Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sleepysysadmin 2539 days ago
My last job, an msp, expected 100% of our time to be billed out. You didn't get lunches or breaks.

If you got your work completed quicker so that you could hit the washroom or go for lunch, you were rewarded with more work.

Furthermore, I was on-call 24x7 and near daily would be called for help afterhours. This wasn't smb stuff exclusively. This was federal governments, hospitals, prisons, fortune 100s. All of which who have fees for downtime around $10,000-15,000/hour.

During my performance review, I got chewed out for have >40 lates. I called bullshit on this. My boss pulled up our time accounting system and turns out all except 1 were weekends. I worked at least 1 day out of >40 weekends in the previous year and I was being chewed out for it... seriously.

Then there was workplace politics; 2 other techs had been fighting for years prior to me even being hired. I had to regularly work with 1 of the techs and when he would rant about the other tech I'd just node and ignore the whole thing.

For whatever reason, the other guy took it as if i was on that guy's team and he started harassing me. I basically ignored it; took about a year before it escalated. This guy came after me with everything. He'd take shit out of my office. He'd bad mouth me to my clients. I collected a list of wtf is going on.

Final straw, I had configured 2x ASA5506 for a remote location in Texas. Both firewalls were accessible on the network. He told the MSP owners that my configuration of the ASAs were so bad they needed to shutdown the facility and ship these ASAs back to Canada for him to redo. Mind you, this is my client not his and this is probably in around 200th pair of ASAs I've configured and these were configured identical to 4 other locations which are up and running.

So I send long email detailing the harassment by this guy toward me.

The next day I was fired.

Point of the story, things can be worse. Pull up your socks!

2 comments

You were dealing with a very toxic person, who said a lot more about you behind your back then you were aware of.

I’ve lived a lot of the same stories. Although yours may be the worst I’ve ever heard, simply because I’ve never been fired. But bits and pieces of your story are in just about every job I’ve had.

I’m no longer confused as to why a lot of people simply don’t want to work anymore. Getting enough money and quitting, starting a menial business, or getting on government assistance makes a lot more sense than your story.

If you're curious to read what a rougher week was like: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/a7zjvr/my_toxic_m...

You might ask why I didn't bail before? I didn't even interview for a single job. I was pretty sick. Had major surgery and chemo shortly after that week. It was a couple months after that week where I got fired.

They had about 30 techs and >20 techs quit and were fired after that.

No one in the world should work under such conditions.

To me it doesn't sound like it could be much worse than what you described