General Discussion
I am not personally a sysadmin at the moment, I oversee developers. That said, since I’m the most closely tech-related manager, I am sometimes sent invoices from the IT department for review, and these invoices are for things as basic as “install new antivirus software” (not the software license, but remote support for the installation), or “configure new VLAN”, or “transfer domain to new registrar” (again, not the actual registration fee, but a support fee for someone else to do it for them). They’re also continually requesting a higher and higher budget but with little tangible results, IMHO. Issues reported 6 months ago still exist, etc. I’m not fully sure how much of this budget is spent on outsourcing basic tasks rather than actual improvements.
When we ask for rationale, they often come and tell us something like “we aren’t familiar with x software from x vendor, we thought about it and it seems better to hire an outside specialist rather than take the chance of fucking it up”
To me, this seems unreasonable. What are we paying you for if you’re just gonna turn around and hire someone else to do your job. I have been a sysadmin in the past (albeit pre-pandemic) and knowing these things (or at least knowing how to figure it out) was a part of the job description. Also, it seems like a huge risk if our own sysadmins are struggling with even basic tasks. I would get it if this were some wildly complicated deployment but cmon a sysadmin should be able to click through some install screens or transfer a domain on their own.
I am probably about to put in my opinion that this is unreasonable, which will likely play a role in this person losing their job, but before doing so figured I’d ask here if there’s a side of this I hadn’t considered.