Interview with a MSP

unnamedplayer

Hi all,

Well, I've got an interview coming up with a managed service provider soon. To be honest, I didn't think I'd hear anything back, but they want me to come in and interview so I guess that is a positive. I've perused the company website and it looks like they have a few different levels of techs, this will be for an intermediate technical position.

Anyone currently working at an MSP or have interviewed at one that would care to share your experience and any advice you may have?

Thanks a lot!

Hypntick

unnamedplayer wrote: »

Hi all,

Well, I've got an interview coming up with a managed service provider soon. To be honest, I didn't think I'd hear anything back, but they want me to come in and interview so I guess that is a positive. I've perused the company website and it looks like they have a few different levels of techs, this will be for an intermediate technical position.

Anyone currently working at an MSP or have interviewed at one that would care to share your experience and any advice you may have?

Thanks a lot!

Currently working at one myself. Only on my second week however, if you've never done this before be ready to have a lot of info to learn right off the bat. I'm picking up a lot so far with still a ton of info to learn, i've barely scratched the surface to be honest.

As far as the interview, sell yourself. Promote yourself as a self-starter with a willingness to learn as much as possible. They look for people that may not know everything but are willing to learn and work hard. That worked out well for me and after an interview with the President and then a second with the VP and my direct supervisor I got an offer that day.

If they're a MS or Cisco partner they may encourage you to get additional certs. I know in my offer as soon as I get my MCITP in either server 08 or exchange I get a pretty nice salary bump. Other than that, good luck. Do you have any other info about them?

unnamedplayer

Hypntick wrote: »

Currently working at one myself. Only on my second week however, if you've never done this before be ready to have a lot of info to learn right off the bat. I'm picking up a lot so far with still a ton of info to learn, i've barely scratched the surface to be honest.

Yea, this is what makes me really nervous. I've never worked at an MSP before and my prior background comes from a small IT shop.

As far as the interview, sell yourself. Promote yourself as a self-starter with a willingness to learn as much as possible. They look for people that may not know everything but are willing to learn and work hard. That worked out well for me and after an interview with the President and then a second with the VP and my direct supervisor I got an offer that day.

If they're a MS or Cisco partner they may encourage you to get additional certs. I know in my offer as soon as I get my MCITP in either server 08 or exchange I get a pretty nice salary bump. Other than that, good luck. Do you have any other info about them?

In a way I think that is kinda the nice aspect of this opportunity, I'm hoping to get a lot of experience with lots of technology that I wouldn't have gotten to work with in my previous job. As for anything else, nope, I just went over their website to get an idea of who they are and what clients they service.

thenjduke

I have worked for one but be prepared to learn alot. I have to say that when I was working for one it was many years ago. It was for a company called IDT they were internet service provider back in the early 90s. I learned alot and this is where my IT career started. I had alot of fun there.

Daniel333

Can you post the job description? How well to do you match up?

it's just like working for an internal IT except you really don't have anyone to back you up. The business line always gets there way. Say admin right, password policies, software installs etc etc

the_Grinch

I currently work for a managed service provider and while I liked it in the beginning after a year and some change I hate it. Let me cover the good aspects first. If you want to learn a ton of technology, best place is with an MSP. In one day I will touch Sever 2000/2003/ 2008, Exchange 2003/2007/2010, Mac OSX, Windows XP/Vista/7, routers/switches of every kind, firewalls of all kinds, spam filters, web filters, voip issue, and software that you properly never heard of. My company will pay for any cert I choose to get (though I work so much that studying is the furthest thing from my mind most of the time). You'll learn a lot and based on how busy it is, you'll get the chance to actually use it.

Now for the downsides. People on the phone will treat you like crap. I am on the helpdesk side (we don't have tiers at the moment) and since people don't view you as their IT Department they treat you with as much respect as a Dell Tech. Instead of knowing one environment, you'll have to know a lot of them (currently we have 40 managed environments doing everything). You'll be amazed at the amount of knowledge you will have to have and even more amazed at the amount that isn't documented somewhere. A large part of my day is spent chasing down field techs who did something one time 5 months ago, never documented it, and now the customer is yelling at me for not knowing.

The other side of learning lots of technology, is having to learn a ton of technology. If you have some specialized training, you'll probably get those tickets. But since a lot of times that is few and far between you'll fill your time working on other things. Now for the worst part of the job I present the staff IT person that you help. We have a number of customers with actual IT people that we backup. We do the server monitoring and what not, but will help them when they call. Usually you will get a call for two reasons:

A. they don't like the person so they pawn them off on you
B. they screwed something up big time and now you need to fix it

As far as A. goes, usually it isn't that bad. They mutually hate each other and are happy to talk to someone else. But B. is the killer. Since they don't consider you their "IT Department" they will make a change and not consult you. Usually they don't know what they are doing or they know just enough to screw it up. Now instead of using that magical resource their company pays a monthly fee, they just do it and see what happens. I've had an customer who's IT person liked to change file permissions on folders you shouldn't touch on 4 occasions. On all 4 occasions he said he didn't do anything it just stopped working, hours later I finally piece together enough information to fix the problem. Now they don't want to look stupid so they will just give you the run around for awhile before they finally tell you what happened.

The final biggest hardship of working for a managed service provider is you are user facing. Some companies like to spy on their workers, take away rights, or flat out fire them without letting them know. So all of a sudden you'll get a phone call with a problem and find out that management had another member of your team make a change to their account without them telling the user. I literally had someone be fired in the morning, had their account disabled, and emailed forwarded while they were still logged in. They go to lunch and nothing works when they get back. Call their people and they said "oh we let so and so go" then explain their calling in saying nothing is working to get "hhmmm so and so was suppose to let them know."

Obviously every job has positives and negatives. I love the people I work with, but hate the job. Now I've only worked for one msp so I can only give my perspective from one company. I've found working for a dedicated IT department to be better, but you might like it. You do get to learn a lot and usually there is ample room to grow. But you do have to take time to measure those chances. My company doesn't do dedicated security so it can only be a secondary thing for me when it arises. You will be very good at a lot of things because I have found that all it takes is time and at the very least you'll learn best practice if nothing else. Good luck and feel free to message me with questions! Or ask them here for the joy of the class....

mikedisd2

Hypntick wrote: »

Currently working at one myself. Only on my second week however...

How about that? I'm just about to get into my second week at a body shop. It's fairly unchallenging work so far but if you have done it, it's a good learning experience. You'll reach a point one day where you don't want to do it anymore but until then, make the most of the hands on, go flat out with the certs and most importantly, don't screw anything up.

For me, I'm engineering a plan to get myself into the projects team ASAP.

willhi1979

I just finished my fourth week working for a MSP. I touch more technologies in a given week than I did at my last job. The priorities are always changing as well as tickets come and go. I've been enjoying it, but there's a constant go-go-go. I feel like our customers treat us well and like the service we provide.

Hypntick

willhi1979 wrote: »

I just finished my fourth week working for a MSP. I touch more technologies in a given week than I did at my last job. The priorities are always changing as well as tickets come and go. I've been enjoying it, but there's a constant go-go-go. I feel like our customers treat us well and like the service we provide.

Same here. For the most part at least, there are a few there that are jackasses but luckily management tends to nip those in the bud pretty quickly. Yeah i'm getting a huge amount of knowledge pretty quickly so far, even on week 2. I see the guys that have been there 6 months and they know a huge amount of stuff so I know what's possible here.

It's a pretty constant pace and I find myself half eating my lunch and half working through it just to resolve stuff. I think i've maybe left on time a few times as well. Overtime seems to be a way of life up there as our staff is only around 15 with 8 techs total providing support in some way for 150+ smbs. It's a crazy pace and I look forward to each day up there.

Previous jobs i've been bored to tears at one time or another, which is great for studying for certs etc. Not so good at learning new tech or improving your skill set. I maxed my knowledge out in a year or so at previous positions, this place will probably take me 3+ years to get to that point.

unnamedplayer

Thanks guys, good information. Do you also participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation every so often? How's that like?

Hypntick

unnamedplayer wrote: »

Thanks guys, good information. Do you also participate in a 24x7 on-call rotation every so often? How's that like?

I haven't yet, new guy obviously. However in a few months I have been assured that i'll be in that mix. I knew that when I got hired however, so no big deal to me.

undomiel

The 24x7 thing is pretty stressful. When it is my turn to be covering the night shift for a month I can visibly see the quality of sleep dropping as I can be expecting a ring at any time during the night. Even if we make it through the entire month without a single midnight call I can still tell that it has made an impact. Getting a call when you just settled in to eat dinner is no fun either. It will take some adapting to but hopefully you don't end up in a busy night shift.

Repo Man

undomiel wrote: »

The 24x7 thing is pretty stressful. When it is my turn to be covering the night shift for a month I can visibly see the quality of sleep dropping as I can be expecting a ring at any time during the night. Even if we make it through the entire month without a single midnight call I can still tell that it has made an impact. Getting a call when you just settled in to eat dinner is no fun either. It will take some adapting to but hopefully you don't end up in a busy night shift.

The worst part is when you first start and you need to reach out to a different team. You'd be surprised but some people don't like to be woken up at 3 AM for something they don't handle.

undomiel

Not at all surprised. I've been the one woken up on a number of occasions. I do my best to remain cheerful and helpful when this happens though. Then provide as much documentation as possible so that it won't happen again. Which doesn't help as far as I can tell. They still call before checking the documentation.

unnamedplayer

undomiel wrote: »

I've been the one woken up on a number of occasions. I do my best to remain cheerful and helpful when this happens though. Then provide as much documentation as possible so that it won't happen again.

You are a good person!!

RomBUS

I've actually been working for an MSP (almost 7 months) and didn't know that it was called this term until a couple of months ago...I was also working on the helpdesk side and it was exactly as the_Grinch described it. Now they moved me to one of their biggest clients (school district) and my only gripe is the mileage (have to travel 30 miles out of my way instead of less than 10 previously which was awesome). There is slightly less work out here than the helpdesk side and I do less "admin" work on servers than I did on helpdesk, also everything out here is already managed by other people, we just do the end user support.

I mean I do miss the helpdesk side because I was learning a lot more (especially with NBX phone systems) than working as a field tech which they moved me to for the school district. But I accepted it anyways.

Working for an MSP sure does have its ups and downs, but what job doesn't

PhildoBaggins

I work for an MSP in the salt lake area and it has been a real good experience. I have learned more in the past 4 months than in the past 4 years. Its a fight club experience, you come in as a wad of dough and in a few months your carved out of wood.