System Admin team hierarchy

[child of wonder]

I, along with another guy, are the Senior System Admins for my company. We are responsible for all the servers, blades, SAN, VMware, disaster recovery, plus other various duties like some application support, firewall, Blackberry server, etc.

Right now, the two of us are on equal footing. We work pretty well together and are the only two with any aptitude, skill, or training in the aforementioned areas. Sometimes we have some "the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing" issues because neither of us are accountable to the other. We communicate quite a bit but it happens. When mistakes are made, our bosses just pick which of us they want to whine to.

My question is this: is this a common set up where many of you work or do you have a Senior/Regular/Junior Sys Admin type structure where there is one Senior or Lead that is accountable for the team of Sys Admins and who ultimately takes the heat for mistakes?

The reason I ask is because the other guy is being deployed and will be gone for a year. We're hiring a 3rd Sys Admin to cover for him while he's gone plus to expand our team to 3 once he's back. This new guy will also be a "Senior Sys Admin" so we still won't have any organization at all. I've approached both my bosses and said I'd like to be the actual "Senior" and be responsible for what happens and to be the final word on what happens between the 3 of us. My current co-worker says he is fine with me taking the lead.

 

[Colt45]

i am the internet and all computers.

 

[tranceport]

My last company was:
Director -> Senior Systems Engineer -> Two Level II Systems Engineers -> One Level I Systems Engineer.

My current company is:
Director -> Manager of Systems engineering -> Systems Engineer -> 2 Systems Administrators

 

[Red Squirrel]

Where I work it's your basic IT structure of Level 1 -> Level 2 -> Level 3

Level 1 actually is the first to know of an incident and is the central point for everthing. It's where I am and it can get quite hectic as we have to manage ALL customers. So we fix or at least troubleshoot all problems that come through, and we have to deal with stupid people who send emails like "my computer does not work. fix asap" with no name, phone number, or anything. We refer to it as the shit funnel. Our manager is the filter, as he gets even more crap then we do.

If there's something we can't fix as it requires physical intervention or is beyond our scope of system access, it gets sent off to the proper group. So Level 2 or 3. Level 2 is basically same as us, but they don't get the issue from the customer, but from us, after we've troubleshooted it. So they run around everywhere and support most customers, but at this point it starts to branch off as other level 2's do different customers. Then there's level 3 which does the server stuff.

There's other groups too but this is in general how our structure is.

I'd say it's fairly well done, though we get a lot of "the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing". But that's because we have too much crap outsourced that should not be outsourced. That causes lot of issues.

My goal is to eventually make it in Level 3 as while it has the most responsibility, there is less different customers to worry about.

 

[spidey07]

Somebody need to have ownership of something. You can't split it like that or you get what you're running into - no real accountability. Somebody needs to own each technology and be able to direct actions of that. Tell your boss you need to be the product manager of whatever technology/ies necessary and that you are ultimately responsible for it and as such get full decision making authority.

And as the impact of your decisions and influence you need to be making a lot more money.

 

[child of wonder]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Somebody need to have ownership of something. You can't split it like that or you get what you're running into - no real accountability. Somebody needs to own each technology and be able to direct actions of that. Tell your boss you need to be the product manager of whatever technology/ies necessary and that you are ultimately responsible for it and as such get full decision making authority.

And as the impact of your decisions and influence you need to be making a lot more money.

I've done exactly that. I've explained how I feel we need a hierarchy and that I would like to be the one who has the final say with what happens and to be fully accountable for everything that happens. At first, it seemed like they were on board with that and initially said the new employee would be a Jr. Sys Admin but now they've gone back on that and want another Sr. Sys Admin.

3 Senior Sys Admins makes no sense, not to mention that the other Admin is being deployed in 3 months. Finding a Jr. Admin would be a quick process. Finding a Sr. Admin will take time to find a qualified candidate plus a lengthier negotiating time frame especially since my company likes to low ball people (I was offered $35k to start and it took 2 months to get them to up the offer to something reasonable). Even if a Sr. Admin accepts a low offer he'll just bail out as soon as another offer comes along.

I'm going to schedule a meeting with both bosses on Monday and explain to them the need for accountability in our area and that I think it's a mistake to simply keep adding more heads to this monster.

 

[Zee]

unofficially im the senior.

officially i am paid the same as others with the same title.

 

[child of wonder]

Originally posted by: Zee
unofficially im the senior.

officially i am paid the same as others with the same title.

We don't even have that. Apparently they think it's a good idea to have 3 "seniors" but no one clearly in charge.

If they want my boss to be the one who makes the final call if the three of us don't agree on something, then they're micromanaging. I would expect him to have input such as budget, requirements, etc. but he doesn't know enough to make the call.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: spidey07
Somebody need to have ownership of something. You can't split it like that or you get what you're running into - no real accountability. Somebody needs to own each technology and be able to direct actions of that. Tell your boss you need to be the product manager of whatever technology/ies necessary and that you are ultimately responsible for it and as such get full decision making authority.

And as the impact of your decisions and influence you need to be making a lot more money.

taking ownership of something is one of those things that sticks in my craw. I'll take ownership of whatever I'm supposed to (and whatever else management deems necessary) but 99% of the other people won't so they can't be the one with the fingers pointed at them when something goes wrong. Hell, other departments will hire contractors/consultants just to get through a new project so they can be fired when it's over and everything that went wrong blamed on them

There really needs to be a support matrix, for example you're in charge of the back end VM environment and SAN, and the other guy is in charge of actually installing and managing the servers on the VM environment

 

[manlymatt83]

Everyone is equal and we just get work done. We communicate well.

 

[RKS]

We ain't networked. If my interweb connection or my computer don't work; I tell Joey. Joey makes 'the call' and some moran comes in and plugs in my 'puter.

 

[Spineshank]

Where i work its 2 Senior Network Engineers, Network Engineer, 2 Senior Network Techs, Network Tech II, Network Tech..........its rather interesting. We also have 2 sites which is why we have 2 of things so they mainly focus on their on particular site but not all the time.

 

[ultimatebob]

At my old job, we were basically all at the same seniority level. To make sure that all of the systems were supported, the system admins were given "ownership" of the servers that they supported, and were expected to be the primary support contact for them when they broke. Most people had about 40 servers under their "ownership" to support, often a mix of UNIX and Windows systems. I personally had about 70 because many of them were VMWare systems.

The system didn't work all that well, mostly due to favoritism by management. One guy had over 90 AIX systems to support when I left, while another UNIX admin (who was married to the bosses daughter) only had 25.

At my new job, the work is split by OS... They have a Windows guy and a UNIX/Linux guy. This method also doesn't work that well, since the data center has 700 somewhat flaky Windows systems and about 200 rock solid stable UNIX systems. Who do you think has an easier job?

 

[Deviant Grasshopper]

Director of IT > IT Manager > 2 Desktop guys

 

[child of wonder]

Talked to the powers that be and they assured me I will be the "lead" and the one having the final say in what happens with the servers. They want the 3rd guy to have some experience so he can hit the ground running, rather than a Jr. Admin.

Hopefully we can find a guy quick.

 

[Tarrant64]

IT Manager ->
Network Admin, DBA, 2xSystem Technicians (Help Desk, etc.).

No real "tier" right now but they're working on it for career development purposes.

 

[Gand1]

IT Director
^
Network/Server Admin and Systems/application Admin (me network/server admin another guy is the systems/application admin)
^
Data Processing/programming (2 people)
^
Tech Support (2 guys and they fight about who is senior)
^
Help desk

 

[child of wonder]

When the other server guy comes back from deployment it'll be:

Me (Senior Systems Engineer) <- New guy and deployed server guy (Systems Engineers) <- Head of Help Desk <- Help Desk

I'm no one's boss or manager but I have final say on the servers, blades, SAN, VMware, DR, etc.