Current Job Advice Needed

Hey gang,

I could use a little advice concerning my current job. About 3 months ago I took on a role as a Net admin/ IT Technician for a small company. The pay is pretty decent considering what I actually do and therein lies my dilemma. I don't do much at all. We're only a two man shop but I MAY handle 5-6 walk-ups/ emails a week. To make matters worse, their infrastructure is ancient. Our newest server is over 10 years old. We actually have two production servers from 1999! As you can probably tell we have no IT budget whatsoever.

My boss knows everything is old and asked that I put together a proposal to upgrade/ virtualize our infrastructure. After beating it up over and over and looking for ways to cut costs I finally handed the proposal over to upper management and explained why we needed it- they know we need it. Despite this they have sat on it for almost two months.

To make matters worse we installed security cameras and after initially being told that I wasn't "hired to monitor cameras" I was asked to do just that not two weeks later.

My boss likes me. He's a good guy but I think he realizes there isn't much for me to do and he's trying to keep me busy with other things non IT related until our project gets approved. IF it gets approved. He muttered the other day that keeping our Exchange Servers on site would maintain my job security.

They have allowed everything to get so old that it's going to take a lot of money and effort to get things upgraded- far beyond the scope of my modest proposal. I guess my main question is this: Should give these guys a chance to say "Yay" or "Nay" to my proposal or should I just get the heck out of here? If they choose to sit on my proposal, how long should I give them before I start shopping for another job?

My two biggest fears are this: either they allow me to upgrade their network and give me the boot (I feel this unlikely as most people working there have been with the company for 10+ years) OR I'm assigned additional non IT roles and stagnate to the point that I sacrifice a career for a job.

Thoughts?

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Comments

yoba222

I'd stick it out until the 6-month point then start sending out resumes. Study for another cert in your free time at work for the next three months so your skills don't stagnate too badly.

DatabaseHead

I'd try to stay it out for at least a year.

volfkhat

I love TE,
so many diverse viewpoints :]

Fulcrum45 wrote: »

My two biggest fears are this: either they allow me to upgrade their network and give me the boot (I feel this unlikely as most people working there have been with the company for 10+ years)
OR I'm assigned additional non IT roles and stagnate to the point that I sacrifice a career for a job.

If they actually let you upgrade the network, and then CANNED you.... that would actually be a win-win :]
It would be worthwhile experience PLUS the added benefit of forcing you to look for new/better opportunities.

But it's probably NOT gonna happen.
and if the DEAD-END-JOB Sirens are going off (in your head)... then you have to GTFO there.
it's really a no brainer.
Don't worry about the "short" employment on your resume. You can always leave it Off (and claim you were unemployed. lol)
Or, just be a little more selective with your next gig (to improve the odds of longer employment)

But if i may,
i'd like to propose a 3rd option:
Convince management to Migrate their @sses to Office-365.
And of course, BE the guy who implements it.
That's Decent EXP for your resume. and after that, you will have eliminated your own Job (and be forced to find better opportunities)
:]

Danielh22185

If I were in your shoes...

I'd definitely give it a little more time to simmer with upper management. If they give you the GO to implement then this could be a really big resume building experience for you. However it does sound like they have pretty shallow pockets in their IT budget, so you might find yourself with little to do again after you get them upgraded.

I also agree with the aforementioned as well, the downtime could mean a lot for you to get studies in for additional certs.

OR, if they end up not letting you do the upgrades, don't sit and wait too long on this dying job. I'd give it around 6 months for them to get their stuff together to give you a yes or no. If yes, stick around and build it. If no, then get out of there.

Also consider your sanity at the job in the current. If it's just plain garbage and you dread going into work daily, start looking now. Don't waste time.

Fulcrum45

volfkhat wrote: »

But if i may,
i'd like to propose a 3rd option:
Convince management to Migrate their @sses to Office-365.
And of course, BE the guy who implements it.
That's Decent EXP for your resume. and after that, you will have eliminated your own Job (and be forced to find better opportunities)
:]

Oh man, I pushed for this so hard, trust me. They've already shot it down because they don't want the recurring costs by having it hosted

I appreciate everyone's opinion on this. I'm going to give them a chance to say "no" and if they do then I'll start looking elsewhere. In all honesty I like the people here and my boss is a good guy. This place is super close to where I live so all of these factors will make it tough to leave if they choose to not upgrade this year. Despite this I'll do what I need to when the time comes.

volfkhat

How's it going?
:]

markulous

How much availability do they need? I'm guessing that since it's so antiquated that they do not have much redundancy. Couple that with the vulnerabilities they have all over their network and they're just asking to have their business come down for a while. Ransomware especially would cripple them.

I was in a similar situation but my boss was unfortunately a moron and was just a horrible human being in general so there was no explaining anything.

You're in a better spot if he's a good guy and listens. Make a short presentation to make him aware of all the risks with not upgrading their environment. Maybe he needs solid data and a quantitative analysis to be convinced.

Fulcrum45

UPDATE: I had almost forgotten about this thread till Volkhat reminded me. Things have turned around considerably since I first posted. I'm staying busy on projects that didn't exist a few months ago and now migrating us over to new hardware to boot. Ultimately what happened was corporate sat on my proposal for months but after the WannaCry scare the IT Director of one of our sister companies made an executive decision to send us some of the equipment we asked for. He deemed the ransom-ware outbreak a "wake up call" to corporate and did what he needed to do. He didn't match the hardware exactly but he checked all the boxes otherwise.

I'm a big Fortinet guy so I got the Fortigate I wanted and was able to replace two aging ISA servers overnight. We were also sent a few new servers which I immediately slapped ESX on and went to work with it. I'm now in the process of getting us migrated over to a new Zimbra mail server as well since O365 is still off the table- no convincing them on that one.

In conclusion I'm pretty satisfied for right now. I've taken enough off my boss's plate and have started to carve a niche of my own since he is not as familiar with a lot of the newer technology. Things are looking up I guess you could say

Fulcrum45

markulous wrote: »

How much availability do they need? I'm guessing that since it's so antiquated that they do not have much redundancy. Couple that with the vulnerabilities they have all over their network and they're just asking to have their business come down for a while. Ransomware especially would cripple them.

I was in a similar situation but my boss was unfortunately a moron and was just a horrible human being in general so there was no explaining anything.

You're in a better spot if he's a good guy and listens. Make a short presentation to make him aware of all the risks with not upgrading their environment. Maybe he needs solid data and a quantitative analysis to be convinced.

In terms of availability there isnt much demand. After 5pm this place is a ghost town. One thing I would give them though is that they had decent backups and some spare hardware should something happen but it would still have been a 24 hour process.

And at least in my case my boss is a good guy. He knew we needed the upgrades bad but I think he got tired of being told "no" all the time despite the writing on the wall.

markulous

In that case, my goal would be just to cover my own butt. I'd have it in writing all of the risks involved with not upgrading the equipment. If he accepts those and something happens, it's his behind and not yours. Even if he's a good guy, if poop hits the fan, you never know how people will react and you could get thrown under the bus.

Blucodex

I'm not an expert by any means but I just replaced an ASA with a Fortigate 900D, If you have any questions about the modules you can always PM me.

Fulcrum45

Blucodex wrote: »

I'm not an expert by any means but I just replaced an ASA with a Fortigate 900D, If you have any questions about the modules you can always PM me.

Appreciate that. I've made my way around Fortigates before so it was nothing too unfamiliar. I think I had it up and running within the hour once I let it run for 24 hours to check for hardware issues.