IT stress

An IT director’s lot is not a happy one.

No suprise here really, network security and virus threats keep all of us on our toes, and if you’re unlucky enough to be the place where the buck stops when it comes to being responsible for this stuff, it’s a pretty stressful situation. On the other hand, Craig sent me an email earlier this morning and told me about spending most of the weekend trying to get a game to work properly on his wife’s PC. That sense of satisfaction that we get when we get something working on a PC is the buss we all come back for, isn’t it? I’ll admit it, finding a solution to a particulary tricky problem, or teaching someone to do something extremely useful brings with it a certain buzz that makes all the worries worth it!

Now the interesting thing, and a bit of a scary thing to me as a jobseeker, if this tidbit:

“The survey found that 61 per cent of mid-sized businesses with between 20 to 250 employees would consider outsourcing their IT support before recruiting specialist IT personnel in-house as a way of coping with unpredictable support needs.”

It makes sense. Not to toot my own horn, but if I were hiring for my own replacement, you would have to have someone with the capacity to live this stuff, and learn new stuff quickly, because what I have to deal with changes all the time. When I first started I did some basic network admininstration, desktop support, and database administration. Since then I’ve had to learn to install servers and switches, write a security policy, learn to admin a telephone/voice mail system, do staff trainng assessments, one-on-one and classroom training sessions, learn new operating systems, learn to admin a corporate version of Symantec AV, do patch testing and management, and countless other little things that no one anticipated needing!

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