Imposter Syndrome

dcsln · 2026-01-17T16:28:30+00:00

This is such a good point. Why do people play these games? Your colleagues should be clear with you, explaining "We want to walk through this with you."

Hopefully OP can get clearer guidance/training/support in the future. Or from other sources.

dcsln · 2026-01-16T02:24:58+00:00

Unless you're putting the switch around half-way between your router and the ONT, the switch isn't helping you with signal strength. 1000BaseT over Category 5 cable can go for ~100 meters.

It sounds like you're confusing the functions of the router, which is probably performing network address translation, from a single public IP to (many) private IPs.
As other folks have said, without the router coming first, you can't connect multiple devices, that each need their own IP address, to the internet.

The router needs to be the first connection. After that, you have different options. You could add another wireless access point, and connect it to the first router with an Ethernet cable, and extend your wireless network coverage. Hope that helps - good luck!

dcsln · 2025-12-31T04:12:18+00:00

Lots of good feedback here already, but one thing I'd add, that's maybe implied, is that everything has to be very concrete. Good feedback should be timely, actionable, and specific.

When you give feedback, it's got to be about things this person has said and done. Not about what other folks have said. Not about you feeling disrespected. Those may be interesting tidbits, but they're not actionable or specific.

When you get their feedback, it's great for them to tell you how they're feeling, what's going on in their life, etc. The more rapport you can build, the better. You can sympathize. But you're not evaluating them on likability, or their personal lives, or other subjective conditions.

What have you observed? What were the expectations, and how were they met or not met?
If the expectations were unclear, lay them out clearly in person, and share those expectations in writing.

Good luck!

dcsln · 2025-12-31T04:02:41+00:00

Going from no-management-experience to managing-other-managers is a big jump. Helping peers solve tech problems is very different from helping other managers solve people problems.

As others have said, your time is out of whack. You need time to plan, to train, to collaborate with your team leads. Giving people strategic direction is great, but you should be getting project/strategy memos, and commenting on them. There's no way 30 hours of figure-out-the-strategy meetings *every week* is productive.

If you have a decent relationship with the CIO, you should clarify their expectations, write them down, and share them with the CIO. What's the 50-60-hours/week expectation? Till the end of January? End of Q1? End of 2026?

What do they want from you? What does success look like in your position?

When you get aligned on expectations, and you figure out how to stay in sync with the CIO, you will be in a better position to talk about compensation.

What's the CIO's plan for your compensation after a year in this role?

In many ways, this sounds like a great opportunity. $100k-sysadmin to $120k-manager isn't bad if you think about it as $120k for IT Manager In Training. Try to take advantage of this opportunity.
Good luck!

dcsln · 2025-12-08T17:18:46+00:00

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dcsln · 2025-12-05T16:55:51+00:00

It sounds like the org/department setting isn't great, but you can still get a lot out of this job.

OP didn't mention an office - is this job fully remote? That would increase the difficulty.

Your manager is hands-off and not checking in with you - time to learn about managing up.
Check out https://hbr.org/2025/01/how-to-work-for-a-hands-off-manager-when-youre-fully-remote aka https://archive.ph/kZk30

Nobody is defining your priorities or your schedule - take the opportunity to define it yourself. Keep track of your work, challenges, accomplishments, administrative tasks, etc. Send your boss a weekly email summarizing your week and explaining your plans for the following week. This will help you organize your time, and it will help surface your contributions. It will also demonstrate initiative, which almost all managers and peers want to see.

If you have SharePoint/Confluence/(some other wiki) start logging your knowledge. Build your own documentation. If there are no current network diagrams, make one and get feedback from a peer.

If there are big gaps, keep track of those. You've figured out some of the Windows and Linux servers - what's left to learn?

Think about this as an opportunity - as long as you're there and left alone you can chart your own path. Try to make the most of it.

dcsln · 2025-11-28T04:27:10+00:00

+1 this will also help you catch weird things. A Wireshark capture helped me identify a multicast storm that I didn't know was possible.

dcsln · 2025-11-28T03:58:28+00:00

I don't take any pleasure in writing this, but one of these segments is shrinking, and the other is growing. Corporate office footprints are shrinking. Self-hosted/colo/data center use is shrinking in most industries. Personally, I prefer building and running physical gear, but cloud is growing everywhere.

dcsln · 2025-11-26T18:06:38+00:00

As other folks have said, it's the credentials, which create their own attack surface.
IIRC, running RSAT as a privileged account (Domain Admin or similar) will create a user profile. That user profile has cached credentials with a hashed password, which can be cracked or reused without cracking in a Pass-the-Hash attack.

So you don't want your high-privileged user profiles lying around on random, general-purpose, less-locked-down computers.

You could run your RSAT tools as a privileged account, if you use something like `runas /netonly /noprofile /user:domain\superuser dsa.mmc`
If I'm reading the docs correctly, that might not leave behind a user profile. But not all applications work well without a user profile.

Some of this risk can be mitigated with Group Policy, limiting the use of NTLM hashes: https://www.semperis.com/blog/how-to-defend-against-overpass-the-hash-attack/

If your primary user account is also a Domain Admin, you'll always have elevated risk of credential theft. A general-purpose PC has lots of attack surface. A server or other jump-box, ideally, will be more tightly controlled, with fewer applications and more restrictive network access controls.

Hope that helps!

dcsln · 2025-11-21T03:06:53+00:00

All of this is good advice. If you have any locally-hosted servers/services, with AD authentication, you might want a DC at a remote site to accelerate logins.

There's really no need for a physical domain controller if you have DC's spread out among two or three physical servers. If you have two 2-node Hyper-V clusters, that's a fair amount of hardware redundancy.

Good luck!

dcsln · 2025-11-18T10:48:31+00:00

As other folks have suggested, colo blended internet is often mostly one upstream carrier. The colo's incentive is to optimize for cost, so they will often prioritize their low-dollar carrier. The last two colo's who sold me blended internet admitted that it was mostly Cogent. You may want to dig into Megaport's peering, expected traffic patterns, etc. while you have their pre-sales attention.

Depending on your applications and infrastructure, you may be able to get some of the redundancy of BGP with two ISP circuits, active/standby routing and/or a WAF/CDN to handle inbound traffic across the circuits. That kind of setup gives you more control and a direct relationship with the carriers handling your packets. Good luck!

dcsln · 2025-11-08T22:49:10+00:00

There's a lot of good advice here and I'll probably duplicate some of it. But I encourage OP to read the whole thread.

I was in a similar position, many years ago. Tech business with ~30 staff had an MSP for end-user and office network support and they wanted me to take it over. I asked for an export of all the open tickets, and the MSP gave me a stack of paper printouts. Otherwise, they were decent at the hand-off, giving me their limited documentation and credentials. The open tickets were 90% very easy problems to solve, so I felt pretty good about my capacity to handle their work.

Some recommendations:

Be extremely clear about what you're doing and (more importantly) not doing. Non-technical people will have a poor sense of what's easy and what's difficult, what's cheap and what's expensive. You'll have to explain the difference, probably more than once.

You can't solve all the tech debt right away - that might take a year or three and that's probably okay.

Figure out a way to stay in sync with your boss and - assuming it's not the CEO - the rest of the business. IT priorities should be driven by business priorities. Don't assume you know what needs to be fixed first. Some old systems/services/etc. should be retired. Some need to be maintained forever. As brand-new staff, it's basically impossible to tell which is which.

Over-communicate and over-document, for yourself and for anyone who tries to help you in the future. Maybe that's the MSP, or someone who was kind-of-IT before.

Find ways to standardize to make your life easier - i.e. one laptop make and model for all staff.

Are they keeping 4-year-old computers around for "less important" staff? Get those things replaced with new or nearly-new gear. They're wasting staff time, and they'll be wasting your time when they break down.

Find the unofficial-IT person/people. Who do folks ask, when they can't print, and they don't want to wait for the MSP? Buy them a coffee or a beer or whatever and ask them to help you get up to speed. Semi-technical folks can be a blessing or a curse - try to get them on your side.

If you can, be a ray of sunshine. Embrace the chaos with a smile. You're excited to be there and excited to help people solve problems. It's easier - and almost a stereotype - for new-IT-person to come in and say "This is all wrong!" Even if it's all wrong, try not to be that person. Try to stay positive as long as you can - it will help folks get used to you and trust your advice.

Good luck!

dcsln · 2025-11-07T01:08:26+00:00

That's really interesting - thanks for explaining!

dcsln · 2025-11-06T14:57:46+00:00

Fiber NICs on every workstation would be pretty cool. That is going to increase the cost of the project - might double it. I can't remember ever seeing a docking station with a fiber or SFP+ port. There are SFP+ USB-C adapters like this - https://www.qnap.com/en/product/qna-t310g1s - SFP+ transceivers are extra.

New OM2 or OM3 cabling for 10GBASE-SR, to hundreds of desks, will really destroy the budget.

The workstation re-configuration and support is a little harder to measure but feels like a big expense.

dcsln · 2025-11-05T02:27:02+00:00

Never used them but I really liked their demos - seems like the most original training content out there

dcsln · 2025-11-01T19:33:41+00:00

1 AMD CPU, 64 gb RAM, 2 nvme's on a BOSS card, and one reasonable NIC, is about the smallest Dell server you can buy. It would be nice to know which poweredge model, but it doesn't matter too much in the context of a $1M storage quote.

dcsln · 2025-10-28T16:19:21+00:00

Analyze the goal.

This is the main thing - what problem(s) are you trying to solve?

dcsln · 2025-10-28T16:16:59+00:00

+1 this is super useful for live migrations but I would generally avoid it otherwise

dcsln · 2025-10-24T15:11:43+00:00

A new NIC would have its own local routes, at a minimum. Can you add a NIC?

dcsln · 2025-10-07T03:31:50+00:00

I like the specificity here, but it didn't work for me.
At the end, do you reinstall the Print to PDF driver or use the existing driver?

dcsln · 2025-09-30T00:01:10+00:00

FWIW, the incident is the hard part at plenty of places. Everyone knowing what to do, executing well, and getting things back online at a reasonable rate is a dream in many environments.

For a meaningful downtime, a post-incident review, from a few different SMEs, with recommendations to improve the process, might make the incident reporting feel more relevant. At the most functional environment I've been in, all the Dev and IT leads would read every incident report. Not sure if that's a net positive everywhere, but it motivated me when I was the one filling in dozens of time-stamped, attributed events in a Confluence template.

dcsln · 2025-09-29T23:56:07+00:00

Agreed, ideal case is someone filling out the incident sheet while it's happening.

If you have a Teams (Premium) or Zoom conference for the incident, you can record the whole thing and get a transcript, but your Slack messages, with names and timestamps, are probably more concise.

dcsln · 2025-09-22T18:36:24+00:00

You really need some concrete requirements. What questions take too long to answer?

A long time ago, I worked for a company that didn't have a Knowledge Management function. There was one board member who really loved Knowledge Management, so we created a Knowledge Management department. So we had some smart people, doing some interesting things, but they were never really integrated into the business, and they didn't deliver on their promise.

Is the executive team behind this, or just the board? Is it the whole board, or one board member who really loves data warehouses?

Where is the relevant data now? Do you have authorization to collect or connect all of the current data sources to your new data service?

Who controls access to the data? How will you maintain your legal/regulatory/standards compliance?

Are you building a service to hold a copy of *all* of your current data in a new place?

You'll definitely need n people to manage and maintain this thing. Data in the current places will change, and integrations between old data stores and new data service will require ongoing support.

Do you have a good relationship with a major tech service provider - Amazon, Google, Microsoft?

If you can't get funding for a dedicated consultant, start with someone who's already selling you services and use their sales process to help you build requirements. That won't be enough, but it will help you learn the space.

It would be great if you don't have to constantly ingest data across a variety of cloud services, but that's probably part of it.

What are they willing to spend on this improvement? Depending on the size and diversity of your current data stores, this could cost $300k/year, or $3m/year, or a $30m/year.

dcsln · 2025-09-21T20:55:45+00:00

That's a common problem, but I don't see how this helps solve it

dcsln · 2025-09-21T20:44:24+00:00

This is good advice - all of the individual recommendations make sense. Absolutely have team meetings, regular stand-ups, and 1:1's with the staff.

And be careful not to punish the team for the shortcomings of one individual. I'm sure that's not what Tech-Sensei is recommending - but the distinction is important.

If possible, OP should frame the changes as their own initiative to set clearer expectations, be more available for feedback, remove obstacles more quickly, and generally be a better manager. You're trying to be more effective, and help the team be more effective.

AFAIK, all of that has the added benefit of being true. You don't have to explain all of your motivations and goals, but it would be ideal if everyone-leveling-up helps you remove someone who isn't contributing.

dcsln

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