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by danudey 4593 days ago
You're not wrong in that there's a lot of questions left unanswered by this post. Where you see 'terrible work environment', though, I see a pretty decent likelihood of 'Lots to do, and also I have no idea how to write a good IT job posting'.

I would have a lot of questions for them, for sure. I've worked as sysadmin for $10/hr with 24/7 on-call (when I was desperate, broke, and nearly homeless), and I'd never go back. That said, if you're the only IT guy… well, obviously you're going to be on-call if something breaks. I would definitely negotiate this up in my contact if I were interviewing for the job.

The interesting thing to me about the potential here is that they already have all of their infrastructure; they have the website, the servers, the CDNs, and whatever else they need to run the site. The job would involve taking over those responsibilities and bringing them in-house. They already have redundancy, monitoring, and distribution taken care of, so you wouldn't be asked to build a new server infrastructure from scratch and take care of it. You might be tasked with bringing it in-house, but that's definitely doable by one person if there's no strict (unreasonable) timeline on it.

As for the wifi: yeah, I wouldn't want to do it either, personally. There's lots of other people who can do it far, far better than I could.

Looking at the PA guys, I'm willing to make a bet that their biggest IT problem is that they don't know what they don't know. Can awful wifi be solved? Presumably, right? But they're dealing with tens of thousands of people. How do you do that? Who do you call?

So, what they need for the wifi example, for example, is someone who can step in and say 'These are the things we don't know and need to learn', or 'these are the questions we need to ask', or 'this is the discussion we need to have' (which ties in with my 'don't know how to write a good tech job post' point above).

One thing I've learned in tech jobs is that having no answers is far, far better than having no questions. Maybe they're trying to hire someone to ask questions.