The Many Faces of Mike McBride

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Wednesday, August 17, 2005

The things I won't miss

First off, I forgot one thing I will miss yesterday, the vacation time. Not only because taking a new job spoiled plans Angela and I were making but because I'm losing the "extra" vacation time earned by having been here a number of years. (I'll go from 17 days per year back to 10) Of course, I also have a bunch of left-over vacation this year that'll be cashed out and will pay for a new laptop since mine is falling apart as we speak. (It's 6 years old, it needs to be replaced anyway, but the failing battery, CD drive, and AC connector all seem to be pointing in the "soon to be dead" direction.)

Anyway, any discussion of what I won't miss about small business IT, especially not-for-profit IT, starts with budget. My experience with small business IT has been that there is no planned IT budget, you just replace things as they need replaced, and purchase new things as you can convince someone who writes the checks that you absolutely need to have them! You spend a whole lot of time begging for money, and only getting it some of the time. That won't be my problem any more. Other people will make the budget decisions, and we'll have a plan of what we need to do going forward. I won't have to hold things together with chicken wire and bubblegum just to keep it working while I try and get money to fix it right! (I'll be nice and not even talk about being underpaid given all the things I'm responsible for, you get the idea.)

Secondly, for all the autonomy I have being the only IT guy, I'm looking forward to not having to be the one person with all the answers! I'm looking forward to learning by working within a team, each experts in their own area. I'm looking forward to being able to ask someone else to help me with something, as opposed to Googling it or posting it here! (Not that you guys haven't been super helpful and saved my butt many times.) I'm looking forward to having input, but not being held personally responsible for every tech decision that is made, even when I'm not the one who made it!

I won't miss the office politics. Yes, I know, every office has politics, but small offices have politics that you can't ever avoid being in the middle of. Especially when you are charged with being the guy to work with all the departments. All the inter-personal conflicts between managers and staff have to be taken into consideration any time you do anything. In my new job, I'll be low enough on the totem pole that I can avoid some of that, I'm sure.

I won't miss being personally liable for software licensing! Do any of you small business IT folks realize that if you are the one guy charged with making sure a business is legal, and it's found not to be, not only can the organization be fined, but you can too? Up to $120,000 per violation, last time I checked. Yeah, you wonder why we have such a strict policy against installing your own software and why I insisted on it?

Last, but certainly not least, I won't miss the cheap, crappy coffee! The folks I interviewed with praised the quality of the coffee over at the law firm. Sweet! :)

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Home wireless security

My latest effort, up at 2Guys2Cities, simple steps to help keep your wireless internet connection from the casual nefarious user.

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Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Blogging from Word

Scoble pointed to the news on the Blogger Blog about the new Word add-in that lets you create posts in Word and post them directly to Blogger. That's a sweet idea. I'll definitely be checking that out!

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Things I'll miss

As a follow up to yesterday's post, here's a handful of things I'm going to miss about working in small business IT:

Autonomy:

I've pretty much been able to do whatever I want, however I want, within reason obviously. I think Firefox is a better browser, I install it on my PC. I think the place could use an intranet site, I cobble together some spare parts, use open source tools and build one. Since I'm the one responsible for making sure we stay legal with software licenses and I'm the one who will have to fix anything that gets broken because of a software install, I'm given pretty free reign.

Comfort Level:

I know our infrastructure like the back of my hand. I know where the points of failure are and how to determine which one might have failed. I know exactly how everything fits together and rarely have to guess about what might be impacted by any change.

I also know my users. I know who's going to be difficult, who needs a little more hand-holding, and who just needs pointed in the right direction so they can work it out themselves.

Going someplace new changes this tremendously!

Flexibility:

Currently, if I need to leave for an hour or two, no big deal. My boss knows I will be here after hours enough to make that up, and I can pretty much determine my own priorities, because no one else really knows for sure what they should be. If I start to get a little burned out doing database reports, I can play around with the intranet site, or do some documentation for awhile.

Working desktop support changes that. I need to be available for users to answer questions and solve problems during the hours they expect me to be there. I have to focus on the problems as they come or are assigned to me by someone else.

Tomorrow, the other side. Things I won't miss and/or am looking forward to!

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Monday, August 15, 2005

The dirty details

While still trying to keep a bit of mystery about where I currently work, and where I'm going to be working, there are a few things that I find very interesting about my upcoming job-switch that I want to share and discuss. Mostly, I'm interested in how much of my experience can be extrapolated out to the IT industry in general. Some of it, I think, is important to be aware of when you work in small business IT, some of it may just be my own situation. If nothing else, I'm spending some of my lunch hour throwing it out there to see what everyone else thinks.

My current job is, as the site's name implies, the entire IT department for a small not-for-profit association. That means I do everything from managing a file server, to building an intranet, to database reporting, to help-desk, to hardware repairs. All of it. I am the all-powerful tech guru of the office, so to speak. :)

That's all well and fine within our small office. It doesn't translate to a larger organization though. As I went about seeking out a new opportunity, I constantly ran into a technology wall. Larger organizations that had Sys Admin-level IT openings were looking for skills that you only get in larger organizations. Things like server clustering, Active Directory, document management systems, supervisory skills, and programs like Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, etc. A 25-person office with one file server simply doesn't have any reason to implement these things, unless they're already in a cutting edge environment, like software developers. Most small, non hi-tech companies aren't going that route with their systems.

So what's a small business IT guy to do? The way I saw it, I had a couple of choices. I could wait and look for small business openings that matched the qualifications I had gained in my 7 years at my small business, but those were few and far between, and would tend to have the same limitations that my current job has. When you're the IT guy, where do you go from there? What's the career path? Is there any high-level voice within the company that represents IT? How are you going to keep current within your industry when your small business isn't using current technology? If you work in small business IT you need to consider these questions, IMHO.

The second option, was to find what I refer to as a step-down job. That means that you take a job that isn't the network admin job you see yourself as, because those larger organizations don't see you as a qualified network admin. Over the last year or more, what I've also discovered, however, is that while these jobs are plentiful the number of employers who wouldn't consider you over-qualified is quite small. Not to mention that in many cases, the step-down in salary isn't worth it.

So, I was pretty much stuck in option number three. Stay where I was, do the best to overcome the limitations that my situation left me with, and keep my eyes open for the "right" fit. I think I've found that in my new position, but I did have to accept some realities of the marketplace.

Reality number one, my not-for-profit experience did not prepare me to be a sys admin within a larger organization. The new place I'm going has almost 350 employees, a server room, WAN and LAN connections, a brand new document management system, multiple email and Blackberry messaging servers, VPN connections, servers dedicated to just doing billing and contacts management. Simply put, even though I'm the sys-admin where I work, there's no way in hell I could be on that level in this environment, and there's no way for me to gain the hands-on experience needed to do that job while I'm still here.

Which brings me to reality number two, the only way to get experience working with that level of technology, is to work in a larger organization, in a "smaller" role. I'm going to be working in a help desk/desktop support/user training role at my new position. (It's at a large law firm here in Columbus, by the way.) That's less responsibility than I currently have, although supporting 350 users is much more support work than supporting 25, so it won't be less of a workload, that's for sure!

In a sense, I consider myself very lucky. While my tech background didn't help that much when it came to working in a larger environment, it was the people skills I've learned and demonstrated here that helped me land this job. Although having knowledge of XP, Office, basic networking, etc. is still necessary, it was my ability to relate in handling difficult tech support requests, in leading training classes, in doing one-on-one training, writing help documentation, etc. that really set me apart. Those "soft" skills that I brought to the table are what got me this position, and made me valuable enough that I didn't wind up having to take a cut in salary just to get out of the small business environment, which I was beginning to think was going to be impossible!

So I guess, my point here is, when you work in small business IT, especially when you work with less than current technology, make sure you concentrate on those soft, people skills. Those are the skills that will help you move up and on from where you are.

What do you think? What's your IT job market experience been?

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Sunday, August 14, 2005

Spyware Weekly and ID theft

Friday's edition of Spyware Weekly has a boat-load of information on that ID Theft ring and the keylogger they were using. Definitely a must read for anyone concerned about spyware infections.

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