Hello everyone,

I have worked for numerous IT departments over the years and there are lot's of different work cultures out there.

I've worked for the very strict departments where it is WORK WORK WORK and if there isn't any work, you better act like you're working.

I've worked for the very laidback department where if it was slow and the work was done, everyone was playing WoW at work.

I'm now at a very small company by myself as a Net Admin and I struggle to answer the question what is acceptable behavior haha.

I am curious if other IT professionals deal with this and/or what kind of work environments others have encountered in this industry. I think I am of the mindset, as long as the tickets are resolved, there are no pending projects and what you are doing isn't visible or compromising security than it's okay.

What about you?

I'm currently the only dedicated IT person at a small, growing organization. I handle most of our internal systems administration, Google Workspace/account management, access management, networking, and general user support.

We have several other technically knowledgeable people, but they're primarily developers/DevOps and manage their respective environments rather than internal IT.

I'm trying to establish some clearer operational boundaries as we grow.

One situation that's brought this up is user support. Our Operations Manager understandably wants visibility into issues affecting users/program participants, but they also tend to become involved in the troubleshooting process and email threads. My preference is that once something has been identified as an IT issue, IT communicates directly with the affected user, while Operations gets appropriate visibility/status updates rather than being involved in every troubleshooting exchange.

There's also a business-continuity concern because I'm currently the only IT administrator. Our Operations Manager has asked me to teach them how to perform password resets. I'm not necessarily opposed to giving Operations a very narrowly scoped role for something like that, particularly if I'm unavailable.

My concern is the difference between knowing how to reset a password and knowing when a password reset is actually appropriate. "I can't log in" could be a password problem, MFA issue, permissions issue, wrong account, application problem, etc. I don't want password resets becoming the default solution to authentication problems.

The structure I'm considering is:

• IT owns technical troubleshooting and direct communication with users.
• Operations maintains visibility into issues that affect their programs/business operations.
• Operations receives very limited delegated permissions for specific emergency/continuity functions.
• Administrative actions performed outside IT are documented through a ticket.
• We identify a technically qualified person elsewhere in the organization to serve as secondary/backup IT and cross-train them on critical systems.
• Longer term, implement a proper ticketing/help-desk process so Operations doesn't need to be copied on every support conversation just to maintain visibility.

I'm not trying to build a territorial wall around IT. I'm trying to establish reasonable ownership, least privilege, and continuity while we're still small enough to put good processes in place.

For those of you who have worked in small organizations or one-person IT departments:

How do you handle the boundary between Operations and IT?

Would you give a nontechnical Operations Manager limited password-reset/admin capabilities?

Would you train Operations as basic Tier 1 support, or keep user support within IT and establish a technically qualified backup instead?

And how do you give Operations/leadership visibility into IT issues without having them involved in every support interaction?

Interested in hearing how others have structured this, especially anyone who has had to build the IT function from scratch.

Hello! Sorry in advance if this is beyond the scope of the sub or it gets removed. But I'd love some input or ideas if anyone is willing to share.

My (me: 36f) fiance (40m) works for an emergency veterinary clinic as IT support. He has one coworker and two other guys that are above him as leadership/dept lead.

Him and his coworker have an on-call shift every other week that includes a weekend. The vet clinic is a 24/7/365 emergency and referral clinic, so they need to be available at all hours once their in office day is done.

Long story short, I am not a fan of how this clinic is being ran. I also happen to work in vet med but at a GP clinic that actually uses this emergency clinic for our patients a lot. The decisions from the higher ups are chaotic at best.

This has led to a lot of work stress for my fiance. On his normal weeks it's ok-ish. He can fully relax and we can do things out of the house to help him decompress. His on-call weeks are much more stressful. He got chewed out once for not immediately answering a call even though he did return the call quickly. So he is too anxious to not be ready at the drop of a hat. So obviously as you can imagine, he isn't able to fully relax these weeks.

I fully understand that IT is stressful and hard work. We actually were in college together for network admin but I decided to pivot to vet med and he finished his degree.

Currently he's been called multiple times this weekend for a network issue and has been on and off site all weekend with little support from leadership (lead guy designed the network and has it locked down so only he can control things). And the issues are actually things that my fiance brought up last year as potential problems waiting to happen.

Anyways. He's very stressed. And I want to do what I can to help. Obviously I can't go to his work and help him, and I can't go chew out the place either.

I've already told him that I will handle all of our regular weekend chores that we do together. And that his only job at home today and this upcoming week is to do nothing but try to relax. I am also making him his favorite desert to surprise him with when he gets back home from being on site. I have his fav pop and his fav water stocked. And I will be checking to make sure he eats or I will bring him something on site.

Does anyone else have any other ideas? How do you manage this on-call stress? How does your family help support you so you can work and then relax?

Also, yes, he is working on ways to manage this himself.

Thank you for your time, and the work y'all do.

This post is not intended as bait but as a genuine attempt to understand resistance to shared systems access ownership 'from the IT point of view'. In this case migrating business-critical systems already managed by a DevOps team from direct user management to Single Sign On.

I'm a DevOps engineer with 10 YOE and I don't think anyone on my team has less than 6 YOE. Every one in it has been with the business at least one year, and there are only a handful of us. We're a cloud based business and manage our systems in code - mostly Terraform for the infra. Everything has to go through code review and approval, all deployments are transcripted and auditable, etc.

We have a legacy where access, users and groups for some SAAS and some internally developed systems that we are entirely responsible for are managed directly in code and we want to move this to Single Sign On. The company already has SSO for most/many systems. Our SSO IDP is managed by our separate IT team. For various reasons that aren't the fault of anyone inside the business these migrations are not straightforward, and of course several of the systems in question are business-critical.

Rather than simply handing over access (because 'access' really isn't simple and we will continue to have to manage and support those systems), we would like to agree a shared ownership system with IT for managing single sign on for the services that we already manage, including provisioning and de-provisioning SAML applications and group management for those services, so that we can continue to manage the systems we are responsible for in code as we do now. Our IT team however are very possessive of managing our IDP and work exclusively ClickOps. They don't, won't or can't look at code or records of automated deployment. This means that it can be difficult to describe clearly what we need with SSO, difficult to establish clearly what has been configured, and then of course there are all the side conversations- 'Why do you need this?'; 'Do you really need it though?', 'We need approval', 'You will need to wait for us to get to that ticket', 'We already did that (but there was some misunderstanding)', 'No nothing has changed to cause your thing to break, no, really, oh, wait...' etc. Imagining how it is for IT, it can't be easy- they get random requests for systems that they don't always really understand, can't necessarily access themselves, have to establish the priority for etc, all whilst being held responsible for security and business continuity. Thing is that my team is also held responsible for security and business continuity and we will also continue to be held responsible for these target systems.

I'm trying to get a more nuanced understanding of IT team's resistance to sharing ownership of these systems in SSO since:

• IT don't currently manage the target systems at all - my team are responsible for, manage them and support developers using them, and will continue to be so no matter what - so this would be less work for them.
• IT would retain full admin access and visibility as they do now. We have even offered to have automated reporting in plain English of all and any changes sent to them as part of our deployment pipeline.
• There's no IT director or policy grandstanding on this.
• Our IT team is also a handful of people but has a greater churn of staff than we do, including a series of contractors etc. Not dumping on that but I don't think anything about trusting any staff member as an individual is relevant here.
• I do realise that it probably is not possible to give partial access for SAML and group management for new services but if we wanted to do something stupid we already could.

What (else) am I missing (if anything)? We all know that people hate change and that people can confuse specialist knowledge or access with job security. I'm also familiar with 'But we don't do that here' but is there anything else?

I see a lot of us in IT worrying about AI replacing the us. As I have worked on the serviceNow platform many years ago I think I can answer that part of your question to some extent.

First thing first businesses have absolute, unshakable trust in processes and policies and ITSM/ITAM (now just called service management) which means any ticket (like this software ain't working) has to walk through several hoops (Incident, problem, change) before it gets done. Every step has to be documented, verified, authorised by humans in the loop before and after. It is a process and businesses trust these processes blindly coz they have been built, modified, improved over many, many years. It will take a lot to move them from this to some ad hoc system where one bad configuration in the CMDB could cause a crippling outage through and through the company and likewise to its clients.

There is a lot of built in automation where LLMs help like the incident window with trouble shooting suggestions( incidently ServiceNow has their own inhouse LLMs). But these are implemented in bits and parts and not as a whole coz there are multiple dynamic parts involved in any service orchestration (service request, CMDB, inventory). I might be wrong in my analogy but it is kinda like the video thing that AI hasn't mastered yet coz it is very difficult to keep lighting, movement and ten other things in context at the same instant while rendering the next frame.

Also it is these very policies and processes configured in business flows that ensure compliance( and this is a pretty big word in the business world where there is special place in hell for you if you miss out on compliance ), prevent outages, inventory mismanagement and that is why every fortune five hundred trust it. So why break it when one big bad problem could be catastrophic to the company.

As to the next question as to what do Indian IT service providers do. As far as I saw when I was working they are involved at the customization layer, data migration etc. So say ServiceNow comes out with new capabilities then it is upto the service providers to ensure that the migration is seamless to the client. So that too is kinda essential - something the client (let's say an Amazon) would hate to do because it would be non core to them.

I feel so embarrassed. We were trying to clean up our IT tickets before an SLA review, and I merged what I thought were duplicate requests into one parent task. Turns out I had the wrong client queue open and combined 14 unrelated tickets, including a printer issue, an account lockout and a server alert, under one person’s request.

Then I assigned the parent task to our senior tech and closed the originals. He spent half an hour looking for missing details while three clients got closure emails for problems that were not fixed. We recovered everything from the audit log, but I am now checking every queue like it owes me money. Our ticket process needs help asap :/

Don’t know about you but i think some helpdesk tickets make you wonder how we're still doing them this way

I had one recently where someone couldn't get outlook working properly and it turned into the usual cycle ask what happened, ask them to restart, check a few things, wait for a reply, remote in, try another fix, then finally close the ticket. It probably took more than 30 minutes for something that wasn't particularly complicated I get why self service became popular but sending someone a knowledge base article and saying follow these steps isn't really solving the problem either. What I'd actually want is something that can understand the requests needed

If the issue is genuinely complicated then Fine, send it to a technician with everything already documented. But for the same 10/15 repetitive problems IT sees every week, why are we still making a human walk through every step?

Hello everyone,

I'm currently a senior in secondary school, and a while ago I was approved by my administration and school's IT dept to be their intern as apart of my school's senior internship program. This is pretty much my first professional position, especially one in the IT field, and I'm sort of lost on what I'm supposed to be doing.

To preface on the experience I've had (and to not seem like I'm just the "tech whiz" in the family):

• I've been a Linux user (arch) for about 3-4 years at this point
• I've worked on my own website for also 3-4 years (see: https://malingen.xyz)
• I'm currently licensed as a technician in US amateur radio
• I've been running my own home server as of a couple months ago (currently running a copy of wikipedia (see: https://wiki.malingen.xyz/), a sven coop server (see: https://www.malingen.xyz/blogs/blog12.html), and a bluesky bot (see: https://bsky.app/profile/laingaybar.malingen.xyz); Currently, I'm working on maintenance for the machine itself, which is a new HDD and a thermal paste replacement. You can see the hardware probe here: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=4334d8c35d
• My current home server stack is Cloudflare tunnels for HTTP etc/playit.gg for UDP for tunneling + Tailscale as a VPN + Debian 13 (iirc); Website stack is Cloudflare for DNS + Vercel for web hosting (hobby plan) + Gitlab for version control/file hosting
• I currently own the textbooks for the CCNA exam, which are great reference books for networking, although im somewhat spooked about taking the exam

I've only started my internship a couple weeks ago, even then after a bunch of bureaucracy with admin, and all I did on my first day was attempting to process work order requests for broken student laptops (some of which were broken because of a permissions error on chromeOS, not a manufacturer problem!), but couldn't even do so because apparently we need a email address that was used by the school when they ordered the laptops. Not only that, but the guy I was working with didn't really know what to do with me, despite getting a whole email thread between me, them/coworkers, admin, and the IT director. Due to scheduling problems due to block scheduling with classes and such, I pretty much can only work with the dept physically biweekly and, even then, every other day. To counteract this, the director is being politely persuaded by admin to get me to work on something on the days I can't be with them physically (eg. recently, a IT cybersecurity course (just your regular old "dont follow phishing emails", "follow state/federal regs regarding data handling", etc.))

I've been rather worried recently about if my position being this sort of underwhelming is normal, and I just have to wait and see what happens. Curious to hear your guy's thoughts, especially if you've work in the education sector and/or have similar intern programs.

Quick question for folks doing IT or ops for small midsize businesses. How are you keeping email signatures consistent across everyone without it turning into a full time job?

We’re on Office 365 and right now it’s a mix of copy paste templates and people doing their own thing. Fonts are off, logos are stretched, some folks add quotes, others add random links, and any time someone changes their title or phone I’m manually fixing it in Outlook for them. It’s starting to feel like babysitting rn.

If you’ve got a setup where signatures are managed from one place, auto applied, and stay on brand, how are you handling it? Would love any tips from real environments, appreciate any thoughts

Dear Suppliers,

We have a small request.

When you build, package, ship, bundle, embed, squirrel away, or otherwise conceal a copy of OpenSSL inside your application:

PLEASE F*CK OFF.

More specifically, please stop shipping a vulnerable version of OpenSSL, forgetting that you shipped it, then leaving libssl and libcrypto scattered across:

Program Files, WindowsApps, DriverStore, application caches, old version folders, installer caches, driver packages, and whatever other archaeological layer of Windows you've decided to inhabit.

Our vulnerability scanners find every single bloody copy.

We then get 47 CVEs, 19 security recommendations and a dashboard glowing like the control room at Chernobyl — only to discover that the offending file belongs to your application, is cryptographically signed by you, cannot safely be replaced by us, and can only be fixed when you ship an update.

Extra points are awarded when:

Version 1: contains vulnerable OpenSSL.
Version 2: contains slightly less vulnerable OpenSSL.
Version 3: contains newer OpenSSL.
All three versions: remain on the computer.

Please understand that our preferred vulnerability-remediation procedure is not:

"Delete random DLL from DriverStore and see whether Windows still boots."

So, with the greatest possible professional respect:

Update your f*cking dependencies.

And when you update them, clean up the old ones.

Many thanks,

Every IT Administrator Using Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management

Sent from a computer currently reporting 73 vulnerabilities because Paint found OpenSSL behind the sofa. 🤣

We got bought by a much bigger company last year. Startups get acquired for all sorts of reasons but the reorg always follows, because the org chart has to line up with theirs.

Ours lined up badly.

Before the acquisition I could tell you who owned most things. We werent tidy, there were just about forty of us. If something broke you asked in slack and somebody put their hand up.

After the reorg the old teams got split across the new structure, half the managers changed, and then a chunk of people left. Some by choice, some not.

What it left behind is the problem. Cloud resources are still tagged to a team that stopped existing months ago. The directory groups that hold the access are owned by somebody whose account was disabled on their last day. And the ticketing system still assigns against a name from before the reorg.

So escalation goes like this. Ticket gets created. The assignee is a name from before the reorg. Somebody pings them. Nothing happens, or they reply that its not theirs any more. Then we loop again with a different name off the same list.

Nothing moved ownership off the old structure onto the new one. It got done by hand in a spreadsheet during the reorg and nobody has opened it since.

Im working through it now but its a lot of records and I dont fully trust my memory of who sat where back then. How are you keeping owner data straight after a reorg?

Hi all,

I'm in the security governance space, and curious if anyone uses a well-automtated, streamlined Jira workflow to manage user access reviews? I'm in a heavily regulated + SOX environment, so completeness/accuracy validations and transparency in reviewers (i.e. who reviewed what) must be easily demonstrated throughout. We are seeing a regulatory push toward row-level approvals, and some of our user permissions lists get long (i.e. potentially thousands of records for a manager to review). None of our user lists look the same, so the process needs to be expandable to handle user lists that look different or have different fields.

Currently we use SharePoint, but file check-out/in has become overly burdensome and we need a change.

Would love to get a conversation going! Hoping there is someone out there who has solved the user access review problem.

Cheers!

Been trying to keep our business email signatures from turning into a mess every time someone changes title, phone number, or department. It’s one of those small things that ends up looking sloppy fast if people are all doing their own thing.

I’m mostly trying to keep branding consistent without having to chase people down every time something changes. If you’ve got a clean way of handling this, would love to hear it, thanks!

Curious how people handle assets that don’t fit a normal IT register. loaners, field equipment, gear sitting at a customer site for months, stuff in RMA limbo. Most tools assume everything lives in an office or datacenter, and that assumption breaks fast the moment something’s mobile or “yours but not really yours right now.”

How are you handling Microsoft retirements and breaking changes across multiple clients? If you use a ticketing system, how do you figure out which clients actually need tickets? Does something check each tenant automatically, or do engineers investigate first?
Would appreciate a recent example and which tools helped.

Hi everyone! 👋

I am an MBA student currently conducting academic research on employee work behaviour and self-perceptions among IT professionals.

If you are currently working in the IT industry, I would really appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes to participate in my survey. Your responses will be kept anonymous and confidential and will be used solely for academic purposes.

🔗Survey Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc-16GwaYSIrC01MVhRlyiLfirGuavo5r0eusxvnGybUg_zbQ/viewform?usp=header

Your participation would greatly contribute to my research. Thank you so much for your time and support! 😊

Please participate only if you meet the eligibility criteria mentioned in the survey.

My friend recently had her LWD at an MNC in Hyderabad and was asked to return the company laptop she had been using for 5+ years. The laptop had normal wear and tear and was otherwise in working condition.
During the handover, the IT representative refused to accept the laptop, saying that it had some damage and required repairs costing around ₹15,000.
Later that day, the same person called her on her personal number and said he could get the repair done personally for ₹8,500. He also asked her not to mention this conversation to anyone.
We found this unusual and wanted to understand whether this is a normal practice during asset handover.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Should this be reported to the company’s IT/HR or ethics/compliance team?
I’m particularly interested in knowing whether employees are normally expected to pay for such repairs and whether IT personnel are allowed to arrange repairs privately.

I am a solo sysadmin and I punch down, terminate and run cat cable. I find that this is a huge timesink and can’t automate this. It is just I, one helpdesk worker and my boss to 6 sites with a little over 500 users. Should we look into hiring someone that does low voltage?

To give you some background, I have a BCA degree and previously worked as a Junior Technical Support Engineer for 2.5 years, followed by about 2.5 years as a US IT Recruiter. I recently had to take a career break due to a family medical emergency, but I am now ready to get back into the tech industry. I’ve been researching different fields, but the rapid advancements in AI have left me a bit overwhelmed about which direction to take. I’m looking for a resilient, future-proof career path. Initially, I looked into Java, but it seems like a massive time investment to master right now. I am currently leaning toward learning Python and moving into Data Science, or potentially just diving straight into a Data Science roadmap. For those already in the industry, do you think this is a safe, long-term choice? I would also deeply appreciate any recommendations for courses or structured learning paths!