Job Satisfaction

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Im just after some thoughts / ideas to be honest so here goes (Warning, this will be a long post).

I’ve been in my role for about 4 Years. Redundancy from my previous role due to COVID so I took the first role that came along. I was trying to move away from "support" but due to the pandemic and everything being so uncertain, I took a Senior Desktop Support role.

2 Weeks before I got made redundant, I got my CCNA which I hoped would get me a Junior Network Engineer role or would be a good starting point on my CV to really get some traction. Again however, there wasn’t much around for a couple of years during the whole pandemic so nothing came of that.

I enjoyed the role for the first two years, we had a great team, I was learning things like OKTA, CrowdStrike and I also got involved with some Juniper networking which was quite interesting too.

In December 2021 then IT Director asked me if I have a few minutes for a quick chat and he said that he had resigned. He is US based so only had 2 Week’s notice. He was my direct report, and I must admit, I was gutted as he was a brilliant manager. From that moment on, it was a downward spiral. We had a team of 18 across the world.... that went down to 4 in the space of 5 Months. There was me with 2 Years at the business, a guy in San Diego with 3 years, guy in Tel Aviv with 6 months and a new starter in New York with 1 Months.

It was absolute carnage! We didnt have a direct report and we were just pretty much putting out fires and just trying to do what we could. We were given a new Manager. The head of engineering took over IT and things changed quickly. I was asked if I would be interested in managing the team for a few months whist things got put in place which I was happy to do. Fast forward a few months and we had a new IT Director, me and someone else had been promoted to Systems Engineer with a significant pay rise and things were going well. We took on more staff, the workload was more balanced and I was enjoying the role.....Then we were taken over......

Things changed VERY quickly in the November. I went on Holiday for a week and there was effectively a cull. Mass redundancies, people resigning etc. We moved over the to the new company quickly and we were part of their “team”. From the off, it was crap. The four people from the new company didn’t want to share information, they had daily Slack Huddles for an hour or so with just the four of them and were not very forthcoming with information. It was just weird. This led up to the Christmas break that’s where things got very weird.

We returned to the office after Christmas to be greeted by an email from the new IT Director (Bear in mind we hadn’t really spoken one to one yet) Everyone was going to effectively be Helpdesk. Literally Password Reset’s, AD permissions and that’s it. My colleague from Tel Aviv was promoted to Sys Admin and the New York colleague was also going to be a Sys Admin, the rest of the team…Helpdesk.

To say I was p!ssed was an understatement so I reached out to the IT Director. He said that he had spoken to HR and they said I was Desktop Support (Despite my contract stating Systems Engineer) and that it was just a temp thing whilst we all integrate with the business. Give him 6 Months to get everything sorted out and we will revisit. Whilst I was annoyed at this, we were about to start IVF so I didn’t want to cause my wife stress so just got on with it…Then the IVF worked so I certainly didn’t want to rock the boat. IT Director and I had a catchup 6 Months later and he said that we will be keeping things as they are, but we are giving you an 8k wage rise…which I didn’t understand. Seeing as I have a pregnant wife who also wanted a year off when the baby was born, I thought I will just get my head down and power through.

Lizzie was born in December, and she is simply the best thing ever! From a work perspective I HATE my job though. I sit around all day waiting for tickets, I try and do more technical work and I don’t have permissions. This morning, there are 26 Unassigned tickets and I’ve gone through each one and I can’t do anything with any of them! Ive reached out to the IT Director numerous times and all I get is “We have more projects on the way” but nothing ever happens. I know sitting at home doing nothing sounds great, but I am so BORED.

I’m still doing my own qualifications, Python PCEP, Google Cloud Digital Leader and I’m working on my AWS Solutions Architect Associate. I’m going to build my CV in AWS and use things like S3, CloudFront etc so show that I can use AWS. I have three months notice period so I’m thinking from September, I’m going to start applying for a new role.

Id like to get involved in Cloud so Ive taken a DevOps job spec from our company website and added courses from our Corp Udemy account to that so that when it is quiet I can work on things like Docker, Kubernetes, Git, Ansible, Jenkins etc.

Sorry this is such a long post but I really needed to vent and it all just come out at once.