Promote him!

I am a Systems Engineer in Silicon Valley (San Jose, CA, USA). I work on high-end servers all day; either setting up new servers, resolving issues that are present or running routine maintenance to (hopefully) prevent any new issues from appearing.

One client I work for has had no Network Administrator for the last 2 to 3 years. But they did have a Desktop Support guy. They hired us a couple years ago and we began working on their servers exclusively, to provide the best computing environment possible. Considering they wanted to spend nothing (literally), this has been a real challenge.

Recently, they decided that they needed someone on-site to coordinate all of the IT support tasks and they chose their Desktop Support guy. In fact, they promoted their Desktop Support guy to their IT Manager. However, considering the types of questions he constantly asks me and some of the choices I see him make, I have to seriously wonder if he has any experience in computers at all. He repeatedly asks questions that he could have Google'd faster than walking over to the IT office where I sit (2 doors away), consuming 1-2 (sometimes 3) hours a week asking these questions. And, when you consider that I'm only there 12 hours a week, that can be up to 25% of my time on-site. And I suspect he does the same thing to the other systems engineer that's only there 8 hours a week.

For example, they recently opened a new branch and, so far, it's taken him over a month to completely deploy a new server, for which he had a pre-configured system image. And since it has taken him so much time, he's dumped all of the desktop support tickets on us (the hired systems engineers), in addition to our normal server support (they have over 20 servers). But, since we probably cost their company about 4 to 5 times more per hour than him, I'm not sure he (or his boss) realizes the expenses he's costing the company.

But then, I'm just the hired Systems Engineer doing desktop support and this is just my opinion.