| September 2006 |
| By Justin Stanley |
I’ve worked for my current employer for the last four years, two of which were spent as their systems administrator. The company develops software for the dental industry and at its peak, employed about 65 different people in their local office. But don’t be fooled by the relatively small number of users; a company this size can still keep its one-man IT staff on its toes.
Large companies, for all their faults, have the luxury of maintaining relatively large IT departments and can hire people with specific skills to meet particular business needs. Administrators, while maintaining a certain level of common knowledge, tend to specialize. They might have one person that’s their go-to security guy, another that’s the master with Active Directory, and another who loves nothing more than spending his day with Ruby on Rails. True, there’s the need for at least one person to be available 24/7, but that duty is typically rotated among the staff.
With a small company, however, the systems administrator is often the be-all-and-end-all of the IT staff. He’s a part-time network administrator and a part-time DBA. He dabbles in a little perl and some C# while simultaneously becoming the local guru on whatever obscure CRM tool the owners originally invested in. He’s part phone tech, part electrician, and occasionally, part carpenter. He’s also the last line of defense against disaster, and if he can’t fix it, it stays broken. Oh, and guess who’s going to be responding to that pager every time it goes off at 3am?
For some, this can be the ideal environment. If you’re the type of person who is easily bored working with the same application or language day after day, you should absolutely look to a small business for your next IT gig. You’ll never run out of new opportunities to learn and you’ll never be bored. After all, you’re the guy that’s going to be responsible for researching, testing, building and maintaining just about every wacky idea that crosses someone’s mind. And you’ll learn ways to make even the most convoluted project work so effectively with whatever outdated equipment you have laying around that MacGyver himself would stand up and cheer.
On the other hand, the amount of stress can be debilitating for some. If it’s broken, nobody’s going to fix it but you. There’s no senior staff to fall back on, no teammate to bounce ideas off of, and the only thing ensuring that you’ll be home before the kids go to bed is your ability to Google effectively (assuming of course, that it’s not the Internet connection that went down). You can count on spending drastically more than 40 hours every week in the office, and the VPN connection will be your best friend. You’ll be blamed for every slight hiccup involving anything with a cord or battery, and you’ll need to get used to the idea of the owner knocking on your door incessantly, whether it’s because the phones are down or because his kids, yet again, disabled his antivirus software at home with disastrous results.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’ve just accepted a new role with a small company. You’re sitting there, reading this, and wondering what the hell you just got yourself into. Here’s your first word of advice: relax. If you aren’t able to maintain some perspective, you’re going to panic and you won’t be any good to anyone. If the web server dies in the middle of the day and, as is likely the case with a small business, you don’t have a spare, try to stay calm. Yes, downtime with some systems can be critical for a small business and you need to try your best to return everything to service as quickly as possible, but if you freak out you’re going to make mistakes. Those mistakes will make you freak out more, and freaking out more leads to more mistakes. See where this is going?
Another word of advice - document. Document everything, no matter how trivial. In a small business setting, there are going to be some abstract setups that affect key processes which normally run smoothly 364 days a year. Murphy’s Law, however, dictates that the one day it doesn’t work will be the day of your kid’s first choir, and the last thing you’ll want to do is spend 12 extra hours troubleshooting the same problem that kept you in the office all night the last time it happened. It doesn’t matter so much what method you use, just make sure it’s documented in a way that you (or your successor) can make sense of it next time.
All in all, being the IT department for a small business can be incredibly rewarding, but only if you know what you’re getting into before you sign on. If you don’t handle stress well, you prefer expertise in one area as oppose to several, or you think that a 40 hour week is a God-given right, you’re better off somewhere else.
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