I was in a similar position a few years ago, as a senior network admin. I asked for help, they hummed and hawed, and then announced: we’ve found someone, a junior, who’ll be starting with you on Monday.

Good! says I, who interviewed him? Like yourself, it was someone with little experience in asking the right questions, but I held out hope-

-until the Monday morning, when Paul started. Nice enough bloke, recent graduate with a degree in Computer Networking.

Brilliant! I think, and I start to explain some of what we do for our customers.

I take him through my RAS setup- I had a Cisco-based VPN to all our managed customers, terminating on a PIX- worked well enough. I showed him how the remote PIX was also used to forward traffic in and out of the customer’s network based on the port.

He looks baffled….a port? Whats a port? he asks.

Well, I says, you know how TCP and UDP allocate ports, registered and otherwise, to determine ‘streams’ of traffic? Well, we can use this in conjunction with IP to control traffic.

What’s IP he says?

At this point, you can imagine my heart sinking….

I’d say no to this job- they aren’t thinking about it seriously IMHO.

I have a few questions.

1) does the business operate 24 hour days?
2) if not, why does it need 24 hour support?
3) if so, how does it expect 1 person to achieve that?
4) what about holidays & sick cover?

In the words of Iron Maiden, Run To The Hills

Doesn’t sound like your CEO has a scooby, but don’t turn it down if you could use the money. Just ask for giant piles of cash and agree that you’ll talk in a few weeks about cover and staff and all the rest once you’ve found your feet. If that conversation might get you fired and you can’t take the risk then maybe better turn it down after all.

If the last guy got away with checking email before bed then in the morning so will your two admins I would think. If they don’t actually have to spin up a box very often then I think you’ll be okay. Gotta be something in it for them though. Get them that reward and they might even quite like working for you.

Take your issues to the board, tell them you believe the CEO to be incompetant

“I think we need to work-through some of the details before I’m comfortable taking on that responsibility….”

Then several meetings whereby you get his agreement to structure the team how you want (which you have worked out in advance), THEN you accept the job.

Lol, its a family run business – there’s no board or shareholders to be concerned with.
Had another chat with the CEO and made it clear that I’m not providing out of hours support. He agreed to this but wants me to be the escalation point of the network admins run into problems, though their technical knowledge is far superior to mine so what that achieves is questionable. This would eliminate any need to pro-activley check emails/voice mails but would mean the occasional (in theory) callout which I can live with. (He knows I spend a lot of my weekends off the grid but I’m not sure the network admins will be happy if they can’t get me…)
Anyway, he’s offered me an extra 5%….

FYI: we’re not a 24hr operation but many of our SAAS clients are and we operate our own data centre.There’s vague talk of migrating to an outsourced data centre some indeterminate time in the future.

hopesmybossisntreadingthis – Member

Old boss was a director/part owner and is walking away completely. He doubts he’ll receive anything back on his original investment… 😯

+

Anyway, he’s offered me an extra 5%….

😆

Whatever you decide, start looking for another position NOW! ❗

5%?! That wouldn’t even cover the recruitment process to fill the role!

Tell him where to shove it, I’m currently being lined up for management with a (over several years) 25% pay rise once I include my lost overtime and callout allowance and its definitely not attractive for work/stress involved.

Tell him where to shove it,

Never tell anyone to shove it unless you have a signed contract elsewhere or enough cash in the bank not to care, ask for 10 or what your old boss was on, look for new jobs and leave when you get one.

you should work out what resources are needed to do the jobs he wants done, then break that down into job descriptions for x positions.

5% isn’t a massive pay rise TBH. That’s almost just a year-on-year rise..

Just explain what you’ve said here – the OoO support is troubling as you have a different life to the previous person that did it, and that part of the job won’t really work for you.

Negotiate hard. Make it clear the job opportunity doesn’t seem that attractive to you. If he gets this feedback from you, deep down he’ll know that he’ll run into issues promoting anyone..

I can understand it from the employers PoV – in my previous job we agreed similar sort of support / OoO terms, however there was no constraint on my life really. It was a sort of gentlemans agreement “I’ll pay you £Xk more, if you are near a computer OoO and there is a problem I’d really appreciate it if you could help out”. In reality it worked out as a once a month thing at most. YMMV.

Had another chat with the CEO and made it clear that I’m not providing out of hours support. He agreed to this but wants me to be the escalation point of the network admins run into problems,

That’s a good start and tbh you ARE the escalation point if you are their Manager anyway. My phone is always on, and once staff know that and that you will always be there to help/talk it’ll only ever ring with a real problem. And then you’ll change things to make sure they can deal with it next time without calling you 🙂

Whether 5% is a good increase, none of us can say as we don’t know how over/underpaid you are for the role.

Also once in the position you analyse the call-out etc and then give a fait accompli position on staff remuneration.

That’s almost just a year-on-year rise..

maybe if you’re an MP. Round here people are grateful if they get the inflation rate.

That’s almost just a year-on-year rise..

maybe if you’re an MP. Round here people are grateful if they get the inflation rate.

Well, based on a 40hr week, the represent s an extra two hours compensation. I suspect the extra workload will be considerably more than that. There are no mechanisms within the company to reward employees for above and beyond performance…