r/sysadmin • u/LarryOrton • 14d ago
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u/argefox 14d ago
I'm that guy, and I've spent a good chunk of my mid career trying to leverage, train, document.
Things went poorly, people think "why would I learn that if we have that guy". And documentation? I put even a well indexed wiki, I loaded the knowledge on ServiceNow. I used to ask "did you read the doc?" Of course they said yes. The documents visits were 1, exactly 1, or 0, for the ones I didn't even had to write myself and just imported from my own repo.
I gave up, and management can chortle on my balls.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
Wiki with zero views is the most relatable thing in this thread. I've written docs that I'm pretty sure only I and the search crawler ever read. Did anything ever actually get people to open them?
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u/DarkangelUK 14d ago
I don't even write a reply any more, I simply send the link to the document I created that they're well aware exists. Seems reading comprehension has dwindled, they don't want discern the answer from the doc, they want it handed to them via chat or email.
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u/badogski29 14d ago
It’s me. I tried to make myself redundant but some people just don’t have the guts to do it. It’s impossible.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
Respect for trying to make yourself redundant, most people won't. If nobody steps up after that, it's a leadership problem, not a you problem.
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u/Site_Efficient 14d ago
Rotating on call and an expectation that the oncall person can run the show alone >90% of the time motivates others to want the information. That usually needs to be backed up by some documentation. But you don't dictate what goes in the doco; the juniors do - they are the ones it exists to help.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
Nothing teaches like being alone on call at 1am with no one to escalate to. Brutal, but it works. Making the juniors write the docs is genius too, you find out real quick what they don't get.
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u/Glittering_Power6257 14d ago
I’m a one-man show. I write the docs to help future successor if I meet an unfortunate crossing with a speeding bus.
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u/Site_Efficient 14d ago
Yeah that's a different problem. The context of the question made it seem like there's a team, with one main person doing a lot of lifting.
For your situation, there's not much you can do except document everything you can and make sure that someone else has access to the passwords
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u/DarthJarJar242 14d ago
In all my years I've had a few of these guys but only one that has stuck around and the trick that worked with him and that still works is:
Let him do the ticket. When he closes it go read his notes have a junior admin read the notes. If the two of you can't put together how he did it send it back to him and tell him to clarify until you can.
This accomplishes two things, familiarizes your juniors with the process, and forces your senior guy to document better.
Then tell him the next time the ticket comes in like that the junior guy is taking it and using his notes to do it but you want the senior guy chaperoning.
The reasoning is simple. Knowledge silos lead to information deficits. It's okay to be the SME, it's not okay to be the ONLY knowledgeable person.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
Honestly this is the most practical answer in here. The junior finds the holes in the notes and the senior finds out his notes aren't as clear as he thought. Everybody learns something, including humility.
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u/nethack47 14d ago
I usually work with juniors to get things into them. Most things are fine, but it requires the right kind of colleague to stick.
Tickets are the explanation for how it was solved, how to get there is the hard part. It is often like dialling in an espresso. It depends on the coffee, the water, the machines state and what you want out of it. Looking at the finished coffee can miss some of the fuzzy bit, which is often a bit of digging around and pushing some theories.
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u/Glittering_Power6257 14d ago
Agree here. Documenting what I did was the easy part. Documenting the steps I did to get there is similarly easy. But these are merely the results. The hard bit is documenting the methodology to get there in the first place. How I link things in my head is hard to put to words, and I often iterate rapid enough process that trying to write it down is going to add considerable time to resolution.
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u/mimic751 14d ago
I am this guy. Don't talk to me when I'm working on it or when I'm troubleshooting it or when I'm trying to figure out what the fuck is wrong because I'll be iterating through so many potential problems that I'm probably dead ass wrong
But when all is said and done ask me what it was what I did to figure it out and what I did to fix it and I will talk your fucking ear off
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u/ooglesnoopleboop 14d ago
Give him lots of money to retain him before he goes off to a company that treats him better.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
Cheapest fix on the list, too. Replacing him costs way more than a raise ever will.
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u/Dumtiedum 14d ago
You say he is special and then mentioning he is the only one touching firewalls? It’s not like a firewall or file storage server is rocket science. Hire someone capable or fix your setup to be HA where you can take such elements offline without your business breaking down.
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u/LarryOrton 13d ago
Agreed, firewalls weren't the point, just an example. HA fixes the hardware single point of failure. The people one is harder.
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u/xCharg 14d ago
So you have a single dude who knows and does complicated task and some bunch of other dudes who can't do complicated tasks and your approach is to... "handle that guy"? Seriously? Maybe, I don't know, do something about the rest of your team's skills and attitude?
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u/LarryOrton 13d ago
Ha, fair, the title made it sound like I'm putting him on a leash. You're right though, the real work is raising everyone else up. He's just where the gap shows up first.
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u/jpotrz 14d ago
I tell him how handsome he is and buy him steak and lobster (it's me. I'm the guy)
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u/OkAbility9543 14d ago
the trick isn't forcing him to document, it's making sure he's not the only one who touches the scary stuff
had a guy like this on my team, we started pairing him with someone else on the complex tickets but framed it as "you're too valuable to be the only person who knows this" not "we're gonna steal your job"
took about 3 months before the backup admin could rebuild the vpn tunnels without sweating through his shirt
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u/fresh-dork 14d ago
i'm often the guy. i document, please read my docs and try to use them, then complain when i leave something out. i promise i'll add it in
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u/SlippyCumSpot 14d ago
Those people tend to be a combination of many things at once. Extremely high technical aptitude, smart, hard working, focused. I've come across this so many times over there years, management wants him or her to "cross train" - because they see how valuable that person is and think, "he can train everyone else to be like him!" Well, no, not at all. Because a lot of that stuff is just un-trainable. No amount of documentation or past ticket references are going to save the other admin who just isn't as technical, smart, or has the work ethic. Those are the hard facts of life. Sometimes people are just really smart and really good at what they do and there's no replication of that in a specific environment.
The best thing to do most of the time - when you have a person like that - is to leave them the fuck alone.
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u/epieikeia 14d ago
Manager hires rockstar employee
Rockstar learns quickly from a little bit of training/mentoring and kicks major ass
Manager delegates most of their duties to rockstar, who does them better
Manager gets promoted due to their department's newfound asskickery
Rockstar graduates to manager's former role
Rockstar hires a regular employee
Regular employee kicks only a moderate amount of ass
Promoted manager wonders why rockstar is so bad at training/mentoring compared to how well they evidently trained/mentored the rockstar
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u/td_mike 14d ago
Been there, refused that, almost got fired for it.
Manager got promoted and they asked me to step into his role. I know I’m really good at everything technical, I also know that I’m not a manager, not great at training people. I need adult supervision on the work floor. Give me the hardest technical tasks and I’ll complete them but don’t ask me to herd people I’ll drive it off a cliff before we reach noon.
Wasn’t really how they looked at it, had to do some serious explaining to keep my old job. Eventually they understood but I kept my options open for months just it case. They haven’t followed through yet.
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u/fresh-dork 14d ago
i want to be a lead, maybe. not a manager. i'll do cross department BS all day, don't make me write someone's annual review
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u/td_mike 14d ago
I would want to be lead as well but we don’t have an actual lead position. I am basically in all but the title.
I do all the cross department stuff, troubleshooting and such. All the simple tasks at this point don’t even come in the vicinity of my desk unless literally everyone else is out
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u/NUTTA_BUSTAH 13d ago
I'm in a similar vein. However I know for a fact that the lead slowly starts molding into a manager. It always happens.
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u/RikiWardOG 13d ago
Yeah this is me too. I fucking cannot deal with other teammates that just want to slack off and eat crayons instead of actually participating. I'm not doing it. Even if it means making less potentially. I can be surface level friendly but when it comes to work getting done I just don't have the patience to repeat myself 50 times
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u/whythehellnote 13d ago
The second worst thing is becoming your manager
The worst thing is someone bad becoming your manager
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u/Xydan 14d ago
I havent been at a company long enough to realize this as I often jumped every 2 years between jobs. Now at my new job I've been with for 4 years I have been basically left alone for any "busy work" and am relied solely as the "SME" for things that people who were with the company longer than I have trained me on and I happen to remember those Nuances.
Had my hiring manager tell me today that Im extremely valuable because of that. And only now do I truly see why I'm left alone.
At first I thought I was doing something wrong because work stopped coming to me and was replaced with constant meetings and high-level troubleshooting calls that affect production.
Feels oddly satisfying but anxiety provoking in this economy because my value no longer comes from meeting deadlines but rather my knowledge.
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u/jjfunaz 14d ago
That is the safest place to be. They can replace monkeys to hit deadlines but they can’t replace
Knowledge. But don’t be the guy holding info for job security.The thing is you don’t get promoted for being good at your job. You get promoted for making others better at your job until you aren’t needed
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u/TheSexySovereignSeal 14d ago
Logistically if it actually goes that far, itll be years before they found out, and they'll be unable to afford you 2 years into your next job.
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u/WelcomeConscious643 14d ago
stay in that company until the next good offer. the market is shit out there. and it is a chill place to take a break
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u/fresh-dork 14d ago
and am relied solely as the "SME" for things that people who were with the company longer than I have trained me on and I happen to remember those Nuances.
fuck. we had one of those. she went to some other group and we found out we hadn't cross trained anyone on some of the stuff she did. woops.
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u/RememberCitadel 14d ago
How come the person we always get paired with to train are the laziest and most unwilling to learn?
The reason I don't cross train is because the person I would train doesn't care about knowledge, the the recognition for doing something, which means they don't learn. Then when they try to do it later they break everything and I have to fix it, which is twice as much work as giving them something shiney and not trading them instead while I just do it myself.
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u/Illthorn 14d ago
I have trained exactly 2 people who were good enough to replace me. The rest wanted their hand held or wanted all the answers handed to them. They could follow a doc but if anything occurred outside of the doc they were lost and couldn't find their way back. Even after multiple attempts to teach them how to aquire the process on their own outside documentation. If people can't or won't learn, there is no amount of effort on your part that will change that
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u/tardis42 14d ago
1000% this, when the person you are cross-training fundamentally lacks the underlying prerequisite knowledge and understanding of how all the other related things work, and worse still isn't curious about any of it, explaining how to do one thing results in broken cargo-cult nonsense the moment anything is even slightly different from the exact scenario given during the training.
If you don't understand how group policy applies to computers/users or how filtering works, touching any policy is a risk.
If you don't understand how switching/subnetting/VLANs work, touching physical or logical config for a switch or AP for anything other than "connect a PC to a free port" is a risk.
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u/RememberCitadel 13d ago
Absolutely. The worst part is, I had nobody to train me, I learned by following the documentation from the vendor, and from seeking knowledge on my own.
So I don't understand why it's so hard to figure stuff out, plus now we have a testing environment for many things, go break that first.
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u/Unable-Entrance3110 13d ago
I learned by breaking things and having to fix them. It's honestly, the only way I learn...
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u/WorthPlease 14d ago edited 14d ago
Every new project and migration "hey we need you to make a doc so other people on the team know how to do this".
I finally got my upper management to stop fucking asking me to write documentation for people who got hired to do the same job as me. I hate it.
Now they just ask me to do a quick dictation tutorial for somebody else and then they make that person write up the documentation.
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u/Uncommented-Code 13d ago
Wait, that's an option?
Shit I need to try this at my next job. Genuinely, I spent so much time 'training' people before I left my previous company while knowing fully well that things will fall apart the moment they need to troubleshoot anything without my help.
It was a huge waste of time, but people kept telling me to just do it (training other people, writing docs, writing things that only I could maintain) and at some point I just lost all motivation :(
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u/WelcomeConscious643 14d ago
is to leave them the fuck alone.
exactly. if you cannot fire those people and put the ones who is competent, and get them trained,
then leave the fuck alone.
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u/mimic751 14d ago
I'm holding up three different technologies that I am the only subject matter expert in the company for because of layoffs or people quitting and I literally wrote two of the programs. I asked to be promoted to staff engineer and they told me that it wasn't a silo that was complex enough to warrant a staff engineer
Well guess who just got offered a principal AI consultant position getting paid three times as much as I currently am
Love my team hate HR. Anytime you apply to a company ask them if they do green circle. That's where when you get promoted they will only promote you to 80% of the median pay and then give you slightly higher raises over the next 5 years to get to median doesn't matter how many years with a company they have they always promote you to the lowest third of your pay band
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u/Rentun 13d ago
when you have a person like that - is to leave them the fuck alone.
That might be what they prefer, that's not really the responsible decision though. When you have someone like that, it starts getting recognized, and other people start leaning on that person because they're the path of least resistance, and the easiest way to solve everyone's problems. People like that will also tend to not say no, and try to solve everyone's problems that you're giving them.
You need to strictly control that, otherwise one of two things will happen. 1. They'll lose focus on the thing they're actually hired to do, because they're busy solving every other teams problems, or 2. They'll burn out, because they're no longer investing energy in themselves and their personal lives.
Both are bad for everyone.
The other thing is, it's just not responsible to have the lynchpin of an organization be one guy. It might be the most efficient way to run things while he's around, but when he goes on vacation, or if something happens to him, or he finds a new job, you're then screwed. You have to drag the other people on the team, kicking and screaming, along with him. Or get rid of them and find someone who can operate at his speed.
If you don't do those things, you're not doing your job as a manager.
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u/groupwhere 14d ago
Super techs are bad for the company from a DR perspective, and bad for morale on skilled teams.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
The morale piece doesn't get talked about enough. Good people stop growing when every interesting problem goes to the same guy. Then you wonder why they leave.
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u/Constant_Barber_5198 14d ago
Everyone can't be a rock star. The hard stuff wouldn't go to the same person if they others stepped up their game and put in the effort.
People don't get that good because they are smart. They get that good because they are tenacious, inquisitive, and work a problem to completion. And when they don't know something, they can recognize that fact and get the info they need.
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u/groupwhere 13d ago
Yeah well. I don't blame them, I blame the boss. Others can't just start taking over shit.
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u/Vulperffs 13d ago
This is not “that guy” issue. Its management issue.
What I noticed in some companies where they had “that guy” the pattern was the same. Management issue happy that they don’t need to invest into hiring because everything gets done. As the company grows the workload gets bigger and bigger and eventually everyone is working at 100% capacity all the time to keep up, no room for cross training, exploration, hardening. Instead of doing projects and tasks everything becomes an incident with a tight deadline. Everyone slowly burns out until one guy does the heavy lifting for some time until he doesn’t because he collapses or goes on vacation and he gets all the blame and is called “that guy”.
So start with the management, hire enough people, competent and compatible. This is not easy and it shouldn’t be. Unfortunately management must do the heavy lifting and lead the team. Not micromanage but inquire the team, feel what is happening and react, help and support, enable them to work.
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u/borider22 14d ago
do not be threatened by your employee who does the job you can not do. approve their time off if they ever submit some.
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u/RagingNoper 14d ago
And if the concern is that their job can't be done without them, hire another one of them.
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u/KoalaOfTheApocalypse 14d ago
I am that guy, and it's fucking exhausting. No matter how much documentation I write - and it's a fucking LOT, it doesn't seem to help. The amount of times I answer questions from other tech with links to the documentation I've already ask3d them to read multiple times is ridiculous.
The problem is not "the one guy who knows everything" - the problem is you won't hire anyone who has that level of competency.
But the worst part of it, and if this is you RS, then it's like I've said a dozen times - how come I can learn and figure out shit, I can plan and implement deployments and make the technical pieces fall together - but nobody else can!
I have to do every damn thing because nobody else you hire is even close to my level. Stop hiring people you like during interviews, and focus on technical competency instead. I'm fucking sick of being the only one capable of just figuring shit out and then having the ridiculously difficult time of teaching the rest of the time and writing documentation nobody ever reads.
The problem is not me knowing everything, the problem is not me hoarding knowledge - the problem is you haven't hired anyone who can keep up. And not just not keep up, you keep hiring people who lack the fundamentals.
Don't sit here and ask me to teach other techs shit they should already know. And it's impossible to teach them critical thinking and analysis skill. I can cross-train anyone on how to use X tool, or Y process, whatever - but I can't teach people to use their brains better.
The problem is not "the one guy who knows everything" - the problem is you won't hire anyone who has that level of competency.
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u/robbdire 14d ago
The problem is not "the one guy who knows everything" - the problem is you won't hire anyone who has that level of competency.
I was fortunate enough to be the guy who knew a lot (not everything) and due to many factors am now the team lead. My first two hires, despite HR liking the people, I vetoed. "Sure they are nice, and have some technical knowledge, but we need more to take over from me so I can LEAD and not just still do what I was doing and try to lead at the same time".
Got two in, one of them beyond my level, one at my level. Oh the difference to the team. And best of all? With two of them they can actually get some time to document so when they had been both out at once, wasn't the end of the world, as I was able to step back in a bit, and our other engineers could use the docs.
Mind you I do not like being management level over all..........
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u/nachoman3 13d ago
Not saying this is the case for you, but I often see those highly competent engineers writing documentation for other highly competent engineers and not for 'regular' engineers. It's often too high level and assumes a background knowledge that is also too high level or isn't written from the standpoint of someone who has never touched this piece of infrastructure.
And some people are just plain dumb/lazy, you can't fix that. Attitude problems are the worst.
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u/KoalaOfTheApocalypse 13d ago
That used to be an issue. I quickly learned to ask L1 or L2 - hey can you take a look at this and tell me if it's easy to understand or any difficult parts or any questions you have? Basically, get juniors to proof read it before publishing to the entire dept. In the past couple of years, I just write what I wlneed to write and then run it thru AI - help me make this compatible for a target audience of L1 techs.
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u/vCentered 14d ago
Your problem is you don't even recognize what the problem is.
The problem isn't that this guy does all these things. The problem is that nobody else does.
You're holding him accountable for their laziness or inability because you know, even if only subconsciously, there's a better chance of getting something out of him than the rest of them.
Instead of holding them accountable and expecting them to be good at their own jobs, you're adding to his workload and making him responsible for making them useful.
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 14d ago edited 14d ago
It me.
I find I can teach people all day long, it's only once in a bit I find someone who is actually interested in learning. Usually people are already getting paid, and doing this usually appears to them as adding more responsibility and not learning something new.
Generally I find you have to give some kind of value behind them learning the new skillset, because pay raise is not always an option.
It's not that we're the best, it's just that we have an interest beyond just making money.
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u/beta_2017 14d ago
Thank you. Was looking for someone to comment something like this. This is me to a T.
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u/vadertator22 14d ago
At first I thought this was a roast comment, but I see now you’re serious. I have found there are two types of IT people. The first composes 85% of all IT folks that are out there and they are ok at best. They don’t love nor hate the job, but they survive and make careers of it. The remaining 15% are those who love technology, problem solving and really want to know as much as they can. They also know the more they know the more they don’t know and that drives them. Essentially they aren’t the type that only knows how to check the oil. They strive to know how to take the engine apart and put it back together. It has also been my experience that those people that fall in the 85% won’t respond to cross training very well from a 15% er. Reason I say this is because they would be a 15% er if they were open to deeper knowledge desired it and would have accomplished it on their own or per a mentor already. On a rare occasion I have worked with a person I call a sponge, which is someone who is next generation 15% and they absorb anything you share or teach. They were you when you started and refreshing to work with IMO.
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u/mimic751 14d ago
This is so true you can always tell because you will teach them something they've never fucking heard of and the next day they've obsessed about it so much that they've built a new tool or wrote a new program or figured out a new system or architected some improvements
If you tell someone something and they don't deep dive the implications of what you showed them then they care just enough to get paid
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u/Glittering_Power6257 14d ago
Tbh, the latter group isn’t bad to have on hand.
As the former, it gets quite depressing when there’s nothing interesting to solve. Why do I live if there are no problems to crush? It’s when the sky is falling and everything is on fire that I feel at my best. Happiness for me is troubleshooting a showstopper SQL Server problem on a laptop in the warehouse, while simultaneously working on a network problem, while on the phone with support for a shipping software problem, and talking to the end user of said software.
Mycroft Holmes: “”You’re not haunted by the war. You miss it.”
At least the guy there for the paycheck isn’t going to loathe life when there’s a dry spell, and probably won’t drive themself straight into the ground.
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u/mimic751 14d ago
In the last 8 years I went from infrastructure engineer, to automation to devops. Then I got my masters in software engineering, and now I'm a principal AI consultant.
I personally need a job hop every so often. I learn too quickly and I find a lot of satisfaction in the novelty
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u/Ekyou 13d ago
I think I know how you feel. I don’t know that I’d call myself a great engineer, but I do it for the passion of it, and it holds me back in a lot of ways. When my coworkers get assigned a boring or easy task, they march happily off to do it with “a paycheck is a paycheck” attitude. When I get assigned nothing but brain dead tasks for a long period of time, it becomes a “what am I doing with my life?” Existential crisis.
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u/TheMillersWife 13d ago
I had to change the culture on my team. We have a resident "Brain in a Jar" who, prior to my arrival, people would just lateral stuff to and run away. Poor guy couldn't stay offline for PTO because inevitably something esoteric would need his attention.
Yes, it's KBs. Yes, it's cross training. But it's also drawing a line in the sand and making everyone adhere to it. I told him that when he's off, don't answer any messages unless it comes from ME, and if anyone does message him let ME know so I can squash it. In the event that genuinely nobody could fix it, when he comes back from PTO we sit down and figure out why that is and make a targeted plan to train someone specific or get away from it.
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u/DominusDraco 14d ago edited 14d ago
everyone routes the hard tickets to him
Stop doing that, thats going to be the reason they quit. Everyone offloads their laziness on to that person. If you are the teamlead or manager, make you the escalation point and only you escalate tickets to them.
Make sure every single person below has done everything they actually can to fix it, and if they havent send it back. They can ask for advice but not have the top person do all the work.
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u/Lemmon_Scented 13d ago
From a management standpoint, there’s a pretty simple solution to this, and everyone benefits. Your indispensable Sys admin needs to be made a gated resource, and s/he should not be picking any tickets from the queue. This should be presented as an opportunity to elevate this resource, free them up from doing low level stuff, allowing them to focus on more challenging, interesting work. If anyone needs access to the gated resource, they should come through you, and you should assign the work to another Sys admin. If THEY need the gated resource, that means there’s a gap in documentation, which they must address. The gated resource should ideally never be asked twice for a solution to the same problem. In addition to implementing this method, the entire team needs to adopt and own the idea that problems never get tenure - if you identify an issue, you NEVER move on with fixing or escalating it.
This isn’t easy to implement, but if done correctly it will transform your team
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u/ArcaneGlyph 14d ago
Pay the guy, pay him 50% more than you think you should. Give him all the sick days and vacation. Then ask for process docs.
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u/Easik 14d ago
I'm that person you are describing. I'm too busy doing all the complex stuff to deal with incompetent lazy people that can't figure it out themselves. I use Google, YouTube, and now AI. It's completely unacceptable that no one else cares enough to do the same and I have to handhold them.
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u/infosuxx 14d ago
This, I'm the guy because I read the f'ing docs.
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u/daddyd 14d ago
one time a few people in the team were having an issue, couldn't figure it out. took a look at it, told them - you need to use option 'x' with the command.
their response - how do you know that?
me - it's in the man page.
i know this is a typical unix/linux jerk joke answer - read the man page - but, damn, if the answer isn't in there.
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u/SnooGiraffes292 14d ago
Another one here! However, I document. Everything. The docu However requires a certain level of skill. It's not something a non interested college kid with a masters in "computer science " will understand in 5 min fresh out of college
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u/bfyvfftujijg 14d ago
I’m also you and feel the same.
So many uninspired people who never try new things!
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u/Mayorbbee 13d ago
Tell me about it :(
I joined my current team a year ago and quickly became that guy after the team lead left and it just feels like I’m burning out so quickly. I have SysAdmins with 15+ years of experience coming to me for the most trivial stuff. I’ve been in IT for 8 but only a sysadmin for 2 years.
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u/Delusionalatbest 14d ago
It's an interesting topic. Not always black and white but there are common patterns when this happens.
Sometimes you have a guy who's just the dude. Lives and breathes the game. Constantly absorbing info and is into the tech. Not necessarily gatekeeping he's just a level above his peers.
Sometimes it's a guy with experience and decent amount of talent that gatekeeps everything to himself. Zero trust in the team and a hard person to work with.
You also have a management layer that facilitates these single point of failure situations. They hire poorly or don't hire at all. Never working with the guy to try to distribute the knowledge and load.
Lastly you often have colleagues who absolutely dgaf about their job and are happy for the guy to do the heavy lifting.
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u/WelcomeConscious643 14d ago
but because the IT manager wants to bring his lousy nephew in, or the IT manager has no authority when the owner's son wants to have a seat.
then, let dave know about it. and then leave dave alone.
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u/LarryOrton 14d ago
So you found the unicorn that actually writes stuff down. Don't tell anyone or they'll poach him. Curious though, was he like that day one or did he pick it up from you?
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u/Slicester1 14d ago
This. You get a greenie and give the greenie orders that their purpose is to create documentation. Ask the senior to collab on a problem and it's the greenie's job to document, take screenshots, and create the process documentation. Ask the senior to review it for errors.
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u/shinyviper 14d ago
“The difference between the master and the apprentice is that the master has failed more than the apprentice has even tried.”
Or something like that.
I, too, am the Jedi for multiple companies. And I’ve fucked up so many things over so many decades, but I always learned.
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u/underwear11 14d ago
I agree but I also feel like there is some natural acumen. I was that guy, buy I couldn't tell you why. I didn't work harder than others or spend extra time studying stuff. I just seemed to be able to retain info better than others. Ask me what I ate today and I have no idea but I can remember nuances to a project I did 10 years ago with no issue.
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u/Booshur 14d ago
So true. I remember not knowing a lot and just refusing to hand off tickets that were hard. I've been that guy everywhere I've worked.
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u/MattH665 14d ago
I was that guy for a while. Until the company finally hired someone with comparible experience that was able to learn the systems I was looking after to the same degree. Oftentimes it's just a case that people at that experience level are expensive and the company doesn't want to hire a second one. They expect multiple more junior level employees to somehow fill in the same gaps. But those employees lack the experience to easily jump in and do the same level of troubleshooting on complex systems on their own, or don't have the confidence to make risky changes as they can't troubleshoot it if it goes wrong on their own.
It's not always us wanting to hold on to knowledge or make ourselves the only one capable of looking after some things. I don't like being that guy, it's stressful, I'm glad I don't have to be now - I can take leave without worrying that m y holiday will be interrupted with a panicked phone call.