PinkFloydEffect
Regular Contributor
I was able to break into the enterprise/production environment a little over a year ago working in a call center with very little formal education, but I have over 10 years of PC and electronics repair experience. I was hired on as "desktop support" by a small company of ~75 employees, that appears to be in a constant struggle. It was exciting at first but got old fast working with a bunch of gross headsets and old hardware, needless to say I spend a lot of time wrapping cords for everything because the owner is paranoid if we leave anything setup it will get stolen...yet we have a huge turnover rate in the call center so I constantly have hardware returning to my office. I am extremely uniform so having boxes of spaghetti monsters does not fly with me. I work directly for the owner who is very aggressive and demanding at times, along with too much pride to take advice from anyone...WHICH MAKES MY JOB HELL. I thought this would be good experience to build a career from so I kept with it for a year to use on my resume but I feel like I am wasting my time now.
The owner has trust issues in general but other IT guys have made some big mistakes in the past which does not help. I am always fighting to manage ~75 PCs that are not even on a domain, and require constant manual changes and updates. They don't want scripts used, they want full GUI control of the PCs with no user restrictions/nothing managed yet expect them not to get messed up. They do not understand production environments and want all software up to date immediately, which is a bad idea they often update things behind my back that are not tested in a control group because they think they are fixing problems that way (that they do not even communicate to me to begin with) which causes tons of extra work to reverse their mistakes. I am stuck in perpetual loops of manual intervention via remote desktop, I am not even finished applying an update to all PCs before they throw a change at me that has to hit them all and I end up spending massive amounts of overtime because I am "overtime exempt" for a little over $30k a year. They are too cheap to buy real solutions or enterprise hardware so I am always trying to manage ununiform consumer grade garbage. They constantly come up with new ways for me to communicate with employees that I have no say in, threw me in an open group chat which turned into a nightmare of lonely employees that have nothing better to do than bother me fabricating issues based on the issues they read others are experiencing. That turned into a game of non-stop babysitting until they went to using individual private messages via employees personal emails. You expect me to waste time trying to help someone I can not even identify who sends me an email saying "it doesn't work" from
I am not learning any practical skills at this point, not making any more money, working in a toxic environment with a bad work/life ratio...it's time to move on, but where do I go from here? I think my only option is another help desk job, I am not qualified for a system admin role. If I had more time outside work I would teach myself active directory and move into system admin. I know I will never work for a call center again unless its a very nice one with good structure. I would really like to get away from end users and focus on networking since I do not enjoy programming or databases but still enjoy hands on with hardware. The thing is it is harder for me to learn something without using and applying it in the field as I work so I thought this would be a good job to gain experience in. I really feel I should choose my path now and go with networking instead of system admin such as my CCNA....but it seems like soo much bookwork (I do own Cisco 200-301). Should I try to get something simpler first like a Network+ or will I be wasting my time? I started watching Network Chuck and CBTnuggets but I am afraid I will forget what I do not apply regularly before I take the test. I have an architectural personality so I would love to design and deploy networks, and I have on a small scale, but I am not fluent in configuring them. I see a better future in networking not only do you get the best of both worlds, working with non-end user hardware and software but also using your creativity. Networks are the backbone of IT now seeing how everything is cloud based there will always be a demand on how to reach the cloud, right?
The owner has trust issues in general but other IT guys have made some big mistakes in the past which does not help. I am always fighting to manage ~75 PCs that are not even on a domain, and require constant manual changes and updates. They don't want scripts used, they want full GUI control of the PCs with no user restrictions/nothing managed yet expect them not to get messed up. They do not understand production environments and want all software up to date immediately, which is a bad idea they often update things behind my back that are not tested in a control group because they think they are fixing problems that way (that they do not even communicate to me to begin with) which causes tons of extra work to reverse their mistakes. I am stuck in perpetual loops of manual intervention via remote desktop, I am not even finished applying an update to all PCs before they throw a change at me that has to hit them all and I end up spending massive amounts of overtime because I am "overtime exempt" for a little over $30k a year. They are too cheap to buy real solutions or enterprise hardware so I am always trying to manage ununiform consumer grade garbage. They constantly come up with new ways for me to communicate with employees that I have no say in, threw me in an open group chat which turned into a nightmare of lonely employees that have nothing better to do than bother me fabricating issues based on the issues they read others are experiencing. That turned into a game of non-stop babysitting until they went to using individual private messages via employees personal emails. You expect me to waste time trying to help someone I can not even identify who sends me an email saying "it doesn't work" from
CandyGurl500@Moron.com with no name or a blank email body with the entire question in the subject line? When people approach me with a question in person I just want to hand them a hammer and a fire extinguisher now. I literally stopped caring and putting passion into my work, which is killing me to do.I am not learning any practical skills at this point, not making any more money, working in a toxic environment with a bad work/life ratio...it's time to move on, but where do I go from here? I think my only option is another help desk job, I am not qualified for a system admin role. If I had more time outside work I would teach myself active directory and move into system admin. I know I will never work for a call center again unless its a very nice one with good structure. I would really like to get away from end users and focus on networking since I do not enjoy programming or databases but still enjoy hands on with hardware. The thing is it is harder for me to learn something without using and applying it in the field as I work so I thought this would be a good job to gain experience in. I really feel I should choose my path now and go with networking instead of system admin such as my CCNA....but it seems like soo much bookwork (I do own Cisco 200-301). Should I try to get something simpler first like a Network+ or will I be wasting my time? I started watching Network Chuck and CBTnuggets but I am afraid I will forget what I do not apply regularly before I take the test. I have an architectural personality so I would love to design and deploy networks, and I have on a small scale, but I am not fluent in configuring them. I see a better future in networking not only do you get the best of both worlds, working with non-end user hardware and software but also using your creativity. Networks are the backbone of IT now seeing how everything is cloud based there will always be a demand on how to reach the cloud, right?
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