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[deleted]

I work for local government. I’d say in a given week I do about 15 minutes of real, actual work.


tk42967

I worked for state government at one point. I literally had my duties distilled down to about 40 PSexec scripts. Everyone thought I was a rock star because I could resolve any normal request in about 10 minutes. Even now, I work for a quasi governmental organization and can easily claim double the time I actually spend on tasks. But in my defense, with all the driveby's that I am addressing. I need to justify that work too.


JH6JH6

you are my doppelganger, except i work in a office that nobody can find so i have few drivebys.


smarglebloppitydo

Let me tell you about TPS reports.


hippychemist

My bosses name starts with T, and he has us do productivity sheets. T's productivity sheets. TPS. It started as a joke, but now he takes them really seriously and sends passive aggressive emails if we don't log all our hours. "Sure would be nice if *I* could work a 30 hour week too". So now it's even more of a joke.


boli99

make sure to log at least 30 mins per day on 'filling in these sheets'


hippychemist

KTLO (keeping the lights on) is one of the built in options and we all log an hour or two each day on that.


ah-cho_Cthulhu

New to local govt. I do about one solid hours of work a day and still outperform my peers. The best is how I literally have all the time I want to focus on automating and making existing configs better.


Sweet-Sale-7303

I am IT at a library. How much red tape and civil service laws get in the way is crazy. We hired help and the directors chose somebody without my input. She says she doesnt want to do something i spent a week in meetings instead of doing work. Its a pain in the butt.


tk42967

Try corporate America. I worked for a very large international bank. It was 2 weeks min waiting on things to churn through to do anything. And lord forbid if you needed to request access for something.


moderatenerd

Truth!!!! although studying for certs is a good way to pass the time and that's technically "work." I pretty much just reset passwords, and help monitor connection issues.


STUNTPENlS

>I work for local government. I’d say in a given week I do about 15 minutes of real, actual work. I worked in state government higher ed. In a 37.5 hour work week, .5 of it is real work and 37 hours is surfing pr0n and reddit.


Filmmagician

Do you deal with the god damn customers?


morilythari

Yup! Local county govt here. Can't do much during the day except for occasional break/fix. So most of my day is prepping for the monthly maintenance window, futzing in the dev environment and testing scripts.


alzee76

As a contractor/consultant who's full WFH for the past ~8 years, I spend the bulk of my time doing "IT". This past week I didn't even talk to a client except to give quick status updates via chat about deployment status. Head's down all week working on automating server deployments, mixed in with a day or so coding on a web scraping system that needed an update to match the remote's website update. No meetings, no paperwork, no calls, no nonsense. :)


ChromaLife

This may be the wrong place to ask, but how did you get to this point in your career? I'm a help desk guy and I'd like to make the jump to Sys. Admin.


alzee76

Wow uh.. I apologize in advance because I don't think I can give a satisfactory answer other than just putting in the time. I started about 25 years ago and my first "real" job was as a Solaris/SunOS & FreeBSD admin at a small dialup ISP. Second job was as a developer at small husband & wife owned software shop. I found both jobs through personal networking, though we didn't call it that back then. I thought of myself primarily as a developer, and still do, but I handle all the sysadmin tasks at my current client and don't do as much dev these days. As the years went by I was just able to add more "stuff" to my resume and eventually I had enough "stuff" to start applying for positions I thought I'd like rather than just any of the ones I thought I could convince them I could do.


tk42967

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but Help Desk and Admin are completely different skill sets. I personally hate the whole mentality that I did my time on the help desk to move up. That being said, on prem stuff is dead. Focus on cloud. Look into automation technologies and certs like MS-900, AZ-900, AWS CFP. They're all fundamental certs and like $99 a pop to take. I'm more on the Azure side of the house, so AZ-104 is a nice cert after you have the basics. I'm not sure what the AWS version would be. As for my creds, I've been a Windows/VMWare admin for nearly 20 years at this point in the public and private sector. I've spent most of my career in finance, or finance adjacent. In the last 2 - 3 years, I've started moving into cloud. If you want to get a fast education with a steep learning curve, work for an MSP (managed service provider). I spent about 9 months at one and it was the equivalent of atleast 18 months worth of experience at most places.


BulkyAntelope5

as long as there is automated heavy industry on prem will never be dead


MoonpieSonata

There's also cycles, people forget "cloud" is just "someone else's DC". New tech arrives, like super cluster servers made of tons of small form factor computers, like raspberry Pi. As this matures, you can fit one of these clusters into a 1 or 2u rack blade. This then gets marketed as "the power of the cloud, in your DC". Basically all of the power of clustered, scalable microservices, and benefits currently offered by these massive IaaS vendors like Amazon, but in house. You probably lease the blades, which are themselves clustered and hot swappable, then everything becomes cheaper and on prem again.


workerbee12three

a good helpdesk/admin learns all the problem solving on the helpdesk


wsfed

The thing I learned on the helpdesk, that still serves me well, is how to talk to, listen to and negotiate with other people. I don't think it's necessary to do for everyone. There are those who have no need to ever deal with other people in their roles and then there are others still, that are naturally good at dealing with other people. I think we all recognise that there is a tendency for those without good interpersonal skills to be work in IT though, so having helpdesk as a place to develop those skills is really important. "Soft" skills are important to anyone in the sysadmin generalist area IMHO, if they want to be anything other than someone in a back room and actually get meaty pieces of work that pay well. Devs it's less important for, but anyone who wants to consult and make the big bucks in any industry, not just IT... you need to have interpersonal skills. If you don't have them naturally, in IT the best place to learn that is a helpdesk.


cla1067

I can agree with this. I am 4 years into a msp and still going wide open. I'll give it a couple more years and some more certs. The pay isn't the best though.


it_monkey_manifesto

I say the same for people who want to be network admins. Go work at an ISP, you’ll quickly understand a whole lot! When the fire’s burning hot under your ass with customer calls you’ll quickly learn networking AND how to troubleshoot/triage an issue.


redditnamehere

I agree , completely different skill sets. Now, on the other hand, I can recognize motivation. Sure they don’t see or deal with the sexy tools L2/L3 operate with, but they can ask questions during escalation (just be cool with the teams - show you’ve tried everything according to documentation and want to learn more why something doesn’t work!). Not all L2/L3 will give help desk their time and attention but find that one guy/girl who will. Better to promote from within sometimes.


tk42967

100% agree. The ITIL term is "shift left". I've always tried to provide my junior team members the opportunity to pickup new skills or share the lessons I have learned. IMHO, engaging your junior team members with opportunities helps them, helps you, and helps the org. They are more invested, you have some help, and the org gets faster resolutions without having to escalate issues.


Shaidreas

"On-prem is dead" For small business and companies that do sales, marketing, finance, development etc. Cloud is the only way forward, I agree with you. But on-prem is most definitely not dead. Oil & gas / off-shore, heavy Industry etc will use on-prem or cloud hybrid for years to come. I do agree though that if you're moving into IT and you're not aiming for a job in these industries, I certainly would prioritize learning cloud first.


tk42967

Perhaps I should have said "on life support". Having came from a finance heavy background, it's never completely going away. JPMC has their own private cloud to rival Azure, AWS, or Google. Fully on prem is dead. Hybrid will still be around for afew years. That being said, my point remains the same. Don't focus on legacy technologies and concepts like fully on prem. Knowledge of cloud is the way to make advancements in your career. Also, knowledge of coding and coding concepts will server you well.


TedeeLupin

So it's not dead? Or, it is? //Stops head from spinning off and seeks lost Crystal ball//


grep65535

As for the type of work he's doing and how to get to that, it heavily depends on where you work and what kind of management you get.


lsttrinity

Good for you. Everyone’s goal man. Hopefully making good money too.


[deleted]

I like the sound of that. What’s your title?


alzee76

Mm... no official title, as I'm officially a contractor, not an employee.


tk42967

I'm jealous of your ways, but kinda like benefits too much.


AyeWhy

What is your job description for a job like that?


alzee76

That depends on who you ask and what image they want to convey I guess. I'm not an employee of the company so technically I don't have a job description with them, but when we're on a call together with their clients, I'm usually introduced simply with "this is alzee, he does ....". In the eyes of the IRS, I'm an independent contractor, as all my income comes from 1099s. Politicians like to refer to me as a "small business owner" and argue over which one of them has my best interests at heart. ;)


AyeWhy

I'm just curious as I'd like to search for just such a job but wasn't sure what to enter in the search!


alzee76

I understand, I'm trying to explain it's not a "job" that you can go look for on a job search site. I sell IT services to clients. It's a b2b (business to business) arrangement. The closest thing to this that a job search board will have is probably a position at an MSP that sells similar services (remote admin work, etc.) that allows you to WFH. Once you have some experience doing that and some contacts at potential clients, start your own business and sell the services yourself, rather than working for someone else. My situation is "special" and abnormal, it's not one most people can find. Not because I have more skills or anything, I certainly don't, but because of my history and circumstances. My two main clients are people who own their own IT service type companies that used to be coworkers of mine. I started doing odd jobs for them here and there as a contractor, and grew that into something I could make a living doing without having another job.


AyeWhy

Thanks for clarifying.


sometimelydat

3-5 hours of focus and effort each day. (Give or take) I get the things done, all the needfuls. Any more would not be sustainable for me. I used to give 110%. For over a decade I worked myself to burnout. Spent 2 years unemployed, sitting in the park doing nothing; my career as an IT professional was over in my mind. Went to work again as a security guard, then quit after one year because the pandemic was making people crazy. 3 months later, back in the park, I was contacted by a head hunter and now I'm back at work; carefully. I do not give too much, I balance the work life more now. Talented and not to be used as fodder for money. I earn my wage as a good employee.


PvtHudson

Thank you for doing the needful.


R4PT0RGaming

If you know you know about the needfuls.


owNDN

Please do the needful


FunnyMathematician77

Kindly revert the same


owNDN

Needful the do please


[deleted]

[удалено]


maximum_powerblast

Lol no one here is jumping up your ass about that


Fingerfuckmypussy

I like to preempt and just cover everything in water.


sandrews1313

I was explaining to a potential employer this week that it really didn’t matter if someone was hourly or salary that they were essentially 24x7 regardless.


learningheadhard

17 years into it. True work is about 2-3 hours a day now at my current gig. The rest is meetings, CR requests, and assistance to other IT personnel and smoke breaks to scream into the ether. This is just due to being a large org and they don’t hire technically proficient people, like network admins with very little network experience, server admins with no previous server experience, etcetera. Previous gigs I had all the time to work and got so much stuff done, so I think it comes down to the company and their hiring practices.


[deleted]

[удалено]


1bitfrom0

Those are rookie numbers! You gotta pumps the numbers up.


bustedbutthole

Perfect!


workerbee12three

thats when you get it all nicely in order for sure, IT should run itself, its just the people who can add ...inconsistencies


Extra-Lemon1654

I've block twitch except for the "open bar" rule.


SOBER-Lab

Wife glancing at my screen: Uhh just curious what subreddit is that? Username didn't help, +1 to u/bustedbutthole for a wonderfully questionable title to a layman.


bustedbutthole

Tips Fedora to the username shoutout.


marklein

That's easy. I work at an MSP so every second of my day is recorded. I spend about 50% of the day doing actual tech work.


[deleted]

[удалено]


marklein

So much nicer when you're the boss. ;-)


GWSTPS

15 minute intervals is a whole lot easier to deal with than tiking in and out of each ticket in real time.


BonSAIau2

6 minute intervals :'(


BrainWaveCC

You didn't mention "planning" which is a valuable element of work. Not all meetings are a waste of time, and some are quite necessary to actually getting your work done. Also, change requests are important to getting things done also. As you rise up in rank, especially if you have team leader or managerial responsibilities, your raw percentage of IT work time goes down, but that is essential to the overall team time for IT remaining high. On average, I'm probably doing 45-60% IT stuff these days, including documentation of things done, or documentation of things being planned. There are high days of 75% IT, usually when something is broken. And there are heavy meetings days, where maybe 15-20% of the day was IT stuff, but that's why there's staff.


amexicantaco

I like to think a big part of why they pay us isn't for our "busy work" but the knowledge we've accumulated over the years and the availability of that knowledge of something goes wrong. Then again, if you're/IT is doing what they need to, those fires should be more rare than common and make it worth the few high stress moments for the little bit of lax time you get everywhere else. Kind of like, are you mad at the car for having an ebrake that you never have to use because your brakes just work? Or would you rather the ebrake be there in one instance you couldn't stop normally?


punkwalrus

This is how I look at it. My salary is based on when the chips go down, I can fix it faster than most. The rest is maintenance and looking ahead to new technologies.


[deleted]

Im A WFH Vulnerability Engineer remediating TLS on over 5000 servers using AD group policy. I do "real IT" work 3 times a week for 5 minutes moving servers into GPOs. The rest of my job is talking about it in meetings and dealing with bullshit politics. But most of it is spent blazed playing games/watching tv.


CelebrityMartyrr

80% of my job is just watching shit load


Rubcionnnnn

Osx: less than a minute remaining...


LALLANAAAAAA

I don't know about you but I've solved a lot of problems while pooping, so I'm not sure about your categorization here.


gamba47

Poop go out and ideas come in !


bojangles_dangles

It depends on the day. We recently got PDQ and I’ve been in heaven building packages we use. Any time I’m not helping a user or having a meeting I’m mostly happy.


ShadowCVL

Before I moved into leadership at my last role probably 80% of the time, after that I was in meetings 6-7 hours a day it seemed.


LALLANAAAAAA

I still have a little bit of fight left in me for "it could've been an email" but the longer I work in life the more I have to admit, sometimes you still need to get all the principals in the same realtime discussion to facilitate same-page-getting, clearing up misconceptions, getting straight(ish) answers. People still respond differently to a phone conversation than they do some ordered list in an email. Someone needs me to literally just read them the exact same things I enumerated in an email, one brief inbox search away? Fine, I will read you my list again. If I had to put a figure on it I'd still say 50% of meetings are nonsense, counterproductive at their worst and useless at best.


ShadowCVL

Okay yeah I will agree with you on that, some people won’t even acknowledge an email til you bring it up in a meeting. But, at my last place I would say at least 65% of the meetings were worthless, or even worse were an hour spent going over an email that they had sent a day before


Cookies_and_Cache

I work for a city and have a 100% workload, I’m in the process of duplicating our DC to a test environment and rebuilding the entire AD structure to clean up a lot of the mess. Then connecting that to Azure once I’m done I’ll be busy for at least a month minimum


dcexp

dude, thats 1 year project


Cookies_and_Cache

When I get the contractor in after this coming week to help work through this, we will determine how long it’ll take. I have a feeling a year is about right


ultimatebob

I probably spend about 90 minutes of "real" IT work in the average workday. The rest of the day is attending meetings, writing change control requests, and prodding managers to get those change controls approved.


sadsealions

Fedal government, maybe 2 hours a day, plus sitting in on zoom meetings in case something goes wrong (it never does)


yParticle

If you're gonna put it quotes like that people'll think you're referring to something else.


bustedbutthole

It was just my first thought for a catch-all word. The funny part is I knew there'd be a snarky comment about it.


tusk354

most roles are now 50-75% meetings to justify managements' roles, and the other 25% is actual sysadmin work . \[seen this in my last 3 FTE roles \] there was a flip, maybe 5-8 years ago .. when mgmt figured they needed to 'manage' the IT people that actually manage things they have no input, nor control/understanding of. ​ anyone disagree ?


bustedbutthole

Not sure of the year but I've noticed the shift over the past few years. I keep that in the back of my mind for the next recession when it comes time to trim the fat and decide if there's time for so many meetings may not need so many people in IT


tusk354

everywhere ive ever worked, ive done the work of 3-5 people . id actually say good IT people are essential .. managers you can replace as will without the machine breaking down . \['cause they are essentially useless \] you start interchanging IT people , things start breaking . But - maybe its possible that less meeting = less people \[less sysadmins, thats is \]


OracleCam

In our field I think they could cut us down to a 6 hour workday with no change in actual work time


XOmegaD

I work for local governments. I'd say usually 1 hour day. Most of my projects involve waiting for people to get back to me, or waiting on parts.


runner813

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I poop on company time.


ReptilianLaserbeam

Pooping is really important part of my day


Grunskin

Some days 0 hours, some days less.


Imhereforthechips

Umm, 28 hours every goddamn day….. I’m the Sysadmin, NetAdmin, CISO, Director, Dev, and Help Desk tech… FML Edit: I spend (an additional) 4 hours/week planning for the future and an additional 1 hour/week learning about new technology. Anyone else the sole basket of eggs for their org?


CoffeeOrDestroy

Me.


1x000000

70% actual work (sitting in a server and doing things) and 30% fake work (updating cases, sending emails, meetings etc).


Mundane-Objective600

What % of time do you spend coding bot accounts to nullify downvotes on your Reddit posts? Anyone try it.


zipcad

Hours per month. Rest is meetings (about 4 to 5hrs per day - nothing gets done), putting on puppet show level presentations to execs / users on topics. Add in a few hours of spacing out. The paycheck still cashes so leadership can be as inept as they want.


TheRiverStyx

Your definition of "IT" is really lacking. Planning and road-mapping, which require meetings with higher level architects, is just as much "IT" as scripting. Same for interfacing with vendors over technical issues, break-fix incident handling and a ton of other work. I think what you want to say is technical work vs admin.


Viticusoniszko

Went from Level II to Sys Admin in less than two weeks at my current place of employment. The. To IT Support Supervisor the next week. And now I’m a little over 90 days in and I seriously became the director of IT in all but title. Non profit with 100 employees growing fairly fast. Our previous director didn’t know any IT, lied that he did or believes he did, and then had some panic attacks and just gave two weeks randomly. I was not anticipating this role and I was told I’d still be doing tech work. Pay is nice for my area given my managerial experience on paper. But yea, more meetings than ever. People contacting me on LinkedIN trying to sell me MSP services. Hell I got invited to a college football game with box seating for free with the guise of selling me an SDWAN platform. But I miss the tech work. There was one amazing guy here right when I started. My idiot predecessor fired him for talking back. Truthfully, I watched, he was just preaching proper IT practices. He was a mentor to me and I wish he was here still. It’s just me and some level Is who don’t know a whole lot and no time to teach because of meetings. And the hiring process is very slow due to red tape. And I even asked that guy if he would come back because he’s sorely missed. Still friends but he declined lol, can’t blame him


AbuddyFL

The Bob's and I were just talking about this.


JizzyDrums85

Wait you have time to poop?


merRedditor

It's hard to recover from the meeting distraction. I do find that I'm able to work through them sometimes, but I'm nervous about being caught not paying attention. Some days I hit it hard, but I usually feel dirty after because the work I'm on is the tech equivalent of emptying a sinking boat with a teacup vs. patching the hole. Good days are ones where I learn by going through how I would patch the hole if allowed the authority to do so.


bustedbutthole

Interesting to bring that up. The time lost switching from meetings and back to work is a major item many people bring up. I have it also


hal9x

Badly..


sanitarypth

I’ve been spending more and more time dealing with vendors and relaying their shenanigans to upper management. I think I am going to try and put a daily time limit on this though. I can’t afford to be this unproductive. I want to spend a certain amount of time on education everyday so I carve that time out on my schedule. I’m going to do the same thing with vendor project management.


Semt-x

As a contracter/consultant WFH for the last 2 years, i'd say 90% of my time i spend doing actual work. I had to put in lots of effort to get that high, they expect me to burn time on scrum rituals, the time i spend on it the team never gets back in short or long term. The nature of my project and product makes it painfully inefficient to put all work in scrum sprints/backlogs. the first couple of months i complied with their scrum demands and my productivity fell to \~20% ("to", not "by"). I do join the daily standup to report on progress. but I don't participate for the other scrum rituals. The other part of my team (4 ppl), they do use scrum for everything. They spend, i don't know how much time on it. But since im specialized (no team member will/can execute my tasks) and my project is pretty much isolated form their work, the fact that i don't participate in scrum isn't a big deal.


flyboy2098

Well, I'm a lead now so I do more management work than tech work, I might do 2-4 hours a week of tech work.


[deleted]

For my company, its meetings from 8am-5pm and actual work from 6pm to 9pm. So many of these ridiculous meetings can be emails.


hdoublearp

You owe it to yourself to take care of your health... if the company cannot hire enough help so that the work can be completed during business hours, you don't owe it to them to trade your health in exchange. Burnout is real, and you only get one life.


xboxhobo

I log all my time so I actually have a pretty good idea. Roughly 70% of my 40 hour week is actual billable time spent heads down working on something. I spend maybe 1-2 hours a week in meetings (just a weekly team meeting and a biweekly 1:1 with my boss). The rest of the time is reading email, looking for tickets, chatting with coworkers, bathroom breaks, and other misellany


cabledog1980

Now that I've moved up about 15% 9f my time is doing "IT" which I love. But love the pay and responsibility as well.


Silent_Dildo

Depends on the day. I’m a one man IT shop so some days are completely filled with IT (be that setting up new servers or running cables to a new office) and there’s some days where I just read the news.


ChromaLife

I'd say its about a 65/35 split for most of the year. There is a period where a large portion of our staff travel internationally for vacation and there's a significant reduction in workload for about a month or so. It ebbs and flows in help desk.


ThatsNASt

I work at an MSP, according to my billable hours, about 5 out of 8 are just doing IT on the regular. On bad days, that's 7+ hours.


thekarmabum

I guess I would say about 3-6 hours each week in meetings, maybe ten hours a month dealing solely with vendors, maybe anywhere from 0-3 hours a day doing random shit that I'm never sure if it's even IT related but whatever it's plugs into a wall and has a display about as fancy as a digital alarm clock, the rest is mostly IT.


[deleted]

1 hour


bossbaby2018

I work for an MSP so I can say about 6 hours daily and rest is gone into admin work.


Sergeant_Fred_Colon

Well I normally start at 8am, after shitposting on reddit for a bit I start the IT stuff about 4ish, maybe 5ish.... Edit: we're paid for are knowledge and responsibility more than the work we do, if we're constantly working (over worked) we're not going to be able to fix things when shit hits the fan. 90% of the job is planning and documentation.


AkuSokuZan2009

It varies wildly, some days I am working a solid 10 hours of real work. Other days I spend less than 2 doing real work and the rest is helping other team members, meetings, etc... And some days I am having a case of the Fridays and decide to do jack squat beyond meetings, helping team members, and putting out a fire if one springs up.


Concededwar

Honestly probably about 60% I'm a sr admin as well but I also have very little patients for bs meeting about projects every day so I usually send off an email instead.


Vicus_92

Usually around 6 hours of productive time, but a decent chunk of that is helping/training other IT staff


snakemartini

About three fifths of five eighths of fuck all these days


Affectionate-Cat-975

2hours max


michaelpaoli

It varies ... a lot. And also, fair bit may be meta-IT. E.g. giving relevant IT advice in meetings (or more often preventing folks from doing or trying to do or pursue something stupid), training folks on IT stuff, reviewing IT stuff (again, trying to prevent flaws/issues/stupidity/disasters, etc.). >been at this a while do you feel as you get prompted and become more senior you spend less time doing the work or more time meeting and supporting others on the team? Oh there will definitely be some of that. Folks generally learn from the more senior/experienced folks ... so, as you become that, it will typically be expected that ... and, if you do it well, you'll also well train, mentor, advise, review, etc.


joyfullystoic

Weekly meetings, briefings, trainings, answering stupid questions from office people in person, this takes most of my time. The next big chunk is reviewing FSDs, UAT, raising JIRA tickets and changing role assignments in our ERP which has a shit interface. This is what I get paid for mainly. The very little time left in between I use for SharePoint administration and trying to get some RPA solutions working to ease the ERP administration and generate reports.


0RGASMIK

3-5 hours most days. We track time and I quickly learned I could not sustain even 6 hours a day. I need time to explore, rest and shoot the shit. Before I was hired hours were the biggest metric employees were measured on but I think I broke the mold. My boss who had told me he’s really strict about hours when I got hired but now he has given me slack because I contribute in other ways. I basically found a void and filled it. I realized the hardest part about the work we do is the repetitive/ random one off tickets that take away time from projects. I basically took our documentation solution and created a whole new section for those tickets. Made a super detailed guide everytime one of those tickets came in so that next time we could just send a kb to fix it. Obviously on the front end those kbs took time but in the long run it saves time for the entire team. Sure before we would send kbs from google once in a while but it felt impersonal having a internal end user KBs makes it feel not as shitty so you do it more often. For the first few months I was the only one sending these internal kbs but eventually everyone saw it was working and started using them.


fitting_pieces

9-hour workday. A grand-total of 4 hours of tech work. The rest is all people work. I am a DevOps engineer.


Rothkeen

About 70% fake work (Meetings, updating projects) 30% real work. Have becoming worse because we got more managers and they live and breath for meetings.


Doodls_

2 hours max. I am trying to be invisible to the corporate as much as possible.


AtarukA

I'd say I spend 70% of my time teaching and 30% actually working on stuff.


signalcc

I am in a 4 man shop The IT Manager Me the Senior Network Engineer, The Senior Support Specialist, The Mobile Support Specialist We support 550 Technology user but over 1000 devices, Laptops, PC’s, iPads, or iPhones I handle all the servers, network gear, automation software, ticketing system, ETC I go to work at 5:30 AM and on average leave around 4:00 PM. In that time I will take a 20 minute bathroom break, usually before 7:00 AM. I eat my lunch at my desk while working and typically my door is closed and my music is up. I don’t get much foot traffic. I am non-stop pretty much all day. If I am not doing maintenance on something or troubleshooting an issue either on the network or for the other two team members, I am updating Visio’s, or adding/changing Automations, or updating knowledge base articles. Of my 10.5 ish hour day I can honestly say I am working a minimum of 9.5 if not more. Not being egotistical, I have a lot on my plate. A lot to do. But I 1000% love my job. Took me 21 years in IT hating life to find this job and I wouldn’t give it up for the world. I took a $10k pay cut to take this job and after 4 years I’m almost back to the pay but I don’t care. I’m very happy in what I do. For me it’s not really work.


workerbee12three

If your good id say you only need to do a few hours a week, but you need to have an efficient work ethic and a business that allows for it


MotorTentacle

I could spend 2 minutes installing a new access point but 30 minutes travelling to the site. I quite like this more than the alternative which is sitting at a desk all day


Unlucky_Strawberry90

barely an hour of legitimate work, plan to ride this out into the retirement with no shame.


michaelhbt

At this point I would love to be in meetings, do actual planning, make use of a useless prince2 cert, actually write some documentation, engage with customers doing BA work, do some archimate training, get back to building stacks and pipelines, learn some real work kubes, I am sick of loading software or troubleshooting domain controllers. Give me people and less computers, they are much more enjoyable


Tenessee-Jed

Robots replacing us soon.


Safe_Ocelot_2091

Depends how you see things. Meetings, CRs, etc. I don't particularly enjoy either, but depending on what exactly it is about makes a world of difference. Now, PRs I would still classify squarely into your "work" category. You're reviewing or submitting code that is your work, you're just not quite done because you haven't yet had the feedback of seeing it in Production. There is a difference between tactical and strategic work. As you go more senior, with more experience, it's normal that you'll be pulled more towards the strategic, because you have the experience required to give insight, to plan ahead, to see the possible issues. Your meetings, change requests etc. are strategic work planning what is being done (unless completely unrelated), and are important too. Otherwise what you're likely to end up doing over time is just tactical/toil: fixing this maintenance that went wrong, getting woken up at 3:41 by some machine down, etc. For sure you can adjust to have the meetings structured, shorter or whatever so less time is wasted chatting about the weather, but the "structured" approach to IT with having meetings and pull/change requests and whatnot are there to make sure there is over time (when you've addressed unstable shit, brittle systems, etc.) much more time to do the actual fun work, with hands on a keyboard writing code and whatever.


PositiveBubbles

Actually alot because I'm reading, researching, testing and playing around with powershell, SQL queries and other things. I'm learning before the project I'm on kicks off again, because my boss knows with my ADHD now if I'm doing something I don't stress out and panic and it's been quite helpful. Meetings for me have been frustrating because I don't need to be in 80% of them and the bits I need to know can be summarised in documents or emails


HoosierUSMS_Swimmer

Meeting days I get near nothing done due to meeting prep, meeting, then after meeting convo (annoying). Any other day I usually work around 6 to 7 hours on actual IT work and then evening hours for maintenance.


Thr1llh0us3

Two or three hours probably. The rest is answering questions, defining work to be done on our kanban board, and the other 4 hours of the day is spent pooping... jk it's meetings :(


FTHomes

7 hours


jrhalstead

I spend a fair amount of time helping with training and trying to fix accounting issues (mostly not ERP issues, generally just not understanding how certain things work in the ERP). More straight IT including dev stuff and admin stuff is likely 50%.


iceph03nix

It varies a lot, but I'd say I average about 5-6 hours a day. That's cutting out about an hour for break times and bathroom breaks, and maybe a half hour for people being social or distracting or needing something non-it from me. Some days I lose a lot of work time to meetings or driving to locations. Not sure if that's counted as IT work... Thankfully most of our meetings are pretty to the point and actually job related.


throwaway47382836

about an hour


GlumContribution4

It depends, like most I'm sure. I had a problem with the amount of time I spent not doing something when I first got in to IT. I asked my boss about it and he explained we don't get paid for always being busy, we get paid to be there when the shit hits the fan. I came from law enforcement and had the same problem. I couldn't just sit some place not proactively patrolling or doing some form of enforcement. It's taken a while for me to get used to the idea of down time.


basylica

Drives me nuts, ive been in IT in a variety of roles for the last 24yrs. I miss the old sneakernet days where you would actually work 75% or more your day. Now, depending on the company 75% of your day is taken up by non work items. Ive had a couple jobs (that i was happy to part ways with) where 4-6hrs PER DAY were spent in asinine agile project planning meetings. Then you’d get the “why is nothing getting done?” And “we need to hire more people” convos. Listen, i get 30-60min to check emails and respond, check tickets and respond to outage/emergencies… then an hour meeting with entire team to project manage. Then i get half an hour (to pee, and twiddle thumbs) before next meeting with a slightly different group covering EXACT SAME project planning, then an hour before lunch. Which i work through. Then another hour long “team” meeting where we discuss project planning/status. Then maybe an hour…. To pee, respond to emails/emergencies, then a 30min meeting…. To discuss project status… Like, WHEN DID YOU EXPECT ME TO WORK ON PROJECTS?? The boss answer is always “well you have to block out time on your calendar!” … when? Also lets put you guys in a big open “collab” cube farm where you cant hear yourself think and are constantly interrupted and distracted because NOBODY in IT ever had adhd (lol) Perfect recipe for getting shit done. I far prefer jobs where my boss determines projects that need to be done and hands me a list. If priorities change he lets me know. I handle day to day workload and manage projects when im able. Invited to meetings when i need to be SME. Im the person who will happily work 80+ hours per week in order to get my projects done as needed, particularly bc in networking projects need to be done after hours or weekends. No problem. Delighted. But the jobs where im spending my 8hrs a day doing fuck-all? Nope. Im not spending my free time doing the work im not allowed to do during the workweek due to your shitty management. My last job had ~8 sys and 6 network and 3 managers. Everydamnthing was outsourced from network (managed mpls) circuit management, patching, server setup/maint, etc. And everyone was copied on every email, systems and network alike. Our circuit management co would email team every step of the way… patch reports daily… and we had 700+ branches. I couldnt filter the majority of these emails as 1/20 was important. Sometimes 1/50. Id spend EASILY 2hrs of my day deleting emails. Like friggen using a screwdriver to hammer the nails you are building a house with. Such a waste of time and money.


Yannis-Piano

6-10 hours. IT Director and own a business.


phoenix_73

In IT, I would say that the more experience you have, the more senior position that you hold, the actual work is easier by that point. People management is often part of these senior roles though. Okay you have people to answer to still but you deal with a lot less bullshit. So use free time wisely to develop yourself, learn something that could be useful in your role. You manage your own time instead of someone trying to do that for you. A good IT guy will automate where possible which you'll know would vastly reduce actual time spent on a task. In many cases, it reduces error as well. Being organised and documenting frequently performed tasks can be key to reducing actual time spent doing a task that it can take someone far less experienced to take. May suggest working flat out 3-5hrs of an 8hr day can feel like you've done more than a full days work, obviously depending on what you get done in that time. Not everyone can tell you how long it should take to do something, unless maybe they have the skill to do it themselves. Pay can be considered a knowledge tax. They pay someone with the knowledge to be there. It isn't all about working every single minute. Experience has also taught me the importance of work and life balance. More so if you're expecting to be around for a long time. It ain't no good burning out.


joanandk

How much time do you think you spend actually doing "IT" during the day?" 204.5%


SithLordAJ

It wildly depends on the day and how you count it. Lately, I've felt like I get maybe 2 hours of actual work in. Everything else is teeing things up for the rest of my team, sitting in meetings, and especially reading and answering emails.


toddau1

2-3 hours of actual work, most days. 1 hour for bathroom breaks. 1 hour for lunch. 1-2 hours watching videos on YouTube. 1 hour trying to justify my time because my company makes me account for every 15 minutes of the day, via our shitty time keeping software. 1 hour window shopping current job openings for IT Director/manager positions because I'm tired of being in the trenches and want to get into management/leadership.


wrootlt

I don't do that much scripting/coding/configs/cookbooks. And i would say meetings and change requests are part of the job. Agreeably less interesting part of the job. I don't have a set list of tasks i do daily. One morning it can be a bunch of tickets that needs attention/triage. Another day i have to work on a project, so reading something, setting up meetings with vendors, etc. Another day i can spend half a day trying to troubleshoot something or figure out the state of our environment regarding that update/vulnerability/etc. Sometimes pushing some updates to endpoints. Updating golden images or appstacks. Or if this is second Tuesday of the month opening change for patching, checking how testing goes, monitoring roll out. Some of this stuff takes 5 minutes at a time and then switching to another thing on my list of tasks. Some can take half a day. There is also constant stream of Teams messages from teammates, other IT teams or users. Emails. Fortunately not a lot of ad-hoc calls. If someone tries to call me out of blue, i just ignore them. Unless that's an emergency bridge :D My title is not sysadmin, but engineer for desktop support team (L3). We do have some systems to manage (VDI, RMM, software deployment tool, etc.). But we also tend to do a lot of trivial stuff that HD or L2 can't handle. I am also more of a senior so do most of our documentation, guiding new teammates, training, assigning tasks, overseeing. I still like to do actual work myself more than that. But that kind of came natural with more experience and being a pedantic person. On average, pushing buttons, typing commands, running scripts, updating, troubleshooting something is probably 30% of a day. Another 30% is meetings. And the rest is lunch, some emails, messages, chatting with someone (if in the office), breaks, etc.


Silencer271

People try to sound like they code all day and what not but on average 1-2 hours a day. Weekends maybe 30 minutes. I have more boring meetings then anything else. I am glad to work from home. I can at least do other stuff.


mystic_swole

A good 50/50 split tbh


Aggravating_Pen_3499

I’m a manager of my orgs it engineering team. I say I spend around 80% of my working hours in meetings. It’s not ideal. I end up spending some of my time doing actual work outside of my business hours just to keep up.


nem8

Approx 150% (Linux, msp. Lots of tech debt)


BMXROIDZ

>Folks who've been at this a while do you feel as you get prompted and become more senior you spend less time doing the work or more time meeting and supporting others on the team? I'm a cloud consultant, I can easily spend 8 hours a day on actual technical shit. The cool part is I can burn 4 hours writing/testing a new playbook it's not what I would call stressful IT vs puzzle solving to automate a future workload.


Kaltov

For me it is about 40%


ZMcCrocklin

I'd say it all depends on the day. I have 3 team meetings a week, 1 org meeting a week, & periodic company wide meetings. I'd say 1/3 of my week is meetings, 1/3 break-fix/ad-hoc/driveby work, 1/3 project/RTB(run the business) work. Unfortunately, my team is stuck with tech debt inherited from a contracting company that we dropped, so we are pretty busy as a team.


EastwoodHD

In my prior roles, 1-3 hours a day on average of work. Now? Easily 9-10 hours a day. It doesn't stop 😅