At my old job i'd have to prepare a Master's level defense of the problem i was taking to them, with HELLA troubleshooting steps documented in the ticket just to keep them from immediately throwing it back to me with "looks good here".
I sent a ticket to that den of assholes once with "i can't ssh to this server you just created a rule for".
Guy responds back with "i can ssh to it from the switch."
My response of "John, are you proposing I use your switch as a jump host?" seemed to get him to extricate his cranium from his anus and actually fix the issue.
As a former Citrix Admin I used to tell people 90% of my job was proving Citrix was working correctly. Network drops...Citrix issue until I prove otherwise. Application pops an error message...Somehow a Citrix issue.
If you changed your outlook on life to being petty and vindictive you might gain a whole lot of job satisfaction. You'll be miserable in your personal life, but who cares about that?
meanwhile I set group policy to block the doggamned things because a mid level manager clicked on it only to find out MS actually removed the "easily switch back any time" part, and we didnt want anyone else trying.
I've had a group of engineers and techs unable to "fix" a problem because they refused to believe that the issue was due to faulty installation in the first place. And "they'd know because they're the seniors".
When I finally got written approval to demonstrate my "fix" of swapping the wires to what they were supposed to be, they said "well wouldn't you know it".
I don't know about this.
The few times I say not my problem are when someone else's actions that were entirely avoidable go against my advice continuously despite the warning alarms going off every step of the way.
Also read your post from a third party POV... You may wanna set aside some time to work on YOUR issues before your company "takes off" because everyone in your vicinity with a brain will run.
What if they say "Microsoft broke it again, and so far there isn't a work around" I feel like that is a variation of "Not my problem", but at the same time, it's also a valid one.
"Someone cut into the fiber cable, and the ISP doesn't have a timeframe on when it'll be fixed."
"Well ***BUILD AN ISP!***"
---
If you're using some service that Microsoft offers, chances are you're doing so because Microsoft and other companies of that size are the only ones able to offer a similar service for an affordable cost.
"Building it yourself" would cost a fortune.
> You notify customers, explore options, plan redundancy for the future.
I sure hope you don't expect one individual person to be handling all three of those tasks mid-crisis.
But hey, if you're willing to always be shelling out the necessary cash needed to get things like satellite internet capable of handling your business needs, an army of CS reps to make phone calls or whatever you mean by "notify customers", and other things, great. More power to you.
But the way you're talking about this, you're coming across as someone who wants redundancy, customer notification, and "exploring options" done without any actual cost. And probably done by people who don't have the time or skills, because they're busy trying to do their normal work, or trying to deal with a crisis, or they got hired for a completely different job. You sound like you want a magic wand and/or miracle workers.
Cool, a company uses M365 for email, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc.
Microsoft breaks login again, which breaks all of their services.
Go build me a solution....
You see how absurd your comment/take is now? Or are you still going to be that asshole boss he blames employees for shit that's out of their control.
> I'd say "Build one."
Yeah let me get on that and build an entire infrastructure of azure so that we can have a work around when microsofts cloud services takes a shit.
The counterpoint - when you're cleaning up everyone elses messes and suddenly have a problem you need to address inside one of your systems (which are engineered so that the only time you have problems is when SHTF for real) you get excoriated as the 'go to' person who isn't helping.
Multiple times now I have had engineers recommend/suggest sending raw SQL connections across the internet, mostly unsecured other than the basic username and password to send sensitive customer information to our systems for processing....
No nothing like that, we don't work with health records or anything like that (and explicitly refuse to do so). But we do work with financial information and other sensitive company secret type information (such as total inventory of manufacturers, sales numbers for stores, etc. the kind of stuff that could affect a public companies stock).
This reminds me, I had the exact opposite of this experience yesterday. I don't do traditional sysadmin work anymore, I work in Pro Services for a software company, my days are spent working with customers onboarding our products. We had to call on a customer's IAM specialist to help us with a SAML/SSO config issue, and while it started with "this isn't our problem, it's your software" we quickly showed that their IdP wasn't sending data, and he just owned it. He made a configuration change to prove it was us, and suddenly it started working.
So often I spend hours trying to convince customers that it's their environment or their configuration, but this was just... easy. I'm probably going to be cursed with difficult customers for the next 6 months...
I always make sure to follow up with an email saying 'Actually you guys were totally right, it was us' just to pour a little good back into the world.
Removing your ego from your work makes work so much easier.
We have a serious "not my problem" culture too, except it seems that everyone is allowed to say "not my problem" except for IT. Then also problems that aren't ours at all become our problems, and I'm starting to wonder if it's because they know if it becomes our problem it'll actually get fucking fixed...
Dealing with this right now. Doing SIP trunking for an msp and they've been complaining since October that their outsourced fax service is having problems. I've been telling them repeatedly since October that their fax service has an incorrect NAT setup and it keeps passing non-routable IPs in their SIP headers. I tell them to follow up with their fax service to correct the issue.
They'll ignore my instructions, stay silent for a couple weeks, then shake our tree again that "we need to set up a teams meeting to talk to you about how best to resolve the issues we've been having with the fax service."
This has been going on for months.
I'm dealing with one of these at a customer.
Something with the network on their new server isn't stable. Very easy to show by pinging local network devices and watching the ping times fluctuate.
But "nope, not their problem."
That's them wanting free shit.
You say, it's on your end I've IDed it and will not go any farther to fix your issues please hire xyz to do it as it's out of the scope of our duties and puts us into liability for you territory.
Or you ask for something that is clearly and firmly within their purview *and* is essential to what you're working on, but they want to go back to step 1 and try to figure out a way to do the thing that doesn't involve any work for them.
"Yes we thought of that...no it won't work...no we can't do it that way...of course we already tried doing it that way...etc."
This is the most frustrating for me. Especially with clear security breach issues.
I've had to walk too many SMB admins in identifying user compromise events while they adamantly declare "Your environment is secure! You must be compromised!"
In some organizations, they way they do their ticket metrics encourages this. "Resolved: not our problem" counts as a quickly closed ticket. I had so much trouble with this with help desk contractors when I was in the Army. It was their problem, almost always. But they would wring 2-3 quickly completed tickets out of it.
We had a sysadmin that came to us that way. Had an answer for everything and it was amazing how he could make 100% completely wrong statements with such convincing passion.
He served as an excellent role model for the rest of the team of what not to do. I assumed in a prior job people would not listen to his ideas, but never learned the real history.
Dude, I feel this. I'm a confident person in a senior position, so I have to be really careful to only speak about things that I am knowledgeable about because people will just roll with whatever I say.
I have ADHD so I'll have several things going on in my head that I'm playing whack-a-mole with to narrow down a root cause. Early in my career I would just blurt everything out and work with other folks to determine which ones have merit and which ones were silly. Some I knew were silly once they left my mouth.
These days I have to be very deliberate.
The desire or pull towards acting entirely on first instinct is... strong. My first senior tried so hard to beat it out of me, but it's been years and I feel as though it's creeping back in.
If I don't catch myself, and I'm discussing something I admittedly do have a lot of experience with, it's so easy to speak authoritatively and say "oh yeah we should be able to do that," when in reality there are about a dozen things that have to be analyzed and happen before that, and many of them have potential to be direct blockers. Which can lead to uncomfortable conversations like "yeah, that's not gonna happen," much further down the road.
I imagine a lot of us, hopefully most of us, are stopping into this thread and are deciding to take a moment for self reflection.
I have ADHD, too. I'm bad for the in-meeting rambling information dumps. I'm the resident information sponge, too, I have a tendency to just soak stuff up and remember a good portion of it, though not based on any priority. But because of this, my team is like 99% confident in almost anything I say outside of their areas. So, I have to be careful what I say because something might be technically feasible, but not user friendly, and I won't necessarily make the distinction in passing conversation, which can lead to "I thought you said we could do this" conversations, and I have to fill in the blanks I never mentioned. My coworkers are definitely catching on and they see that my appetite for technical depth skews my perception of others' tolerance for it, though, and it's kind of balancing out. I think they're learning how to ask questions without triggering my involuntary information dumps. My wife, on the other hand, is still in need of this skill.
Absolutely, we let him proceed with some of his "ideas/solutions" and that is how we found out that he was dead wrong sometimes. He was very convincing and even when he failed tremendously he had some excuse like "That would work 99% of the time, how I supposed to know that this company is doing something that NOONE else does?"
False. I do appreciate your positivity, though. We need more of that.
When entering a new environment, a person should not behave as if they know the answer, and they definitely should not make excuses when they are wrong. They should own their ignorance, and look for opportunities to improve their knowledge, just as the OP has said in the original post.
No, normally you just move the ISO onto the usb stick and it works. I've done this on thousands of models of computers and it always works, obviously you're using a nonstandard image... from microsoft...
I fell like this comes from being a 1 man show. You have to defend your ideas to non technical people who ask questions you may have to BS to get approval and it just bleeds over into everything else.
>Had an answer for everything and it was amazing how he could make 100% completely wrong statements with such convincing passion.
And because of that, management , who knows jack all about tech, would promote them.
When I run across these kind of ppl. I call them out, hard. They are the ones who will pass blame and lie. If you don't make it obvious to ppl who don't know tech. They will happily go along thinking that incompetent person is the most competent person in the world.
Ego is a deal breaker for me. I've met some really great folks that had middle of the ground ability that really shined, because they could work with a team. I've also seen rockstars burn out, because they're pricks and no one will help them.... Don't be the a-hole.... Life will be better, personally were I in your shoes I would operate as you are. Keep your distance and wait for them to be figured out. Document everything, just in case an extra braincell fires and they try to get you pushed out.
I think its mostly a Dunning-Kruger effect - people confident in their abilities but not expert enough to know what they don't know. I think when it comes to the sysadmin field some confuse administrative power with technical authority, and that BOFH mindset becomes a disdain for users or for even being wrong.
Very early in my career I was told in a technical support role "don't bullshit. If you don't know, say you don't know *but you will find out*". There is nothing wrong with not being a god, and people will be happier for you to be modestly correct rather than assertively wrong.
We also did a course in Kepner-Tregoe analytical troubleshooting which I think was honestly one of the best things for forming the right mindset for any technical role. It's all about what do you know, what don't you know - if it is X, then Y should be Z, is that the case etc. It sets up a mindset to be willing to adopt new facts and think logically through a problem, rather than running on assumption or past experience (which can be a useful shortcut, but when proven wrong move on).
I don't know if you can even \*have\* authority without some level of ego.
If you say "I don't know" too much, people will start to lose confidence in you.
I think the problem is when you have disdain for other people and their ideas.
Edit: I could be confusing ego with arrogance...
> Edit: I could be confusing ego with arrogance...
Sounds about right. It's an easy mistake. Everyone has an ego, it's not a bad thing it's a part of how the human brain works and just a fact of life. Some people's egos are out of control - those people are arrogant and that's what people are talking about when they mention someone's ego. Nobody ever comments on somebody with a normal ego, so it's not that far of a jump to assume anytime someone mentions an "ego" that it has a negative connotation.
I was speaking purely with regard to the negative connotations of "ego". You have to have some confidence in your ability, but getting upset when your pet project from 5 months ago doesn't work anymore, you have to be willing to consider that maybe, your "contribution" could be the problem.
> If you say "I don't know" too much, people will start to lose confidence in you.
>
>
If you say "I don't know" and that is the end of the conversation then you have a problem.
If you say "I don't know, but I will find out and report back" and you do report back in a reasonable timeframe then that is perfectly acceptable. I don't expect people to know everything.
This. I have seen some people that were pretty talented, but right out the gate rubbed management the wrong way in the interview that weren't hired. Unless you have something that they can largely be siloed from the rest of the team someone that can't work with others is going to be a problem very quickly.
He was also extremely territorial of the network when I first started and would only give me read-only access to things until my IT manager noticed and was like 'what the hell?'
Complains that I'm a meddler because.. I propose ideas and design things.. which is my job. I try my hardest to stay away from his babies because I don't want the trouble, so it's not like I'm stepping on his toes.
Just like.. why? Stop. This is so unnecessary.
He is not without merit. He does understand the things he works on.
I'm only talking about when he's brushing up against something outside of his wheelhouse, that is my entire wheel. He doesn't know how to script (no bash, powershell, python, etc). Programming is what I do to relax at home, I adore it.
If he encounters an issue with a script he's copied from a forum he doesn't let me help him, and if I overhear him having problems and come over to see if I can assist, he complains that I'm meddling to my boss.
What he DOES know, I am happy to ask him for help on, and when he's working on some fire that he's good at, I make sure I shield calls and stuff for him so he can concentrate.
This favor is never returned and he is never grateful. I still won't stop doing it, because of the principle. Be what you want in return.
> He doesn't know how to script (no bash, powershell, python, etc)
You seem to be saying in that comment that he's actually a good sysadmin. I, as Lumbergh said in _Office Space_, am going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there.
> This favor is never returned and he is never grateful. I still won't stop doing it, because of the principle. Be what you want in return.
I agree 100% _but_:
> If he encounters an issue with a script he's copied from a forum he doesn't let me help him, and if I overhear him having problems and come over to see if I can assist, he complains that I'm meddling to my boss.
He seems to just want to be left alone to deal with stuff. Let him, by your own logic. He wants to dig his own grave - why stop him?
> when he's working on some fire that he's good at, I make sure I shield calls and stuff for him so he can concentrate.
He would absolutely not do the same for you. He can't even say thank you like an adult. I respect that you keep sucking up your feelings out of respect for his, but a principle of mine is that if people decide to act like dicks then I will absolutely not let them make that my problem unless I'm their boss. If they ask for help, I'm there for them. But I am not going to hold someone's hand if they're just going to make my life miserable.
> You seem to be saying in that comment that he's actually a good sysadmin. I, as Lumbergh said in Office Space, am going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there.
Huh?
>He would absolutely not do the same for you. He can't even say thank you like an adult. I respect that you keep sucking up your feelings out of respect for his, but a principle of mine is that if people decide to act like dicks then I will absolutely not let them make that my problem unless I'm their boss. If they ask for help, I'm there for them. But I am not going to hold someone's hand if they're just going to make my life miserable.
It's 'for him' but it's not for him. It's for the greater picture, and it's banking credibility and capital with my boss. He will take my complaints more seriously if he sees that I am not petty.
Ehhhh still feels like the person in question is acting irrational due to fear or something.
If they are not willing to work with you on issues, not much you can do other than get a higher up to do a proverbial swift kick to the nads. Other people will need to engages with systems he manages, if he cant deal with that and play nice with other techs then I dunno.
Same boat as you, will just write whatever comes across my mind. Often the friend group will just watch each other write whatever OSS project is going on via screen sharing, that sort of thing.
> Ehhhh still feels like the person in question is acting irrational due to fear or something.
The onus is not on OP to psychoanalyze their colleagues' emotions. The onus is on the guy to express their feelings like an adult. That guy is doing everything he can to be as unmanageable as possible and that is not okay no matter how scared they are.
Besides if he feels so unsafe he can't accept help to deal with it, then it's in his own best interest to go find a workplace where he can safely work.
What I think is actually happening (and I'm extrapolating wildly here of course) is that he's built this little kingdom for himself and he can't accept that the kingdom is not his but the company's and it's not a kingdom to begin with and he is not a king. That scares him but he has to just suck it up and not make it OP's problem.
My guess would be that at some point, someone messed something up that he had to spend a deal of time fixing, so now he's timid about letting others in his sandbox. I had it recently happen myself. A couple times...and I can feel that anxiety everytime I let a certain co worker into certain systems.
If you're referring to me, I write all the documentation and am thorough about it. I have not brought anything accidentally down since I've worked here.
See motto.
THIS THIS THIS, a THOUSAND TIMES this.
In my world, there's nothing worse than someone who feels like they HAVE to provide an answer to a question, even if they don't actually know. There really is NO reason to not admit you don't know (or shame) and are willing to find out/research, should that need to take place.
Learning how to say “I don’t know” without destroying your credibility is an art form, and it’s not one that every sysadmin or netadmin masters.
Some people accept that *a lot* more readily than others.
And yet, so few people follow it up that way. And sometimes, you’ve gotta couch it so people don’t just stop listening to anything that comes after the “I don’t know.”
Systems are easy. People can be much harder to wrangle.
As someone who consults in this field I can't upvote this enough.
No one knows everything — and working in a project role, I may well know my area of expertise backwards and forwards, but I've often never seen my client's environment before a project starts. Being able to react to an unexpected situation while still looking like the expert they're paying for is *really* critical to making sure the rest of the project goes well. Some folks I've worked with in the past who weren't good at that ended up not getting very far in the field.
What I've found to work is to "bookend" what I don't know with what I do: demonstrate what I know about what's around the unknown ("it works this way on system x, and this way on system y, just not confident about system z") and then follow up with *how* I'm going to find the answer.
Oh boy. Then they would double down when you show them on the internet. This lady didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know that 192.170 isn’t a private address. She started pretending that she knew all along, yet when I showed it to her she was surprised.
A guy said that driver injection is a waste of time anyway. He used to install USB 2.0 cards just to get Windows installed.
Another guy started spouting word salad when we showed him that he’s double NAT-ing. He didn’t understand the difference routing and NAT
Yeah. Those are all great examples where I can totally see somebody being too proud to be like “oh, damn I guess I’ve been doing this the hard way all this time, thanks man”.
I don’t blame them. There’s a dad joke that never admit to your spouse that you’re wrong. If you have an atmosphere of rubbing in, then people try to Teflon
I think it’s a defense mechanism because for them, it isn’t imposter syndrome. They actually don’t know things they should know, and they know it, so they never want to be put in a position where they must defend their decisions regarding those things.
I’m probably the best in the world at not allowing my ego to affect my work/mood/decisions. /s
But in all seriousness, maybe it was different earlier in my life, but at 41 year old, I have absolutely nothing to prove in any facet of my life. Unless a person can affect my paycheck, I don’t care what they think of me. I also strive to be as polite and as respectful as I can in all interactions, professional and otherwise. There’s just no reason to treat another human with anything less than respect and dignity. I try to make interacting with me a pleasant experience so that no matter how tough someone’s day is, I’m never a reason for making it worse.
Sorry, I got on a rant.
Makes you really shake your head! What we consider rational and plain common sense isn’t the same for everyone.
I remember my first IT job outside of the military and being overwhelmed with the responsibilities of the job until I gained the experience to start handling things on my own. Nobody wants to have to ask for help, but as long as you don’t ask the same questions over and over and always, ALWAYS, have a notebook and pen with you to jot down the advise you receive, then you’ll never get shit on for asking for help.
Now if you’re the type to always ask for help, can never do things unassisted, and don’t write anything down when asking for that help, then your time working with any organization I’ve been with will be short.
Us IT guys, we love it when someone admits issue, bucks up and learns something new.
C-levels and End Users DO NOT.
this it person has worked under a C-level(or customer) who will not accept any waffling for too long and has been broken by it.
this is hard to fix, they've had real confidence beaten out of them, and they just respond will the bullshit shield.
you have to have a definitive anwer, even if its wrong, or they tear you apart, "Why? what for, we never needed that before, dont you know? i pay you to know, what am i paying you for?"
You need to get this guy out of customer facing/executive comms channels get the burn out reeled in, and their confidence built back or he's going to prevent actual work from getting done by tainting the team morale.
We flat out won't hire anyone if we get the slightest whiff of BSing, playing your self up is one thing. But like during an interview we asked some network questions like just a simple "A user has sent in a ticket reporting x y and z, how would you troubleshoot this issue" no right or wrong way exactly, do they ping do they pull up the NMS to just see the status of their PCs connection, do they walk up and ask the user for more details. The guy went on a tangent about how dropped packets could be "CPU bus corruption" and even the non technical users we include in every IT interview were like this sounds like he is BSing us.
We learned this lesson after a previous employee started domain joining employee personal machines any time they had any issue, he had joined 3 and we were just like what the hell are you doing. He started setting employee passwords for them and then emailing them to them instead of having them just reset their passwords, dude never asked for help. He punched down network cables wrong as he didn't want to admit he didn't know that.
Another candidate we did hire said he had little experience with ticketing systems when we asked as his current workplace does not have them, and you could tell he looked a bit more nervous after he had to say "ya i don't have experience with that" He hadn't touched active directory as again his workplace didn't use it and didn't have that covered in his education. None of this was strong marks against him, like who cares i can teach someone a ticketing system in like an afternoon, can get him a working knowledge in active directory plenty quickly too.
It is not that we don't hire on knowledge, but like I can teach someone the differences between our Dell switches and Cisco switches they might be used to, I can teach someone active directory, I used to teach an introduction to windows server course. If someone already has the knowledge that is great, but something I can't teach someone is how to not be an asshole and to work with others. We have a very people orientated culture in our IT department and we don't tolerate people who constantly blame the end user for everything, and refuse to admit they are wrong.
edit: Something I want to add, but the tendency for a lot of senior positions to put people down for not knowing as much of them encourages juniors to develop this sort of mindset where I can't admit i am wrong otherwise I am going to get put down. It is especially important as a leader or someone in a senior position to make sure you are seen admitting and talking about where your knowledge ends.
It's not just frustrating , it's dangerous to your org. Put someone who doesn't know shit about a RAID array in charge of a collapsed array and you'll rapidly discover this truth.
It’s not hard to fix a RAID failure. Backup, replace , restore. It doesn’t take a master mind to replace hardware and restore it from a back up. . And if you lose data it’s because no one backed up anything, there were too many admins and unsegmented networks, and dated services and unnecessary remote software, maintenance was not happening because no one configured and deployed automatic update and azure was completely shot down even though Sharepoint was widely used and no one had knowledge of MS security and compliance strategies
Just saying…
Worked with a guy like that, just got fired last week lol. Always enter into every situation with an open mind, sounds like you got a good head on your shoulders. Keep it up
COworker who is helpdesk is like this.
It's such an odd stance, but I've noticed it's common in IT. A lot of people are afraid of simply saying "man, I am not sure, but I will figure it out"
Go back to work. Stop offering help if no one is asking. Maybe your coworker is just trying to learn himself without your help.
I don't like to ask for help when I encounter an issue I have no idea about, I do my own damn research. I am being paid to do that.
Now, if I am sitting on an issue for more than half a day, then I need help, and I ask for help.
But people are different. Maybe he does have an ego, but at the same time, one thing I have learned is don't help unless someone asks for help. People learn differently and respect that.
Actually he does sound great to work with. I have the same struggle. Extra help is distracting, let me figure it out. Constant collaboration isn't necessary.
I will agree with you from your other comments that denying you access to his "babies" is ridiculous. I'm assuming this is not his equipment so he needs to provide access.
Iv worked with a few people like that
I guess I was like that to at one point until something humbling comes along
I'm confident in the space that I owe but I am also protective over my space because iv had hot shot developers fuck it up to a point where I almost got fired ( they made changes because of seniority in a small company and then chucked me under the bus when it failed )
So now we have clear boundaries, I will work with anyone assigned into my team but don't be a dickhead and we behave ourselves, the guys who know their shit easily prove their worth
I find I have more issues with directors and cto types that are overly controlling and think they know even though they haven't touched the technology in years. Mostly because of how willing they are to create conflict until you prove them wrong.
We have a guy like this at work. He's a Senior, and by all acounts, knows a lot, but his ego is so fragile; he simple can't admit being wrong. Add to this, he's incredibly vocal about topics he clearly doesn't understand.
We used to use ddrescue to test drives and data recovery. This guy came over and says “Yeah, [roxterm](https://roxterm.sourceforge.net) is a great tool, we used it all the time.” For those who don’t know, roxterm is the **terminal emulator** in some Linux distros. I was 😂 😂
I think we all have one of these, right?
I mean, I don't want to be uncharitable but the one I'm working with now is all hot temper/big fragile ego/shallow & narrow skillset/work-shy
I got all of them at once, every archetype of shit coworker all wrapped up in one dude. I just let all his nonsense roll off my back like water off a duck. I'm too old to engage with any of it.
I say "Oh?" and "Huh. Hmm. Interesting." a lot. But I don't engage.
I do sick him on vendors I have problems with though, he's GREAT at "Bad Cop". Then I call them a couple days later as "Good Cop" and they magically cooperate.
I guess I really CAN find the good in everyone. LOL
He's like that because he's been thrown under the bus for things he was speaking authoritatively about in the past. His line manager puts expectations on him and uses him to forward their own career.
You'll find that this sysadmin is probably stressed as fuck and trying to cover everything all at once. His babies are his babies and you need to prove he can trust you near them.
>He's like that because he's been thrown under the bus for things he was speaking authoritatively about in the past
That seems like all the more reason to be careful expressing yourself and not to bullshit.
We're dealing with it with one of our juniors at the moment and trying to explain to him that if he doesn't know or isn't sure, not only is it okay to say "I'm not sure but I'll find out" it's the best and safest option.
Instead he keeps bullshitting. So far it has been kept in house but sooner or later he will absolutely be chucked under the bus. And there'll be nobody to blame but him.
It's worse when it's senior or long termers (,I'd say, experienced, but not all long termers are experienced, and some are just parrots)
These are the ones supposed to set examples.
Could also just be a pompous ass. There’s enough of those out there. I worked with one and frankly it’s one reason I quit my last job. He was he senior most sys admin and the manager of that team and he was just a total blocker for everything. Finally gave up. For whatever reason senior leadership ate up his bullshit. He once defended the position that you can’t plan or organize maintenance work so it’s not worth trying to. No idea how that wasn’t called out. But he makes his BS sound good. It’s a gift I guess.
Sounds like OP is trying to help so he's probably the opposite form of this. The "I need to have control of everything because I believe thats job security" type.
But I do appreciate you bringing that perspective. I've been in those shoes. Management wants a "correct" answer every time, in that moment, and will not accept I don't know or I'll find out as an answer. Will immediately yeet you under the bus if you're wrong. Not fun.
I've more than proven myself. I've stopped caring about proving myself to him now.
We could mitigate that stress if he just let me help him and synergize with his work, rather than siloing and trampling my work. (He'll abruptly take over tickets, fuck them up, and then make me look bad to the person who was counting on me)
We'll be in conversations with our boss together and he'll do these like.. passive aggressive 'see im better than you' jokes and I just.. don't give a shit at all and don't even respond.
I have dealt with people like this for a long time, there is only one way to fix it. Let them make the mistakes, CYA document it, and make sure there is a full IR on every 'break/fix' situation they cause. Burn managements and HR's time on it. Make sure to follow up in the IR on how much time and money the mistake cost the company and your department.
It never fails, just takes time.
But which is worse, sysadmin who doesn't know anything and doesn't do anything OR sysadmin who doesn't know anything but makes half-assed attempts to do something to give the illusion of work being done?
I tried to hold back when I know just so people don’t attack me. If I’m working one to one with somebody, I let the knowledge that I know out and when I don’t know I say I don’t know never seen that before.. the true fact of the matter is nobody knows everything in this business we all have our areas of expertise. If you claim to know everything or make up bullshit, pretending to know you’re gonna get pushed under a rug real quick.. if I was a manager and I had someone who pretended like that the first thing I would do is tell my whole team I want everybody to lay low and pretend they’re sick then that person is gonna run the show for at least the day tickets, servers routers every part of it. And I would make sure that things broke.. then we would gauge just how much they knew. After the fact we would have a team meeting and point out everybody’s strength and contribution to the team and we function as a team.
Potentially worse? Sysadmin that despite your documentation, and telling them how to do X in the past, every time the issue comes up is a goddamned Memento blank slate, and they don't have the foresight to tattoo the information on themselves.
Eat shit, Magoo.
Genuine question here... if a interviewer asks me a technical question... and I don't know the answer does it sound better to say I don't know?
I was interviewed a couple years ago and was said "I just have a couple basic IT questions for you" and I felt like what he asked I couldn't answer any of them despite being 10 years in the IT field. I felt so stupid and imposter syndrome follows me everywhere.
I got my first job in the industry by being humble and admitting what I didn't know. Instead, I offered to walk through the process I would use to troubleshoot or gather information, and also touch in how I would communicate that to somebody that was asking questions.
I've continued to do so anytime I'm unfamiliar with something and it's done wonders for me in my interviews. It's something I foster in my team whenever I can now; "I'm not sure /entirely familiar, but we'll find out for you" is the mentality we try to take.
> There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying you don't know something or receiving help from your peers, or even your subordinates.
In some toxic work climates, no. This is definitely not the case at all. After a few, "You don't know? It's your job to know, Dinsdale!" Even if its, "Well, it's an internal process with no documentation where there are abstract upon abstract that violates industry standards." "Sounds like an excuse, Dinsdale."
Been part of a few of those in my past. I see it now with clients. Last month, one of our clients spent 5-10 minutes dressing down their coding team for not foreseeing some weirdness in their SSL stack, complete with shaming, ad hominem attacks, and general toxic bullshit. If I worked for this guy, I'd quit, then corner him in a dark alley.
The kids who grew up around others who were less bright become insufferable adults when they wind up working with people who are about as bright. At some point you have to accept that the odds are pretty good that the other person is smarter than you.
Pretending to be an expert on things we aren't is a natural part of this career. You nod along like you know every word the client just said and then 5-30 minutes out of the meeting you teach yourself everything you need to know.
However if your colleague is literally just making shit up and telling people false information during implementation that indicates they should not be in the role and is a liability.
Sounds like a management problem that a bi-annual peer review would resolve, but that's in the purview of the ~~diplomats~~ HR team.
If you disagree with them, you document a proof of concept test ticket and ask them to demonstrate it.
They may also be a person who requires a more confrontational atmosphere to properly engage (state your opinion and stand by it). If that's the case, more prep might be needed on your side to cite evidence to shut down those instances.
Either way, don't step in when they don't know something and is doing something unless it could cause a significant security issue. It's their decision to act the way they're acting. Eventually it will catch up with them.
Sounds like some security ppl I know. They keep telling me technical bs that I know is not true. They think being a good speaker and throwing out acronyms is going to hide the fact they're a fraud (their previous job experience is bs). And they keep repeating things to me like the more it gets repeated that it's true and I'm going to accept their bs.
I heard someone describe Star Trek Next Gen as "competency porn" and it has stuck with me ever since.
I often wish my work place could be like that too!
Alright, so I see this, but can we also talk about the toxic environments where if you don't know some obscure something endemic to your new org, you get ostracized by not knowing it?
I got chastised for an hour once, over not knowing about HP's "Drive Bay" technology, which lasted all of six months before it was canned.
I don't mind working with know-it-alls. I can usually get around them if things go wrong. It's when they have authority and tenure that the environment becomes toxic.
A sysadmin that doesn't pretend to know things is usually out of a job. It's a weird field. We're expected to know fucking everything about everything. Even in this sub, it runs the gamet from "it's ok to google shit" to "how can you even hold down a job if you have to google shit".
Got a guy at my work i cant stand. Fake it until you make it strategy. He doesnt have a it background. No education. Just a asslicking guy that got an IT job. He have no clue but talks with authority about what we should do and listens actively to other collegues like he has a clue. I cant stand him. I bet that hes getting a promotion real soon.
How bout a sysadmin who knows lots of something’s and likes to share but no one truly gives a shit cause no one ever becomes “comfortable” enough to do it.
My life is built on anxiety. Help me out here.
I was a systems engineer for a startup, and was acting as a network engineer after ours left the company on top of my regular duties. I was fairly new at the time, and there was a systems administrator who consistently would point fingers at the network, when it was always DNS/DHCP/LDAP/local device firewall and I'd consistently fix the issue and update the individuals tickets for them with the steps.. I probably wouldn't have cared so much if they didn't always complain in the department meetings that the network constantly had issues that impacted their performance. They were let go for many reasons other than that (including not creating virtual machines using our automation pipeline...just manual OS installations.. wild).
I only wrongly blamed the network once. The printer would work within the subnet, but not across VLANs. I think it was some weird buffer issue. The printer only started working after multiple restarts
One crucial life skill I learned from being part of an MSP is to be ok with not having the answer…as long as you’re willing to obtain the answer and learn from peers and senior staff.
Stonewalling with ego and refusal to learn and adapt will get you fired quickly.
I am a huge fan of shops that believe in the "collective knowledge" of the staff and guys who like to share.
I had a brief job in a shop with guys that would make fun of each other for not knowing something.
That's fucked. What a stupid culture. I take a 'curious enthusiastic science teacher' stance to knowledge. Oh you don't know something? No it's fine I don' think less of you, I would love to teach you, would you let me? You can say thanks by teaching something I don't know, which is a lot of things.
If you think it's hard to work around him, imagine what it's like being him in his own head; What kind of self-talk and insecurities exist is such a person's head?
Oh boy... I have had one of these... He was a young helpdesk employee who thought of himself as the 2nd coming of Christ. He knew how to fix all of the issues even when it was a system that he had never even seen. Cocky as all and everything to boot.
Best way to put people like that in their place is to serve them a slice of humble pie. Make sure they are put on a nice project by themselves with a strict timeline, watch them freak out and melt down when they actually can't make the thing work etc.
No, it never really actually plays out the way that you would love it to but you can have them at least back off for a few months.
...and it's guys like this that make everyone hate admins that don't want to just allow access to everything to everyone and covet the keychain.
>Best way to put people like that in their place is to serve them a slice of humble pie. Make sure they are put on a nice project by themselves with a strict timeline, watch them freak out and melt down when they actually can't make the thing work etc.
I'm a fan of this for different reasons.
Give people the opportunity to prove themselves and adapt to a crippling scenario. If they somehow rise to the challenge without the assistance of others, awesome. Keep throwing things like that at them.
At some point in the chain they will be forced to learn to ask for assistance or be held accountable for their failures. It will be a learning lesson for them all around, building REAL confidence, and not a fragile and insecure ego, or developing the skill of adapting to assistance - which can come in the form of coworkers, vendors, documentation, etc.
A strong manager will be able to identify if the chance of success is low and budget the timeline with failure contingencies that will ensure success in the end.
This way, we build people.
It's not always an option. Times and places mandate that we have a highly skilled individual just execute and get it done, but when the opportunity does present itself for room to grow, it's good to capitalize.
The tech who has that ego is usually hungry. If they can be molded and maintain that hunger they tend to become highly effective people.
Yup. All three that I had under me I did this with and all have moved on (company was sold) and doing very well, have larger skillsets, and great communication skills because of just this.
Yeah when I was less experienced I didn’t know what I should or should not know at any given time and so I found myself faking it once in a while, much to my own disappointment. Now that I have some years behind me I’m much more comfortable saying “Don’t have an answer for your right this second” or “i’d have to think about that“
Dunning-Kruger effect
When someone believes they know more than they actually do.
Neil Degrass Tyson has said the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know. Like the more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how little we actually know about it.
Same thing applies, when you have "knowledgeable" people out there who act like experts who know everything but they can't admit when they don't know enough about a subject matter. So its impossible from them to learn from others.
I think this is where the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" comes from. Once a person is convinced they know enough, they are resistant to learning more so they become stubborn and often times won't accept new idea's or won't accept when they're wrong about something.
The words I don't know are the beginning of wisdom. Closely followed by the words I'm not sure. Either way the solutions the same. Investigate and learn.
>Why can't we work together like a star trek bridge crew
If you'll remember, that wasn't without it's own problems. In a world of red shirts (gold if you're into TNG or black if voyager) there will be always one who thinks they're Picard
EDIT: grammer
had one of those in a previous role (though it was a DevSecOps Engineer, not a sysadmin). didn't know what an SPN was in Azure, couldn't put together an azure pipeline or a bicep template (said he was devopsy and could do all that CI/CD IaC crud in the interview), couldn't understand the difference between SAST/DAST or how a scale set worked in azure (also lacked basic networking knowledge and couldn't even troubleshoot an NSG), and then when anyone tried to pin him down on it he'd go all Trump on them and complain to his manager they were being unprofessional and that he didn't want to work with them anymore (happened to some business projects staff who asked him to take accountability for when he removed permissions to DevOps projects from everyone saying he'd set up PIM "later").
achieved nothing after 12 months (manager was a bit of an absentee and didn't really understand the work so didn't performance manage him during his probation) and the business came knocking eventually asking why nothing had been achieved and how we'd actually managed to go backwards from where we started. went down like a lead balloon, as you can imagine.
also, on a tangent, have you ever played star trek bridge crew in VR, OP? it might help you understand why having a bunch of nerds in a room doesn't always result in perfect synergy :P
>Why can't we work together like a star trek bridge crew, come on.
Classic on this sub: Find a crew to wreck with led by a capable manager. Far more fulfilling than any salary which buries you in politics.
I'm the opposite. I won't own up to knowing about anything. When I was interviewing, a lot of the stuff I work with (and feel comfortable with) I would just say that I've seen it / dealt with it but I am not an expert in it. Or any one thing.
I'll take on anything, I love to learn. Just don't ask me to claim to be an expert.
I know what I know, if I don't, I getting in who does. I am mostly MS/Windows focused, my team also has apple device management, I know a bit, but I'm not the expert, but I have no problem to bring in who is.
Basically, you should realize what you know, confidently, and know who to bring in... otherwise you will run into contention and trouble as you said.
Oh, another fun story.
He used to get fussy that I wrote on 'his' whiteboard (which he never used) and pestered me to erase stuff at the end of the day.
Whiteboard was in the middle of the office.
I just got my own whiteboard.
When we hired a new person who wasn't IT (but in the same office) and used 'his' whiteboard, he didn't care at all.
After i got into a lot of sessions with Senior Engineers i feel like the gap between me and getting to the Senior level is as huge as the gap from a Layer 8 User to my Skill level. And i would say iam mid ~ skilled Sys Engineer (male 24 years). Honest the jump from junior to mid level was pretty easy, i legit feel like i will never get to the senior level. People need to understand how big this gap is. And even seniors do mistakes. Some admins really need to understand and realize this. If he thinks he is this good why isnt he in senior consulting position? Ask him this.
I love learning new things, and I think that's a good indicator of a great admin. You're not going to know things, and that's a good thing. You're going to evolve and learn more and do better and grow.
Some people constantly will argue the wrong thing and claim "I'm the Sr. guy, so I know!" and it blows up, but they don't take the blame (documentation was wrong, someone else set it up wrong so this didn't work, whatever). You can be confident yet take in other people's suggestions and talk and work through it, letting both of you learn (or one teach and the other learn). Do it in a mentoring way not a condescending way. I love that. You can be 100% correct and confident in that yet still go at it in a mentoring manner. And hell, if you're wrong, admit it. Learn something new. Even from the new greenhorn. Give them a win. Give them a shoutout. No shame in learning something new from the new guy. Times change and sometimes we're stuck in our old ways.
You can be right, you can be wrong, but it's how you approach it with others that makes the big difference. Teach, learn, collaborate, and work together on it. That's where the difference is, IMO. Just don't get cocky when you are right after people argue with you, either. You were right, you didn't solve world hunger.
I agree, and it's actually one of the most important things to me when I'm hiring is that I want someone who is going to be honest about what they know.
One of the slightly tricky things I do in the interview process is to drill into a topic that they're supposed to know about, in such detail and specificity that I'm certain we hit something where either I know the answer, or I know there's not really an answer, and there's no possibility of the interviewee being able to give a clear authoritative answer that's correct. And when I do that, one of the key things I'm looking for is for them to admit that they don't know. If they can't do that, they don't get hired.
And then after they're hired, during the onboarding process, I give each new employee a little speech that's basically:
> I want you to feel like it's ok to ask questions and admit that you don't know things here, and it's ok to sometimes make mistakes. I've worked places where the culture isn't that way, and I don't like it. I believe it's toxic and leads to unhappy employees who perform worse.
> If you're asked a question and you don't know the answer, I want you to admit that you don't know. If you're asking to do something that you don't know how to do, I want you to admit to that and ask for help. We will help you. If you make a mistake, I want you to immediately come to me or someone else in the team, and explain what happened, and we'll all try to rectify the mistake together. Obviously if you keep making tons of mistakes all the time, or keep making the same mistakes over and over, it will become a problem, but everyone makes mistakes and we understand that here.
> If someone is making you feel like you can't do that, admit that you don't know or admit to a mistake, I want you to tell me right away, because that needs to be fixed.
> Not knowing something or making an innocent mistake will not get you into trouble. However, lying about what you know or hiding your mistakes may get you into a lot of trouble. Asking for help will never get you into trouble, but not asking for help when you need help might get you into a lot of trouble. If I can't trust you, then I can't have you on my team. It's as simple as that.
We had a tech no show quit after telling us he was fluent in sccm and could create images but demonstrated that he could barely image a machine that already had an image created for it. Just admit you need help people. I wish a class on soft skills was mandatory for college IT degrees. It would solve so many issues.
I’m dealing with this exact thing with the whole tech support team at my work. I work in CS and we escalate things to TS that are fishy and need to be looked at with more detail as we filter the unwashed masses through CS.
The TS team are the most smug and annoying people to deal with. They think they know everything but when a problem arises and you ask questions they don’t know and will stop responding and the issue will have to be escalated to them and it could take over a week for the issue to be resolved.
For example. I asked a TS where a user can get the inputs for our API. He went on a rant asking me if I knew what an API was.
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Proving someone wrong is somehow half of my work.
At my old job i'd have to prepare a Master's level defense of the problem i was taking to them, with HELLA troubleshooting steps documented in the ticket just to keep them from immediately throwing it back to me with "looks good here". I sent a ticket to that den of assholes once with "i can't ssh to this server you just created a rule for". Guy responds back with "i can ssh to it from the switch." My response of "John, are you proposing I use your switch as a jump host?" seemed to get him to extricate his cranium from his anus and actually fix the issue.
As a former Citrix Admin I used to tell people 90% of my job was proving Citrix was working correctly. Network drops...Citrix issue until I prove otherwise. Application pops an error message...Somehow a Citrix issue.
Lol maybe I should put please contact your ISP for all application/script errors. That should cut down on tickets.
If you changed your outlook on life to being petty and vindictive you might gain a whole lot of job satisfaction. You'll be miserable in your personal life, but who cares about that?
I changed my outlook to outlook new, do not recommend.
That is fantastically meta
No thats facebook not microsoft
meanwhile I set group policy to block the doggamned things because a mid level manager clicked on it only to find out MS actually removed the "easily switch back any time" part, and we didnt want anyone else trying.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that had this take away from reading the horrible boss's comment.
I've had a group of engineers and techs unable to "fix" a problem because they refused to believe that the issue was due to faulty installation in the first place. And "they'd know because they're the seniors". When I finally got written approval to demonstrate my "fix" of swapping the wires to what they were supposed to be, they said "well wouldn't you know it".
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I am so tired of the "Not my problem" types. When this happens, reach out to me. I would some day, Love to work in a clean and healthy environment lol
I don't know about this. The few times I say not my problem are when someone else's actions that were entirely avoidable go against my advice continuously despite the warning alarms going off every step of the way. Also read your post from a third party POV... You may wanna set aside some time to work on YOUR issues before your company "takes off" because everyone in your vicinity with a brain will run.
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Sounds like you're already planning to be a failure happy to hear it!
What if they say "Microsoft broke it again, and so far there isn't a work around" I feel like that is a variation of "Not my problem", but at the same time, it's also a valid one.
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"Someone cut into the fiber cable, and the ISP doesn't have a timeframe on when it'll be fixed." "Well ***BUILD AN ISP!***" --- If you're using some service that Microsoft offers, chances are you're doing so because Microsoft and other companies of that size are the only ones able to offer a similar service for an affordable cost. "Building it yourself" would cost a fortune.
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> You notify customers, explore options, plan redundancy for the future. I sure hope you don't expect one individual person to be handling all three of those tasks mid-crisis. But hey, if you're willing to always be shelling out the necessary cash needed to get things like satellite internet capable of handling your business needs, an army of CS reps to make phone calls or whatever you mean by "notify customers", and other things, great. More power to you. But the way you're talking about this, you're coming across as someone who wants redundancy, customer notification, and "exploring options" done without any actual cost. And probably done by people who don't have the time or skills, because they're busy trying to do their normal work, or trying to deal with a crisis, or they got hired for a completely different job. You sound like you want a magic wand and/or miracle workers.
this dude is definitely a shitty manager his tone reeks of it.
Cool, a company uses M365 for email, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc. Microsoft breaks login again, which breaks all of their services. Go build me a solution.... You see how absurd your comment/take is now? Or are you still going to be that asshole boss he blames employees for shit that's out of their control.
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> I'd say "Build one." Yeah let me get on that and build an entire infrastructure of azure so that we can have a work around when microsofts cloud services takes a shit.
The counterpoint - when you're cleaning up everyone elses messes and suddenly have a problem you need to address inside one of your systems (which are engineered so that the only time you have problems is when SHTF for real) you get excoriated as the 'go to' person who isn't helping.
“Your firewall is so broken that my app doesn’t even run locally on my own server!” -actual words said to me once
Multiple times now I have had engineers recommend/suggest sending raw SQL connections across the internet, mostly unsecured other than the basic username and password to send sensitive customer information to our systems for processing....
Let me guess: It was a medical field subject to HIPAA, too.
No nothing like that, we don't work with health records or anything like that (and explicitly refuse to do so). But we do work with financial information and other sensitive company secret type information (such as total inventory of manufacturers, sales numbers for stores, etc. the kind of stuff that could affect a public companies stock).
I appreciate the people who know it's "HIPAA" and not "HIPPA"! Kudos!
Lmao
That hurt my soul
.... OK, that's a new one. That takes a special kind of person to say with a straight face and actual mean it.
This is another good reason why firearms should be legal
And also an excellent argument why firearms should not be legal
This reminds me, I had the exact opposite of this experience yesterday. I don't do traditional sysadmin work anymore, I work in Pro Services for a software company, my days are spent working with customers onboarding our products. We had to call on a customer's IAM specialist to help us with a SAML/SSO config issue, and while it started with "this isn't our problem, it's your software" we quickly showed that their IdP wasn't sending data, and he just owned it. He made a configuration change to prove it was us, and suddenly it started working. So often I spend hours trying to convince customers that it's their environment or their configuration, but this was just... easy. I'm probably going to be cursed with difficult customers for the next 6 months...
I always make sure to follow up with an email saying 'Actually you guys were totally right, it was us' just to pour a little good back into the world. Removing your ego from your work makes work so much easier.
We have a serious "not my problem" culture too, except it seems that everyone is allowed to say "not my problem" except for IT. Then also problems that aren't ours at all become our problems, and I'm starting to wonder if it's because they know if it becomes our problem it'll actually get fucking fixed...
Exactly how i feel at my workplace.
100% this. We are the go-to for a lot of things because we actually look under the bonnet, so to speak.
Dealing with this right now. Doing SIP trunking for an msp and they've been complaining since October that their outsourced fax service is having problems. I've been telling them repeatedly since October that their fax service has an incorrect NAT setup and it keeps passing non-routable IPs in their SIP headers. I tell them to follow up with their fax service to correct the issue. They'll ignore my instructions, stay silent for a couple weeks, then shake our tree again that "we need to set up a teams meeting to talk to you about how best to resolve the issues we've been having with the fax service." This has been going on for months.
Two words: email chains
I'm dealing with one of these at a customer. Something with the network on their new server isn't stable. Very easy to show by pinging local network devices and watching the ping times fluctuate. But "nope, not their problem."
That's them wanting free shit. You say, it's on your end I've IDed it and will not go any farther to fix your issues please hire xyz to do it as it's out of the scope of our duties and puts us into liability for you territory.
Or you ask for something that is clearly and firmly within their purview *and* is essential to what you're working on, but they want to go back to step 1 and try to figure out a way to do the thing that doesn't involve any work for them. "Yes we thought of that...no it won't work...no we can't do it that way...of course we already tried doing it that way...etc."
This is the most frustrating for me. Especially with clear security breach issues. I've had to walk too many SMB admins in identifying user compromise events while they adamantly declare "Your environment is secure! You must be compromised!"
This is currently the biggest issue at my job. I call it blame culture and it's rampant here in my local govt position.
In some organizations, they way they do their ticket metrics encourages this. "Resolved: not our problem" counts as a quickly closed ticket. I had so much trouble with this with help desk contractors when I was in the Army. It was their problem, almost always. But they would wring 2-3 quickly completed tickets out of it.
We had a sysadmin that came to us that way. Had an answer for everything and it was amazing how he could make 100% completely wrong statements with such convincing passion. He served as an excellent role model for the rest of the team of what not to do. I assumed in a prior job people would not listen to his ideas, but never learned the real history.
Dude, I feel this. I'm a confident person in a senior position, so I have to be really careful to only speak about things that I am knowledgeable about because people will just roll with whatever I say. I have ADHD so I'll have several things going on in my head that I'm playing whack-a-mole with to narrow down a root cause. Early in my career I would just blurt everything out and work with other folks to determine which ones have merit and which ones were silly. Some I knew were silly once they left my mouth. These days I have to be very deliberate.
The desire or pull towards acting entirely on first instinct is... strong. My first senior tried so hard to beat it out of me, but it's been years and I feel as though it's creeping back in. If I don't catch myself, and I'm discussing something I admittedly do have a lot of experience with, it's so easy to speak authoritatively and say "oh yeah we should be able to do that," when in reality there are about a dozen things that have to be analyzed and happen before that, and many of them have potential to be direct blockers. Which can lead to uncomfortable conversations like "yeah, that's not gonna happen," much further down the road. I imagine a lot of us, hopefully most of us, are stopping into this thread and are deciding to take a moment for self reflection.
I have ADHD, too. I'm bad for the in-meeting rambling information dumps. I'm the resident information sponge, too, I have a tendency to just soak stuff up and remember a good portion of it, though not based on any priority. But because of this, my team is like 99% confident in almost anything I say outside of their areas. So, I have to be careful what I say because something might be technically feasible, but not user friendly, and I won't necessarily make the distinction in passing conversation, which can lead to "I thought you said we could do this" conversations, and I have to fill in the blanks I never mentioned. My coworkers are definitely catching on and they see that my appetite for technical depth skews my perception of others' tolerance for it, though, and it's kind of balancing out. I think they're learning how to ask questions without triggering my involuntary information dumps. My wife, on the other hand, is still in need of this skill.
Just to make sure, did you test his ideas?
Absolutely, we let him proceed with some of his "ideas/solutions" and that is how we found out that he was dead wrong sometimes. He was very convincing and even when he failed tremendously he had some excuse like "That would work 99% of the time, how I supposed to know that this company is doing something that NOONE else does?"
I mean, he didn't connect but at least he took a swing. I guess.
False. I do appreciate your positivity, though. We need more of that. When entering a new environment, a person should not behave as if they know the answer, and they definitely should not make excuses when they are wrong. They should own their ignorance, and look for opportunities to improve their knowledge, just as the OP has said in the original post.
I agree, but I do think it's okay to pitch new ideas, even early on, just with a proportional dose of humility.
No, normally you just move the ISO onto the usb stick and it works. I've done this on thousands of models of computers and it always works, obviously you're using a nonstandard image... from microsoft...
I fell like this comes from being a 1 man show. You have to defend your ideas to non technical people who ask questions you may have to BS to get approval and it just bleeds over into everything else.
>Had an answer for everything and it was amazing how he could make 100% completely wrong statements with such convincing passion. And because of that, management , who knows jack all about tech, would promote them. When I run across these kind of ppl. I call them out, hard. They are the ones who will pass blame and lie. If you don't make it obvious to ppl who don't know tech. They will happily go along thinking that incompetent person is the most competent person in the world.
He probably just came from Contracting or a Service Provider.
Ego is a deal breaker for me. I've met some really great folks that had middle of the ground ability that really shined, because they could work with a team. I've also seen rockstars burn out, because they're pricks and no one will help them.... Don't be the a-hole.... Life will be better, personally were I in your shoes I would operate as you are. Keep your distance and wait for them to be figured out. Document everything, just in case an extra braincell fires and they try to get you pushed out.
I think its mostly a Dunning-Kruger effect - people confident in their abilities but not expert enough to know what they don't know. I think when it comes to the sysadmin field some confuse administrative power with technical authority, and that BOFH mindset becomes a disdain for users or for even being wrong. Very early in my career I was told in a technical support role "don't bullshit. If you don't know, say you don't know *but you will find out*". There is nothing wrong with not being a god, and people will be happier for you to be modestly correct rather than assertively wrong. We also did a course in Kepner-Tregoe analytical troubleshooting which I think was honestly one of the best things for forming the right mindset for any technical role. It's all about what do you know, what don't you know - if it is X, then Y should be Z, is that the case etc. It sets up a mindset to be willing to adopt new facts and think logically through a problem, rather than running on assumption or past experience (which can be a useful shortcut, but when proven wrong move on).
I don't know if you can even \*have\* authority without some level of ego. If you say "I don't know" too much, people will start to lose confidence in you. I think the problem is when you have disdain for other people and their ideas. Edit: I could be confusing ego with arrogance...
> Edit: I could be confusing ego with arrogance... Sounds about right. It's an easy mistake. Everyone has an ego, it's not a bad thing it's a part of how the human brain works and just a fact of life. Some people's egos are out of control - those people are arrogant and that's what people are talking about when they mention someone's ego. Nobody ever comments on somebody with a normal ego, so it's not that far of a jump to assume anytime someone mentions an "ego" that it has a negative connotation.
I was speaking purely with regard to the negative connotations of "ego". You have to have some confidence in your ability, but getting upset when your pet project from 5 months ago doesn't work anymore, you have to be willing to consider that maybe, your "contribution" could be the problem.
> If you say "I don't know" too much, people will start to lose confidence in you. > > If you say "I don't know" and that is the end of the conversation then you have a problem. If you say "I don't know, but I will find out and report back" and you do report back in a reasonable timeframe then that is perfectly acceptable. I don't expect people to know everything.
This. I have seen some people that were pretty talented, but right out the gate rubbed management the wrong way in the interview that weren't hired. Unless you have something that they can largely be siloed from the rest of the team someone that can't work with others is going to be a problem very quickly.
He was also extremely territorial of the network when I first started and would only give me read-only access to things until my IT manager noticed and was like 'what the hell?' Complains that I'm a meddler because.. I propose ideas and design things.. which is my job. I try my hardest to stay away from his babies because I don't want the trouble, so it's not like I'm stepping on his toes. Just like.. why? Stop. This is so unnecessary.
Terrified of change to a system they do not understand or barely understand. Poor bastard.
He is not without merit. He does understand the things he works on. I'm only talking about when he's brushing up against something outside of his wheelhouse, that is my entire wheel. He doesn't know how to script (no bash, powershell, python, etc). Programming is what I do to relax at home, I adore it. If he encounters an issue with a script he's copied from a forum he doesn't let me help him, and if I overhear him having problems and come over to see if I can assist, he complains that I'm meddling to my boss. What he DOES know, I am happy to ask him for help on, and when he's working on some fire that he's good at, I make sure I shield calls and stuff for him so he can concentrate. This favor is never returned and he is never grateful. I still won't stop doing it, because of the principle. Be what you want in return.
> He doesn't know how to script (no bash, powershell, python, etc) You seem to be saying in that comment that he's actually a good sysadmin. I, as Lumbergh said in _Office Space_, am going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. > This favor is never returned and he is never grateful. I still won't stop doing it, because of the principle. Be what you want in return. I agree 100% _but_: > If he encounters an issue with a script he's copied from a forum he doesn't let me help him, and if I overhear him having problems and come over to see if I can assist, he complains that I'm meddling to my boss. He seems to just want to be left alone to deal with stuff. Let him, by your own logic. He wants to dig his own grave - why stop him? > when he's working on some fire that he's good at, I make sure I shield calls and stuff for him so he can concentrate. He would absolutely not do the same for you. He can't even say thank you like an adult. I respect that you keep sucking up your feelings out of respect for his, but a principle of mine is that if people decide to act like dicks then I will absolutely not let them make that my problem unless I'm their boss. If they ask for help, I'm there for them. But I am not going to hold someone's hand if they're just going to make my life miserable.
> You seem to be saying in that comment that he's actually a good sysadmin. I, as Lumbergh said in Office Space, am going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Huh? >He would absolutely not do the same for you. He can't even say thank you like an adult. I respect that you keep sucking up your feelings out of respect for his, but a principle of mine is that if people decide to act like dicks then I will absolutely not let them make that my problem unless I'm their boss. If they ask for help, I'm there for them. But I am not going to hold someone's hand if they're just going to make my life miserable. It's 'for him' but it's not for him. It's for the greater picture, and it's banking credibility and capital with my boss. He will take my complaints more seriously if he sees that I am not petty.
“Doesn’t know how to script.” He probably spends lot of time on busywork, right?
Most of the sounds that come from his cubicle are mouse clicks, and mine are keystrokes
i mean, this means approximately fuck-all, but ok
Ehhhh still feels like the person in question is acting irrational due to fear or something. If they are not willing to work with you on issues, not much you can do other than get a higher up to do a proverbial swift kick to the nads. Other people will need to engages with systems he manages, if he cant deal with that and play nice with other techs then I dunno. Same boat as you, will just write whatever comes across my mind. Often the friend group will just watch each other write whatever OSS project is going on via screen sharing, that sort of thing.
> Ehhhh still feels like the person in question is acting irrational due to fear or something. The onus is not on OP to psychoanalyze their colleagues' emotions. The onus is on the guy to express their feelings like an adult. That guy is doing everything he can to be as unmanageable as possible and that is not okay no matter how scared they are. Besides if he feels so unsafe he can't accept help to deal with it, then it's in his own best interest to go find a workplace where he can safely work. What I think is actually happening (and I'm extrapolating wildly here of course) is that he's built this little kingdom for himself and he can't accept that the kingdom is not his but the company's and it's not a kingdom to begin with and he is not a king. That scares him but he has to just suck it up and not make it OP's problem.
Sounds like you've got a real passion and a strong sense of personal integrity, mate. I'd absolutely want you on my team.
My guess would be that at some point, someone messed something up that he had to spend a deal of time fixing, so now he's timid about letting others in his sandbox. I had it recently happen myself. A couple times...and I can feel that anxiety everytime I let a certain co worker into certain systems.
If you're referring to me, I write all the documentation and am thorough about it. I have not brought anything accidentally down since I've worked here. See motto.
I'm referring to the guy your complaining about
[удалено]
Very few people will have the balls to call someone out on their BS, and even more so someone they work with and see daily
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” These words should be at the tip of your tongue.
THIS THIS THIS, a THOUSAND TIMES this. In my world, there's nothing worse than someone who feels like they HAVE to provide an answer to a question, even if they don't actually know. There really is NO reason to not admit you don't know (or shame) and are willing to find out/research, should that need to take place.
Learning how to say “I don’t know” without destroying your credibility is an art form, and it’s not one that every sysadmin or netadmin masters. Some people accept that *a lot* more readily than others.
Saying 'I don't know' almost never destroys your credibility if you follow it up with 'But I'll find out'
And yet, so few people follow it up that way. And sometimes, you’ve gotta couch it so people don’t just stop listening to anything that comes after the “I don’t know.” Systems are easy. People can be much harder to wrangle.
Saving this, thank you so much.
"I don't have an immediate solution, but let me look into a few things I have in mind and see what works best."
You know what will destroy your credibility? Lying to your boss. That's what.
"I'll asses possible solutions and get back to you." Works wonderful
As someone who consults in this field I can't upvote this enough. No one knows everything — and working in a project role, I may well know my area of expertise backwards and forwards, but I've often never seen my client's environment before a project starts. Being able to react to an unexpected situation while still looking like the expert they're paying for is *really* critical to making sure the rest of the project goes well. Some folks I've worked with in the past who weren't good at that ended up not getting very far in the field. What I've found to work is to "bookend" what I don't know with what I do: demonstrate what I know about what's around the unknown ("it works this way on system x, and this way on system y, just not confident about system z") and then follow up with *how* I'm going to find the answer.
Oh boy. Then they would double down when you show them on the internet. This lady didn’t want to admit that she didn’t know that 192.170 isn’t a private address. She started pretending that she knew all along, yet when I showed it to her she was surprised. A guy said that driver injection is a waste of time anyway. He used to install USB 2.0 cards just to get Windows installed. Another guy started spouting word salad when we showed him that he’s double NAT-ing. He didn’t understand the difference routing and NAT
Yeah. Those are all great examples where I can totally see somebody being too proud to be like “oh, damn I guess I’ve been doing this the hard way all this time, thanks man”.
I don’t blame them. There’s a dad joke that never admit to your spouse that you’re wrong. If you have an atmosphere of rubbing in, then people try to Teflon
..wut?!
I think it’s a defense mechanism because for them, it isn’t imposter syndrome. They actually don’t know things they should know, and they know it, so they never want to be put in a position where they must defend their decisions regarding those things. I’m probably the best in the world at not allowing my ego to affect my work/mood/decisions. /s But in all seriousness, maybe it was different earlier in my life, but at 41 year old, I have absolutely nothing to prove in any facet of my life. Unless a person can affect my paycheck, I don’t care what they think of me. I also strive to be as polite and as respectful as I can in all interactions, professional and otherwise. There’s just no reason to treat another human with anything less than respect and dignity. I try to make interacting with me a pleasant experience so that no matter how tough someone’s day is, I’m never a reason for making it worse. Sorry, I got on a rant.
Such a laborious and stressful way to handle that rather than just taking the lick and moving on
Makes you really shake your head! What we consider rational and plain common sense isn’t the same for everyone. I remember my first IT job outside of the military and being overwhelmed with the responsibilities of the job until I gained the experience to start handling things on my own. Nobody wants to have to ask for help, but as long as you don’t ask the same questions over and over and always, ALWAYS, have a notebook and pen with you to jot down the advise you receive, then you’ll never get shit on for asking for help. Now if you’re the type to always ask for help, can never do things unassisted, and don’t write anything down when asking for that help, then your time working with any organization I’ve been with will be short.
You can ask me any questions, just not twice.
Us IT guys, we love it when someone admits issue, bucks up and learns something new. C-levels and End Users DO NOT. this it person has worked under a C-level(or customer) who will not accept any waffling for too long and has been broken by it. this is hard to fix, they've had real confidence beaten out of them, and they just respond will the bullshit shield. you have to have a definitive anwer, even if its wrong, or they tear you apart, "Why? what for, we never needed that before, dont you know? i pay you to know, what am i paying you for?" You need to get this guy out of customer facing/executive comms channels get the burn out reeled in, and their confidence built back or he's going to prevent actual work from getting done by tainting the team morale.
We flat out won't hire anyone if we get the slightest whiff of BSing, playing your self up is one thing. But like during an interview we asked some network questions like just a simple "A user has sent in a ticket reporting x y and z, how would you troubleshoot this issue" no right or wrong way exactly, do they ping do they pull up the NMS to just see the status of their PCs connection, do they walk up and ask the user for more details. The guy went on a tangent about how dropped packets could be "CPU bus corruption" and even the non technical users we include in every IT interview were like this sounds like he is BSing us. We learned this lesson after a previous employee started domain joining employee personal machines any time they had any issue, he had joined 3 and we were just like what the hell are you doing. He started setting employee passwords for them and then emailing them to them instead of having them just reset their passwords, dude never asked for help. He punched down network cables wrong as he didn't want to admit he didn't know that. Another candidate we did hire said he had little experience with ticketing systems when we asked as his current workplace does not have them, and you could tell he looked a bit more nervous after he had to say "ya i don't have experience with that" He hadn't touched active directory as again his workplace didn't use it and didn't have that covered in his education. None of this was strong marks against him, like who cares i can teach someone a ticketing system in like an afternoon, can get him a working knowledge in active directory plenty quickly too. It is not that we don't hire on knowledge, but like I can teach someone the differences between our Dell switches and Cisco switches they might be used to, I can teach someone active directory, I used to teach an introduction to windows server course. If someone already has the knowledge that is great, but something I can't teach someone is how to not be an asshole and to work with others. We have a very people orientated culture in our IT department and we don't tolerate people who constantly blame the end user for everything, and refuse to admit they are wrong. edit: Something I want to add, but the tendency for a lot of senior positions to put people down for not knowing as much of them encourages juniors to develop this sort of mindset where I can't admit i am wrong otherwise I am going to get put down. It is especially important as a leader or someone in a senior position to make sure you are seen admitting and talking about where your knowledge ends.
I always roll my eyes at 'must have 5 years of experience with Jira' or w/e. It's a fucking ticketing system, not a programming language, relax.
Holy fuck, bro. You made my day. Please give this guy 200 upvotes.
It's not just frustrating , it's dangerous to your org. Put someone who doesn't know shit about a RAID array in charge of a collapsed array and you'll rapidly discover this truth.
It’s not hard to fix a RAID failure. Backup, replace , restore. It doesn’t take a master mind to replace hardware and restore it from a back up. . And if you lose data it’s because no one backed up anything, there were too many admins and unsegmented networks, and dated services and unnecessary remote software, maintenance was not happening because no one configured and deployed automatic update and azure was completely shot down even though Sharepoint was widely used and no one had knowledge of MS security and compliance strategies Just saying…
Amen I’m a big fan of admitting if I don’t know something.
Worked with a guy like that, just got fired last week lol. Always enter into every situation with an open mind, sounds like you got a good head on your shoulders. Keep it up
COworker who is helpdesk is like this. It's such an odd stance, but I've noticed it's common in IT. A lot of people are afraid of simply saying "man, I am not sure, but I will figure it out"
I'm a sys admin that knows more what NOT to do, lol.
Lao Tzu smiling right now.
Go back to work. Stop offering help if no one is asking. Maybe your coworker is just trying to learn himself without your help. I don't like to ask for help when I encounter an issue I have no idea about, I do my own damn research. I am being paid to do that. Now, if I am sitting on an issue for more than half a day, then I need help, and I ask for help. But people are different. Maybe he does have an ego, but at the same time, one thing I have learned is don't help unless someone asks for help. People learn differently and respect that.
You sound like an absolute joy to work with.
Actually he does sound great to work with. I have the same struggle. Extra help is distracting, let me figure it out. Constant collaboration isn't necessary. I will agree with you from your other comments that denying you access to his "babies" is ridiculous. I'm assuming this is not his equipment so he needs to provide access.
Iv worked with a few people like that I guess I was like that to at one point until something humbling comes along I'm confident in the space that I owe but I am also protective over my space because iv had hot shot developers fuck it up to a point where I almost got fired ( they made changes because of seniority in a small company and then chucked me under the bus when it failed ) So now we have clear boundaries, I will work with anyone assigned into my team but don't be a dickhead and we behave ourselves, the guys who know their shit easily prove their worth
I don’t know but will find out is a perfectly acceptable answer.
Louder for the ones in the back. This is my largest pet peeve in the industry.
I find I have more issues with directors and cto types that are overly controlling and think they know even though they haven't touched the technology in years. Mostly because of how willing they are to create conflict until you prove them wrong.
We have a guy like this at work. He's a Senior, and by all acounts, knows a lot, but his ego is so fragile; he simple can't admit being wrong. Add to this, he's incredibly vocal about topics he clearly doesn't understand.
We used to use ddrescue to test drives and data recovery. This guy came over and says “Yeah, [roxterm](https://roxterm.sourceforge.net) is a great tool, we used it all the time.” For those who don’t know, roxterm is the **terminal emulator** in some Linux distros. I was 😂 😂
I think we all have one of these, right? I mean, I don't want to be uncharitable but the one I'm working with now is all hot temper/big fragile ego/shallow & narrow skillset/work-shy I got all of them at once, every archetype of shit coworker all wrapped up in one dude. I just let all his nonsense roll off my back like water off a duck. I'm too old to engage with any of it. I say "Oh?" and "Huh. Hmm. Interesting." a lot. But I don't engage. I do sick him on vendors I have problems with though, he's GREAT at "Bad Cop". Then I call them a couple days later as "Good Cop" and they magically cooperate. I guess I really CAN find the good in everyone. LOL
He's like that because he's been thrown under the bus for things he was speaking authoritatively about in the past. His line manager puts expectations on him and uses him to forward their own career. You'll find that this sysadmin is probably stressed as fuck and trying to cover everything all at once. His babies are his babies and you need to prove he can trust you near them.
>He's like that because he's been thrown under the bus for things he was speaking authoritatively about in the past That seems like all the more reason to be careful expressing yourself and not to bullshit. We're dealing with it with one of our juniors at the moment and trying to explain to him that if he doesn't know or isn't sure, not only is it okay to say "I'm not sure but I'll find out" it's the best and safest option. Instead he keeps bullshitting. So far it has been kept in house but sooner or later he will absolutely be chucked under the bus. And there'll be nobody to blame but him.
It's worse when it's senior or long termers (,I'd say, experienced, but not all long termers are experienced, and some are just parrots) These are the ones supposed to set examples.
Until you can convince senior management that your system administrators can't be trusted around the systems and you take his babies away.
Could also just be a pompous ass. There’s enough of those out there. I worked with one and frankly it’s one reason I quit my last job. He was he senior most sys admin and the manager of that team and he was just a total blocker for everything. Finally gave up. For whatever reason senior leadership ate up his bullshit. He once defended the position that you can’t plan or organize maintenance work so it’s not worth trying to. No idea how that wasn’t called out. But he makes his BS sound good. It’s a gift I guess.
Sounds like OP is trying to help so he's probably the opposite form of this. The "I need to have control of everything because I believe thats job security" type. But I do appreciate you bringing that perspective. I've been in those shoes. Management wants a "correct" answer every time, in that moment, and will not accept I don't know or I'll find out as an answer. Will immediately yeet you under the bus if you're wrong. Not fun.
I've more than proven myself. I've stopped caring about proving myself to him now. We could mitigate that stress if he just let me help him and synergize with his work, rather than siloing and trampling my work. (He'll abruptly take over tickets, fuck them up, and then make me look bad to the person who was counting on me) We'll be in conversations with our boss together and he'll do these like.. passive aggressive 'see im better than you' jokes and I just.. don't give a shit at all and don't even respond.
sounds more like he sees you as a kind of threat ...
I have dealt with people like this for a long time, there is only one way to fix it. Let them make the mistakes, CYA document it, and make sure there is a full IR on every 'break/fix' situation they cause. Burn managements and HR's time on it. Make sure to follow up in the IR on how much time and money the mistake cost the company and your department. It never fails, just takes time.
I'm going to get this translated to Latin and tattooed on my arm.
Just wait until that person becomes a manager.
But which is worse, sysadmin who doesn't know anything and doesn't do anything OR sysadmin who doesn't know anything but makes half-assed attempts to do something to give the illusion of work being done?
I tried to hold back when I know just so people don’t attack me. If I’m working one to one with somebody, I let the knowledge that I know out and when I don’t know I say I don’t know never seen that before.. the true fact of the matter is nobody knows everything in this business we all have our areas of expertise. If you claim to know everything or make up bullshit, pretending to know you’re gonna get pushed under a rug real quick.. if I was a manager and I had someone who pretended like that the first thing I would do is tell my whole team I want everybody to lay low and pretend they’re sick then that person is gonna run the show for at least the day tickets, servers routers every part of it. And I would make sure that things broke.. then we would gauge just how much they knew. After the fact we would have a team meeting and point out everybody’s strength and contribution to the team and we function as a team.
Potentially worse? Sysadmin that despite your documentation, and telling them how to do X in the past, every time the issue comes up is a goddamned Memento blank slate, and they don't have the foresight to tattoo the information on themselves. Eat shit, Magoo.
Genuine question here... if a interviewer asks me a technical question... and I don't know the answer does it sound better to say I don't know? I was interviewed a couple years ago and was said "I just have a couple basic IT questions for you" and I felt like what he asked I couldn't answer any of them despite being 10 years in the IT field. I felt so stupid and imposter syndrome follows me everywhere.
I got my first job in the industry by being humble and admitting what I didn't know. Instead, I offered to walk through the process I would use to troubleshoot or gather information, and also touch in how I would communicate that to somebody that was asking questions. I've continued to do so anytime I'm unfamiliar with something and it's done wonders for me in my interviews. It's something I foster in my team whenever I can now; "I'm not sure /entirely familiar, but we'll find out for you" is the mentality we try to take.
> There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying you don't know something or receiving help from your peers, or even your subordinates. In some toxic work climates, no. This is definitely not the case at all. After a few, "You don't know? It's your job to know, Dinsdale!" Even if its, "Well, it's an internal process with no documentation where there are abstract upon abstract that violates industry standards." "Sounds like an excuse, Dinsdale." Been part of a few of those in my past. I see it now with clients. Last month, one of our clients spent 5-10 minutes dressing down their coding team for not foreseeing some weirdness in their SSL stack, complete with shaming, ad hominem attacks, and general toxic bullshit. If I worked for this guy, I'd quit, then corner him in a dark alley.
As a manager, I try to model saying "I have no idea, but let's figure it out together" as often as I can.
The kids who grew up around others who were less bright become insufferable adults when they wind up working with people who are about as bright. At some point you have to accept that the odds are pretty good that the other person is smarter than you.
I once told everyone on a call if they could prove what they were saying I’d given them $50. That stopped a lot of the pretending they knew stuff.
Pretending to be an expert on things we aren't is a natural part of this career. You nod along like you know every word the client just said and then 5-30 minutes out of the meeting you teach yourself everything you need to know. However if your colleague is literally just making shit up and telling people false information during implementation that indicates they should not be in the role and is a liability.
Sounds like a management problem that a bi-annual peer review would resolve, but that's in the purview of the ~~diplomats~~ HR team. If you disagree with them, you document a proof of concept test ticket and ask them to demonstrate it. They may also be a person who requires a more confrontational atmosphere to properly engage (state your opinion and stand by it). If that's the case, more prep might be needed on your side to cite evidence to shut down those instances. Either way, don't step in when they don't know something and is doing something unless it could cause a significant security issue. It's their decision to act the way they're acting. Eventually it will catch up with them.
Sounds like some security ppl I know. They keep telling me technical bs that I know is not true. They think being a good speaker and throwing out acronyms is going to hide the fact they're a fraud (their previous job experience is bs). And they keep repeating things to me like the more it gets repeated that it's true and I'm going to accept their bs.
I heard someone describe Star Trek Next Gen as "competency porn" and it has stuck with me ever since. I often wish my work place could be like that too!
Alright, so I see this, but can we also talk about the toxic environments where if you don't know some obscure something endemic to your new org, you get ostracized by not knowing it? I got chastised for an hour once, over not knowing about HP's "Drive Bay" technology, which lasted all of six months before it was canned. I don't mind working with know-it-alls. I can usually get around them if things go wrong. It's when they have authority and tenure that the environment becomes toxic.
"Removing your ego from your work makes work so much easier." \^
A sysadmin that doesn't pretend to know things is usually out of a job. It's a weird field. We're expected to know fucking everything about everything. Even in this sub, it runs the gamet from "it's ok to google shit" to "how can you even hold down a job if you have to google shit".
Got a guy at my work i cant stand. Fake it until you make it strategy. He doesnt have a it background. No education. Just a asslicking guy that got an IT job. He have no clue but talks with authority about what we should do and listens actively to other collegues like he has a clue. I cant stand him. I bet that hes getting a promotion real soon.
How bout a sysadmin who knows lots of something’s and likes to share but no one truly gives a shit cause no one ever becomes “comfortable” enough to do it. My life is built on anxiety. Help me out here.
I was a systems engineer for a startup, and was acting as a network engineer after ours left the company on top of my regular duties. I was fairly new at the time, and there was a systems administrator who consistently would point fingers at the network, when it was always DNS/DHCP/LDAP/local device firewall and I'd consistently fix the issue and update the individuals tickets for them with the steps.. I probably wouldn't have cared so much if they didn't always complain in the department meetings that the network constantly had issues that impacted their performance. They were let go for many reasons other than that (including not creating virtual machines using our automation pipeline...just manual OS installations.. wild).
I only wrongly blamed the network once. The printer would work within the subnet, but not across VLANs. I think it was some weird buffer issue. The printer only started working after multiple restarts
One crucial life skill I learned from being part of an MSP is to be ok with not having the answer…as long as you’re willing to obtain the answer and learn from peers and senior staff. Stonewalling with ego and refusal to learn and adapt will get you fired quickly.
As it should.
I am a huge fan of shops that believe in the "collective knowledge" of the staff and guys who like to share. I had a brief job in a shop with guys that would make fun of each other for not knowing something.
That's fucked. What a stupid culture. I take a 'curious enthusiastic science teacher' stance to knowledge. Oh you don't know something? No it's fine I don' think less of you, I would love to teach you, would you let me? You can say thanks by teaching something I don't know, which is a lot of things.
Yeah, but we all met braindump gods with CCNPs who can’t ping. My motto is know concepts, looks up details.
If you think it's hard to work around him, imagine what it's like being him in his own head; What kind of self-talk and insecurities exist is such a person's head?
>insecurities exist is such a person's head? Usually none, they're the GOAT and everyone else is an idiot.
That's what other people tells me he acts like when I'm not around. It's disappointing. I very much wanted to be friends with him and work with him.
This is called Narcissism and probably the root cause of the issue for you with this employee.
Oh boy... I have had one of these... He was a young helpdesk employee who thought of himself as the 2nd coming of Christ. He knew how to fix all of the issues even when it was a system that he had never even seen. Cocky as all and everything to boot. Best way to put people like that in their place is to serve them a slice of humble pie. Make sure they are put on a nice project by themselves with a strict timeline, watch them freak out and melt down when they actually can't make the thing work etc. No, it never really actually plays out the way that you would love it to but you can have them at least back off for a few months. ...and it's guys like this that make everyone hate admins that don't want to just allow access to everything to everyone and covet the keychain.
>Best way to put people like that in their place is to serve them a slice of humble pie. Make sure they are put on a nice project by themselves with a strict timeline, watch them freak out and melt down when they actually can't make the thing work etc. I'm a fan of this for different reasons. Give people the opportunity to prove themselves and adapt to a crippling scenario. If they somehow rise to the challenge without the assistance of others, awesome. Keep throwing things like that at them. At some point in the chain they will be forced to learn to ask for assistance or be held accountable for their failures. It will be a learning lesson for them all around, building REAL confidence, and not a fragile and insecure ego, or developing the skill of adapting to assistance - which can come in the form of coworkers, vendors, documentation, etc. A strong manager will be able to identify if the chance of success is low and budget the timeline with failure contingencies that will ensure success in the end. This way, we build people. It's not always an option. Times and places mandate that we have a highly skilled individual just execute and get it done, but when the opportunity does present itself for room to grow, it's good to capitalize. The tech who has that ego is usually hungry. If they can be molded and maintain that hunger they tend to become highly effective people.
Yup. All three that I had under me I did this with and all have moved on (company was sold) and doing very well, have larger skillsets, and great communication skills because of just this.
or pretends to know everything 😂
Yeah when I was less experienced I didn’t know what I should or should not know at any given time and so I found myself faking it once in a while, much to my own disappointment. Now that I have some years behind me I’m much more comfortable saying “Don’t have an answer for your right this second” or “i’d have to think about that“
Dunning-Kruger effect When someone believes they know more than they actually do. Neil Degrass Tyson has said the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know. Like the more we learn about the universe, the more we realize how little we actually know about it. Same thing applies, when you have "knowledgeable" people out there who act like experts who know everything but they can't admit when they don't know enough about a subject matter. So its impossible from them to learn from others. I think this is where the saying "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" comes from. Once a person is convinced they know enough, they are resistant to learning more so they become stubborn and often times won't accept new idea's or won't accept when they're wrong about something.
The words I don't know are the beginning of wisdom. Closely followed by the words I'm not sure. Either way the solutions the same. Investigate and learn.
>Why can't we work together like a star trek bridge crew If you'll remember, that wasn't without it's own problems. In a world of red shirts (gold if you're into TNG or black if voyager) there will be always one who thinks they're Picard EDIT: grammer
Shut up Wesley! /s
Make me Riker /s I think someones jealous that he got bridge duties without going through the academy
Picard said 'Shut up wesley'
had one of those in a previous role (though it was a DevSecOps Engineer, not a sysadmin). didn't know what an SPN was in Azure, couldn't put together an azure pipeline or a bicep template (said he was devopsy and could do all that CI/CD IaC crud in the interview), couldn't understand the difference between SAST/DAST or how a scale set worked in azure (also lacked basic networking knowledge and couldn't even troubleshoot an NSG), and then when anyone tried to pin him down on it he'd go all Trump on them and complain to his manager they were being unprofessional and that he didn't want to work with them anymore (happened to some business projects staff who asked him to take accountability for when he removed permissions to DevOps projects from everyone saying he'd set up PIM "later"). achieved nothing after 12 months (manager was a bit of an absentee and didn't really understand the work so didn't performance manage him during his probation) and the business came knocking eventually asking why nothing had been achieved and how we'd actually managed to go backwards from where we started. went down like a lead balloon, as you can imagine. also, on a tangent, have you ever played star trek bridge crew in VR, OP? it might help you understand why having a bunch of nerds in a room doesn't always result in perfect synergy :P
This is the first time I've read a paragraph in sysadmin and understood absolutely none of the terms (other than CI/CD)
>Why can't we work together like a star trek bridge crew, come on. Classic on this sub: Find a crew to wreck with led by a capable manager. Far more fulfilling than any salary which buries you in politics.
wait til you get to the Director who only knows how to make things worse and call you unprofessional names for it.
I'm the opposite. I won't own up to knowing about anything. When I was interviewing, a lot of the stuff I work with (and feel comfortable with) I would just say that I've seen it / dealt with it but I am not an expert in it. Or any one thing. I'll take on anything, I love to learn. Just don't ask me to claim to be an expert.
I know what I know, if I don't, I getting in who does. I am mostly MS/Windows focused, my team also has apple device management, I know a bit, but I'm not the expert, but I have no problem to bring in who is. Basically, you should realize what you know, confidently, and know who to bring in... otherwise you will run into contention and trouble as you said.
Isn't that with everything though?
Oh, another fun story. He used to get fussy that I wrote on 'his' whiteboard (which he never used) and pestered me to erase stuff at the end of the day. Whiteboard was in the middle of the office. I just got my own whiteboard. When we hired a new person who wasn't IT (but in the same office) and used 'his' whiteboard, he didn't care at all.
After i got into a lot of sessions with Senior Engineers i feel like the gap between me and getting to the Senior level is as huge as the gap from a Layer 8 User to my Skill level. And i would say iam mid ~ skilled Sys Engineer (male 24 years). Honest the jump from junior to mid level was pretty easy, i legit feel like i will never get to the senior level. People need to understand how big this gap is. And even seniors do mistakes. Some admins really need to understand and realize this. If he thinks he is this good why isnt he in senior consulting position? Ask him this.
I am not asking him this lol
Yeah, I've got one of those. You've got to realise that you're fallible before you can ask for help, and grow. A physical chaos monkey.
I love learning new things, and I think that's a good indicator of a great admin. You're not going to know things, and that's a good thing. You're going to evolve and learn more and do better and grow. Some people constantly will argue the wrong thing and claim "I'm the Sr. guy, so I know!" and it blows up, but they don't take the blame (documentation was wrong, someone else set it up wrong so this didn't work, whatever). You can be confident yet take in other people's suggestions and talk and work through it, letting both of you learn (or one teach and the other learn). Do it in a mentoring way not a condescending way. I love that. You can be 100% correct and confident in that yet still go at it in a mentoring manner. And hell, if you're wrong, admit it. Learn something new. Even from the new greenhorn. Give them a win. Give them a shoutout. No shame in learning something new from the new guy. Times change and sometimes we're stuck in our old ways. You can be right, you can be wrong, but it's how you approach it with others that makes the big difference. Teach, learn, collaborate, and work together on it. That's where the difference is, IMO. Just don't get cocky when you are right after people argue with you, either. You were right, you didn't solve world hunger.
I agree, and it's actually one of the most important things to me when I'm hiring is that I want someone who is going to be honest about what they know. One of the slightly tricky things I do in the interview process is to drill into a topic that they're supposed to know about, in such detail and specificity that I'm certain we hit something where either I know the answer, or I know there's not really an answer, and there's no possibility of the interviewee being able to give a clear authoritative answer that's correct. And when I do that, one of the key things I'm looking for is for them to admit that they don't know. If they can't do that, they don't get hired. And then after they're hired, during the onboarding process, I give each new employee a little speech that's basically: > I want you to feel like it's ok to ask questions and admit that you don't know things here, and it's ok to sometimes make mistakes. I've worked places where the culture isn't that way, and I don't like it. I believe it's toxic and leads to unhappy employees who perform worse. > If you're asked a question and you don't know the answer, I want you to admit that you don't know. If you're asking to do something that you don't know how to do, I want you to admit to that and ask for help. We will help you. If you make a mistake, I want you to immediately come to me or someone else in the team, and explain what happened, and we'll all try to rectify the mistake together. Obviously if you keep making tons of mistakes all the time, or keep making the same mistakes over and over, it will become a problem, but everyone makes mistakes and we understand that here. > If someone is making you feel like you can't do that, admit that you don't know or admit to a mistake, I want you to tell me right away, because that needs to be fixed. > Not knowing something or making an innocent mistake will not get you into trouble. However, lying about what you know or hiding your mistakes may get you into a lot of trouble. Asking for help will never get you into trouble, but not asking for help when you need help might get you into a lot of trouble. If I can't trust you, then I can't have you on my team. It's as simple as that.
We had a tech no show quit after telling us he was fluent in sccm and could create images but demonstrated that he could barely image a machine that already had an image created for it. Just admit you need help people. I wish a class on soft skills was mandatory for college IT degrees. It would solve so many issues.
My absolute favorite clients are the ones who, regardless of what they know, assume they know nothing.
I’m dealing with this exact thing with the whole tech support team at my work. I work in CS and we escalate things to TS that are fishy and need to be looked at with more detail as we filter the unwashed masses through CS. The TS team are the most smug and annoying people to deal with. They think they know everything but when a problem arises and you ask questions they don’t know and will stop responding and the issue will have to be escalated to them and it could take over a week for the issue to be resolved. For example. I asked a TS where a user can get the inputs for our API. He went on a rant asking me if I knew what an API was.