Typical work days

Hey,

I'm trying to figure out what career path to take. I'm looking at either server administration or networking.

I thought it would be fun if you guys could describe what a typical day at your workplace is like. I'm sure it would benefit some of the newer members trying to figure out what it is that they truly want to do, including myself.

Cheers.

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instant000

mwaterloo wrote: »

Hey,

I'm trying to figure out what career path to take. I'm looking at either server administration or networking.

I thought it would be fun if you guys could describe what a typical day at your workplace is like. I'm sure it would benefit some of the newer members trying to figure out what it is that they truly want to do, including myself.

Cheers.

OK, I'll go first.

Typical day starts with logging onto email, looking for any hot messages that I need to pay any attention to, while checking my voicemail on the desk phone. If I have any emails that I need to get onto, I mark them as 'tasks" so I will follow up on them. If I don't need to work on the message, I DELETE it at that point. Some people worry about covering your bum, and what not, but my philosophy is that if I have completed something, no need to keep an email about it around.

As most systems are configured for alerting, I may have some alerts to attend to in my email box. If they were important, they should have been sent to the pager, or the assigned company cell phone. (Yes, I worked a job with a pager, and I'm not a doctor.) Of course, if I was paged, I would have been working the issue at that time, unless it was a non-critical, that could wait until the morning.

After looking at that, I log into the trouble ticket system, and see what tickets I have assigned to me that I need to follow-up on, and/or that are unassigned, that should be assigned to myself, and/or other members of the team, and take care of that part.

By this time, I've been at the office at least 30 to 45 minutes. Provided there are no immediate fires, I can then take the opportunity to walk through the server room and the network closets throughout the facility, looking for any amber lights or faults to take care of. (This is a dangerous task, as most techs can vouch for, as people are prone to come up to you, and ask for ad-hoc requests while they see you. This isn't a big deal, as you want to be nice, and help people, but it can create an issue for you, as the trouble ticket might not get logged properly, and you can forget about the issue before you get back to the desk ... even if you write it down ... it's happened to me before, try to get the requestor to submit a ticket, if you can. otherwise, trust yourself to remember to enter tickets for things you write down).

After making sure that the building is not burning down and no faults exist in the server rooms or network closets that will haunt you, you come back to your desk, and work on the tickets that you have.

Expect to be interrupted 10,000 times per day, by people with non-critical requests, who think their minor issue matters while you're dealing with a server down, or a circuit down. Also, you will get interruptions from other, less-experienced techs who lean on your for your expertise.

You get a call from a vendor: they're asking you about Exchange outsourcing (relevant in this story) and you say that you're interested, but too busy to look at it right now.

You get a call from another vendor, and they're asking about if you made a decision on that RAM and HDD upgrade for your Blades and SAN. You say of course, send the quote on over, so that you can hammer out the purchase request so your boss can sign it.

You get many other calls from other vendors, but you screen calls, and only pick up particular ones. Sales people will call you all day, apparently.

You get away from the building for lunchtime, because you know that this is the ONLY way to get an undisturbed break.

After lunch, you want to take a nap, but cannot, as you go into updating the network map.

If you get the opportunity, you give spur-of-the-moment training to your other technicians, so that they will disturb you less often. Afternoons are usually better times for this type of thing.

I find it is usually busiest for me on Monday mornings, and any end-of-period financial closings.

One frequent complaint is that the scanguns are not working (for barcoding). As a background: the fundamental problem behind this is buggy middleware, so buggy, that I wrote a script to restart the middleware drivers every morning, which clears up 95% of the issues, as we found ourselves restarting this one on a daily basis before, as the middleware would not automatically reconnect after backups, as it was configured to do. So, though the script eliminated the daily issues with the scanguns, since the middleware was inherently buggy, it still needed (once every month or so) some hands-on maintenance .... which is much better than every single morning!

As you're in the middle of an ERP migration, you have to deal with installing all sorts of happy little middlewares. As a side part of this, you also have to punch holes in the firewall, to accompany the ports needed for the exercise.

You get more vendor calls in the afternoon, you pick up one by mistake, as you thought it was someone else, but it's only someone with a random survey, or trying to sell you something you don't want. No thanks, buddy, not interested.

You get an afternoon phone conference with AT&T, and you go over the MPLS set-up for connecting your company with the sister company.

When it is getting near the end of the day, some VP shows up with an issue they've been sitting on since 9 AM, but never bothered to report until 4:00 pm, and of course, they need it fixed today. No problem, you've seen this before ... so you fix it like nothing.

When the evening hits, you get home, but don't worry, you'll get called by the salesperson who needs assistance with getting on VPN, or the CEO who is in Japan meeting with the parent company and his Blackberry is failing him, or his laptop has issues logging into OWA.

At least once a week in the evenings, you get a call from your manufacturing base in Mexico (gotta love good ol' NAFTA!), and they need assistance troubleshooting the T-1, or if it is an even-numbered week, they need assistance troubleshooting issues between their switches and WAPs. Or, if it's not so bad, they say that all of Citrix is down, and of course they're doing some special Inventory, or Printing, or Production, and they need it fixed right away.

When you drift off to sleep, you're awaken by your phone ringing: There was apparently another power spike at the facility, and the Exchange Server just crashed.

I'm not sure if that is typical or not, but that is how every single day was at my last job. I wonder how I lasted there 3.5 years, looking back. Must have been the war zone experience in the Army, made stomaching the carnage a bit more bearable. I so wanted to standardize that place, but felt like I was in perpetual fire-fight mode ...Calgon take me away!

Repo Man

I do second level help desk. This position does not handle incoming calls but more account/network share creations and deeper troubleshooting by reaching back out to the end user.

I generally come in and handle all the high priority issues the first level could not fix overnight (mostly network connectivity, VPN, urgent Lotus Notes issues, etc.) After this I'll work on account creation requests, application installs and whatever else gets sent our way. I also do a little bit of training and handle the "get this person fixed and off of our backs" escalations.

Not the greatest job but after 4-5 years of answering phones at various jobs it sure feels good.

garv221

My day consists of 5 hour energies.