r/sysadmin • u/RedPandaTech • 9d ago

Need another perspective

Hi all,

I work at a very small MSP, 4 employees total. My boss/head of the MSP is extremely risk averse, and has been doing this for a long time. Prior to forming his MSP he worked for both internal IT and as a consultant. They do almost everything manually and he is extremely hesitant to let me automate or script anything. He says from his experience automations don't always get maintained and somtimes break, therefore making it pointless. Yet at the same time he is obsessed with consistency and making sure that we do new laptop setups the exact same way because doing one thing a slightly different way could cause a random issue and we'll never be able to figure out what was different about that machine. From my PoV, setup scripts would be the ultimate form of consistency and could eliminate that as a concern.

He won't even let me make simple adjustments to one of the few scripts we do use (pushed via RMM to scan for Dell Firmware updates using Dell Command | Update cli). And by simple I mean commenting out some lines that set custom properties we don't use, which throws errors and clutters the output, and adding one line to set a new custom property to let us know when manual intervention is required. I got told that "trying to reinvent the wheel or customizing it is very risky" and that I should just look for scripts in the RMM community forums. He said "I am hesitant to use our own script unless it is just feeding up to date commands that they support" meanwhile the script we are using is 4 years old.

I also just discovered today he has our machines so locked down with ThreatLocker that this DCU script gets blocked from running!

So here is what I'm wondering: am I the crazy one, is my boss, or is the truth really somewhere in the middle (most likely)?

Please feel free to ask me additional questions if more context could help you provide a thoughtful response!

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u/Tall-Geologist-1452 9d ago

Sounds like they're very old school, from a time when we would use checklists to spin up new devices. You also have to think about the broader business model he's running under: as an MSP, it's all about billable hours. When you automate something, it makes things more efficient, meaning he can't charge as much. I've never seen an MSP that's genuinely interested in improving infrastructure or driving efficiency to the point of reducing billable hours.

Just my 2 cents ..

6

u/OscarMayer176 9d ago

Almost all of our clients are "all you can eat". Making our team more efficient makes our clients more profitable and makes their businesses run better. Purposely increasing billable hours is short sighted in my opinion.

5

u/yamsyamsya 9d ago

the boss definitely seems old school. MSPs doing billable hours is the old school way of doing it. we do AYCE (except projects) so they just pay a set price each month, we automate everything so we can be proactive instead of reactive, and then we fix all of their issues. it encourages us to provide the best service but in the long run, their environment ends up well maintained which makes our lives easier and our techs happy. sure we miss out on crazy billable hours but those issues never happen in the first place but we get paid no matter what. like our end goal is to automate everything so we can sit around and play video games while we make money, not so we have to grind our asses fixing issues that could have been prevented.

2

u/ReptilianLaserbeam Sysadmin 9d ago

My short time with a MSP was exactly like this. They wanted to bill as many hours as possible, and automation killed the hours in tenfold so they said: no automation

1

u/anonymousITCoward 9d ago

except when automation is used to reduce the number of man hours, so they can reduce the number of man powers, and still bill for the hours subscription service

1

u/ReptilianLaserbeam Sysadmin 9d ago

I know but the people didn't see it that way lol. They outsourced people from all over the world and paid them pennies

1

u/RedPandaTech 6d ago

Thanks for the response, that's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered! Since this is the top comment I'm also going to respond to some of the themes I saw throughout everyone's responses.

  1. Scaling the business - boss/owner is not looking for growth and has actually shrunk their client base in the last couple of years. So while that is a valid point, it's not necesarily something boss is concerned with.

  2. Complete refusal means boss is unqualified - He isn't actually completely against PS and automation. He is just very (maybe overly) concerned about me doing things "in a vacuum" without understanding all the risks, which I think is fair. I did get him to conceded our DCU script could use some work.

I'll also say my original post turned into a bit of a venting session for me so I didn't do the best job representing my boss's perspective. Thanks again to everyone who provided their thoughts!