The sysadmin director...advice?



  • So I hope this post isn't somehow inappropriate, anyhow.

    I'm the sysadmin for our company - the everything kind (windows, linux, network, db) but that isn't such a big problem in itself. We've had a major management overthrow and our old CIO is gone, replaced by a new VP and that person has brought in a old partner as the IT director. This IT director is the very same person who performed the audit of our department which resulted in my former boss kicked out of his department, but that's another WTF.

    So this guy demands root/admin passwords, I comply out of respect for his position of course. I did ask him why he wanted the passwords, and he said "I'll be adminning too. I R smart!", so I've gone from the boss being a guy who stays out of our day to day business to a guy who wants to admin the server's the company pays me to admin!

    He starts tinkering with the systems and messing with crap, snooping at log files, installing weird packages and asking me a ton of questions and that's kind of bothered me as it seems like he is spending an awful lot of time trying to understand each and every file, service, application, when he should be focusing on management as far as I'm concerned.

    Worse yet, when he makes changes he does not tell me which seems disrespectful.

    Looking to the TDWTF community for some sage advice if anyone is willing to comment on the situation. 

     

     

     


  • 🚽 Regular

    @neuralfraud said:

    Worse yet, when he makes changes he does not tell me which seems disrespectful.
     

    That's not even an issue of respect. It's an issue of being part of a well-oiled machine. If two people are going to be administering a system, regardless of who's in charge of who, each person needs to communicate in order to avoid confusion and a mess.

    First of all, it sounds like this IT Director is your new boss, right? And since it's a technical position, I don't see it necessarily being a problem that he has the same access you have. After all, to use an old cliche, if you get hit by a bus and there's an emergency, someone needs to take the reigns and take care of it, and it sounds like the IT Director is the best person for the job, unless you have an associate or someone else who's qualified.

    I think you simply need to sit down with the IT director and, in a non-confrontational manner, just define individual responsibilities. As a system administrator, it really should be you who's responsible for the day-to-day operations and emergencies. It's the IT director's responsibility to delegate and prioritize what you do. If you need to replace a hard drive, it's your responsibility to tell the IT Director that, and it's the director's responsibility to make sure that happens to avoid a catastrophe. It's also the IT director's responsibility to inform you that a server should be commissioned to do a new task or a software upgrade should be implemented, and tell you whether that should preempt whatever task you're doing now.

    If the IT director really, really wants to actually perform those activities himself, perhaps because he doesn't want to distract you from whatever task you have at hand, then fine. He just absolutely needs to inform you that he's taking care of it, and tell you the outcome.

    That's how it should work in a non-WTF company. What I'm afraid of is, from what you've said, it sounds like the IT Director could be a control freak or possibly even looking for a scapegoat in case things go wrong, and despite his doing things behind your back is what caused the problem, you get the blame for it because it was your responsibility.



  •  So far the guy doesn't necessarily seem to be making any efforts to screw with anyone or myself, so perhaps it is best that we just have the nice non-confrontational talk to set up the borders.. sounds like good advice, thanks

     

     



  • @neuralfraud said:

    So I hope this post isn't somehow inappropriate, anyhow.

    I'm the sysadmin for our company - the everything kind (windows, linux, network, db) but that isn't such a big problem in itself. We've had a major management overthrow and our old CIO is gone, replaced by a new VP and that person has brought in a old partner as the IT director. This IT director is the very same person who performed the audit of our department which resulted in my former boss kicked out of his department, but that's another WTF.

    So this guy demands root/admin passwords, I comply out of respect for his position of course. I did ask him why he wanted the passwords, and he said "I'll be adminning too. I R smart!", so I've gone from the boss being a guy who stays out of our day to day business to a guy who wants to admin the server's the company pays me to admin!

    He starts tinkering with the systems and messing with crap, snooping at log files, installing weird packages and asking me a ton of questions and that's kind of bothered me as it seems like he is spending an awful lot of time trying to understand each and every file, service, application, when he should be focusing on management as far as I'm concerned.

    Worse yet, when he makes changes he does not tell me which seems disrespectful.

    Looking to the TDWTF community for some sage advice if anyone is willing to comment on the situation. 

     

     

     

    He's a cowboy/lunatic/WTFer - each of the individual symptoms is inconclusive on its own, but what you have there is a syndrome. Run, run fast and run far - unless you're confident you can control him, bend him to your will, use him until he has no further use and then discard him like a used... Sorry, I was zoning out for a bit there. Did I miss anything?


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