The Poor Admin

In the last few years, some of the gains I've made toward making my role more focused on long-term efforts to continually improve and standardize our systems have been rolled back. The organizational details are boring and immaterial to the story; it boils down to the fact my team has less people to do more work, so much more of my time must be spent dealing with the churn of my team's daily duties. As a result, all parts of my job have suffered, and not just in obvious ways.

My primary frustration with this situation is IT systems are entropic. They are constantly changing, and without clear and enforced policies, they get more chaotic as they grow. For a couple years, I felt like I was really making progress toward bringing my company's domains to an acceptable level of standardization, many of which we took over after their previous owners failed an audit or were essentially told to give us the reigns because we were better equipped for managing the services associated with my team. That progress required significant amounts of time, knowledge, and perspective to constantly balance the competing priorities of all those involved, but the costs and frustrations were worth it because I could see the long-term benefits I was creating.

Once I started spending a lot more time working cases again as a result of the the worst workload:worker ratio since we were a two-person team, my task and overall job satisfaction has steadily decreased. I've made comments to team members that I feel like my work is getting sloppier, and I even noted in a yearly self-review that I felt like I was somehow worse/less effective at my job than I had been just a couple years prior. For a while, I assumed the change in task balance was related, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly how.

Then I read a socioeconomic theory about boots.

Full disclosure: I have read very little of Terry Prachett's works. I finished one Discworld book, and it didn't grab me, but I've kept several more in the wings for when I want to give it another try. However, I was introduced to the comments of one of his characters (a Captain Samuel Vines) in a piece about economic inequality. Here's the quote:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

- Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

There's a lot to unpack there, but for the context of this post, the most important thing was the insight it gave me about my job: I'm worse at it now because I'm time-poor.

When I had the luxury of only spending a small amount of time on cases and other immediate-response work, I could invest the rest on "good boot" projects that would pay dividends for years to come in the forms of standardized workflows across environments, easily-identified resources, smooth security audits, risk mitigation via appropriate access levels, and a slew of other things management and end users take for granted shortly after they're accomplished.

When I did have to work cases, they were mostly ones my teammates couldn't figure out or were novel enough to warrant the development and documentation of new policies and procedures. I could spend the time to fully research all aspects of the requests, work with the requesters to develop optimal workflows (including well-defined inputs), and double-check/test/document the work I did. Every time I did this, I saved my team an immense of amount of "future time" since most subsequent requests of the same type would come in with all the information we needed to work them, and our documentation repository had all the information and steps necessary to fulfill them. We see the fruits of this work every day in the cases we can knock out without additional research.

However, my working life is now dominated by "sort of OK boots" work that is essentially just doing my part to keep my team's head above water. The days of testing all new/changed DNS records for correct resolution are long gone, much less checking service account credentials before sending them. I'm forced to make assumptions about all sorts of things because cases come in without the required information, and asking all the appropriate questions for every request is unrealistic because it takes too much time. Every day, I have to choose between either contacting requesters to get the full picture of their requests to ensure I give them the best long-term solutions or doing my best with incomplete information and moving on to the next case to get the queue to a sort-of-acceptable state. My management is essentially forcing me to do the latter.

As a result, my work is sloppier. Sometimes my assumptions are wrong, sometimes I make small typos, sometimes I paste the entirely wrong password or create resources in the wrong domain. I'm also impatient with requesters and coworkers since I constantly feel like I have to do everything at breakneck speed. It's a spiral: the less time I have to work cases properly, the more mistakes I make and the more re-work I have to do, which means I have less time to do other requests.

And all the while, the environments that have not had the appropriate standardization work done in them get worse and worse, further entrenching the status quo and making them harder to "fix" by the day as more and more resources are created using their shortsighted and non-secure configurations. One of my favorite mantras is "The easiest time to start fixing things is today." Perhaps better than anyone, I can feel how thin the soles of my "boots" have become, and I see no obvious end to the frustrating cycle that will force me to re-buy the same kind and keep the costly cycle going.

I don't see a clear path to fixing this without a major change in either team responsibilities or staffing. Management doesn't seem to be seriously considering adding people to the team, but there are indications they might be giving one of our services (that we've managed for over 13 years) to a team that seems to have little enterprise experience with it. I get frustrated with this company and my role somewhat regularly, but this is the first time in a while I've seriously considered looking at other options.