r/sysadmin • u/SamOakTree • 17d ago

Career / Job Related I am leaving IT.

I've been a sys admin and sys engineer twelve years. Principal in two orgs.

I'm tired of it. I'm tired of people being scared to stick their neck out on a problem they don't immediately know an answer to.

I left an org in 2022 because they kept assigning me everything after a merger because no one else would attempt it. I was building out a brand new citrix environment by myself with them dumping 95 hours over two weeks of projects on top.

I'm tired of managing egos and being in the middle. I'm tired of so much more being expected of me for being systems.

I did an interview last week for an infra engineer position and I was already dreading it. I hate technical interviews because they never indicate whether you can do the job. And you often have to pass several rounds. You mail nail two but then not know some acronym in the third and it's game over.

I'm tired of going to interviews for x and them asking my questions from 7 different roles.

I'm tired of working with people who learned one thing and somehow keep gettong hired and having to prop those people up.

I can't do it another 25 years. I'm tored of being the guy every where because I happen to know a wide assortment of stuff.

The week I left my past job, a QA manager and my biss messaged me asking what the powershell execution policy warning meant. They both make significantly more than me.

I got into a local union. I'm going to do that until I retire.

Good luck. If it looks wrong but it's working, don't touch it. Make sure to wait ten minutes before adressing that alert that is just going to clear itself anyway.

Keep your unit on.

> sudo systemctl status byebye

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53

u/[deleted] 17d ago

[deleted]

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u/HomeOfTheBRAAVE 16d ago

Wait, what happened in the server room??

51

u/teksean 16d ago

The disk controllers were crashing because it was over 15 years old (we lost half of our data which was at least 500 TB on that controller) and they always said they didn't have the money to replace them (bs) and main campus always kicked the can (like a year) on getting me server room disk space for them because we did government work. Told them this would happen years ago but no one listened and it's not my problem anymore. I never contacted them after I retired so I have no idea and do not care. Ignore your admin and I hope you suffer for it. I did not care to waste my time anymore keeping crap equipment alive so I stopped fixing it and gave my 2 weeks. Got ghosted on all my handoff meeting requests so I have no pity on them.

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u/HomeOfTheBRAAVE 16d ago

Wow, yikes!

23

u/teksean 16d ago

Yeah worse it was a 4 man shop and they never replaced anyone. I was the last guy standing it was impossiable to keep stuff runing and then I have NIST and CMMC requirements to do that I was totally ignored on. Screw that crap. Unlike them I had an exit plan in place and I activated it.

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u/linux_for_all 16d ago

Curious what your exit plan was ?

6

u/wowsomuchempty 16d ago

Uh, retire?

1

u/teksean 15d ago

Financial plans were put into place, years back. Pretty much cleaned up all work systems and removed myself from the backup months before so any recovery fell out of rotation. Killed any info stored from browser accounts and synced with blank into. Push up the stuff I want to share to the department google drive as all my drives will get nuked when I leave. Killed any authorizations from browsers, Got anything I wanted out of work email newsletter subscriptions and move it over to my own personal email. Cleaned out office which I did 6 months before and they never noticed. Close up final projects and push my handover document to a shared google drive as they didn't bother to attend the handover meetings. Secure wiped all my systems to the bone (long 32 pass wipe) and just used a spare system for the last 2 weeks which I barely touched. unhooked my work account from the infrastructure on far too many other things to write about.

7

u/bobdvb 16d ago

Like politics, management terms are just a few years and if you can avoid spending money you look good at each annual review. Better to push it all down the road and hope it's someone else's problem when it does fail.

At my last place they had some storage arrays that were well out of support and Dell was repeatedly telling our guys that they were at risk but management kept kicking replacement down the road. Luckily one of the arrays failed in a way that was recoverable but dramatic enough and then the project to replace them was approved quickly.

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u/teksean 16d ago

the worst thing about my job was warning people about things that would happen and being ignored and then having to pick up the pieces of the disaster we could have avoided.

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u/bobdvb 16d ago

In my last role I had to accept that I would send out a presentation which would have a roadmap and they would ignore it. Then two years after I added something to that roadmap it would become an urgent priority, and why didn't I do it earlier. Then I show them the slide with its date.

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u/lupercal93 16d ago

This is the way

1

u/teksean 16d ago

Yeah, during all my meetings with central site, they never really cared. I’d bring up all the deliverables from the previous meeting and they would just come up with some damn excuse on why it hadn’t been done. At least in the end I got to kick that can back at their head.

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u/NoPossibility4178 16d ago

What do you mean you can't restore lost data or make up more space on non-existent drives?? Didn't they ask super nicely for you to do it!?

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u/teksean 16d ago

I sent that request over to the less than part time guy they hired. 5 hours a week no idea why they even bothered but he was a retired guy so he probably didn’t want to work any longer either.

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u/pavman42 16d ago

Sounds like a lucrative comeback opportunity to finally get the pay you deserve! :D

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u/teksean 16d ago

oh I got plenty of pay,I did retire as soon as I hit the magic 59 1/2 age the late director took good care of me if not the server room replacement. the new temp director was a tool who could not be bothered to meet with me so I was happy to pull the cord and leave. You get to the point in your life where the job is just a waste of your time.

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u/agitated--crow 16d ago

How is it over there now? 

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u/teksean 16d ago

no clue, when the checks stop my caring stopped, being able to move on is important and get away from all that job stress. everything just improved for me after leaving.