Directive Reviews

There was hardly any time granted for training on the job's aspects. The most training I received was for the company's ticketing (PSA) software, ConnectWise. However, for the rest of the job, there was extensive unfamiliarity with the company's assets, such as the server hardware/software/OS/etc. from other team members. For example, a team member may be familiar with adding a user to cPanel/WHM to set up a new website, but would not be familiar with the inner workings, such as the Apache virtual host(s) being created, or the PureFTPd account. Most of my familiarity with the servers that were managed were gathered from the hosting companies we worked with, and even if I shared this knowledge with other team members, it didn't seem to be well-understood or received by them, with explanations taking multiple meetings. In short, there is a vicious cycle of poor knowledge acquisition. This poor knowledge acquisition segues into the company's inability to solve its biggest business problems. When I had visited the company almost 5 months after leaving, I found 2 employees about to go to a meeting about an issue that was still unresolved, one that I was very familiar with since it entailed about 50% of customer support issues. Because they do not have anyone at the company with the right knowledge in the right department to tackle this issue, it will remain unresolved. You could call these two issues a part of "growing pains" the company is having. It felt like the company wanted to "go big" but still hold onto a "mom and pop" kind of operation. Thus, despite working with mid to large IT companies and investing large amounts of money into technologies (again, ones that are better understood from a marketing standpoint instead of a technical one), the company either can't afford to, or will not pay its employees on what could be considered a reasonable wage for their skills or demanded tasks. Perhaps it may fit some of the employees with lesser knowledge/experience, but even employees who have been with the company for over 5 years were making an insignificant amount more than employees working for 1-2 years. This low pay did not add up to the high expectations associated with my position. It is only natural that a person in IT (especially involving websites) can be considered on-call at all times of the day. Most companies, however, will compensate properly for this, such as a high wage or salary, or even giving the employee a day off in some cases. They also have a rotation in place, which I had attempted to set up near the end of my employment (this rotation was either ignored or otherwise not followed) Directive's "growing pains" prohibit it from accomplishing this. A large clientele with few employees equates to being on-call every night, and hardly receiving compensation at all. In fact, there were even a couple of instances where I was "sprung loose" before the end of the work week to avoid overtime pay. This, along with literally being tired from staying up all night handling the previously-mentioned unresolved issues, was ultimately the issue that led me to finding a new, higher-paying job elsewhere.