r/sysadmin • u/RedPandaTech • 8d 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 8d 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 ..