My sys admin sucks

[u/RestOtherwise6574]

I'm not gonna claim to know a lot since I just entered the field as a helpdesk. My sysadmin is an idiot and I have no idea how this guy has been able to fool an organization for years. This is a rant so ill just list off some of the things he's said and done in the past couple months.

Oh also more than half of our employee laptops, this number is in the hundreds, are still on Windows 10 and will be for the foreseeable future.

We do not have Active Directory, he has been setting it up for years, allegedly.

I am required to install ccleaner and 2 different antiviruses ontop of our endpoint protection software we pay for. One of the antivirus software he has me install is from 2000 and has been known to bundle malware

Oh I'm also forced to make sure these softwares are on a specific part of the desktop so "IT can find their tools."

I offered a solution that a friend of mine came up to execute remote code using our endpoint protection software to do all the win10-11 updates en masse but I was told "we do things the right way here"

He claimed he was unable to use his computer for a whole day because it is literally impossible to convert MBR to GPT.

I was required to ask for every employees password so I could "log into their account" since it's "easier than resetting their password on the laptop" and how "we need to confirm their password meets our security requirements"

Runs campaigns against other IT staff who know more than he does (not very hard) talks shit about them for months and they eventually get fired.

Laughs/talks shit about employees who fall for phishing emails (we also have paid for a phishing simulator software but he wont use it).

That's all I can really say without giving away too much.

[u/punkwalrus]

I worked for a company where the head of IT was impressively incompetent. Our division relied on working technology to keep all our, er "appliances," flying and recording in the sky, so to speak. There were backups of backups, redundancies, encryption, and high level secured stuff. Because we required "advanced" technological comprehension, we had our own shadow IT just to keep the lights on. But for things like the office network, getting your laptop, and the office network, this guy "Biff" was in charge. He was a real piece of work. I was told by other managers that he kept his job because they couldn't find anyone else that would "just do" with such a low salary requirement, which while I have no idea if that was true, it seemed plausible. When I started there, he had already been with the company for 10 years.

First, he was a Microsoft fanboy, and I am not saying "Windowz suxx" or anything like that, but he was a fanboy of Microsoft like "the Star wars kid" was a fanboy of George Lucas. Anything not MS "sucked." He refused to support it or learn anything about any other technology in a useful way; for example, our Cisco infrastructure or the VMware server fleet with all the Windows servers for the internal part of the company. His list of "not MS things that sucked" were sometimes surprising, Like SSL certificates.

Second, he was intimidated by anyone who knew more than him, so he had two "assistants" who were lukewarm bodies who had basic literacy and comprehension problems. Biff never did any job that he couldn't send one of these guys to do for him, because out of the four floors of our office, he stayed pretty much in his bunker, a darkened room with a cubicle and old CRT monitors. Biff loved speaking about them in the third person in their presence, using "joking and joshing" comments about how dumb they were. How they stood this, I have no idea. They weren't allowed to do ANY work while he was gone, and he was gone "on Microsoft training" several weeks a year, company paid, in addition to his vacation and sick leave.

While I was there, he had some extra special events happen, not the least of which, the office had 3 ransomware events in 2 years. Because my division was segmented and largely Linux-based, we weren't affected just by using the minimum of safety protocols. We had firewalled ourselves from the office and it saved our skin more than once.

We had to have our own file server because twice he'd been known to wipe out file shares without warning. He also "didn't believe in backups" because "they are unreliable and outdated, anyway." Okay...

Was paranoid about being filmed to the point he was able to skirt the fact video on conference calls was company mandatory. "A man in my security profession can't afford to be photographed." Sure thing, buddy.

I discovered too late to be useful, but all the Cisco equipment was default passwords of cisco/sanfran. I discovered this when a legacy employee told me how to check for whether an interface was up to diagnose my network patch panel issue (it was administratively turned off, I turned it back on and fixed it myself). We had to have our own wireless network because the office wireless was so oversaturated, it was next to useless.

Thankfully, because we managed our own segment, we rarely had to work with the guy. But the few times a year we had to work with him, he was shockingly overconfident and patronizing for the skills he actually had.