System Engineer Technician 3: the single person keeping the company running

The speaker, who identifies as 'System Engineer Technician 3', describes a corporate IT environment held together by a single, under-documented operator and brittle processes. They say there is "no level 1 or 2" support, responsibility rests on them alone—"My job is not to fix things. No. My job is to be the only one who could." Routine practices are dysfunctional: patching should happen Sunday at 2am but is deferred to Monday at 10.30 because nobody is paid to work Sundays; change requests move from done only to reopened; the Change Advisory Board meets "on Tuesdays. Not next Tuesday but most Tuesdays."

Concrete failures and legacy baggage are named repeatedly. Identity and recovery are fragile: "Active Directory contains every user..." and "BitLocker keys are stored in Active Directory. We've never tested or restored." The knowledge base is unusable: "We have a confluence. It contains 4,000 pages. Search returns none of them." Operational cruft includes "Excel is the company's real database," a critical macro from 2013 that only opens on an old laptop called 'Before Small Change' ("It's four terabytes large"), and a security group named 'Ten Excellence Do Not Use.' Admin rights are gated by a circular form that "requires admin rights." The company counts "240 employees" and "240 active accounts," while an "AWS build somewhere between 30,000 and 300 million" sits misallocated and "reserved instances for a project that got cancelled." The speaker notes automation successes—"Ansible works universally. 999 out of 1000 servers."—and praises serverless for eliminating node patching and 3am capacity events.

Practical controls the speaker uses or recommends: do not sign up new environments without a written justification (they instruct to "ask for a justification document"); force the phrase 'per our governance framework' to stall forgotten requests; teach people how to write secure passwords; and prefer serverless/automation (Ansible) to reduce on-call surprises. The overall portrait is of an organization with scale (numbers and names intact) surviving on tribal knowledge, brittle identity/backups, legacy Excel dependencies, and ad hoc governance rather than tested processes.