Haha, no. I'm a salaried employee. In the U.S. this makes you an "exempt" employee, which means that the employer is not required to pay overtime if you work over 40 hours in one week. Employers of course can pay overtime if they wish and so some salaried employees do earn overtime, though I don't know any personally that do.
As far as a day off, my boss did grant me an extra day off a few weeks ago but I'm working longer and harder now with no end in sight.
So let me sort of sum up what is happening. A few months ago, my old boss resigned. He was also our Cisco networking expert, something I couldn't easily replace. I picked up 80% of his duties, my current boss picked up 10%, and we hired a Cisco expert on contract for a few months but he busied himself with fixing a bunch of problems he noticed and setting up all kinds of crazy network and security monitoring. That was good, but it didn't really ease my load any and we only kept him until late January.
Then two months ago the Director of IT announced they were laying off 75% of the IT infrastructure staff on 4/1/11 and outsourcing the helpdesk, server monitoring/maintenance, and network monitoring/maintenance to a third party. I made the cut as they plan to shift me to work on project initiatives and my boss made the cut as he is highly involved in the operations.
This is not a small task. We have been having at least a one hour meeting every other day, sometimes two two hour meetings a day about the transition and going over gaps. The third party needs a lot of information about our infrastructure, applications and client installers, processes, responsibilities, frequently encountered issues, and organizational hierarchy. As it turns out, about 10% of this is actually documented and we are required to write and supply documentation of the other 90% before we "go live" with the third party, which is happening this week for a few of our smaller offices. Our bigger offices are switching over in a couple weeks. Also, it isn't simply just documenting all the stuff we have and do; in a lot of cases it is totally rethinking it. For instance, since we won't have anyone left to do deskside visits, onsite computer repairs, and imaging, we had to come up with solutions for when people have physically broken computers that the third party can't resolve remotely.
At the same time our Director of IT started losing sleep over the fact that one of our most important business applications could experience a catastrophic failure because the hardware it is running on is quite old and the disk arrays that house the data are the same as three others (out of five total) that have failed in the last six months. Even though we back up the data, recovering from a catastrophic failure of the hardware that runs this application would take weeks. So he decided we are going to put in place a "lifeboat" (a set of clones that we can switch to with a smaller amount of effort in the event of a failure) and a newer environment to work on upgrading the OS and various pieces of the software to the newest versions. This alone is a massive undertaking.
To add to it, he is having us put it at a data center location that we rent space at monthly and stopped using almost entirely about a year ago. This location was completely segregated from our network and had a firewall with all kinds of crazy insecure rules put in to support a big website environment that we got rid of about a year ago. So we have to clean up the firewall and had to figure out a way to connect our office to the datacenter and implement it. All without a real network engineer/Cisco expert. To add to that he wants to utilize a VMware vSphere (ESXi) cluster and SANs, neither of which I had much experience with other than the light administrative tasks I've done with some others that we already have. I'm glad to get the experience, but I don't like the fact that we are rushing headlong into it without adequate planning and testing.
To be fair to our Director of IT, both of these projects are good ideas (though I'm less thrilled about the former). However it is fucking insane that we are doing these both at the same time! To add to it, there are plans to move our office to another building either this summer or fall. That is a pretty huge undertaking that requires a lot of planning to get right and I'm afraid we are going to finally be getting some slack time back from these other two projects and suddenly be presented with the office move with very little or no time for planning.
Keep in mind that I still have all my regular duties as 3rd tier helpdesk and server/network admin and also 80% of the duties of my former boss on top of all this other shit.
Fun.
