- IT Management had a tendency to not communicate effectively.
- Responsibilities felt more in line with an administrative role, rather than IT systems administration or IT support.
- IT Management was rude, unapproachable and did not provide the correct information on many occasions.
- The IT infrastructure itself was a mess, no clearly defined policies, with a history of ill-practice, such as letting end users join computers to the domain named as "happy-bunney" or "coffee". No helpdesk was in place to effectively record tickets, so a mailbox was the only tool in place, which is itself a nightmare. When exposed to little amount of technical work, it was essentially a fire-fight to combat all errors made previously.
- Personal grievance: The job was not as advertised in my particular case. Was advised on the day I started that half of the role involved supporting a HQ office of the parent company. This then became 5 days a week solely in the parent company HQ. This conflicted severely with personal commitments and added significantly to my commute time per week, around 6-7 hours.
- Similarly I was expected to support the parent company, which was stupidly split into 2 domains, supported by teams in mainland Europe who were unapproachable and rude. Took 6 months for me to get the simple access on both domains to even change passwords/unlock accounts.
- My role there was ill-defined, where they expected 24/7 support that I was not contractually obliged to provide.
- Was advised before starting that there was opportunity for training, but this never arised.
- History of poorly documented systems, with a "silo" mentality on technologies. I started 2 weeks before the other IT Support Engineer and we were bombarded with playing catch up on the lack of documentation.
- IT Management were ineffective in their IT skills, simply did not know that much about Windows systems and the infrastructure.
- The company itself lacked a HR department.
- A history of poorly configured backups, using an old tape library that was simply ineffective for the requirements of the business.
- Laptop builds are fairly frequent, but management insists on doing so from a USB stick with Windows 7 and all other software installations are done manually. This makes laptop builds very time consuming.
I'm sure there's more, I just can't recall everything wrong with this team and position, because there is so much.
