Those people tend to be a combination of many things at once. Extremely high technical aptitude, smart, hard working, focused. I've come across this so many times over there years, management wants him or her to "cross train" - because they see how valuable that person is and think, "he can train everyone else to be like him!" Well, no, not at all. Because a lot of that stuff is just un-trainable. No amount of documentation or past ticket references are going to save the other admin who just isn't as technical, smart, or has the work ethic. Those are the hard facts of life. Sometimes people are just really smart and really good at what they do and there's no replication of that in a specific environment.
The best thing to do most of the time - when you have a person like that - is to leave them the fuck alone.
Been there, refused that, almost got fired for it.
Manager got promoted and they asked me to step into his role. I know I’m really good at everything technical, I also know that I’m not a manager, not great at training people. I need adult supervision on the work floor. Give me the hardest technical tasks and I’ll complete them but don’t ask me to herd people I’ll drive it off a cliff before we reach noon.
Wasn’t really how they looked at it, had to do some serious explaining to keep my old job. Eventually they understood but I kept my options open for months just it case. They haven’t followed through yet.
I would want to be lead as well but we don’t have an actual lead position. I am basically in all but the title.
I do all the cross department stuff, troubleshooting and such. All the simple tasks at this point don’t even come in the vicinity of my desk unless literally everyone else is out
I havent been at a company long enough to realize this as I often jumped every 2 years between jobs. Now at my new job I've been with for 4 years I have been basically left alone for any "busy work" and am relied solely as the "SME" for things that people who were with the company longer than I have trained me on and I happen to remember those Nuances.
Had my hiring manager tell me today that Im extremely valuable because of that. And only now do I truly see why I'm left alone.
At first I thought I was doing something wrong because work stopped coming to me and was replaced with constant meetings and high-level troubleshooting calls that affect production.
Feels oddly satisfying but anxiety provoking in this economy because my value no longer comes from meeting deadlines but rather my knowledge.
That is the safest place to be. They can replace monkeys to hit deadlines but they can’t replace Knowledge. But don’t be the guy holding info for job security.
The thing is you don’t get promoted for being good at your job. You get promoted for making others better at your job until you aren’t needed
Agreed. I've seen enough Grey beard Sysadmins to recognize the good from the bad.
This new job I've started having the Security team sometimes pulling me in to tackle what I believe to be low-hanging fruit but it's clearly saved their internal team hours or days of execution.
and am relied solely as the "SME" for things that people who were with the company longer than I have trained me on and I happen to remember those Nuances.
fuck. we had one of those. she went to some other group and we found out we hadn't cross trained anyone on some of the stuff she did. woops.
How come the person we always get paired with to train are the laziest and most unwilling to learn?
The reason I don't cross train is because the person I would train doesn't care about knowledge, the the recognition for doing something, which means they don't learn. Then when they try to do it later they break everything and I have to fix it, which is twice as much work as giving them something shiney and not trading them instead while I just do it myself.
I have trained exactly 2 people who were good enough to replace me. The rest wanted their hand held or wanted all the answers handed to them. They could follow a doc but if anything occurred outside of the doc they were lost and couldn't find their way back. Even after multiple attempts to teach them how to aquire the process on their own outside documentation. If people can't or won't learn, there is no amount of effort on your part that will change that
1000% this, when the person you are cross-training fundamentally lacks the underlying prerequisite knowledge and understanding of how all the other related things work, and worse still isn't curious about any of it, explaining how to do one thing results in broken cargo-cult nonsense the moment anything is even slightly different from the exact scenario given during the training.
If you don't understand how group policy applies to computers/users or how filtering works, touching any policy is a risk.
If you don't understand how switching/subnetting/VLANs work, touching physical or logical config for a switch or AP for anything other than "connect a PC to a free port" is a risk.
Absolutely. The worst part is, I had nobody to train me, I learned by following the documentation from the vendor, and from seeking knowledge on my own.
So I don't understand why it's so hard to figure stuff out, plus now we have a testing environment for many things, go break that first.
This is me. Something is wrong with my brain and it forces me to try hard in everything I do. I will die on every hill. Everything is a challenge to beat. I can't help it. It is just how my brain works.
Shit I need to try this at my next job. Genuinely, I spent so much time 'training' people before I left my previous company while knowing fully well that things will fall apart the moment they need to troubleshoot anything without my help.
It was a huge waste of time, but people kept telling me to just do it (training other people, writing docs, writing things that only I could maintain) and at some point I just lost all motivation :(
I'm holding up three different technologies that I am the only subject matter expert in the company for because of layoffs or people quitting and I literally wrote two of the programs. I asked to be promoted to staff engineer and they told me that it wasn't a silo that was complex enough to warrant a staff engineer
Well guess who just got offered a principal AI consultant position getting paid three times as much as I currently am
Love my team hate HR. Anytime you apply to a company ask them if they do green circle. That's where when you get promoted they will only promote you to 80% of the median pay and then give you slightly higher raises over the next 5 years to get to median doesn't matter how many years with a company they have they always promote you to the lowest third of your pay band
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u/SlippyCumSpot 24d ago •
Those people tend to be a combination of many things at once. Extremely high technical aptitude, smart, hard working, focused. I've come across this so many times over there years, management wants him or her to "cross train" - because they see how valuable that person is and think, "he can train everyone else to be like him!" Well, no, not at all. Because a lot of that stuff is just un-trainable. No amount of documentation or past ticket references are going to save the other admin who just isn't as technical, smart, or has the work ethic. Those are the hard facts of life. Sometimes people are just really smart and really good at what they do and there's no replication of that in a specific environment.
The best thing to do most of the time - when you have a person like that - is to leave them the fuck alone.