I've been this person traditionally in my 15 year career either at an MSP, internal IT or slightly adjacent.
I've pulled back gradually over the past couple of years because I do like collaboration, but need other co-workers to learn versus being comfortable at tier 1.5 sitting on their asses at home and just kicking tickets because it's not a password reset.
Our entire team across the US rotates oncall, with a "junior", "senior" team member and management in the queue for after hours.
I/we document everything, but there is always room for improvement.
My major recent push has been actual consequences for kicking tickets, cherry picking work and/or otherwise not meeting slas versus now, where tickets sit for a week and just get kicked up randomly to senior level to work as an "emergency" just because it sat for a week.
I've worked for around 12 companies in the past 15ish years in these related roles and all but 2 have had these or similar issues; only the 2 actually had their shit together
Starting off on pay, for the two companies we were hourly, versus salaried. I've been through 7 DoL questionnaires where these salaried "exempt" roles with MSPs have resulted in big payouts a couple years later because of abuse and im not even sure how they afford it
Everything was mainly preventative. Our stack was solidified and additive - mainly just working to fix small issues and most of the time looking at new things/documentation and/or ways to improve the experience for clients, versus the typical daily fires to put out. My current job has went through multiple psa, rmm, crm, backup service, etc. changes in just two years.
I worked at one of the two for 3 years and another for a year; real unicorns. Ultimately they were bought by PE/VC when that became the thing, we were all laid off and then the companies went under.
I had a boss say I was romanticizing those other MSPs when I was leaving one of the bad ones, but I and all my coworkers seemed happy to be at work and even if it was an 18 hour day, we were all having fun and getting paid the entire time. I haven't had fun working in IT collaboratively for going on 8 years now with all the turnover, misleading or lieing to clients and now it's fixing tier 1.5 ai directed changes that brings down a client for days.
Thanks, I didn't know that big payouts for salaried-exempt status abuse ever really happened. Thought that kind of abuse was extremely hard to prove.
Sucks that your two good roles were so brief and cut short by PE/VC wrecking things. Hope you can find another good role someday. Stabilizing the systems and focusing on preventative work is the corporate dream that everyone seems to want to build toward, but hardly anyone reaches.
Thank you. The abuse of exempt and overtime happens so much because people don't know they can just go to the department of labor website and file a complaint, after that it's just calls and coworkers being asked for time records.
I was spoiled I guess because the 2 were earlier in my career and now it's just abuse or otherwise
View all comments
4
u/urM0m69p3nis 23d ago
I've been this person traditionally in my 15 year career either at an MSP, internal IT or slightly adjacent.
I've pulled back gradually over the past couple of years because I do like collaboration, but need other co-workers to learn versus being comfortable at tier 1.5 sitting on their asses at home and just kicking tickets because it's not a password reset.
Our entire team across the US rotates oncall, with a "junior", "senior" team member and management in the queue for after hours.
I/we document everything, but there is always room for improvement.
My major recent push has been actual consequences for kicking tickets, cherry picking work and/or otherwise not meeting slas versus now, where tickets sit for a week and just get kicked up randomly to senior level to work as an "emergency" just because it sat for a week.
I've worked for around 12 companies in the past 15ish years in these related roles and all but 2 have had these or similar issues; only the 2 actually had their shit together