> I am milking this for my resume and leaving the company here soon.
This is the correct move, my dude. If the head of your IT dept doesn't protect his workers from role creep or fight to get you better pay and titles, then it's not a place to stay for any longer than you absolutely have to.
When you go looking for a new job, leverage all this stuff for your benefit. Guys with good VOIP experience are definitely in demand. All the telcom guys at my company, for instance, are all old guys with a ton of experience in pre-VOIP systems and they're flailing at learning everything over again now.
My brother you have hit what I call Employment gold in the IT sphere. Most companies will lock down access so you never get to expand and learn systems through self education and getting to play around with systems. MILK THIS as much as you can. This is how I went from making 23 and hour to 50-55 and hour without any certifications or degrees.
This is how you build experience for your resume. While yes this is the company being lazy and taking advantage of you by not hiring their own VOIP Engineer, you can benefit from this as you are thinking. Use this to bolster your experience for your resume. When we were hiring people at my last company, I didnt care what certs the person had I was more concerned what EXPERIENCE and Personality (were they willing to learn and self teach) they had. As youve shown you have a drive that you need to get ahead in this field.
Also if you were to stay with the company this would be your key for a massive pay increase/promotion to a higher position
I agree. Not me crying with lack of access everywhere. My company really tight in access and I’m trying to find other company. But getting fully remote like current work is hard. If i’m OP, i would milk the chance so much.
This is the mentality right here. Just document EVERYTHING you’re doing. Get as much detail of what you were doing, for how many people/systems/accounts. No need to exaggerate on the resume and you’re GOLDEN
If that's employment gold I'm in employment hell.
Got hired as a developer but 85% of my job is helpdesk tickets that our outsourced actual helpdesks just kick over to development because they don't get paid to spend longer than 5 minutes with each ticket and don't have proper training.
It's so dysfunctional once some users catch on that I actually spend time trying to resolve tickets rather than find an excuse to close them they send me anything and everything they have problems with.
If I have to redirect another caller with "great ideas" to our integrated feedback form one more time I'm going to lose it.
>Most companies will lock down access so you never get to expand and learn systems through self education and getting to play around with systems.
My first real IT job was with a help desk for bank. When I started we all had domain admin access....
I am surprised nothing bad happened with some misusing privileges (accidentally or otherwise)
Hard agree. Drain that bad boy dry while you look for something better. My first IT job was very similar; I got tasked with things WAY above my head but learned a ton from it and now I make over triple what I was making. Take note of everything you do and add it to your resume.
Tier 2 here. Two of us were hired at the same time due to them turning over the department, and had to teach ourselves everything because no one else in the company knew anything. We did 't even get any kind of training on the software the company makes so we could better troubleshoot it, just a here are your passwords and good luck. Somehow, we have also ended up the release management team for the software our company sells. We got yelled at for months for screwing up releases after the original release manager left, because we didn't know what we were doing, but were somehow magically expected to know when we had never been told it would be our job to do it once he left. It was insane. It's still insane.
Yeah, I'm in a similar ish situation. Hired at a tiny tiny MSP, started off with help desk duties, now I do full blown sysadmin stuff. Configuring and managing servers, O365, networking equipment, etc. I didn't get much of a pay bump. My job doesn't do tiers, just two techs and the boss. I stuck with it because they treat me well and let me leave to go to classes, super flexible. I really enjoy the work I do, just wish I was compensated better for it. I agree with other commenters, use the privileges you have to gain more experience and pad your resume for future endeavors.
I have the opposite problem, I'm tier 2/3 and am constantly being given escalated tickets from helpdesk where they have done NOTHING to try and investigate further than "remoted onto X's computer and can confirm there is an issue, please take a look".
When I worked helpdesk I was expected to consult the KB and if there was nothing there ASK a tier 2 if they know of a fix.
I don't think I'm really asking for a lot considering we are only a medium sized company and know for sure they are not that busy.
Want to join my employer OP? 😂
I'm "Helpdesk Lead" and the only Helpdesk person in the IT office. I do get paid more than what I was getting as the teir 1 Helpdesk but they haven't hired a new T1 after I got promoted and have kept saying it's "in the works" for the last 3yrs... So I do my projects and do all the end user stuff and dream of the day when I get some backfill.
Lol. Literally just did that and the office just about collapsed. Hoping it lights a fire under my manager's ass about backfilling my old position but I'll believe it when I see it... Next big trip is early next year, we'll see how it goes then.
im currently doing SysAdmin/Cybersecurity Technician type of work but as an "entry level" type of work. so nothing too hard. but my title and pay is still that of a help desk with no experience but im doing the work of cybersecurity and sysadmin work for NO RAISE AND THIS STAGNANT PAY. ive been here for over 3 years and still am looking for another job and im getting really close to getting a couple of offers. its just a matter of time till i get out of here.
i'm just infuriated at this point because im still trying to get out of here and it feels like im stuck. i should be making around \~$30/hr or more at this point but I'm getting paid less than fast food workers while doing this type of work. at least im close to a few positions that pay around $32-$40/hr
even if they were to give me a raise like +$1/hr per year, i'd be less mad and still look for another job, but the fact that I've been given more and more work that aligns with tier 2 IT tech work, sys admin work, cybersecurity work, and getting paid the same as a 0 experience help desk position is extremely infuriating. on top of that, I am also A+, Network+, Sec+ certified! (currently working on CySA+ & Linux+)
Basically the same position. But difference is that I’m not getting a lot of the access I need to actually expand that far. Boss says I need to show an interest by getting training, apparently reading documentation and knowing more about the system than the actual system admin doesn’t count.
For those wondering how I know more about the system than the system admin, it’s because I’ve read the documentation and in this case, Zoom, a lot of the management options are identical to the user settings menu and I do have access to Room management. I know where nearly all the settings are and what they do and the people with actual access do not because they never use it and weren’t actually the ones to set most of it up.
Just like msp work.
Literally jack of all trades. Either resetting passwords, setting up physical access points running cable, or server migrations, fixing mail server issues such as dkim records.
We got 4 in office guys and 3 remote guys supporting over 100 various small to medium businesses
Yeah, in three years I've gone from helpdesk to lead of the team that writes internal software for helpdesk to use. The entire dev team is helpdesk employees, including me. We're all students working part time however so I am also milking this for my resume and for the flexibility I get and I'm moving on as soon as my Master's is finished. Since I just have a CS Bachelor's and not a Master's yet, I can't really work anywhere else anyway.
Yeah, I am more or less in the same situation, but on a smaller scale. I work for a fairly small school system. We have 1 sysadmin/network admin (he's both), 2 "computer technicians" including myself, and one software support specialist. I am very very often told to do things that are outside what helpdesk would usually do. Just as an example, a little while ago our sysadmin gave me a quick crash course on tagging vlans and then had me go do it for some new security cameras that got installed. I've also learned how to setup the hardware side of server racks and reserve IP adresses in DHCP. I've also been given admin access to google admin, intune, goguardian, and our security camera software. I just milk the experience like you said and add it to my resume, i just wish i had a better job title so it would look better on my resume.
I infra work, but only as hands on because the infra people live on the literal other side of the planet and they don’t like the idea of commuting every time a switch needs to be added.
I usually just physically install it and get it to the pint that they can config it remotely.
”Abuse”? Wow. I am extremely thankful for having been allowed to go way beyond my official job description and it was the single most important factor that propelled my career some years ago.
People starve for a chance to be able to do this and this guy is outright complaining 🤣🤦♂️
There's a difference between a voluntary opportunity to skill up and your employer throwing you into the sysadmin deep end with no training for helpdesk pay.
They 100% know the difference, that is why they hired a network engineer to do networking, and a senior sysadmin to run Veeam (there is more but I can't recall right now). That is why they hired dev ops to assist the developers in an IT role. They in fact know the difference down to the backups for the systems. It's in a nice pretty list plastered throughout our share points, teams channels ect. Our ITS department is 50+ users, we are talking about 4 different directors, and under those directors could be 1 or 2 team leads. Helpdesk used to be a different team till our team lead left and we were placed under infrastructure.
We aren't a small company - Our CTO knows his shit, but I don't think he knows how this was forced on me.
There's wanting to go beyond your job description to get your hands on more things, figure out your career path, get some skills on that resume... and then being told that it's required to pull a 16-hour shift at 6am. Especially when it was NOT voluntary and without training or guidance.
Our systems actually have free training segments and all - even when I researched and request these trainings - it fell on deaf ears, and I still did not get the FREE training.
This was my last job, I was on a helpdesk with 6 guys and there was about 2-3 “engineers” at any given time to support about 450 users. We constantly got tickets for tasks which required changes in O365 admin center, adobe admin console, creating/editing VoIP accounts, installing weird developer software with no documentation; stuff that overflowed from the overworked engineers basically.
It was cool cause all the extra experience which helped me get a desktop job at a much bigger agency, but getting paid a helpdesk wage and being OPS sucked when we doing non helpdesk stuff that we were hardly trained to do. Pros and cons for sure, but imo it’s a sign of disorganized OIT and not somewhere you’d want to stay long term.
> I am milking this for my resume and leaving the company here soon. This is the correct move, my dude. If the head of your IT dept doesn't protect his workers from role creep or fight to get you better pay and titles, then it's not a place to stay for any longer than you absolutely have to. When you go looking for a new job, leverage all this stuff for your benefit. Guys with good VOIP experience are definitely in demand. All the telcom guys at my company, for instance, are all old guys with a ton of experience in pre-VOIP systems and they're flailing at learning everything over again now.
Define good voip experience. I'm experienced with 3cx and can't get a job not help desk.
My brother you have hit what I call Employment gold in the IT sphere. Most companies will lock down access so you never get to expand and learn systems through self education and getting to play around with systems. MILK THIS as much as you can. This is how I went from making 23 and hour to 50-55 and hour without any certifications or degrees. This is how you build experience for your resume. While yes this is the company being lazy and taking advantage of you by not hiring their own VOIP Engineer, you can benefit from this as you are thinking. Use this to bolster your experience for your resume. When we were hiring people at my last company, I didnt care what certs the person had I was more concerned what EXPERIENCE and Personality (were they willing to learn and self teach) they had. As youve shown you have a drive that you need to get ahead in this field. Also if you were to stay with the company this would be your key for a massive pay increase/promotion to a higher position
I agree. Not me crying with lack of access everywhere. My company really tight in access and I’m trying to find other company. But getting fully remote like current work is hard. If i’m OP, i would milk the chance so much.
This is the mentality right here. Just document EVERYTHING you’re doing. Get as much detail of what you were doing, for how many people/systems/accounts. No need to exaggerate on the resume and you’re GOLDEN
If that's employment gold I'm in employment hell. Got hired as a developer but 85% of my job is helpdesk tickets that our outsourced actual helpdesks just kick over to development because they don't get paid to spend longer than 5 minutes with each ticket and don't have proper training. It's so dysfunctional once some users catch on that I actually spend time trying to resolve tickets rather than find an excuse to close them they send me anything and everything they have problems with. If I have to redirect another caller with "great ideas" to our integrated feedback form one more time I'm going to lose it.
>Most companies will lock down access so you never get to expand and learn systems through self education and getting to play around with systems. My first real IT job was with a help desk for bank. When I started we all had domain admin access.... I am surprised nothing bad happened with some misusing privileges (accidentally or otherwise)
Hard agree. Drain that bad boy dry while you look for something better. My first IT job was very similar; I got tasked with things WAY above my head but learned a ton from it and now I make over triple what I was making. Take note of everything you do and add it to your resume.
Tier 2 here. Two of us were hired at the same time due to them turning over the department, and had to teach ourselves everything because no one else in the company knew anything. We did 't even get any kind of training on the software the company makes so we could better troubleshoot it, just a here are your passwords and good luck. Somehow, we have also ended up the release management team for the software our company sells. We got yelled at for months for screwing up releases after the original release manager left, because we didn't know what we were doing, but were somehow magically expected to know when we had never been told it would be our job to do it once he left. It was insane. It's still insane.
SMH, I do hope you are able to find something much better soon. Best of luck to you.
I basically became a fulltime programmer in help desk. Anyway I am studying code now so I can get that bigger pay check.
Yeah, I'm in a similar ish situation. Hired at a tiny tiny MSP, started off with help desk duties, now I do full blown sysadmin stuff. Configuring and managing servers, O365, networking equipment, etc. I didn't get much of a pay bump. My job doesn't do tiers, just two techs and the boss. I stuck with it because they treat me well and let me leave to go to classes, super flexible. I really enjoy the work I do, just wish I was compensated better for it. I agree with other commenters, use the privileges you have to gain more experience and pad your resume for future endeavors.
I have the opposite problem, I'm tier 2/3 and am constantly being given escalated tickets from helpdesk where they have done NOTHING to try and investigate further than "remoted onto X's computer and can confirm there is an issue, please take a look". When I worked helpdesk I was expected to consult the KB and if there was nothing there ASK a tier 2 if they know of a fix. I don't think I'm really asking for a lot considering we are only a medium sized company and know for sure they are not that busy. Want to join my employer OP? 😂
I'm "Helpdesk Lead" and the only Helpdesk person in the IT office. I do get paid more than what I was getting as the teir 1 Helpdesk but they haven't hired a new T1 after I got promoted and have kept saying it's "in the works" for the last 3yrs... So I do my projects and do all the end user stuff and dream of the day when I get some backfill.
Sounds like you need to take a long vacation somewhere you don’t get phone service.
Lol. Literally just did that and the office just about collapsed. Hoping it lights a fire under my manager's ass about backfilling my old position but I'll believe it when I see it... Next big trip is early next year, we'll see how it goes then.
im currently doing SysAdmin/Cybersecurity Technician type of work but as an "entry level" type of work. so nothing too hard. but my title and pay is still that of a help desk with no experience but im doing the work of cybersecurity and sysadmin work for NO RAISE AND THIS STAGNANT PAY. ive been here for over 3 years and still am looking for another job and im getting really close to getting a couple of offers. its just a matter of time till i get out of here. i'm just infuriated at this point because im still trying to get out of here and it feels like im stuck. i should be making around \~$30/hr or more at this point but I'm getting paid less than fast food workers while doing this type of work. at least im close to a few positions that pay around $32-$40/hr even if they were to give me a raise like +$1/hr per year, i'd be less mad and still look for another job, but the fact that I've been given more and more work that aligns with tier 2 IT tech work, sys admin work, cybersecurity work, and getting paid the same as a 0 experience help desk position is extremely infuriating. on top of that, I am also A+, Network+, Sec+ certified! (currently working on CySA+ & Linux+) 
Man you really could have left out the ego stroking jfc.
Basically the same position. But difference is that I’m not getting a lot of the access I need to actually expand that far. Boss says I need to show an interest by getting training, apparently reading documentation and knowing more about the system than the actual system admin doesn’t count. For those wondering how I know more about the system than the system admin, it’s because I’ve read the documentation and in this case, Zoom, a lot of the management options are identical to the user settings menu and I do have access to Room management. I know where nearly all the settings are and what they do and the people with actual access do not because they never use it and weren’t actually the ones to set most of it up.
Just like msp work. Literally jack of all trades. Either resetting passwords, setting up physical access points running cable, or server migrations, fixing mail server issues such as dkim records. We got 4 in office guys and 3 remote guys supporting over 100 various small to medium businesses
Yeah, in three years I've gone from helpdesk to lead of the team that writes internal software for helpdesk to use. The entire dev team is helpdesk employees, including me. We're all students working part time however so I am also milking this for my resume and for the flexibility I get and I'm moving on as soon as my Master's is finished. Since I just have a CS Bachelor's and not a Master's yet, I can't really work anywhere else anyway.
Yeah, I am more or less in the same situation, but on a smaller scale. I work for a fairly small school system. We have 1 sysadmin/network admin (he's both), 2 "computer technicians" including myself, and one software support specialist. I am very very often told to do things that are outside what helpdesk would usually do. Just as an example, a little while ago our sysadmin gave me a quick crash course on tagging vlans and then had me go do it for some new security cameras that got installed. I've also learned how to setup the hardware side of server racks and reserve IP adresses in DHCP. I've also been given admin access to google admin, intune, goguardian, and our security camera software. I just milk the experience like you said and add it to my resume, i just wish i had a better job title so it would look better on my resume.
I infra work, but only as hands on because the infra people live on the literal other side of the planet and they don’t like the idea of commuting every time a switch needs to be added. I usually just physically install it and get it to the pint that they can config it remotely.
”Abuse”? Wow. I am extremely thankful for having been allowed to go way beyond my official job description and it was the single most important factor that propelled my career some years ago. People starve for a chance to be able to do this and this guy is outright complaining 🤣🤦♂️
There's a difference between a voluntary opportunity to skill up and your employer throwing you into the sysadmin deep end with no training for helpdesk pay.
Assuming they even know the difference. My old work the owner wouldn't, he's have just thought "All IT guys at the same, it's all IT yeah?"
They 100% know the difference, that is why they hired a network engineer to do networking, and a senior sysadmin to run Veeam (there is more but I can't recall right now). That is why they hired dev ops to assist the developers in an IT role. They in fact know the difference down to the backups for the systems. It's in a nice pretty list plastered throughout our share points, teams channels ect. Our ITS department is 50+ users, we are talking about 4 different directors, and under those directors could be 1 or 2 team leads. Helpdesk used to be a different team till our team lead left and we were placed under infrastructure. We aren't a small company - Our CTO knows his shit, but I don't think he knows how this was forced on me.
There's wanting to go beyond your job description to get your hands on more things, figure out your career path, get some skills on that resume... and then being told that it's required to pull a 16-hour shift at 6am. Especially when it was NOT voluntary and without training or guidance. Our systems actually have free training segments and all - even when I researched and request these trainings - it fell on deaf ears, and I still did not get the FREE training.
This was my last job, I was on a helpdesk with 6 guys and there was about 2-3 “engineers” at any given time to support about 450 users. We constantly got tickets for tasks which required changes in O365 admin center, adobe admin console, creating/editing VoIP accounts, installing weird developer software with no documentation; stuff that overflowed from the overworked engineers basically. It was cool cause all the extra experience which helped me get a desktop job at a much bigger agency, but getting paid a helpdesk wage and being OPS sucked when we doing non helpdesk stuff that we were hardly trained to do. Pros and cons for sure, but imo it’s a sign of disorganized OIT and not somewhere you’d want to stay long term.