I work for a major tech company as a Datacenter Technician and after an injury that caused me to miss 5 months of work, I returned and now find myself being there over a year and not fully understanding my job. The training has been horrendous anyway, but I have no excuse. I should’ve been doing better by now.
I guess it’s now affecting my confidence in myself, and my ability to learn. Even though I’ve learned music production, graphic design, web development, and then database administration, I can’t seem to get a full grasp of working with baremetal and cloud servers.
Both are very reasonably priced, and I much prefer their sysadmin material over PluralSight.
Have you asked your supervisor/lead tech for some mentoring and shadowing opportunities? After my 5th job in I.T./Ops/Development roles, I said the similar every time: “The training has been horrendous…”
I think it is what it is, and dependent on the company. I’ve heard of full blown apprenticeships in development, but I’m still on the search
Good luck. Being away is tough, but once you get back in the saddle you should start to regain your confidence.
All of those OS’s are used. We don’t do much of the setup process or troubleshoot a lot from them since we basically build the bare-metal servers as purchased from the customer, and then during the provisioning process an OS is loaded onto the servers.
Most of the mistakes happen during the building stages if hardware is scanned in incorrectly, or if some hardware is RMA, but during the provisioning process things can go wrong as well. Sometimes the network connections were done wrong physically and in the system.
There’s just so many different companies and models of motherboards, RAM, HDs, processors, etc… Building things can be a little hard to learn. Not to mentioning learning how to fix things when they go wrong lol
I appreciate the kind words and the links. I will check them out.
Oh and as for asking for help, I am currently trying to prove myself with a new boss. If I seem like I don’t know what they think I know, I will not get a promotion I DESPERATELY need lol
Is that wrong? The job already pays the bare minimum.
Hm… So you are overwhelmed troubleshooting hardware and network faults? I think that’s to be expected at first, especially at the data center level.
Do you have an escalation path? A central source for vendor contacts? Anything, ticketing system, OneNote, Zim wiki, etc? If not, I would start compiling a list of contacts of the vendors that support YOU and make a habit of contacting them if/when SHTF.
I’ve worked with Microsoft, Cisco, Netgear, Polycom, Yealink, Dell, and Nutanix vendors regularly. You can’t be expected to know everything. See below for more on that.
There is no shame or lack of worth employment wise when you know you need a crash course or a refresher on something. You’ve been out for five months, if they can’t understand you need to get brought up to speed or some new lessons, then, as much as I hate to suggest this, I would seek employment elsewhere. I.T., Devops, whatever we’re calling it these days, it’s about culture as much as it is about tech and engineering. We all help others succeed, we serve the business, and we try and have fun because we love what we’re doing. If they’re not willing to help or provide guidance, I would consider other options.
I do hate that my solutions mostly involve spending money. What kind of computer do you have? Have you considered building an ESXi lab? You can get server hardware for cheap on Ebay. I am fortunate enough to live next to a place called The Server Store (yes, I know ) where I have SAS, SAN, NIC, RAID, and whatever acronym you can think of. I still went through iXSystems for a couple of things and got a tower, rack, and SAN off Ebay. It is definitely worth labbing up, even if you just do it a few hours throughout the week.
Anyway, I’m rambling. Best of luck to you! Remember to reflect often as to why you’re here. It’s easy to get caught up in the frustration with end users, but these types of job are awesome because we love tech and we love building things. Keep that at the front of your mind and you can go anywhere.
Also, don’t consider yourself a failure. You got hired, you made it. Remember what made you so excited about this job, reinvigorate your passion. We all start somewhere. Every time I’ve aced an interview I’ve started my next job and said “I have no idea wtf I’m doing…”.
Thanks for your insight and guidance. You’ve given me a lot to think about. I didn’t want to post this on Facebook, but I felt like I could reach out to my fellow tech peeps and someone would understand me lol
Makes more sense than posting something on Facebook. The pit of society haha
It’s natural to feel like you are on the back foot after missing so much time. Don’t let doubt creep in. Reading over your 3 post, 1 half shows your lack of confidence and time off. The 2nd half shows someone who wants to prove themselves in the face of new management. You show an ability and knowledge of the work, so picking yourself up now is easy.
Would picking up some online course help? Sure! Although I will say that many online courses are slipping over into each other, and you have real world first hand knowledge to work with.
I see this as a moment of adversity, Things shouldn’t be easy because you wouldn’t appreciate the victories/success. Stay at it, read up in your spare time. (I’m a huge advocate for education and doing things for betterment) Keep your chin up. You will be fine
Haha! I bet. I go to a store here that has almost any electronic you will ever need and the parts to build almost anything. I spend WAY too much time there.
