Dealing with none technical IT Managers

Just finishing working with the IT Manager from another company we are dealing with. Guess what he was like?

Its as if to be an IT manager in a multi-national you have to know nothing about routers, firewalls, switches, subnetting, security and also have no idea about Cisco in any way. I basically had to do it all while he watched, bloody annoying.
 
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@Jay, I really hate to be a grammer nazi here but man... it's "NON", not "none"
Someone is "non-technical"
they are not "none technical"

I thought it was just a typo in your thread title, but reading your posts you use "none" consistently.
 
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you are correct though
 
In regards to the pay aspect, the key is to stay hourly if at all possible. As a salary employee YES, dunbass managers/supervisors will make more than you....it's expected. Having said that, being hourly there is less of a possibility that your manger/supervisor makes more than you in total. Base pay yes, but with OT... Unlikely. I know for a fact that I make more than my boss as an hourly engineer. Anytime I flip open the hood on my laptop after hours, the clock starts. Nothing worse on the mind and body than to work and not get paid for it. Makes getting a promotion tough because any promo from my current role will probably bring me to a salary position. These days, in my field, i will take the OT.
 
lol I delt with a non technical IT manager for about 3 years at a server tech position for a hospital. I got out of that job to take a lower status (but better pay, go figure) job at a NOC. I was tired of dealing with him, and because of his red tape making it impossible to excel at that position, I just got bored.

The guy was purely insane. Not only was he clueless about technology, but he was a confrontational condescending asshole prick selfish bastard who will step on everyone's toes to make sure he looks good and everyone around him looks bad. Yeah I just put a bunch of verbs and adjectives together. There is not really a single word to describe this guy.

The best is the time he was looking at a screen since someone was showing him something and he noticed the VMware Icon for our management software and said: "What's VMware?" As a bit of background, a few years before he had spent close to a million dollars on upgrades to the VMware ESX environment. New servers, new SAN, everything. VMware runs the place. Kinda bad he did not know what it was. He also did not know the difference between split tunneling and hyperthreading. He was freaked out because someone enabled hyperthreading on the RSA appliance. lmao.
 
Wow Red. Sounds like a word for word description of the guy I delt with when I was consulting.
 
Red Squirrel said:
... I got out of that job to take a lower status (but better pay, go figure) job at a NOC...
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Same here. Service Desk Team Lead for a large municipal government (one of the biggest in the world) to Tier 1 NOC tech a few weejs ago. Now making about 50% more cash.

Ironically at my last job, the bosses loved me because I got stuff done. The people I couldn't stand were the other Team Leads (LAN, WAN, Field, etc) because they were primarily people that only knew how to do things because they'd been going through the same motions for the last decade. They knew how to do things, they just didn't understand what it actually did.

A month or so before I left, I proposed that we move our email handling from the company domain to the client-side domain, simply because it was easier to manage on the client side since we administered it. Management approved the move after I demonstrated how much simpler it would be to audit our service desk emails. For my last 2 weeks, I did battle with the Level 2 / LAN-Admin team lead (she was an idiot) and the LAN team lead (not an idiot, but apathetic and lazy) because they could not figure out how to properly set up the service desk agents rights in EMC. They kept swearing up and down that they had set up the rights properly and that it was the Service Desk's Outlook Client that was jacking up the rights. They even CC'd in practically all of management while they lambasted me about it in emails.

After numerous attempts to make it clear that our Outlook Client could not be mysteriously granting us special rights (including demonstrations of the issue using Outlook Web Access) I finally got a boss who knew how terrible they were to let me log in with the appropriate level of access I needed to view the rights assigned to us.

They were ALL jacked up; we were inheriting permissions from groups the service desk agents should not be in and it was painfully obvious. One of the last things I did before I left was reply to their email thread with a screenshot of the screwed-up permissions with red boxes and arrows showing all of the mistakes, making it easy for all of the non-technical managers CC'd due to my Reply All to understand. The response from the "Leads" was basically a shocked "uh... good catch... someone screwed those up. But not us, of course not!"

I was privately told when I left that if one of their positions open up, I'm always welcome to come back and take the spot. :p
 
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Moral of the story, if you want peace, prepare for war.

To move up you have to step on some heads, if you can't do that watch your back.
 
My manager is absolutely clueless. There are pros and cons. I can do what I want and say whatever I want and they have no idea. The con is that I don't get much guidance and can't learn a single thing from my manager.
 
My manager can talk about technology like he invented it to other people who are not technical at all. But as far as really knowing how stuff works; he doesn't have a clue. I have to tell him if it will work or not or what the impact is etc. In my dept, the managers focus primarily on the business. The problem I have with this is that they can't properly assess what skill level you are on because they don't know how difficult a project or task really is. They have nothing to judge it against. Hence why, promotion in my dept is rare. And yes it is very common for favoritism; they go against a lot of management principles. It all comes down to personal gain, and money. Some people can get hired and get paid top dollar but don't have a clue. Others can be top notch IT gurus and be underpaid.
 
Got totally done over by my manager today.

Was called into my managers office, asked to explain what meeting had gone on while they were on holiday (there was only one) Asked me what the meeting was about, asked me what advice I gave in the meeting. Copied my advice word for word into an email, copied the directors into the email, proceeded to say I had given a user incorrect advice in a meeting and I should have said "insert text that was copied word for word from what I said"

The directors where not in the actual meeting so don't know that the advice I gave was the exact same advice my manager just sent to them and so it makes me look like I don't know what I am doing and that they saved the day!
 
Eickst said:
I don't mind the managers who don't know anything and KNOW that they don't know much, so they delegate tasks or ASK the people under them for a solution/suggestion.

It's the managers who don't know, but thin they know, that cause the most problems.

I can live with either (I prefer the former) but one thing I absolutely CANNOT stand is a micro-manager. Let me do my job, if you don't trust me to do it why am I even here?
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My boss, thankfully is cool, and knows what he talking about and delegates well, which is kinda a rarity....

I do however have another person I dont work directly for, but he steps in and tries to go above my bosses head ALOT, hes one of those guys that convinced everyone at work he worked for Microsoft even though all he did was beta a product they had years ago. This person doesnt know left from right but tries to demand and act like hes god of IT, which is annoying considering hes not in the IT department at all.

And we have reminded him of this point before, but that never seems to work at all either.
 
Roscowgo said:
Mine insists winzip is better than 7zip or winrar.

Of course she also prints out emails for me to look at and asks me to respond to them.:confused:
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I really do not understand that, some people just insist on printing everything out and showing it to me, FORWARD IT TO ME FFS!! lol
 
calvinj said:
How about the difference between a ray 5 and a raid 5..

Also if someone figures this out let me know. I've seen it too many times where people make it to the top who have no business being anything more than a tier 1 answer the phone person.
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I was once a spectator at an argument between my (former) immediate supervisor and the CIO as to the nature of raid5. One insisted that the reason raid was so fast was because you "wrote to the back of the disks and read from the front, guaranteeing that each operation has a disk to itself". The other, my supervisor, said that it wasn't speed that you used raid for ( and rightfully disagreed with the CIO's interpretation of raid5 ), but insisted that you use raid to back up your data. He was also under the impression that raid5 provided data security, because of the checksums. In his mind, checksums meant encryption.

By this point in my employment at that place, I was fairly jaded to that job, but I still found myself marveling at the ineptitude of the decision makers in understanding some very basic and necessary concepts.
 
/usr/home said:
Anyone worth their salt knows that RAID is used for backups :p.
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Only seasoned professionals would know that it provides security too!

Perhaps not coincidentally, I made good headway in developing my drinking problem while working there.
 
I liked and respected my previous boss. But it was hilarious listening to him tell a customer that his problem was probably related to the power in his home.

He loved to sell UPS units. You can see where A and B go together. We had people with brand new buildings up to the latest codes and he was like "Welp, probably the power in your house ya know".

We just cringed, and laughed.
 
Eickst said:
I don't mind the managers who don't know anything and KNOW that they don't know much, so they delegate tasks or ASK the people under them for a solution/suggestion.

It's the managers who don't know, but thin they know, that cause the most problems.

I can live with either (I prefer the former) but one thing I absolutely CANNOT stand is a micro-manager. Let me do my job, if you don't trust me to do it why am I even here?
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I had a job with a mortgage company for 5 years. Same boss/management for 4.5 of those years. The last year was a little rough as they changed things...

Then they brought in a new CIO. The guy was beyond terrible. Yes, he had plenty of prior management experience as a C level and director. He somehow was chosen to displace our current IT Management. I was at a new company within 6 weeks of this dick starting.

On top of having no people skills and being a complete dick to everyone on his staff, he didn't know his technical things from his asshole. Multiple meetings he would berate me in front of vendors (Who all knew me personally... little did he know) and try and call our staff out. He got mad at me once for using a cat5 cable that had a ferrite core on it. He tried claiming the ferrite core was only for 'high end' applications blah blah blah. I told him "they ship for free with our phone power supplies... we just through them into a bin" which only led to blank stares and angry feelings.

Yes, IT bosses can be dicks. I figure I'll be happy with having a boss that respects me and my work. I need a leader, not micromanagement.
 
Arr the old putting your staff on the spot infront of vendors trick! I get that one as well!
 
Jay_oasis said:
Arr the old putting your staff on the spot infront of vendors trick! I get that one as well!
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The kicker to mine is that almost each time he tried to make me look dumb in front of a vendor, he had no clue that I had long established professional relationships with at least one person from most of these groups. The vendors have mostly dropped this company since then as the management situation made it too hard to do business/not worth the money.
 
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^ Managers can be dicks in any situation, not just IT.
I do feel your pain though as I have worked under many IT administrators who treated our enterprise environment like it was the mid-90's.
The admins above them barely even knew how to check their e-mail, yet they were the 'tech committee' of multiple departments.

Trust me, karma is always a bitch to these people.
Speaking of which, karma actually caught up to my old supervisor, and needless to say, they are no longer anything within IT now, let alone an administrator.
 
stiltner said:
I liked and respected my previous boss. But it was hilarious listening to him tell a customer that his problem was probably related to the power in his home.

He loved to sell UPS units. You can see where A and B go together. We had people with brand new buildings up to the latest codes and he was like "Welp, probably the power in your house ya know".

We just cringed, and laughed.
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sounds like a person i know. Every problem with a computer is one of 2 problems, and when it appears it isn't one of those two, that just means you aren't trying hard enough to fix it as it really is just one of those two problems.

although a 3rd problem did magically come up last week. A laptop wasn't able to connect to the vpn server as it was too close to their desktop monitor and that was blocking the VPN signal from getting to the server.

sad to say this person isn't of manager status but is "sys admin" status.
 
Do you ever get told not to do something by your boss then when a user complains be asked by your boss why you didn't do it and told to do it from now on?
 
Jay_oasis said:
Do you ever get told not to do something by your boss then when a user complains be asked by your boss why you didn't do it and told to do it from now on?
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bro, i was stationed at a client site for 5 months on a project. i was told specifically by my boss, and this has nothing to do with anything technical. but to not socialize with anyone. not make any friends. not talk to anyone but sit in my office and do my work. pfft that went out the window. nearing the end of the project things were going sour between the client owners and boss man, they dropped us and were not going to do business with us again. boss man told me it was my fault because nobody there liked me, and that i should be more personable. pfft. they threw me a fucking good bye surprise party on the last day i would be there. oh, and boss of THAT company specifically dis invited my boss. ha.

ive been told to do something, warned boss man that users wont like it. users complain to owner of company that pays us, who complain to boss who scolds me. rinse repeat x1000.

ive been told to take shortcuts on projects. told him if you take this shortcut, it wont work the way this particular customer needs it to. he goes and uses random technical jargon that really makes no sense to convince customer that it IS the way they want it. and then when gasp it doesnt work and customer complains. "dont take shortcuts anymore, this is not the way this company functions"

just a couple months ago i got yelled at for putting 127.0.0.1 in some place or the other i cant remember. he spent 5 solid minutes telling me how can i not possibly know the most simple things, and i ask him.
"ok calm down. what doesnt work? is there anything thats not working, because ive looked it over and i cant find my mistake...im not trying to be pompous but if everything is working, and ive looked over this a dozen times, whats the problem?"

more yelling, not answering my question on if something doesnt work or not, and ends his rant with, "your supposed to put the servers own IP there".

My jaw dropped to the fucking floor.
 
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How about ignoring emails? I have to say that is most annoying! Especially when end users call you to complain that the IT Manager is also ignoring their emails as well.
 
Jay_oasis said:
How about ignoring emails? I have to say that is most annoying! Especially when end users call you to complain that the IT Manager is also ignoring their emails as well.
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my boss is the king of ignoring emails. and hes a jackass about it too.
if i tell him something via email i never ever get a response. if i remind him, he sends me an all caps email saying im taking care of it you dont need to worry about this. if i dont remind him and the shit hits the fan, im a busy guy, why dont you remind me.

if i tell him we need to make a purchase, i never ever get an email back saying ok its on the way, or hey i got something slightly different, will it work? shit either arrives or it doesnt. i asked him if i could just be cc'd on order confirmations, since im supposedly in charge of organizing projects and speccing parts for our company, and itll help me with the timeline. "your job is not purchasing, all i need from you is the part number"

on top of that, ive learn t i have to space out emails where sentence one tells him what we need. enter enter. sentence two tells him why. enter enter. exact product name in full. link to purchase product from our vendor. anything other than this format almost guarantees ill never see my part. he just TL: DRs all emails so i have to make it like im writing to a 5 year old.

still 50% of the time, 2-3 weeks later, i get an email that says, hey can you tell me what exactly i need to order?

playing liason with the customer who cant reach him? jesus christ its painful.
 
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Jay_oasis said:
How about ignoring emails? I have to say that is most annoying! Especially when end users call you to complain that the IT Manager is also ignoring their emails as well.
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Depends on the environment I think. My boss ignores most of my emails and I fucking love it. Gives me free reign to do what has to be done.

Oh, I still send her informational emails, but never something I need a decision on; I just make the decision myself and let her know what I decided. :D
 
Procyon12 said:
my boss is the king of ignoring emails. and hes a jackass about it too.
if i tell him something via email i never ever get a response. if i remind him, he sends me an all caps email saying im taking care of it you dont need to worry about this. if i dont remind him and the shit hits the fan, im a busy guy, why dont you remind me.

if i tell him we need to make a purchase, i never ever get an email back saying ok its on the way, or hey i got something slightly different, will it work? shit either arrives or it doesnt. i asked him if i could just be cc'd on order confirmations, since im supposedly in charge of organizing projects and speccing parts for our company, and itll help me with the timeline. "your job is not purchasing, all i need from you is the part number"

on top of that, ive learn t i have to space out emails where sentence one tells him what we need. enter enter. sentence two tells him why. enter enter. exact product name in full. link to purchase product from our vendor. anything other than this format almost guarantees ill never see my part. he just TL: DRs all emails so i have to make it like im writing to a 5 year old.

still 50% of the time, 2-3 weeks later, i get an email that says, hey can you tell me what exactly i need to order?

playing liason with the customer who cant reach him? jesus christ its painful.
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Wow that sucks. Don't know your situation and all that but maybe a new job is in order? What that guy is doing is nothing short of ultimate douche baggery.
 
Procyon12 said:
my boss is the king of ignoring emails. and hes a jackass about it too.
if i tell him something via email i never ever get a response. if i remind him, he sends me an all caps email saying im taking care of it you dont need to worry about this. if i dont remind him and the shit hits the fan, im a busy guy, why dont you remind me.

if i tell him we need to make a purchase, i never ever get an email back saying ok its on the way, or hey i got something slightly different, will it work? shit either arrives or it doesnt. i asked him if i could just be cc'd on order confirmations, since im supposedly in charge of organizing projects and speccing parts for our company, and itll help me with the timeline. "your job is not purchasing, all i need from you is the part number"

on top of that, ive learn t i have to space out emails where sentence one tells him what we need. enter enter. sentence two tells him why. enter enter. exact product name in full. link to purchase product from our vendor. anything other than this format almost guarantees ill never see my part. he just TL: DRs all emails so i have to make it like im writing to a 5 year old.

still 50% of the time, 2-3 weeks later, i get an email that says, hey can you tell me what exactly i need to order? Tell them you are left with no choice but to look for another job if the conditions do not improve.

playing liason with the customer who cant reach him? jesus christ its painful.
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dude you need to go to HR right away, there is no reasoning with a piece of shit like that.
 
the thing is, this isnt even the half of it. really. and our HR guy ha. the guy has no idea what hes doing. im actually looking into talking to an employment lawyer right now....
 
Whatever it takes, life is too short and IT people are in too high demand to put up with that crap.
 
shiznit said:
Whatever it takes, life is too short and IT people are in too high demand to put up with that crap.
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*Good* IT people are in high demand, true. I've only met....3 of us? 5 if you allow for personality quirks that limit their usefulness in a business meeting setting.

The rest...well. They're doing good if they can successfully log in every morning ( a litmus test which half of them manage to fail ).
 
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I was being overly generic for sure. I don't know his expertise or skill level but we are fortunate to be in an industry that offers a lot of room for maneuvering without having to re-invent yourself. If your job is keeping you down and preventing you from accomplishing your goals, you can beef up your skills in another area and change positions without having to go back to school or even leaving the company you work for. Many of my friends in other industries would love that kind of flexibility.
 
In trouble today for spending about 1 and a half days (at most) setting up a new rack, racking all the equipment (including the very heavy UPS), running the power under the floors, setting up and configuring all the cisco equipment and racking that, sorting our fibre install, sorting out the ISDN2e, arranging the new VoIP install and making sure all the cable are labelled, tidy and easy to access.

I was told I wasn't using my time very well. I actually got very very angry and told my boss that all I do is try my best and all I get is told how it should have been done a different way by someone who couldn’t do it in the first place!
 
Procyon12 said:
just a couple months ago i got yelled at for putting 127.0.0.1 in some place or the other i cant remember.

"your supposed to put the servers own IP there".

My jaw dropped to the fucking floor.
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Im sorry, i know that's extremely frustrating, but i just couldn't help myself laughing when i red that.

What did the boss say after you taught him "networking lesson #1 local host" ?
 
lol that's hilarious. Those are the type of people that really should not be IT managers. The people who hire IT managers need to understand that an IT manager should still know (and have experience with) technology.
 
morbid_looney said:
Im sorry, i know that's extremely frustrating, but i just couldn't help myself laughing when i red that.

What did the boss say after you taught him "networking lesson #1 local host" ?
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To be fair, there are times when it makes sense to use the server's IP over localhost. I'm thinking specifically of fail over situations, where you can't guarantee the application segment will be running on any specific host.

Now, the funny thing I ran across today is a manager using user attributes as a kind of half-assed security group for one of our AD integrated applications. Under organization name, he's been typing the full organization unit. On every one of over 1000 users. Typos? Sure, that happens too.

"Why didn't you just use security groups?"

"Active Directory doesn't support security groups!"

"...

Carry on"
 
XOR != OR said:
To be fair, there are times when it makes sense to use the server's IP over localhost. I'm thinking specifically of fail over situations, where you can't guarantee the application segment will be running on any specific host.

Now, the funny thing I ran across today is a manager using user attributes as a kind of half-assed security group for one of our AD integrated applications. Under organization name, he's been typing the full organization unit. On every one of over 1000 users. Typos? Sure, that happens too.

"Why didn't you just use security groups?"

"Active Directory doesn't support security groups!"

"...

Carry on"
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yeah i know what you mean. but i believe in that case it was an application server, and within the properties of the application you write which IP it should look for the images, since the images reside in a flat directory outside the normal db. by default that value is 127.0.0.1 for the application and the only time you would ever change it is if you had the images on another location. i also like to leave it because people in my company like to change IP schemes willy nilly without double checking everything.

and your second part, lol...how about this, my boss likes to set things like firewall settings, mapped drives, and etc, individually on each computer....
and if we take over a client from another IT company he finds any excuse to take down all the AD controlled GP settings...

once at a client the DHCP server service kept failing. no IPs for computers, no logging into domain accounts.
i told him right off the bat what the problem one.
"no, the problem is their complicated AD setup, go delete all that stuff and make it basic"
"no, thats not going to solve it"
"fine ill have someone else do it"
needless to say, that didnt work.

when my boss doesnt think something is possible, and you tell him it is, he just doesnt believe you. once he locked himself out of a router, lol. so he told me to go onsite and reboot it with a paperclip (he felt very proud telling me how to 30-30-30 a router). i tried to tell him,
"but i can...."
"no just go, itll probably take you the rest of the day to get everything set up again"
"ok"
done in 5 min and went home 3 hours early.
 
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