1 month in my new job and hating it.

Hello All,

So I have been working in IT for about 1.5 years just recently left my first IT job as an IS support Analyst to a Technical Support Engineer position and I am truly dreading it. The environment is relaxed but I feel like I am just doing customer service which is all I do. I am not learning and new technology and I have asked for more responsibilities and been given data entry type projects. When I applied for this position the job title stated I would be working with servers, switches, and doing a little bit of customer service. I cannot return to my old job as they have already hired my replacement. What do you guys think? Is it fair to start looking for a new job after a month of working at my new job?

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[Deleted User]

Honestly, I would give them a chance. They may be giving you these tasks to see your capabilities. They need to know your work ethic, work quality etc. I say by around 4-6 months they will let you play with the servers and switches. Best of luck in your journey!

PCTechLinc

You have to take the bad with the good. Take this as a learning experience, do the best you can do, and ride it as long as you can. You do NOT want "job-hopper" to be the first thing prospective employers see on your resume, especially if you don't have an established track record in this field.

Basic85

It sounds like they misrepresented/lied the job, I say stay for at least during the probation period 3-6 months or whatever it is at your company as with each company it's different and see how it goes. Is this an MSP? It definitely sounds like one.

Next time you can ask what the day is like, responsibilities, who would you be reporting to, etc. Some employers will bark back at you for asking too many questions and to me that is a red flag but to each and every there own. Good luck!

cyberguypr

I don't know. 1 month sounds like too early to tell. Some places ramp you up slow. I say give it at least a few more months and see what happens.

Jon_Cisco

If you only hate it because you are not working with the technology I would stick it out. Sometimes positions take time to develop as they figure out how to best use you. Just make sure they know your interested in the technical stuff.

Good Luck!
Jon

MeanDrunkR2D2

I wouldn't toss anyone who is new to working with servers/switches until after I was confident they knew the existing setup as well as that they wouldn't go wild having admin permissions on everything and blowing up the datacenter. Only a fool would hire in someone new to a technology that could have a severe impact if they do something they may not quite understand the consequences to should they make one mistake.

Give it another couple of months and keep working hard. If you have downtime, study the existing documents/tickets/network diagram to see how things are. If they have guys you can shadow doing that work, ask to do so when time allows. Once you have that trust they'll give you more freedom to do those things.

EANx

They could be using this to see how detailed and responsible you are, as well to see your attitude.

rj1790

Thanks for the reply guys!

I have been answering alot of sales calls and they have been training me on sales which I do not like. I am starting to feel like this is just a call center role. The only positives is that, I can study and, I got a higher pay grade. I will continue applying for jobs to see if I can get another bite. Hopefully, it will get better

cyberguypr

I am confused. Is it sales or customer support? Care to expand?

rj1790

I am confused myself. Job title is Tech Support Engineer, but funny thing is I have not been doing anything technical at ALL. I am supposed to do Tech Support calls but my manager says "Its Rare", so that's why they are training me in sales. It's to be noted that this is a small company that has like 15 employees.

MeanDrunkR2D2

rj1790 wrote: »

I am confused myself. Job title is Tech Support Engineer, but funny thing is I have not been doing anything technical at ALL. I am supposed to do Tech Support calls but my manager says "Its Rare", so that's why they are training me in sales. It's to be noted that this is a small company that has like 15 employees.

In this case, throw your resume out there and interview like mad. Get out. Don't quit, but work to get out

EANx

You left out the key pieces of info in your leading post. That the work they hired you for "is rare" means you might have been bait and switched. I'd suggest looking again.

rj1790

EANx wrote: »

You left out the key pieces of info in your leading post. That the work they hired you for "is rare" means you might have been bait and switched. I'd suggest looking again.

If I'd knew I would have not have taken the job. I should have done a better job at screening the employer. Any legal action I can take on this?

MeanDrunkR2D2

rj1790 wrote: »

If I'd knew I would have not have taken the job. I should have done a better job at screening the employer. Any legal action I can take on this?

Nothing that would be worthwhile or get you anything. Get a new job and post a warning on Glassdoor about your experience.

N7Valiant

Try looking at getting into an MSP.

I was about 2 months into the job with no working IT experience when I touched servers under supervision.

Nowadays at almost 7 months in I regularly get my hands on AD, GPO, and even expanded the schema. MSPs might be the way to go if you want to touch servers since there are often too many clients and not enough Tier 3 techs to solely limit access to SysAdmins or higher.

volfkhat

rj1790 wrote: »

When I applied for this position the job title stated I would be working with servers, switches, and doing a little bit of customer service.

It's funny; that was all i needed to see.
I was surprised at everyone's advice to "stick it out".

Dude, these people LIED to you.
GTFO outta there.
Period.

If it's only been 4 weeks... Leave the job off your resume.

In fact, you might even let your resume reflect you are still at your old job (January 2017 - Present)

Just say'in...

ThePawofRizzo

Where I am, you won't get much access for weeks, or longer. One place I worked gave a new hire too much access, and in 6 weeks he was fired for excessive absenteeism. So, after that experience, new hires had more proving to do. Could be similar scenario there. Give it time.

boxerboy1168

I'll do it if you don't want to.

scaredoftests

Give the job more time.

TechGromit

rj1790 wrote: »

Is it fair to start looking for a new job after a month of working at my new job?

LOL, it took me over a month to get all the access I needed for my job, there were so many systems to learn and get access to. You really need to give job 6 months to a year, so long as you don't have a manager from hell, you need to stick it out. I know a guy who got a nice promotion and absolutely Hated the paperwork part of his job, but he stuck it out and a few years later he's moving back into server work, and gets to keep his 100k+ a year salary and bonuses to boot.

rj1790 wrote: »

Any legal action I can take on this?

Absolutely, You can sue anyone over anything, but don't expect a lawyer to take your case pro bono, the lawsuit is on your dime, at $100 an hour. Also you can pretty much forget about ever working in IT again, at least in your city, You will be forever be known as the guy who tried to sue his employer because he didn't like the work he was given.

LordQarlyn

I don't know. On several of my IT jobs, I was given full systems access on day one. On my current job, I was thrown pell mell in to a microcosm of a corporate enterprise network and told to figure it out lol. Of course different companies have different rules. It does sound like bait and switch, enticing people with IT skills to apply but putting them in nontechnical work.

TechGromit

LordQarlyn wrote: »

I don't know. On several of my IT jobs, I was given full systems access on day one. On my current job, I was thrown pell mell in to a microcosm of a corporate enterprise network and told to figure it out lol. Of course different companies have different rules. It does sound like bait and switch, enticing people with IT skills to apply but putting them in nontechnical work.

Then you don't have very many systems. I have around 30 systems, everything from TACAC for Switches, accessing reports, scheduling work, checking out assets, submitting engineering requests, Approving, placing in process and approving work orders, submitting work order to records, emaill access, share drive access, AD rights, USB exception, local admin access, password repository access, submitting travel report to get reimbursed, online training are some of the systems that come to mind. In a large corporation, I'm still running across systems I don't have access to and need to submit a request to get that access.

GeeLo

Hey Hi

Question to rj1790 , when you got this job that you are working at now, did you get the job though a staffing company / job recruiter? Just wondering..

"To me"... it sounds like they may have had more than "one" job opening, and put someone else in that "tech support" call position and then rolled you into that sales support position because they also needed it to be filled... I'm not saying that is right.. just saying. I would started flipping out resumes again.

LordQarlyn

TechGromit wrote: »

Then you don't have very many systems. I have around 30 systems, everything from TACAC for Switches, accessing reports, scheduling work, checking out assets, submitting engineering requests, Approving, placing in process and approving work orders, submitting work order to records, emaill access, share drive access, AD rights, USB exception, local admin access, password repository access, submitting travel report to get reimbursed, online training are some of the systems that come to mind. In a large corporation, I'm still running across systems I don't have access to and need to submit a request to get that access.

True my current position doesn't have a particularly large network, but it's big enough and connected to enough systems that bumbling in it in incompetence could have caused major disruption at work. But one of my earlier jobs was working on DoD enterprise servers, while admittedly very boxed in, I was given enterprise admin credentials at the start and could have screwed things up seriously. But yeah, accessing systems outside was not done, if you needed something done on another system, you have to send a request up your chain, wait for it to come down the chain of the admins for that system, and they would execute what you needed done. This was the procedure even when the guy who would be the one doing it was sharing your cubicle lol.

N7Valiant

TechGromit wrote: »

LOL, it took me over a month to get all the access I needed for my job, there were so many systems to learn and get access to. You really need to give job 6 months to a year, so long as you don't have a manager from hell, you need to stick it out. I know a guy who got a nice promotion and absolutely Hated the paperwork part of his job, but he stuck it out and a few years later he's moving back into server work, and gets to keep his 100k+ a year salary and bonuses to boot.

I get slow-walking access, but that isn't what this sounds like.

It sounds like a sales/customer-facing position when he was promised a technical position. That would be a move that has me looking for the door.

mzx380

To be fair, one month might be too soon for you to see any real responsibility. The last thing your job would want is to give you something meaty, you screw up and you use the excuse that "I'm new" to make yourself look bad

Best to give it a few months and then determine if its worth sticking around

Jon_Cisco

rj1790 wrote: »

Hello All,
When I applied for this position the job title stated I would be working with servers, switches, and doing a little bit of customer service.

I really feel like we are missing an important piece of information here. Does the company have servers and switches to work with?

Is there someone else already working on them. My first assumption was you were in a technical environment and simply not being assigned technical work. You should be able to get a good idea of the type of work that is being done around you. If it does not involve servers and switches you might have a problem.

TechGromit

N7Valiant wrote: »

It sounds like a sales/customer-facing position when he was promised a technical position. That would be a move that has me looking for the door.

If he had a good solid 5 years experience with switches and servers, I would agree with you. But he has 18 months experience, and was his last job even working with switches? You don't give someone with little or no experience unrestricted access to your switches and servers. You give them limited responsibilities and see how they handle them, then when you get time you give them access, but peer check all there work until your sure they know what they are doing.

Where I work making any changes to switches besides a shut / no shut can get you in serious hot water, if you don't have prior approval to do so. Even for something as simple as a interface change on one port. You have to have your paperwork in and approved before making changes. For anything with low risk, most of the time is just a rubber stamp approval, but your covered if something unexpected happens. I had something similar happen on a switch I worked on a few months ago, I made a change to one interface but on 4507 switches, this change is applied to all interfaces on the blade, which I wasn't aware at the time. I didn't know what the other ports were set at before, so I backed out my change by copy start up to running config. This reset all the ports on the switch, which caused a server VM interface to drop. This cause other issues which resulted in an outage and the VM interface had to be corrected by an server admin, but I had all the proper approvals in place, so I didn't get in any trouble over this.

UnixGuy

Do you want to be in Sales?

Pseudonymous

Definitely sounds like a bait and switch situation. I would usually recommend giving a job at least 90 days before you decided to if you want to leave, but in this case it appears they just lied to you. If your boss says you'll rarely get tech calls and is instead training you in sales, then it's not a tech position. Don't worry about job hopping. I'd just leave this one off of your resume and find something you're more interested in.... unless you want a job in sales.