So a couple months ago I left a job at a global financial firm as a Linux Administrator in my hometown for an out of state job of the same title. There was a pretty decent increase in salary so I felt it was going to be a good career move.
However, once I got here I realized the company is a complete....how do I word this nicely....free for all. Very little organizational structure/communication and because of this we can't concentrate on being a proactive organization. Additionally, the job barely has any linux administration in it. The most I've had to do is clean up their crappy implementation of nagios, write a few scripts (that I had to push for, nothing ever comes from management), and add some additional disk through a service catalog. We never have to touch the actual hardware or do linux system builds. Come to find out there is an actual sys admin organization that I'M NOT A PART OF, and they actually provision systems to us. Mostly what I've been doing day to day is desktop support and jboss application support(server side) because they have absolutely no desktop support organization within the company and, if you review our primary responsibilities, we're an application support team not linux administration. As the new guy on the team, the desktop support responsibilities seem to mostly fall into my lap which is extraordinarily frustrating. I've only been here five months and I don't see it getting any better. Management has literally laughed at me when I've brought ideas to them to increase efficiency within the organization procedurally or technically. I don't want to lose my skill sets that I cultivated at my last position, but I also feel bad about already considering finding a new position. I don't want to look bad on my resume because I haven't stuck around at a job for more than two years.
I'm also in a lot of debt from school. Higher than average, so money is a constant stressor.
So I guess my question is this in lieu of droning on and on about how much my job frustrates me:
Have any of you felt stuck in jobs that claimed to be Linux Administration, but under the covers were actually some other position? How long did you give it before you started looking again? How did you keep your skill sets current? If some of you are managers (or dealt with a similar situation), what's the best way to approach a manager's manager to express concern for the position and a dwindling skill set or the organizational difficulties I'm seeing? Does it look bad to be hopping around jobs?
Just curious about the experience of others.
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