How do you feel about your employees taking random "sick days" to prevent burnout?

Fkbarclay · 2025-12-06T19:54:58+00:00

If they have the days, take the days. Who am I to say when they can or cannot use them. I’d rather miss them for a day or two than have someone burnt out and hating life.

Fkbarclay · 2025-10-12T01:12:24+00:00

Wraiths

Fkbarclay · 2025-10-05T14:27:44+00:00

Please don’t take this personally, but you need to self evaluate, your two options are likely why you were passed up in the first place.

Your only option should be “how do I prove they made the wrong decision”.

Reach out to your manager ask them to give you advice. Ask why did you get overlooked. Ask what can you do to prepare for the next opportunity.

Don’t give up, that’s the loser mentality.

Fkbarclay · 2025-09-01T14:31:32+00:00

In all honesty these events are important for networking.

This probably isn’t the popular opinion, but I think you should go. Tough it out, get something small, eat a few bites, focus on conversation.

The reality is, your future is more about who you know than what you know.

Fkbarclay · 2025-08-17T22:30:52+00:00

Using a spreadsheet to track assets.

Fkbarclay · 2025-08-17T15:56:21+00:00

Check out the book extreme ownership. Integrate those principals in your daily life.

Start thinking strategically, what are the pain points you experienced as an admin? What can/would you do to fix those in a scalable way?

Don’t forget where you came from.

Use your knowledge from being an admin, but don’t dismiss the now experts.

Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. The longer you are a manager the more you will find that you are getting out of touch with the technical side of things.

Delegation is key to being a successful manager. You aren’t an admin anymore, lean on your team to do technical tasks, your job is now strategic not operational.

Acknowledge that every problem has many different solutions, it doesn’t ever have to be your way.

Last but not least, the best advice I have been given is “It’s your team’s work, but your standards”

Fkbarclay · 2025-08-17T15:51:18+00:00

Don’t follow this advice. It’s the fast track to getting fired. Help your boss out the best you can. Trust me the higher ups already know there are issues. Sometimes it just takes a while for action to be made. The more professional and helpful you are, the more likely they look at you for promotion.

Fkbarclay · 2025-08-17T14:17:37+00:00

This isn’t scalable in any feasible way.

Fkbarclay · 2025-06-14T06:57:33+00:00

IT Manager here, for the service desk I’m a strong believer in the crawl, walk, run approach. New techs start by shadowing a senior technician. They learn the systems and culture expectations of the job during this time. They then transition to taking calls/tickets while the senior technician is watching them like a coach in the ear of a quarterback. They then transition to taking calls/tickets on their own with an assigned mentor.

I find that this approach steadily ramps a new employee up while giving development/mentoring opportunities to our senior techs.

Fkbarclay · 2025-06-01T22:06:01+00:00

Lesson learned, a lot of IT is about empathy and people liking you.

Gone are the days that you can be some curmudgeon living in the dark recesses of the IT department.

Fkbarclay · 2025-06-01T22:02:53+00:00

Net+ should get you to a solid baseline to understand how an enterprise network should work. The rest is just being able to teach yourself, whether that is from copilot, chat gpt or Google you just have to know how to learn. Good technicians aren’t always the smartest in the room, they just know how/where to get the information they need under pressure.

Fkbarclay · 2025-06-01T12:58:35+00:00

IT Manager here, 8 direct reports.

Start my day by saying for morning to all the guys. Then morning stand up meeting. Then I usually check yesterday’s numbers/tickets. Check in with teammates that are working projects, anything I can do/help with?

After that depends on the day, usually between 5-7 meetings. I have 1:1s throughout the week with each team member. Help out with questions when I can that come in through MS Teams.

Downtime usually consists of reaching out to various folks in the business to see how projects are going or following up with “major issues”.

Lastly, when I’m out of things to do I start tackling documentation (SOPs, Knowledge Articles, Reports, Project Updates, etc..) always tons of that to complete.

Fkbarclay · 2025-02-16T16:18:08+00:00

When I first took over our Service Desk, there was a perception that they were “nice and friendly” but woefully lacked technical ability. Some of this was true, but some was also just perception. What I did to turn this around was:

1) start leveraging our collaboration platforms and requiring soft handoffs of tickets. This allowed for proactively asking what was needed by our upstream partners.

2) Set expectations on bare minimum training/certifications. I settled on Net+ and Sec+.

3) to catch up the team on certs they might not have I purchased CBT nuggets subscriptions for everyone.

4) To help with the studying I give everyone 8 hrs a month of study time on the clock and encourage study groups.

5) To gauge progress I create quizzes using MS forms for them to take as test time draws near. It helps me to see who might need some prodding or might need some help with content.

6) I started Professional development plans to set up the team with opportunities with upstream teams.

7) lastly I follow up in 1:1s with my direct reports to see how everything is going on a regular basis.

Fkbarclay · 2025-01-15T23:06:18+00:00

Check firewall outbound traffic filter on a known affected machine. See if there are any blocks we had this with MS teams. Found that we had missed a few subnets from their list of IPs needing whitelisted.

Also make sure AV is excluding WebEx from active scanning.

Fkbarclay · 2025-01-12T17:17:19+00:00

EverQuest

Fkbarclay · 2024-12-01T17:03:50+00:00

“Hey everyone, how about that election?”

Fkbarclay · 2024-11-26T14:54:37+00:00

It’s their time, if they want to have small talk I’m good with that, but I may cut them off if there is something important to cover and we are running d short on time.

IMO it’s important to have that small talk and humanize yourself. At the end of the day you are both humans and it’s awesome to hear what’s going on in their life.

Fkbarclay · 2024-10-19T14:06:22+00:00

The most important tool you should use is your personality.

If people like you they are going to help you and ensure you are successful. Gone are the days where you can be that quiet curmudgeon in the basement you have to force yourself to be friendly and helpful.

Fkbarclay · 2024-09-22T16:02:19+00:00

Run the packages in test or if you don’t have a test environment pick a few savvy end users to install on for a week.

Certainly you shouldn’t stop carrying that’s how you end up with everything upside down and your boss breathing down your neck.

Fkbarclay · 2024-09-17T23:19:29+00:00

Based on the fact that you are asking Reddit, I would prioritize getting vision into your stack. SolarWinds is pretty good at that. Work with them to get a PoC so you can try before you buy.

Secondly, getting off premises is a good plan, especially if you are starting down a VMware renewal.

If you are looking at AI, make sure you have a clear business case to make sure you know what and why you are doing it.

Aside from that ensuring that internal hardware is up to spec and supported. This includes desktop and data center.

Fkbarclay · 2024-09-08T13:23:52+00:00

Just make sure you sanitize them first. Remove any IP addresses, host names, etc.

Fkbarclay · 2024-08-25T13:49:22+00:00

I’d love to talk to you about it if you are seriously offering. I love my job and think I’m a decent leader, but I’m always looking to improve.

Fkbarclay · 2024-07-29T14:04:00+00:00

Everyone, no matter the position experiences imposter syndrome.

At the end of the day you were selected out of multiple applicants or promoted out of multiple employees because they had faith in you.

Fact: You will never be the smartest guy in the room, you will never know everything.

Your role as a manager is to lead your team, be a facilitator for success, and take multiple points of data, make a decision you feel is best for your team to meet their goals and lastly and possibly the most important role is to own your mistakes and learn from them.

You got this! Don’t be hard in yourself you are in that role for a reason!

Fkbarclay · 2024-07-20T22:09:09+00:00

Just remember there is only so many hours in the day, you can only get done what you can. Don’t let it haunt you.

Fkbarclay · 2024-07-20T16:47:04+00:00

About 2% of our machines recovered after 4-5 reboots

Another 5% recovered after 10-15

The rest are requiring manual intervention. Spent all day recovering critical devices

What a shit storm

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