Why won't senior staff let junior admins do anything?
Junior IT staff are blocked from gaining practical experience because managers and senior team members perform all tasks themselves and gatekeep necessary permissions. This leaves juniors unable to learn, question their purpose on the team, and unable to perform essential responsibilities.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Asking repeatedly for role assignments and access tickets
- 2Drafting emails to management to request specific permissions
- 3Looking for another job or considering returning to an MSP environment
- 4Sharing a custom-filtered view or scheduled report with PII and sensitive events filtered out
- 5Limiting IT access strictly to employee/manager levels, equipment updates, and onboarding tasks without admin privileges
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“That would be a hard no from me. They do not need access to all of that information and it’s not a good idea to give it to them”source ↗
“This is a generic question but should IT have full admin access to Rippling (the HRIS system)? They said it's important for sox compliance but all my study is telling me that they should not have full admin access.”source ↗
“In rippling, if I give them permission to see audit logs, it's basically a full admin. I think it's related to sox - that's what I was told.”source ↗
“They are asking for ability to create/manage permission profiles which can give them the ability to create profiles and stuff and ability to look at compensation and PII basically. My gut instincts tell me no but they are quite persistent about it and mentioning that we are out of compliance.”source ↗
“if our Manager only does everything, how am I going to be able to do and learn things and gain the experience?”source ↗
“It just feels like my access is being gatekept even though I have been doing everything right so far”source ↗
“if EVERYTHING is done by him, then how will I ever learn? What am I there for....”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 2How to map and consolidate scattered user permissions?
- 4Why do B2B clients keep asking to whitelist huge IP ranges?
- 5Do mandatory passkeys bypass traditional two-factor authentication?
- 2Why does accounting software force logins for every company file?
- 5Locked out of new network switches because the consultant left
- 2Why do permission changes take so long to apply now?