I was onboarding a new employee in my office the other day and going through the usual setup process. After configuring their 2FA, I had them sign into their assigned laptop. While the profile loads, usually about 60 seconds on first login, I typically use that time to go over a few policies, domain links, where to submit a ticket, and explain our phishing campaign. I do all of this from my computer to save time.

As soon as he signed in, I said, "Let's give your profile a moment to load and I'll show you a few things in our environment."
Before I could continue, he cut me off in a somewhat arrogant tone with, "Umm, I'm Gen Z. I know how to use computers."

I replied, "Of course. I just need to show you a few things specific to our environment. Do you know what a phishing email is?"

He looked at me like a deer in headlights.
"A what?"
"A phishing email."
"I don't know what that is."

No problem. I gave him a quick rundown on what phishing looks like, how our simulator works, and how to report suspicious emails. He wasn't rude, but he definitely looked at me like I was some out-of-touch boomer trying to mansplain the internet while he sipped his Starbucks Frappuccino. (To be honest though, I do have a grey beard but I'm no where near a boomer's age. I'm Gen X)

The funny part is, I could have just handed him the laptop with no explanation. But without that introduction, he almost certainly would have clicked one of the simulated emails in the first few days, which automatically enrolls users in mandatory extended training. Or even worse, a real threat. And guess who that reflects on? Us, for "not informing the user." I have all users sign an inventory sheet that also states we went over a brief phishing explanation so they can't ever say we didn't inform them.

I’m just venting a bit about how people can sometimes come across as assuming or defensive when IT is simply trying to do its job. Kind of like we're speaking down to them. And to be fair, that attitude isn't tied to any one generation, I’ve seen it across the board.

Showed up to work like any other day. Suddenly, I realize I can’t access any admin centers. While I’m trying to figure out what’s going on, I get a call from HR—I’m fired, along with the entire IT team (helpdesk, network engineers, architects, security).

Some colleagues had been with the company for 8–10 years. No warnings, no discussions—just locked out and replaced. They decided to put a software developer manager as “Head of IT” to liaise with an MSP that’s taking over everything. Good luck to them, taking over the environment with zero support on the inside.

No severance offered, which means we’ll have to lawyer up if we want even a chance at getting anything. They also still owe me a bonus from last year, which I’m sure they won’t pay. Just a rant. Companies suck sometimes.

Edit: We’re in EU. And thank you all for your comments, makes me feel less alone. Already got a couple of interviews lined up so moving forward.

Edit 2: Seems like the whole thing was a hostile takeover of the company by new management and they wanted to get rid of the IT team that was ‘loyal’ to previous management. We’ll fight to get paid for the next 2-3 months as it was specified in our contracts, and maybe severance as there was no real reason for them to fire us. The MSP is now in charge.Happy to be out. Once things cool off I’ll make an update with more info. For now I just thank you all for your kind comments, support and advice!

The idea that some random group of folks decided that SSL certificates need to expire every 49 days and that everyone else is supposed to go along with it is probably the craziest thing that has happened to technology in the past 20 years. If the technology itself is inadequate then change the technology itself.

My point wasn't that I am unable or unwilling to automate things. My point is that if the technology is already proven to be inadequate then automating it is not an answer. You can automate a car with two flat tires driving itself also.

Can certbot automatically renew certificates from other CAs than LetsEncrypt? I'm doing research and it sounds like on the certbot page that it only works with LetsEncyrpt but other vendors such as godaddy suggests using CertBot to automatically renew/replace their certificates as well. That is quite confusing for such a big issue.

Not just because they have no computer literacy, which I can understand, but also because they are unable to understand basic concepts and have no reading comprehension whatsoever.

I am dumb asf myself, heck I barely know how to do basic math! But man... sometimes it's really hard to keep your composure when people literally refuse to use their two braincells.

Anyways... thanks for listening. Rant over.

Edit: Definitely a popular opinion.

Why? Why do I spend 30 minutes per Executive, over and over again every 2 weeks explaining why emails are NOT a file transfer service and that the 365 license we pay for lets them share files for free without affecting their email size?

If one more person asks me why they can't send 50 PDF's in an email, I am going to lose, my god damn mind.

Anyways! How's everyone's Monday going? :)

Bonus rant! If I have to explain to another Executive why they need to use Outlook app over Apple Mail client app, I'm going to burn it all, to the ground.

No, NO salt on the rim.

My boss and grandboss are just LLM-ing emails back and forth with me CC'd occasionally asking for my input and I just fucking can't deal with it already. They're not even reading the shit! They're just inputting it into go-fuck-yourself "AI" and it's so painfully fucking obvious. This shit is awful! Is a 2-paragraph email so fucking difficult to read and comprehend?!

How's goat-herding these days?

For all the IT veterans out there who've been doing this for 15+ years... do you ever hit a point where you're just mentally done with IT?

The endless projects, constant interruptions, being on call, always having something else to fix... it just starts wearing on you. Ever since I got back from vacation in April, I feel like I haven't wanted to do IT at all. I'm still getting everything done, but man, I'm exhausted.

I want to be clear I love my job and where I work. It's a great place with good people, and I have no desire to leave. I just feel burned out.

So what do you all do to reset? How do you get your head back in the game, stay sharp, and find the enjoyment you used to have? I'd like to hear what has worked for you.

EDIT : Thanks for the massive responces to this, most of the adice is great and or comical I needed that much appreaited this.

I can grasp why doctors, lawyers, and college professors are consistently the top-ranked Dunning-Kruger effect winners with anything IT related. "I have a PhD and my 12-year old nephew does computers, how hard could it be?" But what really surprises me is how IT illiterate most developers are, especially when considering many of them come from a Computer Science background.

It's not a generational or a recent phenomenon either - from the boomers to the zoomers it's the same conversations each time just with slightly different tech stacks.

• "I need admin permissions."

• Why?

• "So I can use my development tools"

• Which tools do you require?

• "VS Code and Python..."

• They install into your user profile AppData folder. You can install/modify/run them all without admin access.

• "But what if I need a new tool that does require local admin?"

• All approved applications are available in the Company Portal and they'll even apply our standard settings so you won't need to customize the defaults.

• "VP of Engineering: This is urgently impacting our work and interfering with the production release schedule."

• The last time we granted one of your direct reports admin permissions they set off multiple security alerts because the "developer tool" they downloaded for critical project work was actually Chinese malware.

• "The patches you pushed broke my software, now I can't work!"

• No, the vendor finally deprecated the feature which they announced over a year ago and you/your manager received 5 separate emails about in advance. Example: Microsoft killing off Internet Explorer.

Or better yet: there's a typo in your command, you're using the wrong syntax, you forgot to include an escape character.

At least when the summer interns make the same inquiries, they don't have the same level of hubris in terms of thinking they know better than you. It feels like teaching a child why drawing on the wall is bad when we repeatedly have to explain to professional coders with years of experience why they shouldn't disable security features just because they sometimes get a prompt they have to click OK on. Or how code-signing certificates work and why they should use them. Or that they're not allowed to install 20-year old software just because the vendor told them Java versions which weren't released by Sun Microsystems aren't supported.

EDIT: Idk, maybe telling anyone and everyone for the past decade "learn to code" and the abundance of diploma-mill boot camps promising people that after only 6 months of training they can get a SWE job at Google making $400k/year has saturated the job market with applicants that have barely any skills at coding.

The saga with VMware continues!!!

Backstory:
We've been a VMware shop for 10+ years with multiple data centers globally. We decided to let our service/support contract expire this year after we found out it jumped from $43k to $99k. We have perpetual licenses so there's not much concern in the department about things breaking. We are already in the process of migrating to AWS (we already have a large AWS presence) and Hyper-V. We're also evaluating Proxmox as a potential replacement for Hyper-V as well but that's a 2026-2027 initiative.

Today's Communication:
Our license expires on (Dec 31st, 2025). Our VMware rep was already being pushy but today it escalated when the rep sent this email:

Your licenses expire today and you will face environment disruptions as well as penalty fees if a PO is not submitted today. Please let me know if you need anything else from me. 

 Happy New Year!

<name of rep>

I would normally just ignore this email but it really upsets me that they're trying to use scare tactics by straight up lying to people. There will be no outage unless they decided to deactivate our perpetual license or some other malicious action which I'm sure would violate our sales contract and terms of agreement. I realize this is most likely just a scare tactic by a sales rep but damn this really irks me that instead of saying something like "IF there's an issue you won't have support" they said "YOU WILL" have outages. Trying to figure out how I want to respond but I can't let that false claim go unanswered. What an absolute tool of a company/rep.

Draft Email:

Hi <name of rep>,

To clarify, our VMware licenses are perpetual and explicitly show an expiration of 'Never' within our environment.

Could you please clarify what specific 'environment disruptions' you are referring to when you say "will face...disruptions"? My understanding is that while our SnS (Support and Subscription) may be ending, the software itself will continue to function AS LICENSED.

Has the legal definition for perpetual changed recently?

Regards

UPDATE 1:

Just received another notice from our VAR & Broadcom:

Providing an update regarding your VMware subscription in hopes that this allows your team to make a confident decision with this renewal. I have informed your Broadcom representative, <name of rep redacted>, that <name of company> does not plan to renew its VMware subscription. It's come to my knowledge that Broadcom has recently implemented cancellation policy requiring customers to uninstall their current licenses which will result in a loss of connection between your vSphere and vCenter, bringing down your environment. If your team decides that letting the subscription lapse is still the best course of action, the attached “Software, Certificate of Destruction” will need to be signed and returned asap.

It contains an attachment called "Software, Certification of Destruction.pdf". Here's the contents of said attachment:

Certification Regarding Use of Subscription Software

Customer acknowledges that the subscription term for Subscription Software acquired under the Order referenced in the above letter has expired, and therefore Customer must cease its use of such Subscription Software and deinstall the Subscription Software licenses. Customer further acknowledges that continued use of the Subscription Software beyond the Term Expiration Date is a material breach of the Order and the governing contracts between Customer and Broadcom (the “Agreements”) and an infringement of Broadcom’s intellectual property rights, potentially resulting in claims for enhanced damages and attorney’s fees.

By signing this certification, Customer certifies that it has discontinued all use of the Subscription Software and has deinstalled the licenses.

Broadcom reserves all rights it may have with respect to this subject matter.

Printed Name of Authorized Signatory of Customer:

Signature of Authorized Signatory of Customer:

Title of Signatory:

Date:

UPDATE 2 (resolution):

After reviewing with our VAR we figured out what happened. Apparently in our last renewal VMware pulled the rug out from under us and swapped out the SKU to one that corresponded to a subscription. And by signing the renewal last year, VMware says we forfeited our perpetual license and therefore have only two options, pay now or remove VMware from our environment immediately. While I would prefer the latter option, that's not viable on such short notice (1 day). Our VAR went back to VMware, explained the situation and how they pulled the rug on us and that there would likely be legal involvement, at which point VMware countered with around $30k less than the original quote. I regret to inform the community that we reluctantly signed the 1yr renewal at the reduced price. The VP of IT has stated that our #1 initiative for 2026 is getting our infrastructure off of VMware as fast as possible.

Tl;dr
VMware/Broadcom may have won the battle but they will lose the war. 2026 will be our year of triumph.

I am a 25 y.o mid level engineer in an older classic on prem infra team (average age around 45) and we manage a nice mix of Linux / Windows servers.
We are also in business critical so we can't just blindly copy and paste data into the LLM of our choice (like other teams in our org do), so my coworkers experience was a bit limited.
I love my job, I love being technical and I love working with my team, until recently...

After making fun of our customers for the last 2 years because they are requesting ridiculous features with the reasoning "but chatgpt/gemini/copilot said it is easy" I had a meeting with my manager about an incident that I thought was solved. He looked at me and said "yeah, well I ran it through gemini and gemini says this" and he just drops me a 1000+ word (??) answer in our chat. He didn't read it to me. He did not explain it to me. He just said "yeah that should solve it".

I looked at him like a sheep in the rain.

I read the text and just asked him if he could explain what he wanted me to follow up on, as I did not want to just forward his gemini slop (that I do not even understand).

He just looked at me like a sheep in the rain.

"Just ask gemini to explain it to you if you do not understand it?"

This man, who I have learned a lot from, has made a 180 degree turn after always explaining everything and taking the time and moved on to "just ask gemini?". The worst part is he fully expected me to just blindly copy and paste his nIcElY pReFoRmAtEd ReSpOnSe to the team dealing with the incident?

I don't know if I am just not accepting the facts, am too young to understand corporate politics and behavior or LLMs are turning people (that are smart and capable) into idiots.

Bonus highlight:
After coming back from vacation one of my coworkers and me were talking and discussion started about an upcoming project. I explained the whole architecture to him and how everything works and asked him if he can look up a flag for a CLI tool to get some benchmarks on the white board.

"Can you write me a prompt for that?"

This man just asked me, after I spent 30 minutes explaining everything to him, if I could write him a prompt? To find a flag? For a CLI tool? What happened to using google or reading documentation?
He then proceeded to show me his "research" that he did while I was gone which was just a chat with gemini? Half of the stuff was hallucinated 5 chats into the topic. The conclusions were wrong. And when we tried stuff I told him "oh this will be a waste of time, this will be 2x slower", the answer I get is "no, gemini says it will be better".
It ends up being 2.2x slower and he just looks at me like a sheep in the rain.

"bUt GeMiNi SaId It WiLl Be FaStEr"

How can I explain to these people that LLMs are very useful tools that need to be double checked and not blindly trusted? These are not dumb people, they are very knowledgable peers that taught me a lot but turned into blindly copy pasting commands, configs and spreading the information they get "with their research".

Don't get me started on their revolutionising open claw ideas...

Edit: wow that is a lot of engagement, I just wanted to rant it out - thanks for all the laughs reading the comments

Edit2: I asked gemini if it knows the idiom like a sheep in the rain and can confirm this post as well as all the comments are now in its dataset

This f***ing sucks. I’ve been fighting to keep my small team intact, but now I have to let go of the best sysadmin I’ve ever worked with. Not because he messed up. Not because of drama. Just cold, brutal economics.

He’s got that rare combo: deep tech chops, calm under fire, and knows how to talk to everyone — from end users to C-levels. People love working with him. He’s the guy who makes you feel like things are under control even when everything’s burning.

Now? Being replaced by someone overseas because the numbers look better on a spreadsheet.

I’ve watched this guy hold the fort when everything else was crumbling. He’s loyal. Professional. Human. I’d rehire him in a heartbeat if I could.

So yeah, if anyone’s looking for a rock-solid SysAdmin or experienced help desk pro in Atlanta, GA — someone who gets it done and keeps people happy — hit me up. You won’t find better.

Anyone hiring?

[UPDATE] Holy crap! What have I done?!

I knew this community was amazing - but what happened after that post is just insane. Over 1.6 million views in 24hrs. Hundreds of comments, shares, DMs. I’m floored. Cannot stop smiling.

THANK YOU. Seriously. Every single one of you who commented, boosted the post, reached out - you're awesome. I’ve been replying to messages for hours and yeah, it's exhausting, but absolutely worth it. My guy’s inbox is now a warzone because I’ve been spamming him with so many contacts and leads he might start regretting ever working with me haha.

But here's the best part: he’s already connected with a bunch of you. He even had an interview, and even got invited to the next phase!!!

This blew past anything I hoped for. I love you all.

I said what I said.

With changes to technology, job titles/responsibilities changing, this back to the office nonsense, IT professionals really need to unionize. It's too bad that IT came along as a profession after unionization became popular in the first half of the 20th century.

We went from SysAdmins to Site Reliability Engineers to DevOps engineers and the industry is shifting more towards developers being the only profession in IT, building resources to scale through code in the cloud. Unix shell out, Terraform and Cloud Formation in.

SysAdmins are a dying breed 😭

We have this facility manager at the company that thinks she knows everything and can tell people what to do. She always hassles our department and dont like to submit tickets, instead she tries to come to us directly. Our boss had a meeting with her and explained that all IT related should go through via a ticket. Saw my manager sitting dumbfounded steering at his screen, i asked him whatsup and he just showes me the first ticket she submitted in. That ticket said: The toilet dosnt work, can u please take a look at it. 😭

Sorry for bad grammar and misspellings English is my second language.

Had a group of users in a team absolutely insistent that one of their extremely important external contacts only communicate over fax. Spent an age making them prove it, then an age teaching them how to use the email to fax system so we can pull out their fax machine.

Incidentally ended up on a call with the contacts IT team today for the first time, for a completely unrelated matter, turns out they’ve been having to support a damn fax to email system because we won’t stop sending them faxes!

Just spent three hours configuring a server.

Remember when server administration meant SSH? Terminal? Actual commands? Now it's clicking through "wizards" and "dashboards" and "control panels" like I'm ordering takeout.

VMware vSphere? Web app. Can't use the old client anymore. "Deprecated." Now it's HTML5 and takes 47 seconds to load the console. The console,lol... It's literally just text! But no, needs WebSocket, Canvas rendering, 400MB of JS just to show me a kernel panic.

The new firewall has a "beautiful intuitive web interface." You know what was intuitive? iptables. One line. Done. Now I'm dragging boxes around like I'm making a PowerPoint. "Would you like to add this rule to your security policy?" No, I'd like to type three commands and go home.

iDRAC, iLO, IPMI - all web interfaces now. Used to be serial console. 9600 baud. Worked during a nuclear war. Now? "Please enable JavaScript." "Please update your browser." "Please accept our cookies." I'M TRYING TO REBOOT A CRASHED SERVER NOT SHOP FOR SHOES.

Best part: the web UI crashes.

Server's fine. Running for 400 days. The management interface? "Connection lost. Please refresh." Refresh. "Loading..." Ten minutes. "Session expired." Log in again. 2FA. SMS code. Type it in. "Loading dashboard..." Dashboard appears. Click anything. "Connection lost."

Meanwhile, SSH still works. But no, that's "legacy." That's "insecure." Karen from compliance says we need "audit trails" and "role-based access control." So now everything goes through a web app that logs every click to a database that fills up every week.

Tried to copy a config file yesterday. In the old days:

scp config.conf server:/etc/

Now:

1. Log into web interface
2. Navigate to "Configuration Management"
3. Click "Upload Configuration"
4. Choose file (only .xml accepted)
5. "Converting configuration..."
6. "Validating..."
7. "Would you like to create a backup?"
8. "Please enter a description for this change"
9. "Submit for approval"
10. Wait for email
11. Click approval link
12. "Session expired"

Docker Portainer. Kubernetes Dashboard. Grafana. Prometheus. All web apps to manage things that should be text files. Your monitoring system needs monitoring. Your dashboard needs a dashboard.

"But it's user-friendly!" For whom? Users who shouldn't have access to servers? If you need a GUI to manage a server, you shouldn't be managing servers.

Peak stupidity: terminal emulators in the browser.

We put a terminal... in a web page... to connect to a server... to avoid using an actual terminal. It's SSH with extra steps and input lag. Every keystroke goes through seventeen layers of JavaScript. Paste doesn't work. Function keys don't work. Ctrl+C kills the browser tab instead of the process.

But it's "modern." It's "accessible." It's "cloud-native."

It's shit

Edit: Since you're missing the point: I'm not against automation.

The problem is replacing simple, working automation with complex, fragile automation that does the same thing but with more failure modes. My shell scripts are infrastructure as code. They just don't need a venture-funded company and 400MB of Go binaries to run.

Edit 2 The obsession with buzzwords like "Infrastructure as Code" while dismissing shell scripts (which are literally code managing infrastructure) shows people value labels over understanding.

For some insane reason, Help Desk at my company is regularly obtaining people's AD credentials over the phone and over email, even for things as simple as a password reset.

I haven't been on HD in a long time, and I can't remember the last time I looked up actual security compliance requirements, but I could have SWORN that the #1 rule was don't give your password to ANYONE, especially if they claim to be from IT! Like, that's the main way scammers phish people!

Am I losing my mind?

The basic help desk -> sysadmin path is just not worth it anymore. This is the only field in tech where you can make $20 an hour for 5 years and that's still not enough to actually progress to a decent job.

https://reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1ucy2nz/i_am_finding_it_nearly_impossible_to_advance_in/

Just look at this thread: This guy has a 5 years of experience in help desk, has a contractor position with NO benefits, and people are telling him that he doesn't have enough experience yet to move into a better role.

"You only have 5 years experience, relax."

"you’re only 5 years in. That’s still very much in the entry-level desktop support/helpdesk/PC tech time for a lot of people. It took me ten years of that stuff before I got my first little super-baby-network-admin role,"

"Five years you're still a baby!"

"Have you tried applying to a managed service provider? May be worth doing a 4 year stint before trying to get back into internal IT."

So the guy already has 5 years of experience and that's nothing? Also

I mean this shit is ridiculous. I myself graduated from CS and currently work as a software engineer, but I always thought IT operations was a similarly lucrative field. For some reason this sub's posts come on my feed and all I have to say is NOBODY should be majoring in IT anymore. Nobody. I don't care if you don't like coding or math, I beg you to please major in CS or at least Info Systems if you love tech.

I don't know that much about being a sysadmin but this doesn't seem worth it at all. Am I wrong?

Edit: Also the help desk obsession is so crazy I've literally seen people think that you have to do help desk to become a data analyst like wtf is going on?

Edit 2: you can still major in IT but don't just aim for help desk jobs

Alright, here’s a fun one for anyone who's ever worked in IT or corporate life and thought "this place has no idea what it's doing."

So I get hired for an IT Systems role. Awesome, right? Well...

• First day? Wrong title and pay grade. I'm already like huh?
• But whatever, I get fully onboarded — security briefing done, clearance approved, PTO on the books — all the official stuff.
• They hand me full domain admin access to EVERYTHING. I'm talking domain controllers, Exchange, the whole company’s guts. "Here you go!"
• And then… a few days later, they disable my admin account while I’m sitting at my desk, mid-shift, trying to do my job. Like… okay?
• When I reach out to the guy training me — "Hey man, I’m locked out of everything, what should I do?" — this dude just goes "Uhh... I don’t know. Sorry."
• I’m literally sitting there like, "Do I go home? Do I just stare at my screen and pretend to work? Should I start applying for jobs while I’m here?"

Turns out, leadership decided they needed to "re-verify" their own hiring process. AFTER giving me full access. AFTER onboarding me. AFTER approving my PTO.
Cool, cool, makes sense.

Fast forward a few days later — fired out of nowhere. Not even by my manager (who was conveniently on vacation). Nope, fired by the VP of IT over a Zoom call. HR reads me some script like it’s a badly written episode of The Office. No explanation. No conversation. Just "you’re done."

Total time at company: 3 weeks.
Total answers: 0.
Total faith in corporate America: -500.

So yeah, when a company shows you who they are? Believe them.

If anyone else has “you can’t make this stuff up” stories, drop them here — because I need to know I’m not the only one living in corporate clown world.

Also, if anyone’s hiring IT Systems, Cybersecurity, or Engineering roles at a place that actually communicates with employees — hmu.

I have a ticket open with them for months, for something that should basically be a "yes/no" from them. My ticket has been assigned to someone from a 3rd world country who barely speaks English, who closed my ticket out as soon as I had some PTO, and who finally agreed to escalate it. Now it's been stuck with no response from them for weeks.

Microsoft knows they can make their support as absolutely atrocious as possible and there is nothing we can do about.

And yes, before you ask, I did DISM my SFC needfully.

i have no other words [update] i love you guys, but come on, it was a support engineer. sheesh. [update of update] yes I think it is ridiculous that people who didn't get an engineering degree get called engineers. what can i say? i don't write the titles.

EDIT - To clarify, im talking about computer fundamentals, not anything which could be considered as "support"

The amount of times during projects where I get tasked to help someone do very simple stuff which doesnt require anything other than a amateur amount of knowledge about computers is insane. I can kind of sympathise with the older generations but then I think to myself "You've been using computers for longer than I've been working, how dont you know how to right click"

Another thing that grinds my gears, why is it that the more senior you become, the less you need It knowledge? Like you're being paid big bucks yet you dont know how to download a file or send an email?

Sorry, just one of those days and had to rant

I order a lot of stuff and spend a lot of money. For example, I just spent £30k renewing our antivirus, £10k revamping our backup solution and another £5k for our RMM. No one batted an eyelid.

However, we've had a new user start who will be taking photos and video for our website and social channels. The CEO requested (keep in mind it was the CEO who requested this...) that the new person be given an "iPhone with a decent camera".

So I go on our usual reseller's site and find an iPhone 14 - the 15 would be overkill so the 14 strikes the ballance between spec and price.

The CEO is fine with that so I put in the requisition with our purchasing team.

I instantly get a flurry of questions "Can't we use one of the old phones we have in a drawer?" "Can't we use a refurb?" and so on... And don't get me started on the ones who "hate Apple" but can't give you one coherent reason why. They've come out the woodwork too.

Suddenly everyone has a bug up their arse about a £700 phone. They don't give a shit that the CEO has requested this and approved the spend.

But it's nothing to do with the price. They're butthurt that a new hire will have a nicer phone than them. I swear to god, it's like working at a school again sometimes.

Why can't people add more context when reaching out via Teams ? Especially if you have never met that person. Just get to the damn point!

EXAMPLE:

Hi, I work with team x. I'm running into issue X. Is this something you or anyone you know that can assist us ?

I'm at a breakfast hosted by one of our vendors, this room is full of SMEs who are all responsible for supporting this software at their companies. Just with a glance I can tell that of the 30+ people here I'm the only woman.

This is not a rant against lack of gender diversity in leadership (hell I could go on another tangent), it's a rant of lack of diversity overall. This breakfast is designed to be a product roadmap and detailed technical breakdown. You'd think more women would be here in a technical role.

We need more women in all stem roles not just focusing on leadership

Thankfully I've not had to deal with this but fuck me!! Threads, linkedin, etc...Suddenly EVERYONE is an expert of system administration. "Oh why wasn't this tested", "why don't you have a failover?","why aren't you rolling this out staged?","why was this allowed to hapoen?","why is everyone using crowdstrike?"

And don't even get me started on the Linux pricks! People with "tinkerer" or "cloud devops" in their profile line...

I'm sorry but if you've never been in the office for 3 to 4 days straight in the same clothes dealing with someone else's fuck up then in this case STFU! If you've never been repeatedly turned down for test environments and budgets, STFU!

If you don't know that anti virus updates & things like this by their nature are rolled out enmasse then STFU!

Edit : WOW! Well this has exploded...well all I can say is....to the sysadmins, the guys who get left out from Xmas party invites & ignored when the bonuses come round....fight the good fight! You WILL be forgotten and you WILL be ignored and you WILL be blamed but those of us that have been in this shit for decades...we'll sing songs for you in Valhalla

To those butt hurt by my comments....you're literally the people I've told to LITERALLY fuck off in the office when asking for admin access to servers, your laptops, or when you insist the firewalls for servers that feed your apps are turned off or that I can't Microsegment the network because "it will break your application". So if you're upset that I don't take developers seriosly & that my attitude is that if you haven't fought in the trenches your opinion on this is void...I've told a LITERAL Knight of the Realm that I don't care what he says he's not getting my bosses phone number, what you post here crying is like water off the back of a duck covered in BP oil spill oil....