It was my first job after university, so I didn't know what and where I was getting into and I remember not caring about it too much (looking back, that was a serious mistake). So, in short I ended up in that horrible part.
My first job there was to prepare ITIL tickets(although I had a fresh CCNA and quite nothing regarding ITIL) for upgrading company's network switching hardware in their German datacenters as a part of an ongoing effort to revise and possibly lower their count. Everything would be going ok, if it weren't for a fact, that in the effort of gaining customers (and possibly pulling them away from the competition), T-Systems had agreed on contracts that promised 24/7 up-time for all of the hardware under their administration, 365 days a year. They somehow forgot though that when doing an OS upgrade on a switch, traffic going through has to go down for like 5 minutes when it restarts. Since there were like 100-1000 devices connected to each of those switches and they belonged to several different customers(i.e. other companies), imagine the chaos, stress and the attitude of some of their managers, when you call them that their connected hardware is going to lose the connection for 5 minutes during midnight hours. We ended up having to haggle for weeks between us and our customers as well as between several of our customers together when those 5 minutes of downtime would be possible(you can imagine the most frequent response) all the while the project was getting more and more behind schedule.
Also, let me mention that a lot of those switches(and devices on them) were several years old(more on this later) and until this project started, there was no complete and updated database of exactly what these machines were and what is connected to them. We were stumbling upon things like 15-year old switches that still had some customer traffic going through them, but there wasn't anyone working at the company anymore, who would have access. There were 3 separate databases of all the T-Systems hardware but they were only partial and (as we have found) quite incomplete. Missing and old data, missing devices, devices that were in the databases but we found they are long gone, devices with no data(but with some unknown traffic going through) that weren't in any of databases etc.
After a half year with these upgrades I changed my position to something more technical - firewall administrator for the company's devices segment. Although I was trained for switches, I welcomed it and learned a lot from my older colleagues in this new team. But, the main problem here was that we were 10 admins for like 100 firewall nodes located all over the world, so us newcomers were able to learn only when there was time(which was rare) and even then it had to be quick. We were severely understaffed and although our team manager did what he could, we waited for almost a year for "reinforcements" or some (much needed) training (because apparently our branch as a whole had overspent it's training budget the year before).
Above I mentioned old hardware. Well, here the situation was even more bizarre. Pretty much all our devices were so old that their vendor had stopped officially supporting them long ago and because of an ever-present focus on spending less coming from our higher management, we were forced to configure them with way more stuff they were designed to handle (i.e. they would seriously struggle with that amount of VLANs even if they were new). I estimate that over 90% of all incidents we had to solve during the time I worked there were caused by old, severely overloaded hardware. When we reported it up the chain, management in Germany refused to give any budget for really solving the problem, even for buying newer models of the same device model line that would be able to handle the load. In desperation, our management in Slovakia tried a complete reorganization of firewall teams, but the requirement from Germany was that it has to be done while maintaining full operation capacity! Naturally, such thing would lead to dissolution of teams and collectives that formed over a long-years of battling stress together every day, so I really wonder how they managed to pull it off(I left just before that happened).
There were even more absurd issues. For instance, we didn't have complete admin access to around 20 firewalls in Germany, because German laws (reportedly) prohibits that. However, a year before T-Systems reportedly laid off like a thousand of their employees in Germany, moved all their workload to us in Slovakia and for us it meant that whenever a German firewall node went down and became stuck, to repair it we required low-level access. We had to contact a (!single!) person there to wake up(since these things happened mostly at night) and insert his access code, so we could make repairs. However, that person wasn't required (by contract or any suchthing) to respond immediately like we were, so we ended up in high-level incident calls during the whole night waiting until he turned his phone on in the morning.
One day during winter, our manager(great guy by the way, he was one of the main reasons we were holding it despite all those problems) mentioned something about acquiring a pretty big customer(like Fortune-500 big) because we reportedly offered (among other things) cheaper price in cloud services. This new customer was supposed to be implemented until September. Days and months went by and everyone forgot about it. In last 2 weeks of August(!) our manager came from a meeting saying: "Remember that big customer we supposed to have fully going by September? Looks like they just started deploying the infrastructure for him and they want us to dedicate some people to be exclusively available 24/7 as cloud firewall specialists for the next two weeks so they would be able to get customer deployed on schedule(that schedule pretty much hasn't changed since winter). So, understaffed as we were already, most of us untrained in cloud firewall deployment(only 4 people had !some! experience with it), were to support such a massive operation that had to be done in just two weeks and the (mostly foreign) part of the management was still thinking it can be done in time(until they realized in the end it couldn't). I mean, we tried as much as we could, but seriously, what the hell they've been doing all those months before August?
This is just a small part of what was happening in our T-Systems branch but again, I say it really depends on where in T-Systems Košice you'd end up. I ended up in the "bad" part and I remember often wondering how on Earth this company still has any customers.
After this experience I completely lost interest in networking and left, making a rule for myself that I'll never work for IT company employing more than 10 people. The only two things that kept me there for that long was my initial interest and absolutely amazing colleagues in former "AdminLAN Firewall" team. Thanks you all, your ever-present humour along with hard-working and sincere attitude was the only thing keeping the team (and probably the company) afloat.
