April 30, 2011

Come on, bro.

A director level position has just opened up. The person holding this position quit with about 9 days notice. The week before finals. To take a consulting position. With a week's vacation before starting.
Our employer paid for his training. He used our network to test in a production environment.

Now it's easy for me to judge because I worked with him. He said he had better things to do than have dinner with his coworkers. He usually trained us about 80% of the way, enough to feel responsible, enough to be dangerous, but not enough to troubleshoot, be proactive or to create reliable systems. The off hours guys received no direct training.

When I started, there was almost zero documentation.  What little notes we had was split between our ticketing systems' knowledge base and Google Docs. Usually one person in the dept knew each system. So, if the IT staff was out that day there was no support for that system. Very few things evolved through team work and there was no cross training.

I've documented every tech responsibility I have in a Google Doc. Sometimes my notes aren't %100 clear, but most of them are really great. They're shared with everyone in the team. Not everyone is expected to perform everything, but if the sysadmin is out then at least we have something to go on, plus the off hours guys have somewhere to start. They may not have big picture perspective but they have an idea of the procedure.

You're welcome, work.

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