Pros
Team is mostly good, nice people
Cons
The windows server team has been deteriorating, with work-life balance becoming increasingly unsustainable. Recently, in an attempt to save a few dollars, our manager collapsed the rural on-call rotation, removing assigned staff and shifting their workload onto the already overworked and stressed Edmonton and Calgary teams. Both teams already monitor over 3,000+ servers after hours, and this additional burden is making the situation worse. To make matters worse, our manager has restricted on-call swaps—SA2 (intermediate staff) can only swap with other SA2s, but options are limited in both Edmonton and Calgary. Previously, P4s (senior staff) were part of the on-call rotation, but they’ve been removed and reassigned as managers or supervisors. When we raised concerns, our manager became hostile, dismissing the fact that P4s are contractually required to take on-call shifts, as they do on every other AHS team. Instead, we're told that SA2s are “seniors” based on the pay scale, rather than experience or role expectations. The on-call schedule itself is poorly structured. It excludes capable staff, including the rural team, who are no longer in rotation despite being qualified. Our environment is highly redundant, the rarity of a server going down is likely to have a back up and can be delt with in the morning by someone local. Additionally, monthly patching schedules are assigned using a random website wheel, meaning patching often overlaps with on-call weeks. This forces staff to scramble to find coverage, as it's impossible to handle both responsibilities simultaneously. In the worst cases, this results in working late for nearly half the month due to poor scheduling. Another major issue is management. While our team has one official manager, day-to-day operations are handled by five P4s, creating a bottleneck that slows progress and leads to unnecessary conflict. The P4s are not at fault, but having five people doing the job of one creates inefficiency and friction within the team. Career advancement is also stifled. SA1s (junior staff) are not given training on key technologies, such as clusters, yet interview questions heavily focus on them. When we fail to answer due to lack of exposure, they are met with dismissive and condescending responses. As a result, SA1s with over five years of experience are overlooked in favor of external hires, rather than being properly developed within the team. Recently, our manager has introduced Friday meetings to push an agile/scrum framework, but this does nothing to address the fundamental issue—our team is management-heavy and poorly structured. Many team members are now looking to leave, which is unfortunate because the team itself is strong. If these issues aren’t addressed, we risk losing valuable staff and further damaging morale.