r/ITManagers

Hi all,

One of my favorite sub reddits btw. I just received my first IT/Service Desk Manager offer after interviewing the past 7 months. For some reason I'm not as excited as I should be. The industry is just in a very disappointing state and hasn't really fueled any spark in me. Let's cover the role.

Growing company ( Engineering / Mechanical/ Construction Industry)

9-11 analyst - I have the opportunity to scale the desk and hire a lead if needed.

Fully onsite with more locations opening so opportunity to travel and relocate. I currently work fully onsite but would love to go back to remote or hybrid. Not really a change here. Commute is short under 15 min.

Opportunity to make the service desk my own. I was previously a solo IT so i liked this concept.

Bonus, only two interviews before the offer and received offer a few hours later after the second interview.

A blend of hands on technical and business leadership.

IT is growing and expecting to double within the next 1-2 years. So maybe opportunity for more promotional growth. My experience spans across IT and Cybersecurity.

In comparison to the salary ranges I've interviewed for it is on the lower end but only 4k away from crossing 100k . I'm just seeking more due to YOE.

It's been a year since I've worked in tech and seeing the downfall is something lol overall this offer has a lot of pros than cons. Maybe not being excited is a good thing but humbling this market is insane. I will take the time to review and decide.

TLDR: Been in IT for over 20 years, no certs or degree, self taught. Getting degree gated out of positions I want and can't land anything lower because employers accurately view me as a flight risk. (which to be fair I am.) Looking for help with direction or if I should take up goat farming. Tried the network which I haven't been maintaining, no hits. Canada based.

Quick background - been in IT since I was 22 (45 now). Started and the bottom and worked my way up - finished my last job in January as a solo IT manager for a resource company after 10 years; left due to toxic environment and burn out. Recovered over 4 months and have been applying to positions since beginning of May.

Running into a large block in the form of degrees and certs or my lack of them. Didn't have a training budget for much of my career so I'm mostly self taught. I'm looking to get into a strategic advisory position, it's where my interests and skills are currently are (did a bunch of M&A work at the company that helped me solidify what I enjoy) either short term (Project Management) or long term (IT Director).

However, can't land a job; had three job interviews so far, one rejection, one stalled for four months (probably not first choice) and one I declined because the offer was from a company that would put me right back into the same place I left due to burn out.

Just looking for advice or direction from people who might have been there before. I understand the market is terrible but bills still need to be paid.

Edit: Have been looking more into contracts lately as a way to land something temporary.

Just started my first IT Manager role at a hospitality company. Our IT team is pretty small: IT Director, me as the IT Manager, and one technician.

One of the first things I noticed was 678 open Zendesk tickets. After digging through them, I’ve found tickets going back to 2024, people asking for followups, tickets that seem to have been resolved but never closed, and a bunch of Google Admin/third-party integration notifications. So the 678 number definitely doesn’t mean 678 active problems, but the queue still seems pretty messy. At my previous company, we had more locations with basically the same number of IT people, and I never saw a backlog like this.

I’m only 2 days in, so I’m trying to understand the environment before making changes.If you were in my position, what would you tackle first?

We’re currently a 99% macOS company, though we may add more Windows and possibly Linux devices in the future. We have about 20 employees, are fully remote, and expect to grow soon.

I’ve been tasked with choosing an MDM solution for device provisioning, inventory, and software management. My only previous experience was with ManageEngine, which felt overly complex and cumbersome.

I’m the DevOps engineer, and we don’t currently have a dedicated IT administrator, so my priority is a reliable solution that requires minimal setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting.

Our HR team already uses Rippling and has suggested its device management offering, but I’d like to hear about other options. What solution does your organization use, why did you choose it, and how much does it cost?

The company I work at is growing which is great, however we have a guy who is the new VP of statigy. Hes a nice guy been there about a year however. He's as of late igoring processes in place in the business and building his own like 2.0 versions of those. Trying to make his mark I guess. However hes trying to buy web apps for that suit the business that we are in that will automate and make things smoother in the business. However he isnt including key people including IT. Is this normal? Is this somthing I should be angry or annoyed about cause I kinda am. I had to find out 3rd hand and say somthing and find and ask all the approiate questions like are they SOC 2 complainant is the data encrypted is the data used to train AI models, do they support SSO if so what do they use entra, duo etc etc. He did get them to answer all the questions however we''ve never been invited to a meeting or a demo of the sofwate and I dont even know if or when or if they even bought it alrady. Since this is a web app and its not tied to IT Directlly should I just ask the questions that need to be asked and move on?

For IT/admin folks: what PDF-related issue do users keep bringing back no matter how many times it gets “fixed”?

Printing? Forms? Default app settings? Signatures? Huge files? Plugins? Updates? Something breaking after a new version?

PDFs feel boring until they become everyone’s problem at once.

Hello

In this post I just want to know what is your situation, especially if you are solo IT support and also sysadmin in your company.

Do you use ITSM for service management system?

Do you use it just for communication and record activities? Because most of them will be done by your self.

Thank you in advanced.

Hope everyone is safe and well.

Young budding IT manager, newly promoted into the role from a service desk person - full of ideas for various service improvements, just finding it difficult to avoid death by powerpoint.

Senior manager wants to brain storm ideas to decide a path way forward for the year ahead.

I would rather just illustrate my ideas effectively and just show I'm willing to put my neck out vs just here to pickup a paycheque.

anyone have any creative ways or experience with using something like MindMapping or similar of the ilk to build an effective roadmap?

Thanks

Hey all you IT managers. I’ve been out of the game for a bit. I was a IT manager for a few years and now work more on the vendor side. I’m curious, what’s the costs looking like for basic business equipment like laptops and such with the shortages going on, and how are you managing these increases? I saw a post saying 32GB of ram is now going for almost $600 so I’m curious how businesses are funding EOL and renewal of hardware?

Are you cutting elsewhere and if so where? Is this even sustainable at this point? Extending HW lifecycle?

In my last role before things got as bad as they are now I already moved our refreshes up to 7 years with a 5 year option if someone wanted to specifically ask for a refresh, but it was a broke government agency so I didn’t have a choice.

If you are a salesperson, vendor, SaaS app, or anyone else who isn't an IT manager that wants to share news, ask questions/get feedback, etc. then please post below!

I would be curious at your experience , and the split on who owns the website for your organization. Also when it comes to commerce who manages the integration to the OMS. Do you have a relationship with the marketing team? is it contentious? Curious how your teams handle the change velocity wants of marketing vs the stability wants of IT.

Seen this happen enough times now that it feels like a pattern nobody wants to admit.

Team builds an agent > Demo goes well > Everyone is excited.

Then the deployment review starts and the questions that should have been answered in week one are suddenly blocking everything.

1. Where does the data go during inference??
2. Who is accountable when the agent gets something wrong??
3. Can you show an auditor exactly what it did three months ago??
4. Who controls what gets changed and when?

Not edge case questions. Standard stuff.

And yet most teams are still treating governance as something you figure out after the interesting work is done.

The projects I have seen actually make it to production handled this upfront through architecture rather than paperwork.

Data stayed inside the org, audit trails were built in from the start, access controls were decided before deployment not after.

Came across the term Sovereign AI from on of the post by Lyzr while reading about this recently.

The idea being that proper enterprise readiness means the whole stack lives inside your environment from day one.

Makes sense the more I think about it.

Don't understand why does this keep being the last conversation instead of the first one?

We're in the middle of evaluating cybersecurity platforms for an org of around 2,000 employees and would love to hear what others have actually gone with.

Our environment is a mix of cloud services, SaaS apps, endpoints, and a growing number of AI tools, so we're looking beyond traditional endpoint or network security at this point. Our biggest priorities are visibility into where sensitive data lives, how it moves across the org, and keeping management overhead reasonable given that we don't have a large security team. Solid integrations and reporting matter too.

We're looking at a handful of platforms right now, but it's honestly hard to separate the marketing from real operational experience. If you're running IT for a similarly sized org, I'd love to hear what you chose and what actually pushed you in that direction.

I started leading my first IT team at 19. 4ish years later and I've taken on manager responsibilites such as interviewing, hiring, reviewing, mentoring, time sheets, PTO requests, etc., for an entire service desk department across 2 branches.

Not only that, but I was moved to a metro to be the first IT person in their branch and create all their infrastructure. I have built and owned Jira systems for the dev team and service desk team. I have worked with countless of software vendors. I created and completely manage our unifi network. I make all IT purchases. And I've been doing that for the past couple years now.

But this work environment is rough. I love the work, but I get only a couple holidays paid off, 2 unpaid sick days, 14 PTO days (until last week it was 8, and they told me I cannot get more than 14 PTO days), I don't get paid great, and I'm treated poorly. I report directly to the CEO who tells me I think too highly of myself when trying to negotiate higher than a tech salary. I've been told I'm easily replaceable. I've been forced to work many hours of OT. I've put things on my personal cards (got reimbursed for most).

And I'm tired. I'm also a full time college student (WGU IT Management) and my company told me I wont get anymore raises until I finish that degree. Which makes school a lot more stressful.

I've been an Service desk Tech -> Service Desk Supervisor -> Network and Service Desk Manager -> IT Operations manager, all under 4 years.

I've been applying for well over a year now to service desk manager or operation roles. And I recently applied to a k-12 software company's Service Desk Manager role that I really want. I meet all the requirements except the experience (they said 5 years experience and a degree). But I know I would be able to do that job well. And the company is known for a great atmosphere (they give free lunch!!). But I don't think I'll even get an interview. I've been auto sorted out so many times. I did send a cover letter and messaged the recruiter on linkedIn but have not heard anything in about a week :/

I just don't know what to do. This job is killing me. And don't get me wrong, I am so grateful for the opportunity and truly understand how lucky I am. Its just time for me to move on but I can't.

Any advice?

Got a question for IT managers? Please post it here! Got something silly to share with IT managers? This is the right place! Come share it with us.

So the other day we’ve had an issue at one of our sites where PCs were becoming unresponsive and it was spreading throughout every OU. The issue began to spread and the IT Site Lead(Supervisor) reached out to me because he was stuck as he couldn’t resolve the issue and a lot of my suggestions weren’t working either. So at this point I tag all the way in when I find time to troubleshoot the issue. It took me about a week to figure it out as I kept having to stop for meetings, tasks, and other escalations. Anyway I had my one on one with the IT Director (who I directly report to) and explained to him about the escalation that I prevented from reaching his desk and how I fixed the issue. My teams is Tier 1 Desktop Support (supposed to be entry level IT as the VP of IT keeps reminding me) and weren’t as advanced in the troubleshooting that I conducted as I used to be a System Engineer for this same company before taking the Regional Manager role. He was kind of upset about the fact I resolved the issue and stated that’s something your team should handle.

But question is dang is it wrong that I’m the most experienced and knowledgeable on my team as the manager? I’ve been with this company for 8 years and moved from Desktop Support all the way to System Engineer to now Regional Manager. And like I said they keep saying my team is “supposed” to be entry level, what am I supposed to do when the other teams (Sysad etc) are either too busy or playing the that’s not my problem game. I try my best to coach and train my team up but you don’t know what you don’t know.

Thoughts or comments?

I took over IT for a mid-size firm, though I'm still adding rows to the tool list I inherited. Past 80 apps now with a 3rd ive never heard of until I went digging. Every department bought what they liked, expensed it and left me to secure logins.

The overlap is almost funny. Two CRMs, 3 things that do tickets and a couple of AI tools signed up for on a company card.

The shadow IT is what actually worries me. Every one of those apps is an unmonitored door into our data but when I bring up consolidation, every team acts like I'm mugging them.

How do you get SaaS sprawl under control when every tool has a champion ready to go war for it?

Is there a specialised tool out there that lets us investigate employees for their activity on their computer, provide stats etc. Instead of compiling it from various sources, I am sure its possible via RMM, scripting etc but they want a good dashboard to look at whenever they want.

Example: exactly when laptop was turned on and off, How many total active hours of sales employees over zoom calls or team calls, browsing history capture and keep for 90 days,

Thanks in advance!

Spent the last quarter building out a remediation automation pipeline. The plan was simple enough, when a CVE hits a certain threshold, the system checks if the asset is production and internet facing, identifies the owner, creates a ticket, and if the risk is high enough, triggers the patch deployment directly through our endpoint management tool. Intended a closed loop, no human handoff.

Got the whole thing wired up, tested it in dev and it worked beautifully.

Then we tried to point it at production and everything fell apart. The automation didnt really break, the thing is nobody would sign off on letting it run against real assets. The infra team wanted proof that the asset list was accurate before patches star ted deploying. The security team wanted confirmation that the ownership mappings were current and not outdated stuff from previous quarters audits. The app owners wanted to know how we'd verify a patch didn't break their service. Every objection came back to the same root which is nobody trusted the underlying asset data enough to let automation act on it without a human in the loop.

So now we have this beautifully engineered automation pipeline sitting idle while we go back and manually validate the asset inventory it depends on. The irony is killing me,, we built automation to save time, but we cant use it until we spend months verifying the data it needs, which is exactly the manual work the automation was supposed to eliminate.

If anyone has ever been in this gap, I would really love to hear how they handled it. Even if you havent, I need ideas on how you can get from having asset data to trusting the asset data enough to automate against it