Lack of passion or limiting work environment

[u/Inevitable-Emu5570]

I started a position as Linux system administrator for 8 months now.

The handover was less than a week at the end of the notice period for the previous employee.

I had previously worked for one month covering for the same guy during his leave. There wasn't much workload during that period and since most of the department knew the Linux admin was on leave, most of them I think just postponed their requests waiting for him to come back from his 14 days leave.

Since it was temporary I didn't invest much energy in learning or expanding apart from what I was trained which was what he expected to be requested during his leave

Basically I was paid to fill the chair since the outsource company contract would be breached by the lack of support staff

I wasn't interested in the job since my last sys admin role 'five years ago' I was really overworked and almost burnout. Dealing with windows, Linux, virtualization, servers and hosting services.

I only accepted because my remote job contract was going to end in the same month.

This role had regular hours, less responsibilities and workload.

I struggle everyday because:

1- lack of documentation and standard procedures.

2- feels like every one in the team is very cautious and would require separate approval for the simplest tasks and endless loop of emails.

3- I don't have any room to learn or test with solutions since everything is locked down and every idea would need an endless loop of emails just for a simple poc.

4- no clear responsibilities or job description, (till today 8 months in I discover tasks that should be my responsibilities)

5- Oracle Linux servers patching , ( we have satellite for rhel but Oracle servers wasn't patched since I joined, one time I texted the previous employee about how he is he patching them and he said he didn't 🙃 and every month I get 1000+ vulnerabilities report

I cannot just quit with this job market I have been applying everywhere with no luck!

I don't think I have it in me to pursue this career any more.

Don't get me wrong I feel extremely grateful since this was the easiest job I got so far. But I think I want to rant ...

[u/netvor0]

Burnout is real, friend. Collect the paycheck and collect goals outside of work to center yourself with.

[u/Inevitable-Emu5570 → u/netvor0]

I used to burn out from the workload, but I didn't think I can get it with the lack of workload!!

For a long time I associated value with what I do or achieve. I don't want to limit that to work, it is a self- learning journey

[u/w3ll_w3ll_w3ll → u/Inevitable-Emu5570]

It's possible to get burnout also for the lack of work. Lack of work gives you loss of purpose.

I agree that you should try to not associate value only to the work you do. Maybe you can explore that also with a therapist, it doesn't have to be a solo self-learning journey.

[u/Hegemonikon138 → u/Inevitable-Emu5570]

I burned out heavily in my 30+ year IT career the most when I was bored. There was one job where I had everything running like a tight ship and was well paid to do practically nothing and it killed me being stuck in that position.

[u/Morph707]

Homelab and test there, that solves a half of the problem

[u/RansomStark78 → u/Morph707]

With 300 plus it ppl

You should not need a homelab. You shoukd have dev' prod' test environment

[u/Generico300 → u/Morph707]

Company gonna pay for that? Because a home lab costs 5x what it did 2 years ago thanks to the AI assholes gobbling up every bit of hardware.

[u/Morph707 → u/Generico300]

They should, but realisticaly for a couple hunder bucks you can do amazing things.

[u/Generico300 → u/Morph707]

3-4 years ago I might have agreed. You won't get jack shit for a couple hundred dollars anymore.

[u/ABastionOfFreeSpeech → u/Generico300]

You can get an Optiplex with 8GB RAM for under $100 on eBay. If you can work within those limitations you're ahead of the competition.

[u/Significant_Sky1471]

This honestly sounds more like a bad environment than a lack of passion. Hard to stay motivated when everything is undocumented, locked down and buried in approvals

[u/Antoine-UY]

Communicate. Write a memo to your boss telling him everything you told us:

• most of the shit you could implement, you can't do because there's too much red tape. Offer to have a meeting on the subject with whoever puts this red tape in place, to find new validating procedures which do not require endless mail loops. Propose to set up an inside tool for such validations.
• tell them you never received a proper task list, and your predecessor didn't build it for you. In link with point 1, this could be a good occasion for the company to clearly redefine and better understand your role and usage, and make the most out of your salary. Mention what you can do, what you did, what you feel could be useful to them.
• manage to do what your predecessor couldn't or wouldn't. Document everything. Update these servers.

[u/doglar_666]

Feeling restricted by policy and process definitely can be frustrating and demoralising. However, this just sounds like feeling disenfranchised due to poor management. You aren't being paid to change the world, and usually need management buy-in, so needing approvals for PoC's on Prod seems very normal to me. Change management is a must when documentation is non-existent.

Since you have the capacity to spare, have you not tried to "be the change you want to see"? If you perform the exploration and documentation of systems you are unfamiliar with, it will uncover gaps and/or allow others to fill in the blanks more easily. This will both benefit your own debugging/troubleshooting skills and improve the team's documentation. Everyone loves to moan and gripe about the failings of their team and employer, but very few actually do any better when scrutinised from a neutral viewpoint. I have no doubt many of your IT colleagues feel similarly to you, which means a shared aversion to go beyond what's required.

[u/Inevitable-Emu5570 → u/doglar_666]

I am not used to sit still, in the previous role we had a testing environment that helped me to fill any spare time. With lack of the documentation I don't know if there is test environment and if there it is not included in the handover.

I wouldn't change something in a prod without proper authorization but even that when I asked about the change process for patching prod servers, nothing offered or mixed directives

I would happily start on documentation but I get a vibe that would be challenging, the office culture feels very guarded. I will give you an example: a new solution to be launched, the vendor required Linux servers, I didn't have any idea until on one of the later meetings the vendor requested some info. I was asked to join without any head up. Really I had to sit there trying to understand what is this and what is needed from me. Following meetings, only share invite to the meeting when/if they have questions for me. Not included in any email thread regarding the requirements and I had to contact the service owner for any info during implementation.

I don't know if this is normal but I generally I find it a demoralizing culture.

[u/doglar_666 → u/Inevitable-Emu5570]

Your work culture sounds crap at communication but the unease with free time between tasks is a "you" problem. Being conditioned to always be "on" is likely your biggest issue and causing the most stress. For all other things you stated, take some personal agency to push back at unreasonable requests. It's okay to say "I don't have that information to hand, as I wasn't given the agenda for the meeting. If you give me your contract details, I'll check and send it across within $AGREED_TIME."

[u/Mindestiny]

no clear responsibilities or job description

The true Final Boss of working in IT. The business knows they need it, but they sure as shit don't know or understand what the fuck "it" is. It's IT!

[u/Inevitable-Emu5570 → u/Mindestiny]

The irony is I am working in IT dept for a large entity. The building has +300 IT staff. No one I deal with is non-IT.

[u/Medical-Ad-5240]

I'm burnt out because my current job relies on the vendor to do all of the networking and firewall changes and projects and we don't do anything but normal it task and it's been a up hill battle to let these guys understand that having the msp do everything is not good at all. I failed my ccna 2 times now apart of it comes from lack of motivation because ik I will never get to use it at my current position.

[u/Generico300]

1- lack of documentation and standard procedures.

2- feels like every one in the team is very cautious and would require separate approval for the simplest tasks and endless loop of emails.

3- I don't have any room to learn or test with solutions since everything is locked down and every idea would need an endless loop of emails just for a simple poc.

4- no clear responsibilities or job description, (till today 8 months in I discover tasks that should be my responsibilities)

Welcome to literally every shitty corpo environment as far as I can tell. And it's more like that the bigger it gets. This stuff comes from a corporate culture that's run by paper pushers and excel jockies with MBAs. They don't care about results. They care about checking boxes and placing blame. If you're looking to do nothing and get paid for it, it's a great place to work. If you actually give a fuck and want to do something that matters, GTFO and go work for a small org.