Hi Reddit, I come to you seeking advice and condolement in my time of frustrations and stress.
I work at a tech company that sells office equipment to other businesses.
I originally was just in the call centre providing tech support to users, but management decided to put me in a “hybrid role”, where half the day I'd be providing tech support to users via the call centre and the other half I'd be working as a network admin. This was their solution to solve their staffing problems – have one guy do 2 jobs.
Sounded great when it was pitched to me and I lunged for it thinking I'd learn tons of new stuff as a network admin. But in reality they've got me doing 2 jobs whilst paying me just for one, and it's absolute torture.
For starters, I'm not actually doing any network admin work. Our “network” is a complete mess. It was setup by our previously underperforming network admin who did a shambolic job of setting it up.
There's no documentation or diagrams showing how it works, no cable management in the rotuers/switches, the Domain controller is so outdated (it's still running on Windows Server 2012 and some in house apps running on Windows Server 2003).
Because it was set up so shit from the beginning, my boss doesn't want us touching it at all, since if we “break” anything there's no way to put it back together since we have no idea how any of it was set up. The network hangs by a thread.
So instead I'm just in house helpdesk.
This is where I'm dying. During the day I have internal users forming a line at my desk, demanding help from me as I take calls in the call centre. I can neither focus on the calls nor helping the user. I'm constantly making mistakes since I can't focus on the customer over the phone since I have someone throwing a tantrum at my desk because they need me to fix some issue. I'm copping flack from both sides.
Furthermore, there's no funding for IT. I'm constantly refurbishing PC's as old as 2010 since they don't want to spend. The wallports are damaged, naked exposed wiring everywhere which I touch with my bare hands when setting up user's IP phones etc.
There's 3 colleagues in the IT team and they're not much help. They don't know how to do much, get frustrated very easily and constantly just pass tasks off to me despite knowing I'm occupied in the call centre half the day. Lots of finger pointing when things go wrong, not much solution oriented mindset, more of shifting the blame and looking good to upper management whilst doing it.
I've had enough. I'm burnt out and utterly miserable. I'm planning to quit.
Furthermore, this company doesn't seem to really give wage increases either. I know my fellow colleagues are still on the same wages they were on several years ago when they started. Some have had promotions, some have also taken on additional roles like myself but no change to pay. They're still on whatever they were several years back. I earn the highest in my team since I started the latest, so my pay is what the current industry standard is right now, whilst theirs reflect the industry standard at the time they started.
IT is great field but the working conditions suck and that's been my overwhelming experience.