Sysadmin

You've got a few options:

• try and do the job to the best of your abilities, learning as you go, while making yourself invaluable to the company and then making sure you use that to your advantage to get promotions and wage increases.

• say it's not what you were hired to do and leave or get fired for not doing the job, then go try find another job.

That's pretty much it. Unfortunately, jobs are very rarely what they were advertised as, generally being expected to do a lot more than you were told. You won't get anywhere by saying "not my job" or "I wasn't hired to do that". You either do it, or someone else will while you go back to unemployment.

1. they're under paying you.
2. if you can get through this hell for 2 years, you'll likely be pretty set as a Windows admin. No joke, I got promoted into a very similar position from being a datacenter tech. I fucked all kinds of shit up, broke everything multiple times, didn't leave the office for days on end. While you're waiting for access to be able to do things, start learning powershell. Don't fix problems, automate solutions. What I mean by that is anytime you fix anything, immediately write a script to fix it next time it happens.

In many, if not most, startups and small companies titles don't mean much. You have to do more than you were usually hired for.

Try and learn as much as you can as fast as you can and then either ask for more money or look for another job.

As long as the environment is not bad, it may be a good learning experience. When I compare my startup years to some of my co-workers who never worked at a startup I was able to learn a lot more than them. Many of my co-workers have only worked at large companies so they were never exposed to a wide range of tasks because in corporate america jobs are far more segregated and specialized.

This situation is normal in smaller companies, it is a big growth opportunity. It will be really hard, and they will underpay you whole time. You can learn a lot, other comment mentioned learning powershell, I would add document everything you do before and after doing and write your action plans and checklists.

This could be a growth opportunity but you have to put your management hat on. You're one person with part time help. You need more resources which will come in the form of contractors and consultants. To get these you need a plan of what has to be done and how it drives value to the business. Financial risk is going to be a big driver for most businesses.

First thing is you need actionable intelligence. You want to assess the state of things, figure out what kind of risks exist and do business impact assessments on the most severe issues. This is what leadership needs to authorize budget. Your CEO having global adminis not a business problem. Over permissive permissions that could lead to a compromise that causes a regulatory penalty is. Things have to tie to money.

Microsoft has a pile of assessments you can run here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/assessments/

Fixing M365 sounds like a priority. Getting help doing a CIS assessment wouldn't be a bad idea either. Using cybersecurity as a driver for change works very well because you surface a lot of risk.

If they want you to grow into a senior or manager role then don't be everything guy, delegate. It sounds like there's lots of higher value stuff to attack if you can convince leadership to let you offload some tasks.

Now I've started this job and got to know that comany's CEO is apparently quite controlling and wants to know and see everything. He is also a Global admin in M365 and has additional high privilege roles assigned.

If I saw that I would run from the hills. Even if your org has mandatory MFA, conditional access, and PIM, the CEO having admin rights to all that is one EvilNginx phishing attack away from losing everything.

Sadly, it is normal for companies to pay peanuts to IT but expect someone who knows everything.

There is a reason imposter syndrome is rampant through our industry when junior engineers are given keys to the kingdom.

CEO with global admin privileges is a red flag

They will get hacked.

It will be his fault.

You will get blamed for it.

They didn’t hire a it manager because they don’t want to pay for one. I don’t know how the culture is there but from your description, it doesn’t sound good. I would keep my options open outside the company if it were me

Please, Please tell me you're not in Canada. This sounds similar to a job I interviewed for. I've been a Linux guy for 14+ years and it sounds like they're moving me on to next round for a windows job. If you are in Canada, I'm desperate so you'll have help soon.

Otherwise, the main takeaway here is don't work yourself into the ground. Do your 7-3 and go home to relax. Don't study, don't think about work, just RELAX. They said themselves they'll pay you to learn, mistakes are okay, and they know youre a Jr. who is learning.

From this job you should learn windows, learn how to set professional boundaries and stick to them. Dedicate an hour or two once a week to apply to other jobs. It's not important but you don't want to stay there. Don't burn yourself out. Good luck.

This sounds pretty normal for a small company that doesn't really understand its I.T. needs yet.

Aim to automate as much as you can, you'll be busy enough without having to perform the boring, but necessary, repetitive tasks like handling user on-boarding, off-boarding, password resets, and permission changes. I've generally found that it's best to do a job manually first, noting down everything, then aim to automate it the second time, because, if there was a second time, there'll be a third, fourth, fifth, and so on ad-nausiam.

Try to also automate testing. A script that can sanity check permissions, paths, and the like will save you many painful hours of debugging as you can test every change, rather than working out that the quick fix you did last Tuesday has broken the CEOs access to a critical slide deck today, and needs to be fixed 5 minutes ago.

Document the why, the how, and the what of everything you do. It doesn't need to be fancy, a set of text files is more than enough, but I've been using Obsidian, or vimwiki on Linux, and it will save your bacon when you need to figure why something is the way it is, how you can fix it, and what to change. If you do use a wiki, keep a daily journal, but link the entries to pages about the relevant services. Don't store the wiki on sharepoint, or you risk not having access when you need to fix sharepoint.

Set up an internal monitoring service that can notify you if a service goes down, or one of those tests you automated starts to fail. You will seem like a wizard when you're already fixing a problem before anyone else notices.

Seen as the CEO has admin access, as, presumably, does the external IT person, enable audit logging on everything. That way, when something breaks, you'll know who did it, and what they did, even if it was you.

As others have said, this will be hard, but it's a massive opportunity to grow your skillset rapidly, in an environment that sounds like it may tolerate some mistakes.

Good luck.

Pretty normal for a small company. The boss thinks they’re an IT god (I need global admin), they think they are outsourcing everything, and you just need to do a few little things here and there.

It can be a good way to learn, but you need an exit strategy. It’s a small company, so documenting everything won’t protect you (outside of a legal issue), because it’s not going to be read by someone other than the one firing you and you probably won’t accrue enough time to make a wrongful dismissal suit worthwhile if that were to occur. But the mindset can help with making the right choice instead of the easy one.

They might spring for some certifications, see what you can get.

I can say that most job postings sound like this. Reading through parts of it sound like your spearheading a new initiatiative, some sounds like you will run a team, and some sounds like your running the ticket queue. I don't know if its the lets get someone and expect them to do everything thing or if its the thing where they gather all sorts of things around a job and similar jobs and just plaster them into tha listing without having the direct report look it over. I actually did work for a small place. I was hired by a guy running the IT but he left and the guy who owned the company decided he would save money and take over the role. He did not know what he was doing. He ended up having me move everything to google apps and then when another employee left and did not back up important files he wanted me to say it was my fault for some reason (I think his reasoning was I should have foreseen this and put something up but I had been telling him the whole time we should make sure people keep their stuff on the backed up file server) and I said no and he let me go. I was annoyed to have to go find work and not be getting a regular paycheck for awhile until I did but otherwise was not unhappy to be away from the place. Should have started looking for a new gig after my boss quit and he decided he could just cover the IT management himself.

I don’t know how many employees the m365 platform needs to serve but where i work there are multiple dedicated teams to manage it all.

But we also do have hundreds of unique functions and roles that all need their own set of rights and permissions with regular audits wether permissions are to loose/underused.

No one in IT has local admin anymore but we do have a (logged) way to temporary elevate ourselves to local admin when needed.