The shit umbrella and the shit funnel.

I work on a small infrastructure team that does the datacenter operations.

We were formerly managed by a 14 year veteran, nearly a founder of the.company, who had personally developed much of the corporate infrastructure. He came up through Corp IT on the windows side and used to work directly with users. He was interested in our personal development and personally oversaw and helped things down to the smallest request.

He was a shit umbrella. He shielded the team from the shit coming down from above.

He got kicked upstairs to an Architect position and they brought in a professional IT manager, Indian and non technical.

The new guy is a shit funnel. "I getting a lot of pressure from leadership so I am putting pressure on you." Direct quote.

All this guy does is enforce due dates on tickets. No excuses if the due date slips- that is failing.

That is a shit funnel. The shit comes down from above and gets concentrated and passed on.

I am chronically ill and fully qualify for disability. I will be going out on disability starting today because this manager has made work intolerable.

But not before I leave scathing upward feedback on my way out.

I'm 57 months clean from drugs and looking to return to IT after a 8 year absence due to addiction and recovery. I have a bachelor's degree in IT with a 3.9 gpa and 7 months of experience. I have a clean criminal record. I plan to put full-time caretaker on my resume to cover the gap. I'm going to get an entry level desktop support job.

This dude has a fake associate IT degree from a shitty online degree mill with a 2.0 gpa and had no experience when he got a helpdesk job. I cut him off years ago because he borrowed 600 and took 4 years to pay it back after saying it would only take a month. He says I'm not worthy of IT because I used to use drugs and that I can never reach my goals of system admin and IT manager. He claims he is morally superior because he never used profanity or had drugs or a drop of alcohol. What should I do? does his word hold any weight? does he have the right to say who can go into IT? I'm so upset

Foreign language real-time communication solutions.

Running an Eaton 5PX 1500VA rated for 1350W. Our current load is around 1000W, with short peaks close to 1200. We expect the normal load to reach roughly 1400W after adding another server and some network gear.

We’ve received quotes for:

-Eaton 5PX G2 2200VA / 2200W

-Vertiv Edge 2200VA/1980W

-Schneider Electric Smart

-UPS X 2200VA/1980W

Eaton has the better capacity margin. But we had a few annoyances with the Eaton. The network card has been inconsistent around alerts and event logging, and the fan is noticeably loud. Eaton generally seems to be well regarded, so I’m not sure whether this is typical or simply an issue with our older unit.

Right now I’m leaning toward the APC. The NMC/SNMP support, alerting and shutdown integration seems better. Our supplier has also confirmed that it will fit the available rack space and upstream power setup.

Before we place the order, I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who has managed both platforms. Given the choice, should I stay with Eaton or switch platform? What other factors should I consider?

A lot of small businesses now use separate tools for customer replies, scheduling, marketing, research, invoices, and lead follow-up.

The time savings are real, but I think there is a quieter risk: dependency.

Once customer data, calendars, workflows, notes, and customer history are spread across several tools, switching becomes harder. Even if a tool gets more expensive or less useful, the business may stay because leaving means rebuilding the process.

This seems especially risky for small teams without IT staff or a clean export system.

For small business owners: how do you decide when a tool is actually saving time versus creating lock-in?

I have been a working IT Professional for 17yrs (freakkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk) I dont even realize that until i have to tell it in an interview, lol.

Worked ONLY in 2 companies and they were Service companies and I am a IT Service sector employee (ITIL/ITSM is my forte). I am now in my third company for the last 3 years exactly, and this is not a service company.

Just yesterday my boss called me up and told me they decided to give me a mid year hike cuz they have been seeing my good performance....and i was like whattttttttttttttttttt ...
(tbh i worked like crazy back in my service company days- like 14-15hrs/day on avg and no one batted an eye or even gave more than 1.5-3% annual hikes) So now when i got this its firstly unbelievable to me, but more importantly it shows that my work is been seen..

Just o check - is this common ?

I feel good about this and its not about the money, its the message behind it - YOU ARE SEEN AND APPRECIATED.

But more importantly, I guess I want this to maybe serve as a hope for anyone who's reading this - that your work will be rewarded in some form or other soon

EDIT - I see why some of you might think it’s a HR/retnetion tactics and tbh even if it, it’s alright cuz it benefits me. To tell you guys bit more - I was massively underpaid at my previous job with a MSP and my current company had hired me at a 125%hike to bring me to market value. I am sure I am not underpaid. I know what my role gets, atleast in my country.
Secondly, I am a WFH role. Never got to meet any of my bosses/colleague ever. Being wfh, staying in my home(and not renting an apt in a big city), being allowed to work-cations from anywhere in the world etc are the kind of perks I am okay with even if I were not adequately paid. And now they added a cherry on top, an out of the blue mid year hike. I never dreamed of being able to say that for myself. I am not allowed to say a word to any of my colleagues so sharing this with the Reddit community.

Also, it’s impossible to know my bg in a small post, but to give a small brief I am also indifferent to work I do, and go batshit crazy appreciation for people who ack and appreciate me even a little bit. Like, i forget that they appreciate me not just like that, but cuz of my sheer force of nature to do good work. So thank you for looking out for me. I could have been underpaid and this thought would ever occur to me. (Wow I need some growing to do when it comes to self well being and awareness)

Thank you for being happy for me and protecting me, truly ❤️‍🩹💖🎉😇

I am a newer program area supervisor, and much of my work involves coordinating with an IT project manager and SQL/UI developers to coordinate our program data storage and reporting systems. The project manager has been very hands-off, and things feel very reactive and stressful for both program and IT teams as a result.

This is my first time in a role that interacts with IT project managers in this level of detail, so I don't have a strong sense of expected roles/responsibilities of someone in that position. What should or shouldn't we expect them to do?

I would also love to hear about some processes that have been successful for other IT staff that works with a similar setup!

(Also, let me know if this question belongs in a different subreddit).

some gaps can be handled in-house while others slow the whole project down. for IT managers here what usually triggers the decision to bring in a consultant, vendor, or outside specialist?

Why developers are over valued by salary, respect, decision making scenarios compared to any other role ( Devops/system architect/... )

Could anyone help me with how can I do that?

We are a traditional MS SQL show utilizing a core license and SSRS. We have been thinking of making thw switch to PostgreSQL to allow for more allocation of server resources to not be tied to the core restrictions.

Has anyone decided to run PostgreSQL as production and if so, how or what did you replace SSRS with?

Full disclosure, I'm on the ManageEngine team, and I work with database/app monitoring side of things. I'm not a DBA and won't pretend to be one, just sharing something that's been landing well internally and figured it might be useful here too. Downvote/ignore if it's not your thing.

One of the things that I came across was the fact that the DBAs and IT admins spent most of their work week on fixing database issues- chasing pages, jumping between five dashboards to trace one slow query, then explaining to leadership why the "all green" board didn't stop last night's outage. I don't know about you, but that sounds like the perfect recipe for burnout with the right amount of stress and a pinch of "I might quit anytime".

So we figured we'd run a free webinar on July 15, 2026 (6am GMT / 11am EDT) built around why admins feel that way, how to strategize a working DB monitoring plan across hybrid/multi-database environments, the metrics to look out for, which we hope would ease the burnout feeling. It includes a live demo, open Q&A, and a free practical handbook for DBAs.

Here's the (free) registration link, if you're interested. https://www.manageengine.com/products/applications_manager/webinars/database-performance-monitoring-webinar.html

Would be happy to take questions in the comments too, including "why would I trust a vendor on this" (totally a fair question btw, so ask away)

just sat through a demo with another big name MDR vendor and i'm exhausted.

we're evaluating new MDR vendors because our current setup is basically an expensive ticketing machine right now.

we asked what happens to alert volume in the first week after it goes live, before tuning and they came up with some version of ‘it varies by environment’ and a promise to follow up with numbers.

follow up? That wasn't a hard question. If you've onboarded fintech clients before you roughly know what week 1 looks like.

feels like a lot of these guys have a great slide deck and a shaky answer when you ask something operational.

is everyone just buying these pitches?

Not new to management but supporting several new teams from IT to development. What resources (books, podcast, etc) do you use to learn and keep relevant. Also any software that might support a different teams.

Lately, I often find myself having to query Active Directory, and especially Entra ID and M365, using PowerShell scripts—sometimes quite complex ones—to retrieve information and generate reports.

With Copilot, it's a pain; before getting to something that actually works, it takes at least 5-6 prompts to fix errors in the script's construction.

With Claude, for some reason, everything feels much more instantaneous, and generally, everything runs correctly on the first try.

Is it just my impression? Am I prompting Copilot incorrectly while Claude just digests everything? What is your experience?

Looking for Microsoft 365 best practices for a large dynamic company group

I'm a Microsoft 365 admin trying to figure out the best architecture for a company-wide group (100+ users) and I'm wondering if there's a better approach than what I'm currently doing.

What I need

I want a single company group that can:

• Automatically include users through dynamic membership
• Share SharePoint sites, files, OneDrive content, Teams resources, etc.
• Allow sending company-wide emails
• Allow sending required Outlook meeting invitations (not optional)
• Have moderation/approval for announcements, meeting invites, or posts
• Allow certain trusted users to bypass approval while everyone else requires approval
• Scale as employees are hired/terminated automatically

Current setup

1. Dynamic Distribution List

• Used for company-wide emails and Outlook meeting invites.
• Membership is dynamic using an Exchange recipient filter based on US users.

2. Private Microsoft 365 Group

• Used for SharePoint, file sharing, and collaboration.
• Membership is dynamic through an Entra ID Dynamic Membership Rule.
• I had to use PowerShell to configure some permissions because the portal didn't support everything I needed.

Problems I'm running into

• I now have two separate groups that should always contain the same people.
• The Dynamic Distribution List works well for email/meetings but doesn't provide SharePoint, Teams, or file collaboration.
• The Microsoft 365 Group provides collaboration but doesn't seem to support everything I need for company-wide communication.
• I haven't found a clean way to have approvers/moderators, while allowing a few designated people to post or send meeting invites without requiring approval.
• I also haven't found a good way to make Outlook meeting requests "required" from the sender side other than relying on attendees not changing their RSVP.

My questions

1. Is there a better Microsoft 365 architecture for this?
2. Should I be using a Dynamic Distribution List, a Microsoft 365 Group, a Mail-enabled Security Group, Teams, Viva Engage, or something else?
3. Is there a supported way to have dynamic membership + SharePoint + company email + moderated announcements/meeting invites all in one solution?
4. How do large organizations typically handle company-wide communications while keeping membership automatic?
5. Is maintaining two dynamic groups (one for collaboration and one for email) simply the recommended approach?

I'd love to hear how other Microsoft 365 admins have solved this in production. Thanks!

A lot of help desk tools advertise tons of features, but I’m curious what teams actually use day to day. For a small SaaS or service business, which features are must-haves and which ones are mostly marketing?

Things I’m thinking about: ticket assignment, automation rules, canned responses, SLA reminders, customer portal, knowledge base, reporting, and integrations.

Have you been hiring recently, and do you have any thoughts on the hiring process and how to filter the candidates? Do tests or take-home tasks still make sense in the era of Claude Code? I am currently hiring an AI Engineer, and I am wondering what the best way is to prefilter the candidates in a way that I can actually test knowledge/skills. Test where people copy-paste answers in ChatGPT doesn't feel like the best way to check for knowledge. Another issue is that a lot of people have moved to AI Engineering recently from different backgrounds.