We get mail..

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

Tony writes, asking about how I got to be a one-man IT Department. Since many of you may be looking for the same type of position, here’s my answer to him:

Actually I sorta got into this postion by accident. I used to work in accounting, but spent alot of my free time working with computers and learning about them. When I first started working where I work now, I was in an accounting, clerical-type job, but started helping out with various PC problems, and demonstrating my abilities to both use, and fix PC’s. When the IT guy left 6 months after I started the powers that be figured it was cheaper to simply move me over there and spend a little money on some network admin training than it would be to go on a full-fledged IT candidate search. That was about 6 years ago and I’ve been here ever since.

Definitely just a case of being in the right place at the right time. 🙂

So, unfortunately, I don’t have any actual job-hunting advice for you, other than if you really want the autonamy that goes with being the whole department, focus on small companies, and accept that you will probably not have much authority in your job. The people with authority are all in management postions, there’s no one for you to manage when you’re the one-man IT Department!

Share with your friends!
LinkedInBlueskyMastodonThreadsRedditBuffer

Similar Posts

  • One way to help burnout

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    After all that discussion about burnout among help desk folks, today I had the rare experience of getting to do something different. I spent most of the day driving down to our Cincinnati office to work on a couple of projects, and then driving back to cover the help desk through the end of the…

  • Linked – The 1 Major Skill That Most Employees Say Their Bosses Lack

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    Every poor manager I’ve ever dealt with has been a poor communicator. Almost every shortcoming or problem I’ve seen people have with a manager or coworker could be filed under a problem with communication. It’s THE thing in the workplace. Ideas, expectations, priorities, and everything else in the workplace come down to the ability to communicate. If you cannot communicate clearly, you are lost, and the people who work for you or lost.

    Yet how many organizations promote the top performer or their most senior individual contributor without ever considering whether they are good communicators? And how many prioritize teaching them how to communicate as managers?

  • Spam fighting

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

    See, sometimes Microsoft has a good idea . By limiting the number of messages you can send with a free email account, they cut off all those spammers using hotmail accounts to send spam. That would be a good thing, and the 100 messages per day should be plenty for normal users. Really, if you…

  • Spamalot

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    Are some of the Spam Cures Worse than the Disease? That the headline of the lead story in the latest WinXPnews. They go on to mention the large number of reader emails they get and how few of them they actually have time to personally answer, and how, when they do take time to answer,…

  • How Blogging Improves Us

    ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

    I was listening to the latest Akimbo podcast and Seth Godin said something very interesting about how his blog helps him. He talked about how it forces him to focus, and to think about what he wants to say, etc. Having been a blogger for as long as I have, I paused to think about…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)