Dear Mrs. K.,
Three quick things I'd like to tell you:
1.) I'd like to remind you (again) that you need to logout and turn off your computer, not just turn of the screens. I was so hopeful you might have finally internalized that after one of the interns "accidently" messed up all your user settings. Well, at least I gave me a somewhat funny Reddit thread to read, thanks for that.
2.) You really use the same password for every. single. effing. site on the net. One day this will bite you in the ass on a gigantic scale. Almost a shame I won't be there to see it.
3.) Please regard this posting as my informal 2 weeks notice. I quit. You'll find a formal letter on your desk tomorrow morning. Enjoy.
For all the people that took the time to post here, let me give you my perspective of the situation, you can then choose if you'd be happy working here (psst, I got it on good authority they will be looking for a new it guy soon! Fire up your resumees!).
My main background is in web development, but I've learned my fair share of media design (Graphics, Audio & Video) and system administration during my time at the university (dropped out due to financial reasons) and the 7 years of freelance work that kept me afloat. I do a lot of SysAdmin work, but I could hardly compete with a full time SysAdmin . Besides the occasional website for clients I mostly worked as "that it guy" for small businesses - i'm a very good fit for those companies because they don't have the money to hire a "100% SysAdmin" + Designer + Web Developer. They just hire me, often part time, to keep IT running and use my spare time to help get creative stuff out of the door.
And I kinda like this. I have a lot of different stuff to do, can do some creative work, and am also more "integrated" into the company.
When my work started with Mrs. K's ..erm I mean "Cobblebjorn's" company things were quite fun. Had the opportunity to actively shape how the company works, I find that very satisfying. I spent a lot of time to setup a decent backup strategy that would allow getting a new file server up and running within half an hour should the live machine suddenly go up in flames. Making sure the stuff on the file server has top priority, without it this company can close it's doors, it's that simple. Now add the fact that there is virtually no budget for IT - the "server" is basically a desktop PC. No hardware Raid, no redundant power supply, no UPS! This thing is frail like f*ck, so can you blame me for double-checking that the backups work whenever I'm in the office?
Security is treated like the ugly step-child in this office. Because "every minute we spend typing in passwords, etc. is a minute we can't get any work done!" I'm forced to give some users easy access to things they could easily break, etc. This is a security nightmare! The result is that I constantly have to remove malware, and in general try to make things as safe as possible while working around the stupid stupid stupid demands of the other employees - and because it's THEIR works that brings in money that fat it guy should setup things the way THEY want, not how he things it would be wise. F*ck that!
The reason I spend 3 days a week at the office instead of working from home is very simple: There is always, ALWAYS, someone who needs help with something. As mentioned before the credo is that things need to work as smoothly as possible, often it's very time-critical work. So the it guy needs to be in the office so that employees can just grab him and drag him to their computers and show him how they managed to fk things up this time. Things that if I had my way they could not fk up in the first place! In the last couple of months my work day at this company is about 60% tech support!
It has become harder and harder to find any satisfaction in this job. My boss takes it for granted that things work smoothly - if they work smoothly. If they don't it's obviously my fault. Doesn't matter if I warned about that exact scenario months ago and was told "we have no money to spend on that right now". There is only so many times you can say "I told you so" before it gets sour.
There is absolutely no understanding here for the work I do, and pretty much no appreciation either. I get blamed for things that I was actively being hindered to prevent! Project roadmaps get completely changed a month into development because "I talked to my husband and he things we should present this stuff differently". I spend hours, sometimes days finding and evaluating software that fits a very specific requirement (while working within the constrains of a virtually 0$ budget), and all that work is for nothing because somebody doesn't like the way the UI looks and isn't willing to spend 30 minutes to actually give it a try and see if the programm works and does what was required. No, let's not do that, let's just say "I don't like that the tool bar is on the top and not on the right. Bad it guy, go find something better!".
Oh and let me talk to you about hosting companies and email blacklisting, ok? Some of you have already guessed we do not host our own mail server, our glorious leader bought a "All Inclusive Hosting Package Business Pro" from one of the big cheap hosters. Email, Webspace, Exchange, ... too bad it's broken every other month! The Webspace has some ridiculous limitations (so they can cram even more virtual servers onto one machine) and the Exchange server just refuses to sync every now and then. But who get's the blame? Yours truly. Pretty much all I can do is call the hosting company, talk to 4 different people until they finally connect me to somebody who is actually in a position to deal with the current problem... and then wait. But to our glorious leader it's a matter of work ethics - the problem is not solved because I don't insist enough! Or - this one has become the standard lately - she just claims that I simply to not want to fix the problem and use "out of my sphere of influence" as a cheap excuse. Right. I do simply not want to fix the problems. Because I like being reminded of those problems every 15-20 minutes by 5 different people. It makes no. effing. sense!
Oh and that website thing? The "I could do it with wordpress in 1 day and it looks good, how could you take 2 weeks and it looks aweful" situation? Let me put it this way: My site fucking works! It can do every single thing that's on the feature list, doesn't load ~3MB of needless scripts, does look good on any device from Desktop to Smartphone, and I actually spent some time to harden it as good as possible so that the Wordpress that I am forced to use won't be malware central 3 days after relaese. But alas my prototype had only basic placeholder images and some "shiny" stuff/effects were not implemented yet - but that 90$ Commercial Theme DOES have shiny spinning and blinking stuff and uses high quality stock photos as placeholders, so it must clearly be superior in every way - no matter if half the functions set in the project roadmap are not working in it. Bad it guy, lazy it guy, what do we pay you for?!
The last couple of months I have been thinking about quitting a lot. I decided against it mostly because of nostalgia. The company DOES produce some really good stuff, and in a way I'm a bit proud that I made a lot of that possible. But it has become more and more frustrating doing my job. Boss is not listening, most coworkers are not caring. Why pay somebody to take care of your it when you then sabotage his work?! I'm in damage control mode half the time and even after almost loosing an important client because of something I repeatedly warned about, people just don't listen, don't learn.
And then you see your boss posting on Reddit trying to find out if you're actually working or just slacking off.
Sounds like a dream job, right? Well you're in luck, they're hiring!