong with any of those, i'm the one
> that gets to fix it.

Chris, many of us wear many hats.  especially in a smaller company, it's
not uncommon to have technical duties in addition to a "real job" in
such a small shop.  the reason "real job" is in quotes is because so
many non-technical business folks i've run across think of their primary
business operations as the "real" work, and the details of "all that
computer stuff" that they don't understand (that *supports* their
primary business operations) as bothersome busywork.  i've repeatedly
found such non-technical business folks inevitably in management
positions right above me.  oh, but this isn't about me is it?  :-)

while i'm not you, in my case more than a couple of these stuffed
shirts-- i mean middle managers and executives:

- have minimize the importance of that which they do not personally
understand,

- seem to question the productivity and/or actual activities of those of
us working long hours, sometimes into the wee hours, and sometimes
sleeping late and coming in late the next day as a result.  these same
people often express that nothing good can possibly be getting done at
night that can't get done just as easily during the 9-5 business day.

- often either fail to see or outright reject the correlation between
certain sysadmin tasks needing to be done after users have gone home,
sysadmins working late, and sysadmins coming in later than 9am the
following day

- will question the professionalism of people who wear their hair long
and prefer to dress casually (how unbusinesslike!) but, oh right --
again, this is about you, not me -- and

- in times of economic pressure and possibly downsizing pressure, will,
as in your case, ask for techs to justify their own positions, even down
to detailed auditing of the actuual work.  maybe this is because we
"appear" to task-switch constantly and sometimes cannot answer, on the
fly, in a half dozen laymans words the question, what are you doing
right at this moment?

i don't mean to management bash, but underappreciation is almost
unavoidable in many organizations and it seems there will always be a
few whose control needs interfere with the work of the tech staff.  it
sounds to me like your "bossman" does not appreciate what you do *now*,
and certainly has not in his wildest nightmares imagined what would
happen to his precious business operations were you suddenly not right
there, doing just what you do.  it is decidedly Not Good to dwell
silently on "what would not get done if i weren't here to do it" because
the fact is that if you quit, someone would eventually hire someone to
start picking up the balls that dropped after you're not there to juggle
them.  it *is* good to document what you do, to try to help those in
management enumerate what responsibilities you've assumed, what regular
scheduled tasks you perform, and how much of your time each demands of
you.

of course you have only a vague notion right now of what such a list
would look like because you're too busy to write it all down!  but as
he's mentioned both re-assigning you to a new job, firing you (he said
he "doesn't want to fire you" but the possibility arose, and even
mentioning such a thing is a f***king cheap-shot-way to make someone
justify their jobs, IMO!), and ouright asked you to tell him what you
do.

in his defense, this sounds to me like a cry for help.  he needs to know
*specifically* what it is that you do and why.  if anything, you need
*more* help in doing the work, not more work to do!  i wouldn't tell him
that directly, but rather show him.  this is your opportunity to give
him the information he needs to come to that conclusion all by
himself... which is what managers do, right?  they make decisions.  make
this one easy for him.

i think you should take the opportunity to try and define your existing
job description (not to add new responsibilities!).  ask him if it would
be okay if you took two weeks to keep an accurate and detailed activity
log of your job, jotting down each task that you do, why you do them
("this was requested by X", "that was reported as broken by Y", "Z asked
how to do the other thing"), when, and how much of your time each task
ends up consuming.  do this.  stick to it religiously.  write down every
thing that consumes your time.  don't consume more time writing tho --
just a simple log - one entry per line, with start and end times, and
just enough words to remind *you* later on what each task was, how it
went, what it led to, etc.  resist the urge to computerize this!  this
is a job for "ink smeared upon sliced tree" technology.  you cannot
carry your workstation around with you all day.  a pocket-sized note pad
(not notepad.exe on a PDA either!) should do nicely.

then each day (or night) transcribe these detailed notes into a second
log ---this one can be electronic databits, in which you go back over
the paper entries, rewriting each to log the times and explain in
Non-Technical Terms, what each thing was (what you did, where you had to
go, what you had to find out, what software tools you relied upon, what
went wrong, what you had to do to fix it) -- whatever you need to say to
make it apparent that each task is either:

 1. important (and in fact necessary) to the business (that you do on
your own), or

 2. urgently requested by someone else, for them to be able do their
jobs, or

 3. annoying unimportant crap that others insist you do that should not
probably not even *be* done, but that you must do because they outrank
you.

when writing this stuff, think about your boss coming up to you during
each of these tasks and asking you what you're doing, and why, but with
you actually having the time to stop and tell him in a nice
un-stressed-out and unhurried manner.

in all probability this document, spanning two weeks will be voluminous.
you'll be sure to send it to him electronically to be polite (and he'll
merely scroll through it -- not read it beginning to end, to be sure--
but that's okay), but you will print it out also, so that later, if at
any time he or someone else chooses to minimize what you do around here,
you can pull it out of your desk and drop it on theirs with a satisfying
thud, if need be.

since no one will ever read the thing, prepare a summary to become the
first few pages, maybe a nice word table grid-thingy summarizing the
recurring tasks that need your regularly scheduled attention, the
average Number and Urgency of each type of ad-hoc technical request that
you handled in this random two-week sampling period from the entire
staff, *all* of them, from:

  "i can't print",

  "my new hard drive, USB mouse, scanner, speakers and CDRW drive have
arrived.  why aren't they installed yet?",

  "i can't open this file attachment on my PC",

  "that new web page on our site doesn't work in Opera" and

  "my computer gets real quiet when i turn it off" all the way on up to

  "the webserver is down!"

  and on tuesday afternoon, "oh, btw, a customer called me friday to
tell
me all email sent our company's domain is bouncing"

  and an executive asking why "we don't have OS X, Java, Weblogic (it
sounds so logical though!) ActiveX, Flash MX, XHTML" or whatever other X
might be that you
don't have, and that one of his friends at another company does
apparently have, and is bragging about and making him feel that his
(company) is somehow techs-ually inadequate, and you having to take no
less than 30 minutes to explain to him why we already do, don't need,
don't want or can't afford or The Thing, after which you are instructed
to "get it" anyway.

try to group all of your summarized tasks under logical headings that
happen to fall under different logical job titles such as "PC
Technician", "Telephone Technical Support", "Network Administrator",
"System/Server Administrator", "Database Administrator", "Web Designer",
"Perl Programmer", "JavaScript Programmer", or whatever yours happen to
be.  Also do a bit of research to find out what a fair market salary is
for each of these job titles is in your area (if you have no idea, call
companies you find in the paper or on monster.com advertising the
positions, and ask them what the lowest junior Entry-Level salary is
they would expect to pay for each -- employers and HR dept's are usually
very unwilling to talk salaries, until you ask about the lowest junior
Entry-Level salary :-) then they'll probably yammer on endlessly!)

also, be sure to organize the information in such a way as to highlight
all the different departments or business operations of the company that
rely on you to do their work.  do you reboot the PBX phone system when
it screws up? add new hires into it?  have a computerized fax server?  i
bet HR calls you for every hire and fire, every secretary calls you when
someone can't send or receive a fax.  does some mission critical
automated business operation rely on regular emails?  our accounting
department used a free online service that sent them the foreign
currency exchange rates every single day without which they could not
bill canadian and other customers properly.  when it stopped working is
of course when i found this out and set up a slightly more reliable
system with our bank :-).  does the sales department run some weird
contact lead-tracking and contact management software that must be
installed, configured (and endlessly re-installed and re-configured) on
eich of their workstations for them?  who does this?  you?  who does
sales if it's not done?  nobody, right?  similar examples of this "weird
application support" is typical of accounting software systems, support
ticket-tracking systems, fund-raising systems, automated data feeds
between customers, vendors and/or partners.  your purpose here is to
drive home the fact that your job is *not* office services, accounting,
sales, customer support or purchasing (and certainly not The Evil
Practice of Black "Marketing"!!) but that all of these operations
require computers, and you are the computer guy, stretched so thin
because no one ever thought to create the IT department.  does your
company even have a CTO?  i thought not.  but they have a CFO and he is
responsible for all things Monetary.  shouldn't someone be in charge of
all things Computer?

i have to say that if your boss seeks to burden you with *additional*
duties by cramming you, a square peg, into the round hole he has in the
marketing department, and if this were 2000 and not 2002, i'd advise
updating your resume and seeking appreciative employment elsewhere
sonner than later, for that alone.  but thiese days jobs are not so easy
to come by.  he may think that by doing this, he will save the company
money, not having to hire a new marketing person *or* another computer
guy -- you can do both!  if you take that new title, it will most likely
be like taking a second job, with without the second paycheck!  you'd
probably gain numerous new responsibilities in addition to the technical
ones you already have now, which you have less-than-no-time for already
...as evidenced by your original post, desperately seeking advice in
managing and schedulibng the work you have now into the hours available.
he needs to be shown that what you do has substance and value that can
be measured.

so when you email him that Big Document, after 2 weeks, i would suggest
that in that email you formally request to meet with him soon (if not
right away).  if your small company (or his management style) is one of
those in which meetings tend to be short, open-door, ad-hoc affairs,
standing around in an office or cubical and waiting for the next
periodic 5 minute interruption, than ask him to schedule at an hour to
meet with you and "discuss your future with the company".

i choose those words because, like him, you are *mentioning* (without
threatening) merely that your future with the company needs some
discussing, and while he'll hope you just mean by that that you're going
to ask for a promotion or a raise, he'll fear that you might mean to
give him two weeks notice and quit.  now at some level he knows that he
doesn't know what
you do, but is pretty sure that if you left suddenly, a bunch of
miscellaneous stuff will suddenly need to get done by someone, and that
he'd have to find and hire that someone.  in this way you set him up,
and hopefully he *will* set aside some time, close the office door, and
hold his calls, so you two can talk about the large email you sent him,
and your future.

i'd take the meeting as an opportunity to express that:

1. (just like everyone else around here), you like the company and the
work and the people etc, work hard and wear a lot of hats "because we
all want the company to do well... i take personal pride yadda yadda
yadda", and then

2. you understand that "not everyone around here appreciates" what you
do "as well as he does" (stroking his ego as if you think he appreciates
you, while knowing full well that he is actually "the everyone around
here" that has no clue what you do)

3. that the technical work that you do may be undervalued by some, whose
jobs are tied more apparently into direct revenue-producing operations,
but that "we both know" that other organizations our size in our
industry (implying our competitors) depend on technology just like we
do, and hire a whole IT *staff* to support it!

4. express your regret that you are not a degreed college-educated
programmer analyst (and that as a result you buy when you might have
built), that you are not a seasoned network engineer (so you rely
heavily on your ISP's expertise, google and Evolt for advice a lot), or
a professionally trained and certified PC repair technician (so you have
replaced when a better man may have repaired).  tell him that you have
done the best job that you can, and have learned alot while you've been
here, both about computers and whatever industry your company is in.

after all this groveling (he will realize you're not quitting, and will
be further relieved that you're not asking for a raise).  i bet he will
shower you with praise for the work you've done and advise you not to
sell yourself short.  if he does this, then you have won.

you can then apologize for the fact that you are not interested in his
offer of a different position in the marketing department, and explain
that you've realized after compiling your list that he obviously *must*
be considering hiring a more professionally trained and experienced
network admin, web developer (or whatever it is the lists says you do
most of the time) and that you understand that he probably *has* to do
that, for the good of the company!  but that you're more interested in
pursuing formal training for the technical career that you've chosen,
than switching to a career in marketing.

now he'll wonder if you *are* quitting, but soon realize that you
*think* you're getting an ultimatum: the option of either taking the new
job (that you don't want) or being fired.  and then he'll think that
*you* think that in *either* case he's already decided to hire a new
tech guy.  he now knows that in your opinion (which he secretly
respects) no one man can do this job, much less, this job plus another
one too.  and he also knows (from your list) that although you work on
the website (which may be critical to public relations and possibly
sales) you're not doing marketing or sales work.  you're supporting
these mission-critical business operations, as well as many others.

of course this is all a scary, risky kind of mind game that i probably
wouldn't be able to pull off either, with a straight face.  but its the
kind of position you can take that almost cannot result in anything but
him telling you:

"no, no, not at all Chris, my boy.  you have it all wrong!" [after
reading the thing i didn't read, i know that:] "We need *you* in this
job, not some green wet-behind the ears college-boy with a shiny new
degree and no real-world experience"!  i've been planning to tell *you*
to hire somwe more computer guys :-) ... it's just been so hectic
lately... "i've *always* known", [since looking at your work log], he
won't mention, "that you need at least one assitant!  Why you're the
second-hardest working person here" [besides me]  "and, also BTW i don't
want you staying late anymore.  we don't want you burning out now, do
we?  you're muct too important to the future of this company!"

> seeing as how i haven't been doing this very long (almost 2 years with
> almost no mentoring) and am spread really thing i am not able to focus
> on one subject for very long and thus my knowledge is most areas is
> more than some people, but definitely not at any level where i could
> go to another company and say "here is what i can do! give me a job!"

be honest about all that.  tell him you'd really like to learn from the
professionals about how to secure your network from hackers, the company
email system's confidential information and your competition, the users
from viruses, and the website from script kiddies, but you barely have
time to read about these things in trade magazines, much less take an
actual class!

hopefully :-) he will assure you that you're neither being fired nor
asked/forced to change departments.  he might even realize (and then
tell you) that the company often *pays* for outside staff development
and training!

>
> please anyone and everyone chime in with your .02!

sorry, i don't have two cents.  i tried this exact shenanigan six months
ago, and the bluff failed miserably.  i was replaced immediately and
have been unable to find any work since in this g_d-forsaken economy,
and have just recently run out of unemployment benefits.

but i hope my advice has been helpful:  **Think Positive!**

:-)

-dave

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