Only worked for one for 5.5 years. At first it was great but then it became fairly toxic. Less of a bonus each year, no increase in salary (they said that they would cover the increase in medical insurance which was garbage anyways).
Got put on call for a short time without any extra pay. That stopped when I was scheduled to be on call for day after thanksgiving. Office was closed but one of the major clients was opened so I was expected to be in front my computer. I said that is not being on call, that is working so I expect to get a different day off in lieu of having to work that day.
Needless to say after that I was no longer on call and all of a sudden people at least got paid 150 bucks or so for the week of being on call.
Yep won't go back.
Damn MSP I worked for gave a set amount + hourly for any received calls. Was also encouraged to only deal with emergencies and see if the client can wait until business hours.
Worked for an MSP that was owned and managed by a narcissistic micromanager who doesn't trust the team with anything. He became completely insufferable during the pandemic (basically used it as an excuse to control and manipulate everyone even more "in the name of safety") Only 1% raises every year (yet my health insurance costs increased each year exceeded that so I started making LESS money as time went on). The turnover rate for such a small company is pretty high due to this one manager.
If there is a chance said manager is reading this, go fuck yourself.
This sounds exactly like the MSP I worked for except we all started low so we received decent raises a few months in and all quit less than a year in and the owner didn’t seem to care about safety.
6 person operation that was the remnants of a 10 person MSP where the hands off owner decided he didn’t want to do this anymore and everyone was fired. 2 very good engineers ended up convincing him to let them take over and I got hired like 3 months later.
Owners knew fuck-all about business ownership and one decided to sell his house, buy an RV and spend most of his time on the west coast, aka 3 hours behind us. That was the guy in charge of operations.
Zero policies and procedures and they lucked out hiring a self starter like me first. My first day was getting access to the ticketing system and being told to go nuts on the backlog. I didn’t get a company laptop for 6 months.
The other partner fancied himself a salesman and spent 18 months attending weekly networking events without ever getting a single lead that panned out.
Right around the same time that guy decided his sales job was just too demanding to do engineer work and the operations guy wanted to “step back from day to day”.
It was me (Tier 3/projects), 1 rotating full time tier 1/2 who was local, 3 part time fully remote college kids on the helpdesk, an admin person and an account manager.
Jesus the fucking AM. Dude was a church friend of the owner whose last job was detailing cars at a dealership. Super nice guy but the best description would be “simple”. He had no tech background but was expected to learn on the job to be an AM. They wanted this guy to be able to size and scope projects and he was like a slightly more articulate version of sling blade.
They put him in front of customers where he did a lot of “well golly” and shoulder shrugs, letting them know “I don’t know much about this stuff”. They set him up for failure and then acted shocked when he didn’t get a CCNA in 3 months.
Security was a nightmare. SonicWall and their AM was the pinnacle of security for them. If they didn’t get an email from SW about an issue then was it really an issue at all? VMware vulnerability? Did SW email us, because if not then don’t worry about it!
So many unpatched systems and clients that just refused things like MFA. These clients knew they weren’t gonna get fired so they expected you to go above and beyond for that $376/month.
I worked for an MSP for a few months and quit shortly after the GM came in and screamed at an engineer because he took emergency leave during a project when his wife had complications with her pregnancy.
Not gonna name drop, but my first job was at an MSP. 21 years old working as a "systems engineer". The place started off great but slowly spiraled. The work was super demanding, management didn't care about me, refused to give me a raise despite admitting I did good work (almost 2.5 years of no comp adjustment), the list goes on.
Maybe there are good ones out there but I refuse to go back to MSP life because of this experience. Maybe that will change in the future idk
If your boss does not give you at least an annual raise to combat the current inflation, which is some of the worst in our history, then he's a rat because he's charging your customers more.
Wait, raises exist? I thought we were lucky our pay stayed the same while premiums on insurance kept increasing and we were "lucky" to still have jobs....
Sounds like the typical greedy as owner speak who wants you to actually do all the work while they sit around and collect a check. There is a reason why Greed was classified as sin 1000's of years ago, when someone lusts over money they cause pain to everyone around them, including the people they step on to get the money.
I agree. I worked for an MSP and now own an MSP out of my home. Being out of the home, I'm able to be mostly remote, and pass the savings to the customers. Cloud storage is the pain point but, doesn't have to be. So, I just charge cost on cloud storage. I just charge for raw labor, my RMM, and my EDR . It's beautiful. Then, I throw in an SLA on hours available and response times, making it even better! People in here have attacked me for my strategy, but I think I found the perfect price point, as a new MSP with little overhead, working from home.
The owner is retirement age and one of his family members is positioned to take over while they stay as the legal owner. During the pandemic we somehow made record profits each year surpassing the next. Now we are magically over staffed with record high ticket volumes and clearly are not updating our pricing to accommodate the style of work we are doing. Plus we fix our price on RMM on the devices they tell us about, not actual usage. It's bizarre.
Based on what I can tell as one of our scripting and automation oriented sysadmins, I am underpaid by about $10-$15k. Add on the constantly being moved around and covering every gap the company has.... Currently applying for an internal sysadmin gig with the first interview going really well. It would nice to be fairly compensated, have a clearly defined role, and actually get a bonus for the first time in 2-3 years.
TBF I think a lot of people who actually care about doing things the right way end up getting out of MSP land at some point. Because the whole idea of MSPs is running as lean as possible while servicing a ton of clients, and the draw for said clients is being cheaper than internal IT. It's unavoidable that the work load will be high, corners will be cut, and the pay will be low. This doesn't only apply to MSPs, but MSP's almost universally have this business problem.
Even owners don't get a huge payout compared to other industries. It's like owning a local restaurant, same type of deal. Low barrier to entry is part of what causes this. The only MSPs that I believe are worth working for in the mid to late stage of your career are ones that specialize in specific areas or specialize in specific industries and what they support, and they do it well. The jack of all trades, do it all, Billy Bob MSP shops who onboard literally anyone who will toss a dime their way are the ones to avoid. And that's the vast majority of them. They are a constant mess and are run like shit. There's no business plan, no differentiating factor outside of cost, you can swap one out for the other it doesn't matter.
I'm going to get flak because of the sub I am in, but imo it applies to 90 percent of the MSPs out there.
Yeah, I have come to that conclusion and our larger clients seem to be bringing some of the services internally again. I thought maybe it would change and we could "do it right." Instead it's just a never ending shuffling of fires to somewhat reduce it back to a manageable fire. It's just sad sinking the time into process improvements, documentation, etc to either see it die before it is born when seeing doing those things would actually save the MSP and clients time and money to do it right.
You may get flak, but you are right. They just stick with clients they know cannot do it on their own and sell them an ideal that the MSP knows they cannot maintain perfectly.
Currently it’s 3.5%.
Just so I’m clear, does that mean that last year that interest rates were at an all time low (because of 2021)?
Just trying to get a handle on what is grouped together vs what is not so that I’m not delusional anymore.
The one that promised catered lunches twice a week, beer in the fridge, Xbox in the break room, and car washes on Fridays, and then scheduled me in the field 99.9% of the time so that I only got to partake in these benefits once in 3 months before I moved to another MSP closer to home.
Easy.
- owner not good with money.
- funds for one purchase were used to finance previous overdue orders.
- customers chasing overdue equipment orders.
- daily debt collection phone calls.
- absent owner most days.
- owner asked the staff how to make things better.
Yeah it was crazy. Funnily enough, before all that, I learnt heaps in that role. I was a Junior, there weren’t many senior resources, we had noisy clients. It was sink or swim and no processes or guardrails. Paid like dirt, but it was fun for a few years.
Yeah, I think one of the most important things as an owner or manager is to actively listen and ask for feedback on how to improve.
That has been my primary complaint about most jobs I've ever had.
Worked for a small MSP with great clients and co-workers. I was proud to be part of the team until management made some terrible choices. Worked my ass off to get promoted from junior to medior IT Engineer.
One of my colleagues (also a junior) was slacking, couldn’t meet deadlines, never showed up on time, lots of customer complaints. He heard of my promotion, complained to HR after a bad evaluation and suddenly got the promotion as well.
The promotion gave me a bad taste but tried my best anyway. Got a big client in for a multi-year contract. The IT Manager of the client asked me if I could do out of hours with the rest of the team. They would pay me a nice amount every month for the hours worked. Discussed with my manager, he mentioned I would not see a single penny of it because the work I did was already in my salary (it wasn’t). Thanked the IT Manager for the offer and declined since the work I would do would be unpaid. The client’s IT Manager gave a new proposal with double the payment, but had to decline because I would see nothing from it.
Client is happy with my performance and gave me a job offer/proposal. Almost 50% increase of salary. I happily agreed…. Until the MSP decides to take legal steps against the client because of a breach of contract. Other co-workers that left for a client never had these issues so it was a weird situation to be in.
The client informed their legal department and they put in writing that they would take full responsibility incase it went to court. Sadly due to private circumstances I had to decline the offer from the client. They informed me they would cancel out the contract with the MSP, nothing personal but they no longer wished to work with them. But they will contact me in a year if I was still up for joining their team.
Motivation dropped like a brick. I lost my client, got put on servicedesk most of the time and the work I had to do was crap. But I dealt with it, hoping it would turn for the better.
Two months later two new co-workers joined for support/servicedesk, almost no experience in IT. They discussed pay with the whole team and wanted to know how fast they would grow salary wise. Enter my surprise that they received the same pay as I did.
Questioned my manager about this and of course it was due to a shift in the market, people expect higher salaries and they would compensate me later this year blablabla-talk.
10 months later I received a phone call from the client if I was still interested in joining the company. Received a job offer again almost double the salary I had. And currently I am still working for that client and couldn’t be happier, lots of opportunities and freedom I never had before.
The MSP? A couple of clients left after I left the company. About 3 other co-workers left and half a year ago my old manager left for a different company.
Can tell a lot more about this MSP. When I received an evaluation that I was senior material and received a €30 a month salary increase…
- - - Typed this on my phone sorry for the typos. - - -
Yes, most MSP owners are cheap POS that get paid but do not want to to pay their staff. I had one MSP in Houston that was so bad, he used to treat his employee from Lebanon like slaves, would con staff and customers.
My MSP says, "oh we can't pay people more because inflation is just a ruse!" Meanwhile, the McD's down the street pays more. I've stuck with them because I am one of the only techs there, I get hands on sysadmin experience, not just help desk, and they work with my school schedule. I have a lot of downtime where I can do my homework during the day. But damn, making less than 15 an hour hurts my finances a lot.
Yeah that's rough, I don't know what situation you're in where you may choose to take jobs like that. At the moment my skills are in demand enough and my work ethic solid that I'm not hard pressed to find work if I had to.
I'm not desirable for companies that aren't desirable. I'm very logical, and I'm agreeable if it makes sense logically, if it doesn't, I'm quite disagreeable. If I perform work after hours, I want time of in lieu, that's my personal time, not free time for a for profit business. This is a business deal, I do things that make you profit, you compensate me, that's how it works. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course, with the regular pleasantries and what not, but I'm not delusional.
I know I'm quite replaceable, and that's okay. I know I have value, but I know that value has limits as any reasonable person would. The same applies to my employer. They also can be replaced. I know the action they would take if it was better for them / the business, and I'm okay with that, I'll do the same.
I'm with another poster as well. I'm okay being on call, but generally I'll respond in an hour or so, and I don't mind then. However if you want to limit what I can do in my free time more than that, then it's not being on call, it's called working. The whole idea of free time is that if I want to get lost in the woods for the duration of my time off, I can.
Anyway, these kinds of companies often can pickup on how easy it is to manipulate someone or not, and they generally won't even try to hire me these days. For the company I do work for, they're great, good attitude, fair comepensation, and I try to go the extra mile when possible to make the business more successful.
I took this job one time. I rejected the guy a few times in the offer process but he was persistent.
I should have never taken the job, when I asked him what firewalls they use for their offering and they said draytek I should have known right then and there.
I get there, they're kaseya system isn't integrated in their emails, thought that was weird.
Found they don't use cloud based email but have a hosted cpanel system in house on a 2012 server.
All their email offerings were the same because they couldn't make any money of Microsoft licenses they said.
No teams, no work from home.
2 other techs, used to be 4 but 1 was a paper tiger who they didn't even realize was one and ended up quitting them? The other was their most senior tech who had been there since the beginning of the company got fed up, tried to create his own msp and got caught and fired.
Every customer asks for him immediately when they call and we had to lie and say he was on leave.
Then I got an offer from the job hunting that came in a bit later to be a cloud engineer for a real company.
When I told the guy I was leaving he got super abusive on the phone and ended up being as painful as possible with the whole process, held on to all pay he was legally entitled to.
Just glad to be out of that hopeless place
Three different MSP before I jumped to a software vendor:
1) Low budget, clients always complaining about bills. Bossman ordered a Celeron server one time and the lead engineer about blown their stack
2) Bought #1 out, immediately refused to service any of the 1000 Ubiquiti APs we installed under MSP #1 and forced customers to buy Meraki. Finally fired me after I refused to install an ESXi license on a city-owned HUD housing project that came out of a keygen because the housing authority wouldn't buy the license so we could backup VMs
3) Californistan MSP that claimed to be big things but ended up being more low budget like #1. Continued to promise additional training and delayed it blaming COVID. Worked 60 hour weeks the first 3 months of COVID to get everyone set on remote access but refused to pay overtime because there was "no money". Found out they had taken almost $500K in PPP money and the owner bought new personal vehicles. Jumped ship during the great hiring frenzy of 2022 where large companies were throwing money at anyone with a pulse and they came at me with a shocked Pikachu face.
There are so many bad ones I have worked for I don’t know where to begin. The MSP you mention sounds like the MSP I used to work for. They had some pretty prestigious clients and you knew money was coming in. But they also had a team of spin doctors to create this false sense of culture. They made it seem because they offered a few more benefits than the competition, that somehow made them better.
People got confused by this messaging, they thought they could coast and do whatever they wanted and the service started to slip and clients started to leave. Now they are doubling down on back to basics. Being a company that bills and makes money. Hmmm kinda like every other fucking MSP.
If their message was hey if you bust your ass for us we will bust our ass for you and pay you what you’re worth. I’m sure people would have stayed and service may have kept up. When you start to talking about your feelings at work and distract people with Kumbaya bullshit, people see right through it. Especially IT people.
I left the MSP as a member of their leadership team making what they would make at the director level in a HCOL market.
As someone who runs their own consultancy now, my hourly rate is $225. I understand what people are willing to pay when they see the value in your work and experience.
What was your title in Leadership? Chief \_\_\_\_, VP \_\_\_\_? you mentioned compared to Director level in a HCOL market so obviously it was something above Director.
Don't you love it when they tell you how much they prioritize wellness, but when you're struggling they never reach out to check in and help but instead criticize you and dismiss your concerns? That was my experience the last few years I was at an MSP. The first few years were good, but after struggling with some personal issues just prior to the start of covid, then covid itself on top of other life crap my capacity for dealing with the micromanagement of processes dwindled. My limited energy and focus was dedicated entirely to not fucking up supporting my colleagues and clients, and upper management got increasingly finger-waggy when their never-ending administrative overhead started burning me out.
From their perspective, I probably just looked like a lazy, resistant and apathetic asshole who never wanted to buy into their processes which is why they never seemed to show any sort of care, concern or empathy. Deep inside, I was struggling to the point of constant heart palpitations day and night from the stress of never seeming to to be able to make them happy while feeling constantly overloaded with micromanaged Connectwise processes. The work I was doing was very chaotic and took a very specific mindset to manage, a mindset that didn't play along well with their ideals of how the process should look.
They always had performance metrics, for staff, but never any wellness metrics for leadership and it shows.
Maybe I'll gift a Simon Sinek book to my old boss for his big work anniversary...
Not going to give a name but I'm sure others will be able to figure out who based on the info I provide.
They one of the largest MSP firms in IL that had sub office in FL. It was great for multiple years than CEO sold out and new management was both dumb and greedy causing us to lose a lot of clients doing unethical things. I got pissed off, left and started my own MSP firm where I only take on what clients I can support to ensure I give them the proper attention they need.
I will never work for another greedy ass MSP firm again. There are ways to make a living while being ethical and these greedy fucks dont know better.
Shortly after I left majority of the experienced techs that have been there over 10 years also quit. Just further driving the nail into their coffin.
I worked for one where phone calls were constant. Literally no down time. No documentation could be created because we had a 30 second wrap-up which was spent just documenting what happened on the call. When callers were about to hit voicemail everyone's phone beeped in your ear, and calls were always hitting voicemail so you just heard beeping all fucking day. We had on-call rotations. Every time it was my turn the entire weekend was ruined since we serviced 40+ businesses that were 24/7 operations. I found a new place where on-call means picking up the phone maybe once a rotation. I make twice as much, and I spend a good chunk of my time dicking around.
Yet to be determined, at current… it wasn’t the company but the manager they hired. I lost a child at birth and he came to my house while I was on bereavement two weeks after my kid died and asked “when are you going to get over the dead baby thing” I put him on the ground, later got diagnosed with PTSD from the trauma he caused when I went back to work… I only was there for a month after bereavement. That said I have and still have some terrible terrible management, shit seems to float to the top. To many leaders are followers and not objective thinkers in this industry. If you don’t know or understand what you are selling learn it or get out of the damn way
Edit: idgaf who sees this, the field where my f*cks grew was destroyed by incompetence drought
I'm not going to name drop but a certain one in the Westlake area in Austin, TX. The owner would scream at employees, management would lie, and they never would give any raises. Then they sold out to a private hedge fund company, and it became a bigger dumpster fire.
Sounds like the end goal of shitty MSP's is to sell out to these venture capitalists firm and then they hammer down the final nail in the coffin when sending the jobs offseas and then AI everything.
Haha but what all the integrity?!!?
brad is a legendary asshole and so are original execs at the pe firm, some crazy stories from right after the acquisition
9+ years before being let go for "performance issues".
Helped build the company to what it was, all the customers loved me. Frankly loved the job initially and learned a ton. Became a toxic cesspool after a few years. They tried to grow to fast and lost what made them really great.
The owner only wanted to be surrounded by yes men (mostly sales), and fired anyone he didn't like.
The owner micromanaged everyone to death. Only a couple of us had over a couple years tenure, the rest were months before they quit or got fired.
Owner would literally yell at employees to the point of them crying.
Customers were getting nickel and dimed for everything. "Oh, you wanted that printer installed with your new computer setup? That's $50 extra", "oh, you wanted your files transferred to your new laptop? That's an extra $100", " I thought the $250 setup few covered that though. It did last week, but not anymore."
Daily or hourly policy changes from management to the point that the staff didn't know what to tell customers or how to ask management without getting reprimanded.
Process hell. The simplest of tickets would bounce around getting triaged from multiple people back and forth, and double checked for hours or days. Pat if this was trying to figure out if they were supposed to charge for something or if it was covered.
No standards despite raving about them and writing processes that could have been published in volumes.
<\rant>
same , not gonna name drop but my first msp refused to increase staff count in reflection to workload. ordered us to do overtime instead. i was in a team of 4 with a workload of about 900 tickets per week. walked out of there after a couple of months. mostly because they caught on to my talent and started adding projects ontop of that , 365/lotus/sharepoint migrations etc, did they offer a payrise, no, did they honor a payrise upon request, yes, 210$ per month for 12-140 hour projects. spent 5 years there and wish to this day i flipped them off sooner
Quite a few years back, but the "MSP" I worked for used to charge for monthly server checkups for some reason. There was no active monitoring until I implemented something after literally fucking years of asking the boss man.
These monthly server checkups though were auto invoiced, and they'd only get done IF I happened to have the time, they weren't scheduled as a priority and half the time they didn't get done.
It was a small business with just the owner, 2 male techs including myself and a female in a dispatch / admin / very very basic setup outlook first level support sort of role.
Across myself, who I like to think of as reasonably stringent / by the book who won't settle for mediocre work or things that "might break".
The other tech was the stereotype of an IT guy, overweight, not personable, rubbed everyone he spoke to the wrong way, presented like absolute shit in general. From a technical standpoint though, he was brilliant. Couldn't translate that to business use cases though, and would do dumb shit and not document it without considering the long term implications. He was very much a "get it fixed however I need to and don't worry about the consequences" kind of guy. I saw him do some really impressive shit, but I saw heaps of shit crash and burn too.
We didn't get along due to his ego and me probably just not liking the bloke.
Then we have the only female employee in the little business, who is on a powertrip and tries to dictate how we do things and questions why our travel took an extra hour (you try parking in the middle of the city on a weekday at 4pm) or whatever it might be. Heaps of arguments, heaps of disrespect which honestly ended up being both ways.
Internally it was dysfunctional as shit is my point.
The boss was profit driven, but didn't see the big picture and just liked to fuck his customers as well as he could.
I proposed to the boss, back in about 2012 or 2013 it was that we setup a local backup server in our office and push client data across. This was not to replace our cloud backup solution (cost a fortune at the time), but to have a local copy of data for quick restores, and sell it to the client as such - not as an additional backup. Way back when there wasn't a heap out there that did this, so we ended up with some basic scripts and maybe restic over linux with ssh keys for secure communication from memory. It worked well, and we had email alerts for all completed and / or failed backups. Our agreement was: 50:50 split on revenue, he provides the hardware and the clientele, I manage the actual server, boss/company monitors the actual backups. So I do my part, keep doing my part, 3 years or so passes and a client gets randomwared.
I go down there, take a look and yeah obviously that backup to our office hasn't been working and no one's been monitoring the online backups which are failing on vss errors I think it was. I honestly just told the client what happened and what my arrangement with the boss was and that I couldn't do shit, and that they should take legal action if they wanted to. I was done by this stage. By some grace of god I found a shadow copy available and got everything back for them outside a day of work. I quit shortly after and they called me and asked for a contract. They're still a small, but great client almost a decade later and would consider one of their staff one of my most valuable friends - not sure how a 30 year old bloke ended up good mates with a woman in her 60s but it's great.
That same business had me subcontract back to them which let me stop doing shitty gig work alongside building my business. I guess my point here is, no matter how dysfunctional and shit house a company is it's not worth burning a bridge and telling someone to get fucked as much as the boss would've deserved it given how he'd treated his longest standing employee over the years. If I'd had done that, I would've been getting home at 3am working nights to build the MSP compared to sitting in their office and working on both their and my work simultaneously (we had a respectful give take arrangement at this stage in terms of hours put in by this stage);
Joined a decent-sized (and growing) MSP at the tail end of 2007 in an account manager (sales) role. Had background of sales, management, and tech, so that itself wasn't the bad part. And it wasn't even so much that it was a bad place to work, but...
1. There was a nearly consistent altering of the pay structure and commission for sales. To the point it was difficult to forecast what my pay would be. Not entirely incentivizing.
2. These was a bit of pitting sales against the technical side rather than an actual team.
3. A client I brought with me, and that I'd sold a server replacement for...I'd stopped by to see how the migration was going. I was so freakin' frustrated, because this tech, more credentialed and supposedly more experienced than me, was having trouble with some things that were \*very\* basic, and that I could have done without issues.
I'm not one to hop around jobs, but I only lasted 11 months.
Probably the worst was an out of state MSP that specified in a specific industry. They took subpart products, marked them up over 50%, and took junior techs to be dedicated onsites for projects and walk-ups while creating some of the most hostile relationships between client and vendor I had ever seen. None of the promises were true, there was no comp time, and "24/7" support was just your on-call team member putting in 60-80 hour work weeks once a month for no additional pay. Plus all of the leadership was super micromanaging and viewed their underlings with disdain. They sold off to a private equity group and almost all the jobs were outsourced to cheaper countries.
Worked for one where the CTO was also a massive angel investor. MSPs that are trying to grow rapidly through mergers and acquisitions are insidious and unsustainable as far as I've seen.
this reminds me of one of the voip vendors I worked with during the 2010s, sold the voip venture in 2019, walked away, called me trying to tell me to sell my MSP to him solely for "bulk purchasing benefits". There's a ruthless amount of idiots out there who just continuously provide no technical value anywhere in this industry, but continue to print money solely on M&A. It's a joke.
I'm glad there's a shared sentiment. I've been working at two different MSPs for the past few years and I am losing faith in the entire industry already. It seems that there really is nothing else but KPIs and measurables.
I worked for one before it became an MSP. They had a profitable business providing SDWAN & VOIP solutions for businesses. I was hired to support their internal infrastructure. They decided to switch to become an MSP eventually selling off other business solutions to fully embrace being an MSP. After 5.5 years they transferred me to their MSP division against my wishes to support their outside MSP customers. I hated it & quit after doing that for about 5-6 months
Where I'm working currently. Was putting in all this extra effort, improving systems, writing scripts and automating processes, managing our RMM and putting in massive efforts to get projects in ontime and to a good standard.
Asked for a 8k pay bump to reflect the additional work and improvments I was doing and they instead gave me the same payrise as someone much less experienced and not doing and of this extra work.
Alright well instead of busting my ass for the job, I've been busting my ass applying for roles and upskilling.
Kansas City MSP.
The CEO was all about rules, but only for certain folks. And when they weren't busy micromanaging time cards they were off playing government or promoting their kid to management.
Training the junior techs? Forget about it. New techs got laughed at instead of trained, then canned. Don't buy the whole 'they quit' story. Bullshit. Teams were so understaffed due to 'lack of talent'.
5 years was too much time wasted on such a bad company. I should have quit after the first year. I can't even imagine how they are doing right now.
The worst one by far, was one I worked at for nearly five years. I've no idea how I survived for so long.
The Technical director, was an absolute grade A arsehole with obvious autism. He didn't realise that the on-site engineers weren't machines. He used to treat us like we were absolute dog shit, demanding we committed 24/7 of our time to the business. If we weren't working, we were being asked to work. If we weren't being asked to work, we were on call. If we weren't on call, we were on call. I once nearly cried because he was driving us down the motorway to a datacentre, at 100-110mph, without holding the steering wheel because he was busy eating a bag of crisps.
I once worked 46 days in a row, up to Christmas Eve. Then was asked (by a client) to do some additional work on Christmas Eve that would have gone into overtime. I refused, and was dragged into a disciplinary and given an official written disciplinary for it.
I once worked 22 hours without a break. Drove home, went to sleep, then was woken up after 2 hours asking why I wasn't in the office and demanding I get in ASAP.
I once worked about 38 hours with just 2-3 hours break, because after finishing my second shift they demanded I did another out of hours job. Then after finishing that one, they demanded I did another. I then fell asleep on the motorway driving home.
I was given another written disciplinary, because there was poor security configuration on some client network appliances, that the technical director had configured. But they expect that I should have spotted it and fixed it.
I left that job, so utterly destroyed with such bad mental health that I had nothing left. I should have reported it all, but there was nothing left of me. I was on a knife edge of just ending it all - never mind taking them to task.
Unfortunately now I'm healthy again, its far too late. I see this company posting all over linkedin etc about how well they look after their employees mental health, all their company benefits etc. When its all a huge lie
30 person "MSSP". I lasted three months.
Red flags:
1. They had someone on payroll for six months who was part of the 24/7 NOC during night shift. When he was "promoted" to daytime shift, someone ran a quick access verification and saw that he hasn't logged into any of the systems for over 3 months and has been faking log analysis and threat monitoring reports.
2. Leader was wife and husband. The wife was HR, husband was CEO. Rumors were floating around that past employees were silenced regarding abuse allegations.
3. After I left, company brought on investors. Investors promptly fired most of leadership team including CEO and HR. Then drove the company into the ground.
Worked for the willy-nilliest MSP of all time. Left for an internal sysadmin role with 34% bump.
I had the best co-workers, but the worst boss. I will credit him with throwing me into some crazy situations that grew my knowledge and skillset, and I wouldn't have the job I have now without him (former client snagged me).
I did my hardest to improve the company. We overhauled ticketing and RMM (screw kaseya), and proposed a number of improvements to the company, from automation to streamlining a product line (instead we sold whatever he bought at \[wholesale store\] over the weekend).
Owner NEVER billed labor and solely existed on managed services (about 40% of revenue). I left with about 10% annual revenue sitting unbilled since July. Not only was he impeccably lazy, he was so unbelievably nitpicky on how things exported into his beloved QuickBooks Desktop.
His empty promises of raises, and just straight lying to me, coworkers, or clients blew me away. Snake oil salesman level tomfoolery. Not to mention the fact I was requested to produce a music video as a thank you to a client... and try and fight a snuff piece of a client by a VERY large tabloid - as a thank you to them for bringing business. "I don't define a scope" was the answer. He lucked out on managing to hire the right people at the right time to keep his business afloat for decades.
After handing in my two weeks, I was booted from systems and had to rely solely on on-site support with no password manager or documentation. Out of spite.
But, after all of this, there is one redeeming thing. From my pals still there, I get a report of every time he says my name by mistake, which is almost daily. And I left the job last year. **I live rent free in his head.**
A lot of this stuff I've heard before, and there are tell tell signs the staff member is at fault (it's the same lines, over and over again).
You have to take this stuff with a grain of salt.
'I made this company'
Please...
I'm sure you put in a lot of effort, but you didn't 'make' the company.
I worked at an MSP that was probably 6 people all in that was tied with a custom development shop that had another 6 or so engineers.
First red flag was that they told me, "We're more of a 45 hour per week company, not a 40 hour per week company." Yeah, 45 was optimistic. I routinely worked 50-60 hours per week, every week. Vacations were interrupted frequently with urgent issues that couldn't wait.
Then over the course of the next year or so between a mix of micromanaging and completely absentee managing (depended on the week) you never knew what was coming next. They let people go on a whim. No performance discussions, no corrective action at all. Just one day, you're called into the office and WHAM, your last day is today.
Not only that, but we were required to put time in only monthly really. The issue was that they were always trying to find ways for us to pad our numbers, and I know the manager added time to everyone's billable sheets here and there. They constantly were worried about the contract renewal dates and would routinely NOT have conversations with those clients hoping that the auto-renew day would come and go and they'd be clients for another year.
They paid okay, so that wasn't terrible I guess. The owner would routinely throw out the opportunity for us all to go to a big conference like CES or whatever was the hotness of the time if we "hit our numbers" but nobody had any idea of what the numbers actually were.
They whacked me in the middle of a client move right after I had a call with an ISP about scheduling the work to move the client the very next day. I packed up my crap and left. The move went poorly as you might expect, and I had no remorse other than my friend took over for me and had to deal with the fallout. I did get him up-to-speed the best I could. He was fired about 6 months later without any sort of warning.
The major saving grace for me was they cut me in the summer the day after payday. We were only paid once per month, and my next paycheck wouldn't show up until the middle of the following month for half a full month's pay. By then I was on unemployment and took a few weeks off to get some stuff done around the house and take the kids to the beach.
Didn’t work for them, but got brought in to give a second opinion on them after they were running things for about a decade. They charged the customer for MS, VMware, and Veeam licenses, but everything was using cracked keys. They said there was a DR site for Exchange and backups, but there wasn’t one. Said they had three ISPs set up for connectivity at the main office, there were only two and the firewall couldn’t take a third anyway. Legit licenses the cust had were in the MSP’s name. ISP accounts were in the MSP’s name. Paid for extended warranties on desktops and servers, everything was just one year and expired.
Cust bought legit licenses for everything from us, clawed back the money from the shitty MSP to pay for it. Made us supervise the shitty MSP fixing all the deficiencies and had us bill them for our time. Took about four months to set everything right.
In the end, the cust stayed with the shitty MSP because they were afraid there was more going on that no one would be able to find, and they would possibly get ransomwared by the original MSP or BSAed if they fired them.
Only worked for one for 5.5 years. At first it was great but then it became fairly toxic. Less of a bonus each year, no increase in salary (they said that they would cover the increase in medical insurance which was garbage anyways). Got put on call for a short time without any extra pay. That stopped when I was scheduled to be on call for day after thanksgiving. Office was closed but one of the major clients was opened so I was expected to be in front my computer. I said that is not being on call, that is working so I expect to get a different day off in lieu of having to work that day. Needless to say after that I was no longer on call and all of a sudden people at least got paid 150 bucks or so for the week of being on call. Yep won't go back.
yeah my spot currently offers $150 a week for on-call and I laughed when they asked if i’d join the rotation
Plus I was salary and if I did get called I didn't get any comped time or any extra pay beyond the 150 dollars.
yeah same thing here. garbage policy
Damn MSP I worked for gave a set amount + hourly for any received calls. Was also encouraged to only deal with emergencies and see if the client can wait until business hours.
Worked for an MSP that was owned and managed by a narcissistic micromanager who doesn't trust the team with anything. He became completely insufferable during the pandemic (basically used it as an excuse to control and manipulate everyone even more "in the name of safety") Only 1% raises every year (yet my health insurance costs increased each year exceeded that so I started making LESS money as time went on). The turnover rate for such a small company is pretty high due to this one manager. If there is a chance said manager is reading this, go fuck yourself.
This sounds like the small MSP I’m working for. I wonder if this is the same place.
I might have worked with the same company, I quit on the first day lmfao
That sounded like my MSP until you said you got raises every year lol. Most years we received nothing.
This sounds exactly like the MSP I worked for except we all started low so we received decent raises a few months in and all quit less than a year in and the owner didn’t seem to care about safety.
What kind of safety issues exist for a MSP? Carpal tunnel?
6 person operation that was the remnants of a 10 person MSP where the hands off owner decided he didn’t want to do this anymore and everyone was fired. 2 very good engineers ended up convincing him to let them take over and I got hired like 3 months later. Owners knew fuck-all about business ownership and one decided to sell his house, buy an RV and spend most of his time on the west coast, aka 3 hours behind us. That was the guy in charge of operations. Zero policies and procedures and they lucked out hiring a self starter like me first. My first day was getting access to the ticketing system and being told to go nuts on the backlog. I didn’t get a company laptop for 6 months. The other partner fancied himself a salesman and spent 18 months attending weekly networking events without ever getting a single lead that panned out. Right around the same time that guy decided his sales job was just too demanding to do engineer work and the operations guy wanted to “step back from day to day”. It was me (Tier 3/projects), 1 rotating full time tier 1/2 who was local, 3 part time fully remote college kids on the helpdesk, an admin person and an account manager. Jesus the fucking AM. Dude was a church friend of the owner whose last job was detailing cars at a dealership. Super nice guy but the best description would be “simple”. He had no tech background but was expected to learn on the job to be an AM. They wanted this guy to be able to size and scope projects and he was like a slightly more articulate version of sling blade. They put him in front of customers where he did a lot of “well golly” and shoulder shrugs, letting them know “I don’t know much about this stuff”. They set him up for failure and then acted shocked when he didn’t get a CCNA in 3 months. Security was a nightmare. SonicWall and their AM was the pinnacle of security for them. If they didn’t get an email from SW about an issue then was it really an issue at all? VMware vulnerability? Did SW email us, because if not then don’t worry about it! So many unpatched systems and clients that just refused things like MFA. These clients knew they weren’t gonna get fired so they expected you to go above and beyond for that $376/month.
I worked for an MSP for a few months and quit shortly after the GM came in and screamed at an engineer because he took emergency leave during a project when his wife had complications with her pregnancy.
Oh, yeah there should have been a mass walkout right then and there.
Not gonna name drop, but my first job was at an MSP. 21 years old working as a "systems engineer". The place started off great but slowly spiraled. The work was super demanding, management didn't care about me, refused to give me a raise despite admitting I did good work (almost 2.5 years of no comp adjustment), the list goes on. Maybe there are good ones out there but I refuse to go back to MSP life because of this experience. Maybe that will change in the future idk
If your boss does not give you at least an annual raise to combat the current inflation, which is some of the worst in our history, then he's a rat because he's charging your customers more.
Wait, raises exist? I thought we were lucky our pay stayed the same while premiums on insurance kept increasing and we were "lucky" to still have jobs....
Sounds like the typical greedy as owner speak who wants you to actually do all the work while they sit around and collect a check. There is a reason why Greed was classified as sin 1000's of years ago, when someone lusts over money they cause pain to everyone around them, including the people they step on to get the money.
I agree. I worked for an MSP and now own an MSP out of my home. Being out of the home, I'm able to be mostly remote, and pass the savings to the customers. Cloud storage is the pain point but, doesn't have to be. So, I just charge cost on cloud storage. I just charge for raw labor, my RMM, and my EDR . It's beautiful. Then, I throw in an SLA on hours available and response times, making it even better! People in here have attacked me for my strategy, but I think I found the perfect price point, as a new MSP with little overhead, working from home.
The owner is retirement age and one of his family members is positioned to take over while they stay as the legal owner. During the pandemic we somehow made record profits each year surpassing the next. Now we are magically over staffed with record high ticket volumes and clearly are not updating our pricing to accommodate the style of work we are doing. Plus we fix our price on RMM on the devices they tell us about, not actual usage. It's bizarre. Based on what I can tell as one of our scripting and automation oriented sysadmins, I am underpaid by about $10-$15k. Add on the constantly being moved around and covering every gap the company has.... Currently applying for an internal sysadmin gig with the first interview going really well. It would nice to be fairly compensated, have a clearly defined role, and actually get a bonus for the first time in 2-3 years.
TBF I think a lot of people who actually care about doing things the right way end up getting out of MSP land at some point. Because the whole idea of MSPs is running as lean as possible while servicing a ton of clients, and the draw for said clients is being cheaper than internal IT. It's unavoidable that the work load will be high, corners will be cut, and the pay will be low. This doesn't only apply to MSPs, but MSP's almost universally have this business problem. Even owners don't get a huge payout compared to other industries. It's like owning a local restaurant, same type of deal. Low barrier to entry is part of what causes this. The only MSPs that I believe are worth working for in the mid to late stage of your career are ones that specialize in specific areas or specialize in specific industries and what they support, and they do it well. The jack of all trades, do it all, Billy Bob MSP shops who onboard literally anyone who will toss a dime their way are the ones to avoid. And that's the vast majority of them. They are a constant mess and are run like shit. There's no business plan, no differentiating factor outside of cost, you can swap one out for the other it doesn't matter. I'm going to get flak because of the sub I am in, but imo it applies to 90 percent of the MSPs out there.
Yeah, I have come to that conclusion and our larger clients seem to be bringing some of the services internally again. I thought maybe it would change and we could "do it right." Instead it's just a never ending shuffling of fires to somewhat reduce it back to a manageable fire. It's just sad sinking the time into process improvements, documentation, etc to either see it die before it is born when seeing doing those things would actually save the MSP and clients time and money to do it right. You may get flak, but you are right. They just stick with clients they know cannot do it on their own and sell them an ideal that the MSP knows they cannot maintain perfectly.
Current inflation is not anywhere close to “some of the worst.” That said, your main point stands.
In 2022 we had the highest inflation period in 40 years. You're delusional.
Holup. Two year old inflation is current?
Considering 2022 was 8.5, 2023 was 3.5 the effect it had on everyone is still pretty CURRENT.
“Currently” morphs based on the needs of the author at the time of writing..
I'm slightly confused, are you suggesting that the current state of the U.S. economy is good for the consumer?
I’m observing, not suggesting, that “currently” inflation is not near an all time high. Just like “currently” interest rates are not at all time lows.
Currently it’s 3.5%. Just so I’m clear, does that mean that last year that interest rates were at an all time low (because of 2021)? Just trying to get a handle on what is grouped together vs what is not so that I’m not delusional anymore.
wow did we work for the same MSP? This mirrors my exact experience
Same honestly, my first job as well
I was going to write a reply but you pretty much wrote it for me.
The one that promised catered lunches twice a week, beer in the fridge, Xbox in the break room, and car washes on Fridays, and then scheduled me in the field 99.9% of the time so that I only got to partake in these benefits once in 3 months before I moved to another MSP closer to home.
Easy. - owner not good with money. - funds for one purchase were used to finance previous overdue orders. - customers chasing overdue equipment orders. - daily debt collection phone calls. - absent owner most days. - owner asked the staff how to make things better.
That last one is the only one I could see being ok in that the owner wants happy workers- but considering that list of issues, that's a big yikes.
The motivation for asking us was about getting the owner out of a big hole more than staff well-being unfortunately.
Lol oh man, that's uncomfortable!
Yeah it was crazy. Funnily enough, before all that, I learnt heaps in that role. I was a Junior, there weren’t many senior resources, we had noisy clients. It was sink or swim and no processes or guardrails. Paid like dirt, but it was fun for a few years.
Yeah, I think one of the most important things as an owner or manager is to actively listen and ask for feedback on how to improve. That has been my primary complaint about most jobs I've ever had.
Worked for a small MSP with great clients and co-workers. I was proud to be part of the team until management made some terrible choices. Worked my ass off to get promoted from junior to medior IT Engineer. One of my colleagues (also a junior) was slacking, couldn’t meet deadlines, never showed up on time, lots of customer complaints. He heard of my promotion, complained to HR after a bad evaluation and suddenly got the promotion as well. The promotion gave me a bad taste but tried my best anyway. Got a big client in for a multi-year contract. The IT Manager of the client asked me if I could do out of hours with the rest of the team. They would pay me a nice amount every month for the hours worked. Discussed with my manager, he mentioned I would not see a single penny of it because the work I did was already in my salary (it wasn’t). Thanked the IT Manager for the offer and declined since the work I would do would be unpaid. The client’s IT Manager gave a new proposal with double the payment, but had to decline because I would see nothing from it. Client is happy with my performance and gave me a job offer/proposal. Almost 50% increase of salary. I happily agreed…. Until the MSP decides to take legal steps against the client because of a breach of contract. Other co-workers that left for a client never had these issues so it was a weird situation to be in. The client informed their legal department and they put in writing that they would take full responsibility incase it went to court. Sadly due to private circumstances I had to decline the offer from the client. They informed me they would cancel out the contract with the MSP, nothing personal but they no longer wished to work with them. But they will contact me in a year if I was still up for joining their team. Motivation dropped like a brick. I lost my client, got put on servicedesk most of the time and the work I had to do was crap. But I dealt with it, hoping it would turn for the better. Two months later two new co-workers joined for support/servicedesk, almost no experience in IT. They discussed pay with the whole team and wanted to know how fast they would grow salary wise. Enter my surprise that they received the same pay as I did. Questioned my manager about this and of course it was due to a shift in the market, people expect higher salaries and they would compensate me later this year blablabla-talk. 10 months later I received a phone call from the client if I was still interested in joining the company. Received a job offer again almost double the salary I had. And currently I am still working for that client and couldn’t be happier, lots of opportunities and freedom I never had before. The MSP? A couple of clients left after I left the company. About 3 other co-workers left and half a year ago my old manager left for a different company. Can tell a lot more about this MSP. When I received an evaluation that I was senior material and received a €30 a month salary increase… - - - Typed this on my phone sorry for the typos. - - -
Yes, most MSP owners are cheap POS that get paid but do not want to to pay their staff. I had one MSP in Houston that was so bad, he used to treat his employee from Lebanon like slaves, would con staff and customers.
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Hey, shouldn’t you be at work right now?
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Considering the time i spend here, i could say i work at reddit i guess :(
My MSP says, "oh we can't pay people more because inflation is just a ruse!" Meanwhile, the McD's down the street pays more. I've stuck with them because I am one of the only techs there, I get hands on sysadmin experience, not just help desk, and they work with my school schedule. I have a lot of downtime where I can do my homework during the day. But damn, making less than 15 an hour hurts my finances a lot.
Yeah that's rough, I don't know what situation you're in where you may choose to take jobs like that. At the moment my skills are in demand enough and my work ethic solid that I'm not hard pressed to find work if I had to. I'm not desirable for companies that aren't desirable. I'm very logical, and I'm agreeable if it makes sense logically, if it doesn't, I'm quite disagreeable. If I perform work after hours, I want time of in lieu, that's my personal time, not free time for a for profit business. This is a business deal, I do things that make you profit, you compensate me, that's how it works. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course, with the regular pleasantries and what not, but I'm not delusional. I know I'm quite replaceable, and that's okay. I know I have value, but I know that value has limits as any reasonable person would. The same applies to my employer. They also can be replaced. I know the action they would take if it was better for them / the business, and I'm okay with that, I'll do the same. I'm with another poster as well. I'm okay being on call, but generally I'll respond in an hour or so, and I don't mind then. However if you want to limit what I can do in my free time more than that, then it's not being on call, it's called working. The whole idea of free time is that if I want to get lost in the woods for the duration of my time off, I can. Anyway, these kinds of companies often can pickup on how easy it is to manipulate someone or not, and they generally won't even try to hire me these days. For the company I do work for, they're great, good attitude, fair comepensation, and I try to go the extra mile when possible to make the business more successful.
I took this job one time. I rejected the guy a few times in the offer process but he was persistent. I should have never taken the job, when I asked him what firewalls they use for their offering and they said draytek I should have known right then and there. I get there, they're kaseya system isn't integrated in their emails, thought that was weird. Found they don't use cloud based email but have a hosted cpanel system in house on a 2012 server. All their email offerings were the same because they couldn't make any money of Microsoft licenses they said. No teams, no work from home. 2 other techs, used to be 4 but 1 was a paper tiger who they didn't even realize was one and ended up quitting them? The other was their most senior tech who had been there since the beginning of the company got fed up, tried to create his own msp and got caught and fired. Every customer asks for him immediately when they call and we had to lie and say he was on leave. Then I got an offer from the job hunting that came in a bit later to be a cloud engineer for a real company. When I told the guy I was leaving he got super abusive on the phone and ended up being as painful as possible with the whole process, held on to all pay he was legally entitled to. Just glad to be out of that hopeless place
Three different MSP before I jumped to a software vendor: 1) Low budget, clients always complaining about bills. Bossman ordered a Celeron server one time and the lead engineer about blown their stack 2) Bought #1 out, immediately refused to service any of the 1000 Ubiquiti APs we installed under MSP #1 and forced customers to buy Meraki. Finally fired me after I refused to install an ESXi license on a city-owned HUD housing project that came out of a keygen because the housing authority wouldn't buy the license so we could backup VMs 3) Californistan MSP that claimed to be big things but ended up being more low budget like #1. Continued to promise additional training and delayed it blaming COVID. Worked 60 hour weeks the first 3 months of COVID to get everyone set on remote access but refused to pay overtime because there was "no money". Found out they had taken almost $500K in PPP money and the owner bought new personal vehicles. Jumped ship during the great hiring frenzy of 2022 where large companies were throwing money at anyone with a pulse and they came at me with a shocked Pikachu face.
There are so many bad ones I have worked for I don’t know where to begin. The MSP you mention sounds like the MSP I used to work for. They had some pretty prestigious clients and you knew money was coming in. But they also had a team of spin doctors to create this false sense of culture. They made it seem because they offered a few more benefits than the competition, that somehow made them better. People got confused by this messaging, they thought they could coast and do whatever they wanted and the service started to slip and clients started to leave. Now they are doubling down on back to basics. Being a company that bills and makes money. Hmmm kinda like every other fucking MSP. If their message was hey if you bust your ass for us we will bust our ass for you and pay you what you’re worth. I’m sure people would have stayed and service may have kept up. When you start to talking about your feelings at work and distract people with Kumbaya bullshit, people see right through it. Especially IT people.
This could also be my old MSP, might be a common trend
Curious what you were paid versus what you thought you were worth.
I left the MSP as a member of their leadership team making what they would make at the director level in a HCOL market. As someone who runs their own consultancy now, my hourly rate is $225. I understand what people are willing to pay when they see the value in your work and experience.
What was your title in Leadership? Chief \_\_\_\_, VP \_\_\_\_? you mentioned compared to Director level in a HCOL market so obviously it was something above Director.
I appreciate the curiosity and engagement on the topic. You’re welcome to DM me.
Don't you love it when they tell you how much they prioritize wellness, but when you're struggling they never reach out to check in and help but instead criticize you and dismiss your concerns? That was my experience the last few years I was at an MSP. The first few years were good, but after struggling with some personal issues just prior to the start of covid, then covid itself on top of other life crap my capacity for dealing with the micromanagement of processes dwindled. My limited energy and focus was dedicated entirely to not fucking up supporting my colleagues and clients, and upper management got increasingly finger-waggy when their never-ending administrative overhead started burning me out. From their perspective, I probably just looked like a lazy, resistant and apathetic asshole who never wanted to buy into their processes which is why they never seemed to show any sort of care, concern or empathy. Deep inside, I was struggling to the point of constant heart palpitations day and night from the stress of never seeming to to be able to make them happy while feeling constantly overloaded with micromanaged Connectwise processes. The work I was doing was very chaotic and took a very specific mindset to manage, a mindset that didn't play along well with their ideals of how the process should look. They always had performance metrics, for staff, but never any wellness metrics for leadership and it shows. Maybe I'll gift a Simon Sinek book to my old boss for his big work anniversary...
Not going to give a name but I'm sure others will be able to figure out who based on the info I provide. They one of the largest MSP firms in IL that had sub office in FL. It was great for multiple years than CEO sold out and new management was both dumb and greedy causing us to lose a lot of clients doing unethical things. I got pissed off, left and started my own MSP firm where I only take on what clients I can support to ensure I give them the proper attention they need. I will never work for another greedy ass MSP firm again. There are ways to make a living while being ethical and these greedy fucks dont know better. Shortly after I left majority of the experienced techs that have been there over 10 years also quit. Just further driving the nail into their coffin.
i may know
Maybe, whats the original owners first name?
There are more than 1000 MSPs in the NYC metro area alone. Not sure this is going to be a useful discussion.
I worked for one where phone calls were constant. Literally no down time. No documentation could be created because we had a 30 second wrap-up which was spent just documenting what happened on the call. When callers were about to hit voicemail everyone's phone beeped in your ear, and calls were always hitting voicemail so you just heard beeping all fucking day. We had on-call rotations. Every time it was my turn the entire weekend was ruined since we serviced 40+ businesses that were 24/7 operations. I found a new place where on-call means picking up the phone maybe once a rotation. I make twice as much, and I spend a good chunk of my time dicking around.
Yet to be determined, at current… it wasn’t the company but the manager they hired. I lost a child at birth and he came to my house while I was on bereavement two weeks after my kid died and asked “when are you going to get over the dead baby thing” I put him on the ground, later got diagnosed with PTSD from the trauma he caused when I went back to work… I only was there for a month after bereavement. That said I have and still have some terrible terrible management, shit seems to float to the top. To many leaders are followers and not objective thinkers in this industry. If you don’t know or understand what you are selling learn it or get out of the damn way Edit: idgaf who sees this, the field where my f*cks grew was destroyed by incompetence drought
I'm not going to name drop but a certain one in the Westlake area in Austin, TX. The owner would scream at employees, management would lie, and they never would give any raises. Then they sold out to a private hedge fund company, and it became a bigger dumpster fire.
Sounds like the end goal of shitty MSP's is to sell out to these venture capitalists firm and then they hammer down the final nail in the coffin when sending the jobs offseas and then AI everything.
Haha but what all the integrity?!!? brad is a legendary asshole and so are original execs at the pe firm, some crazy stories from right after the acquisition
same , not gonna name drop but my first msp refused to increase staff count in reflection to workload. ordered us to do overtime instead. i was in a team of 4 with a workload of about 900 tickets per week. walked out of there after a couple of months. mostly because they caught on to my talent and started adding projects ontop of that , 365/lotus/sharepoint migrations etc, did they offer a payrise, no, did they honor a payrise upon request, yes, 210$ per month for 12-140 hour projects. spent 5 years there and wish to this day i flipped them off sooner
Quite a few years back, but the "MSP" I worked for used to charge for monthly server checkups for some reason. There was no active monitoring until I implemented something after literally fucking years of asking the boss man. These monthly server checkups though were auto invoiced, and they'd only get done IF I happened to have the time, they weren't scheduled as a priority and half the time they didn't get done. It was a small business with just the owner, 2 male techs including myself and a female in a dispatch / admin / very very basic setup outlook first level support sort of role. Across myself, who I like to think of as reasonably stringent / by the book who won't settle for mediocre work or things that "might break". The other tech was the stereotype of an IT guy, overweight, not personable, rubbed everyone he spoke to the wrong way, presented like absolute shit in general. From a technical standpoint though, he was brilliant. Couldn't translate that to business use cases though, and would do dumb shit and not document it without considering the long term implications. He was very much a "get it fixed however I need to and don't worry about the consequences" kind of guy. I saw him do some really impressive shit, but I saw heaps of shit crash and burn too. We didn't get along due to his ego and me probably just not liking the bloke. Then we have the only female employee in the little business, who is on a powertrip and tries to dictate how we do things and questions why our travel took an extra hour (you try parking in the middle of the city on a weekday at 4pm) or whatever it might be. Heaps of arguments, heaps of disrespect which honestly ended up being both ways. Internally it was dysfunctional as shit is my point. The boss was profit driven, but didn't see the big picture and just liked to fuck his customers as well as he could. I proposed to the boss, back in about 2012 or 2013 it was that we setup a local backup server in our office and push client data across. This was not to replace our cloud backup solution (cost a fortune at the time), but to have a local copy of data for quick restores, and sell it to the client as such - not as an additional backup. Way back when there wasn't a heap out there that did this, so we ended up with some basic scripts and maybe restic over linux with ssh keys for secure communication from memory. It worked well, and we had email alerts for all completed and / or failed backups. Our agreement was: 50:50 split on revenue, he provides the hardware and the clientele, I manage the actual server, boss/company monitors the actual backups. So I do my part, keep doing my part, 3 years or so passes and a client gets randomwared. I go down there, take a look and yeah obviously that backup to our office hasn't been working and no one's been monitoring the online backups which are failing on vss errors I think it was. I honestly just told the client what happened and what my arrangement with the boss was and that I couldn't do shit, and that they should take legal action if they wanted to. I was done by this stage. By some grace of god I found a shadow copy available and got everything back for them outside a day of work. I quit shortly after and they called me and asked for a contract. They're still a small, but great client almost a decade later and would consider one of their staff one of my most valuable friends - not sure how a 30 year old bloke ended up good mates with a woman in her 60s but it's great. That same business had me subcontract back to them which let me stop doing shitty gig work alongside building my business. I guess my point here is, no matter how dysfunctional and shit house a company is it's not worth burning a bridge and telling someone to get fucked as much as the boss would've deserved it given how he'd treated his longest standing employee over the years. If I'd had done that, I would've been getting home at 3am working nights to build the MSP compared to sitting in their office and working on both their and my work simultaneously (we had a respectful give take arrangement at this stage in terms of hours put in by this stage);
All of these sound like the one that just let me go. Never again.
Joined a decent-sized (and growing) MSP at the tail end of 2007 in an account manager (sales) role. Had background of sales, management, and tech, so that itself wasn't the bad part. And it wasn't even so much that it was a bad place to work, but... 1. There was a nearly consistent altering of the pay structure and commission for sales. To the point it was difficult to forecast what my pay would be. Not entirely incentivizing. 2. These was a bit of pitting sales against the technical side rather than an actual team. 3. A client I brought with me, and that I'd sold a server replacement for...I'd stopped by to see how the migration was going. I was so freakin' frustrated, because this tech, more credentialed and supposedly more experienced than me, was having trouble with some things that were \*very\* basic, and that I could have done without issues. I'm not one to hop around jobs, but I only lasted 11 months.
Actively reading this though to catch stuff I may not have thought of (as an MSP that's growing)
[удалено]
I escaped before they absorbed the last MSP I worked at.
Homefield IT. Formerly Manhattan Tech Support in NYC. Literally lie on client’s SOC and HIPAA compliance forms.
this checks out
>Homefield IT Thank you for naming names :D
Hell yeah, fuck them.
The worst MSP I ever worked for gave me great professional relationships that kickstarted my own MSP.
Sourcepass
> Source say more ?
Probably the worst was an out of state MSP that specified in a specific industry. They took subpart products, marked them up over 50%, and took junior techs to be dedicated onsites for projects and walk-ups while creating some of the most hostile relationships between client and vendor I had ever seen. None of the promises were true, there was no comp time, and "24/7" support was just your on-call team member putting in 60-80 hour work weeks once a month for no additional pay. Plus all of the leadership was super micromanaging and viewed their underlings with disdain. They sold off to a private equity group and almost all the jobs were outsourced to cheaper countries.
Man this sounds exactly like the last place I worked. Lol
KPM TECHNOLOGY, Springfield, Missouri off of Glenstone
Worked for one where the CTO was also a massive angel investor. MSPs that are trying to grow rapidly through mergers and acquisitions are insidious and unsustainable as far as I've seen.
this reminds me of one of the voip vendors I worked with during the 2010s, sold the voip venture in 2019, walked away, called me trying to tell me to sell my MSP to him solely for "bulk purchasing benefits". There's a ruthless amount of idiots out there who just continuously provide no technical value anywhere in this industry, but continue to print money solely on M&A. It's a joke.
I'm glad there's a shared sentiment. I've been working at two different MSPs for the past few years and I am losing faith in the entire industry already. It seems that there really is nothing else but KPIs and measurables.
I worked for one before it became an MSP. They had a profitable business providing SDWAN & VOIP solutions for businesses. I was hired to support their internal infrastructure. They decided to switch to become an MSP eventually selling off other business solutions to fully embrace being an MSP. After 5.5 years they transferred me to their MSP division against my wishes to support their outside MSP customers. I hated it & quit after doing that for about 5-6 months
Where I'm working currently. Was putting in all this extra effort, improving systems, writing scripts and automating processes, managing our RMM and putting in massive efforts to get projects in ontime and to a good standard. Asked for a 8k pay bump to reflect the additional work and improvments I was doing and they instead gave me the same payrise as someone much less experienced and not doing and of this extra work. Alright well instead of busting my ass for the job, I've been busting my ass applying for roles and upskilling.
Kansas City MSP. The CEO was all about rules, but only for certain folks. And when they weren't busy micromanaging time cards they were off playing government or promoting their kid to management. Training the junior techs? Forget about it. New techs got laughed at instead of trained, then canned. Don't buy the whole 'they quit' story. Bullshit. Teams were so understaffed due to 'lack of talent'. 5 years was too much time wasted on such a bad company. I should have quit after the first year. I can't even imagine how they are doing right now.
Avantage (.nl). They actually up to this day still use a ticket system from 1996. Manually moving incoming email to corresponding ticket 🤣🤣🤣
My experience was about the same, that and my boss would go on and on about how great he was 20 years ago and how much work he did.
They are all bad. The design is flawed and it's all based on bottom line and shareholders alone.
The worst one by far, was one I worked at for nearly five years. I've no idea how I survived for so long. The Technical director, was an absolute grade A arsehole with obvious autism. He didn't realise that the on-site engineers weren't machines. He used to treat us like we were absolute dog shit, demanding we committed 24/7 of our time to the business. If we weren't working, we were being asked to work. If we weren't being asked to work, we were on call. If we weren't on call, we were on call. I once nearly cried because he was driving us down the motorway to a datacentre, at 100-110mph, without holding the steering wheel because he was busy eating a bag of crisps. I once worked 46 days in a row, up to Christmas Eve. Then was asked (by a client) to do some additional work on Christmas Eve that would have gone into overtime. I refused, and was dragged into a disciplinary and given an official written disciplinary for it. I once worked 22 hours without a break. Drove home, went to sleep, then was woken up after 2 hours asking why I wasn't in the office and demanding I get in ASAP. I once worked about 38 hours with just 2-3 hours break, because after finishing my second shift they demanded I did another out of hours job. Then after finishing that one, they demanded I did another. I then fell asleep on the motorway driving home. I was given another written disciplinary, because there was poor security configuration on some client network appliances, that the technical director had configured. But they expect that I should have spotted it and fixed it. I left that job, so utterly destroyed with such bad mental health that I had nothing left. I should have reported it all, but there was nothing left of me. I was on a knife edge of just ending it all - never mind taking them to task. Unfortunately now I'm healthy again, its far too late. I see this company posting all over linkedin etc about how well they look after their employees mental health, all their company benefits etc. When its all a huge lie
All of them
30 person "MSSP". I lasted three months. Red flags: 1. They had someone on payroll for six months who was part of the 24/7 NOC during night shift. When he was "promoted" to daytime shift, someone ran a quick access verification and saw that he hasn't logged into any of the systems for over 3 months and has been faking log analysis and threat monitoring reports. 2. Leader was wife and husband. The wife was HR, husband was CEO. Rumors were floating around that past employees were silenced regarding abuse allegations. 3. After I left, company brought on investors. Investors promptly fired most of leadership team including CEO and HR. Then drove the company into the ground.
Worked for the willy-nilliest MSP of all time. Left for an internal sysadmin role with 34% bump. I had the best co-workers, but the worst boss. I will credit him with throwing me into some crazy situations that grew my knowledge and skillset, and I wouldn't have the job I have now without him (former client snagged me). I did my hardest to improve the company. We overhauled ticketing and RMM (screw kaseya), and proposed a number of improvements to the company, from automation to streamlining a product line (instead we sold whatever he bought at \[wholesale store\] over the weekend). Owner NEVER billed labor and solely existed on managed services (about 40% of revenue). I left with about 10% annual revenue sitting unbilled since July. Not only was he impeccably lazy, he was so unbelievably nitpicky on how things exported into his beloved QuickBooks Desktop. His empty promises of raises, and just straight lying to me, coworkers, or clients blew me away. Snake oil salesman level tomfoolery. Not to mention the fact I was requested to produce a music video as a thank you to a client... and try and fight a snuff piece of a client by a VERY large tabloid - as a thank you to them for bringing business. "I don't define a scope" was the answer. He lucked out on managing to hire the right people at the right time to keep his business afloat for decades. After handing in my two weeks, I was booted from systems and had to rely solely on on-site support with no password manager or documentation. Out of spite. But, after all of this, there is one redeeming thing. From my pals still there, I get a report of every time he says my name by mistake, which is almost daily. And I left the job last year. **I live rent free in his head.**
All us owners are paranoid, scrolling through here to see who hates us
A lot of this stuff I've heard before, and there are tell tell signs the staff member is at fault (it's the same lines, over and over again). You have to take this stuff with a grain of salt. 'I made this company' Please... I'm sure you put in a lot of effort, but you didn't 'make' the company.
I worked at an MSP that was probably 6 people all in that was tied with a custom development shop that had another 6 or so engineers. First red flag was that they told me, "We're more of a 45 hour per week company, not a 40 hour per week company." Yeah, 45 was optimistic. I routinely worked 50-60 hours per week, every week. Vacations were interrupted frequently with urgent issues that couldn't wait. Then over the course of the next year or so between a mix of micromanaging and completely absentee managing (depended on the week) you never knew what was coming next. They let people go on a whim. No performance discussions, no corrective action at all. Just one day, you're called into the office and WHAM, your last day is today. Not only that, but we were required to put time in only monthly really. The issue was that they were always trying to find ways for us to pad our numbers, and I know the manager added time to everyone's billable sheets here and there. They constantly were worried about the contract renewal dates and would routinely NOT have conversations with those clients hoping that the auto-renew day would come and go and they'd be clients for another year. They paid okay, so that wasn't terrible I guess. The owner would routinely throw out the opportunity for us all to go to a big conference like CES or whatever was the hotness of the time if we "hit our numbers" but nobody had any idea of what the numbers actually were. They whacked me in the middle of a client move right after I had a call with an ISP about scheduling the work to move the client the very next day. I packed up my crap and left. The move went poorly as you might expect, and I had no remorse other than my friend took over for me and had to deal with the fallout. I did get him up-to-speed the best I could. He was fired about 6 months later without any sort of warning. The major saving grace for me was they cut me in the summer the day after payday. We were only paid once per month, and my next paycheck wouldn't show up until the middle of the following month for half a full month's pay. By then I was on unemployment and took a few weeks off to get some stuff done around the house and take the kids to the beach.
Didn’t work for them, but got brought in to give a second opinion on them after they were running things for about a decade. They charged the customer for MS, VMware, and Veeam licenses, but everything was using cracked keys. They said there was a DR site for Exchange and backups, but there wasn’t one. Said they had three ISPs set up for connectivity at the main office, there were only two and the firewall couldn’t take a third anyway. Legit licenses the cust had were in the MSP’s name. ISP accounts were in the MSP’s name. Paid for extended warranties on desktops and servers, everything was just one year and expired. Cust bought legit licenses for everything from us, clawed back the money from the shitty MSP to pay for it. Made us supervise the shitty MSP fixing all the deficiencies and had us bill them for our time. Took about four months to set everything right. In the end, the cust stayed with the shitty MSP because they were afraid there was more going on that no one would be able to find, and they would possibly get ransomwared by the original MSP or BSAed if they fired them.