Hey Everyone,
As I'm sure most of you have been through this, I'm quite frustrated at my current job. It is low pay and I have never had a pay increase in my 5 years here. Users always complain to me about how little they make and tell me but then I am always too embarrased to tell them I make less than they do. This is actually just common here as that is why most people leave.
I have done the job of 3 people here for the last 2 years. We have 3 campuses and used to have a person at all 3 places. It has been just me for a little over 2 years. They only just now hired a person for 1 of the other campuses. We are a small 2 year college. On average I clear out 1250 tickets every 6 months according to my stats on our support software. So they keep me busy. I currently drive around to all 3 cities to do this and I pay my own gas. We are 100% Windows based for the users, with Win10 as our OS.
Other than the pay the most frustrating part and the tipping point to me is that I am never allowed to grow as an employee here. I have asked for access to several of our systems (SCCM was the last example) in order to learn new skills I can't replicate at home in my lab easily but always told no. I am asked to support 2 certain systems that I don't even have access to which i find insulting. Users are users, you all know them, they are mostly idiots who are very lazy except for a few.
So to sum it up, I don't feel appreciated. I have given my all here and always ask for extra responsibility and access to things in order to learn and grow. I am asked to train the new person and subsequent new hires because I know our environment so well.
I have a few skills. I feel like I am a good problem solver. I havent had a problem in my 5 years here that I could not figure out given a few days. I do as much with Powershell as I can. I could do a lot more if I had more access and higher credentials in our AD environment. When I first started here I was told to go to each pc and work on the problem and update them from that physical location. I quickly grew tired of that and learned how to use Powershell for remoting, update scripts that I automate now, and printer management. So I have become much more efficient. I have the A+, CTS, and Network + certs. I am about to take the SNCP storage exam and then start on Microsoft certifications. I want to do Linux exams but doing Microsoft first because that is our environment. I have basic to intermediate level Linux skills. I first started using Red Hat around the years 1999,2000. I'm a little fuzzy that far back now. However i think i still have my Red Hat cd roms somewhere in storage. I currently use Fedora and Suse, mostly Fedora though. My work desktop is a raid 0 machine with mdraid and kvm enabled where i run Fedora and a couple different Windows vm's. My laptop is just kvm with 1 Windows vm for when I am on a different campus. I operate 2 webservers personally and other things that I access from home usually. I can do basic hardening and don't have any issues working on the command line to do whatever I need to do on them. I run a few other things as well on the same cloud hardware to learn in the past such as Rocketchat, Mediawiki, and OSTicket. I can do basic level c++ and python stuff.
So with that little bit of context, when does the average IT person move on ?
Am I overthinking things?
Should I just be happy to have a job?
What do you all do when you want to learn new things to be more valuable that you can't do at home?