I miss what IT used to be.
There used to be a day when the IT guy or team were just people who existed in the company. When something went wrong, they’d fix it. They’d spend their day being proactive and researching updates and software patches and seeing how they work on the network. They’d coordinate with sysadmins and security and the CTO for pain point mitigation and user communication. They’d act as the company’s computer handyman. And it was a great gig. Every job has its down time and being on the helpdesk would allow for a lot of it between the odd ticket or Slack message.
Now it’s all KPI driven, propelled by ticket counts and activity and escalation matrices and SLA requirements. Now everything you do is tracked and stacked with metrics out the ass, you can’t take a twenty minute shit without your manager wondering why your Teams status is unavailable for so long.
Case in point, I work in a small office. Less than fifteen employees. I’m responsible for all of our IT issues here. But because I run a tight ship, and since most of my users are savvy as it is, I hardly have any reason to leave my desk. Maybe an occasional thing, some little 30 second piece of advice or showing someone a button they missed and have to click, and that’s it.
My manager requires a ticket for that. That thirty seconds of brain time dedicated to thinking about something job related, has to be ticketed, noted in detail, cordially worded, closed with proper notations and categorization. It’s five minutes of ticket work for thirty seconds’ worth of “work”.
I’ve been informed that any time I need to reset a persons password, I cannot do it on my own. I certainly have the ability to do so. I can just right click someone’s name in AD and do that. Fifteen seconds of work. Hardly any effort.
Instead I need to make a ticket for it. I need to put down justification for the action. I need to escalate it to a sysadmin. That sysadmin needs to raise it with our CTO who then has to talk to stakeholders associated with the user or department and then approve of the change. Then and only then can the SYSADMIN initiate the PW change. But does the sysadmin set the PW and then inform the user? Nope, I have to still play the middle man and give them the info. Because it’s “not their job” and that’s “not the workflow”.
If I need to move a computer object in AD from one room to another, I have to do a similar ticket > escalation process except it has to be in the form of a change management request. Meetings have to be held to discuss this and other CMRs pending that week. Meaning for a simple drag and drop in AD and a quick physical swap between rooms, I have to wait up to a week or more for a meeting to take place and get this fucking thing approved.
It’s just fucking bonkers.
And then, if I’m not making tickets for every walk up or question it Teams message, I’m getting yelled at for not being active in the queue. If I’m not working and closing tickets for offices I’m 8000 miles away from and have zero visibility into, I’m not a team player. If I’m not updating tickets that have gotten absolutely zero traction for two weeks, daily, if only to just say “no update available”, I get yelled at and accused of slacking off. Like, do I only exist to send you notifications? Do I only exist to make sure the ticket system works?
I’m tired of being a ticket jockey. I want to go back to being an IT person. Free from KPI and SLA and stakeholders and micromanagement.