When a two-person IT team becomes one without a raise or support, it’s a critical career crossroads. Here’s a senior engineer’s guide on how to analyze the risk, negotiate your position, or strategically plan your exit.

So, Your Teammate Quit and You’re the Last Admin Standing. Now What?

I remember this one job, years ago. We were a lean two-person infrastructure team managing a couple hundred VMs for a growing e-commerce site. My counterpart, a brilliant network guy named Kevin, put in his two weeks. Management smiled, wished him well, and told me, “You can handle it for a bit, right? We’ll get a backfill requisition open soon.” Six months later, I was still handling it. The “requisition” was lost in some budget black hole, and I was getting 2 AM PagerDuty alerts because a log partition on `prod-db-01` filled up for the third time that month. I was burned out, underpaid, and the single point of failure for a multi-million dollar company. If you’re reading a Reddit thread titled “2-man IT team → solo admin for 300 users, no raise,” you’re not just having a bad week. You’re living my nightmare, and you’re at a serious career inflection point.

The “Why”: Understanding the Business Myopia

Let’s be blunt. When management lets this happen, it’s rarely malicious. It’s a combination of blissful ignorance and a focus on the bottom line. From their perspective, the lights are still on, tickets are getting closed, and they just cut a salary from the books. Win-win, right? They don’t see the mounting risk. They don’t understand the “bus factor”—the number of people who need to be hit by a bus for the project or company to completely fall apart. In your case, the bus factor is one. It’s you. This isn’t just about you being overworked; it’s about the massive, unmitigated operational risk the company has taken on by placing its entire technical infrastructure on your shoulders.

Pro Tip: Never frame the problem as “I’m overworked.” Frame it as “The business is at risk.” Your personal burnout is, sadly, a low-priority ticket for upper management. A single point of failure that could halt revenue is a P1 incident.

So, what do you do? You have three paths forward. Let’s break them down.

Option 1: The Diplomatic Offensive (Document and Demonstrate)

This is the “give them a chance to fix it” route. You don’t just complain; you come armed with data. Your goal is to make your invisible work painfully visible. You need to translate your daily firefighting into the language of business risk and productivity loss.

• Track Everything: Quantify your workload. How many tickets did you close this week? How many password resets? How many after-hours alerts? Put it in a simple report.
• Build a Risk Matrix: Create a simple table that outlines the systems only you know how to manage. What happens if you get sick for a week?
• Propose Solutions, Not Problems: Don’t just say “I need help.” Say, “To mitigate our single point of failure risk on the primary ERP database, I recommend we either backfill the Senior Admin role or engage a managed services provider for after-hours support. Here are the costs and benefits of each.”

Present this to your manager. If they are competent, they will see the flashing red lights. If they brush it off, you have your answer, and it’s time for Option 2.

Option 2: The Self-Preservation Play (Automate and Insulate)

If management won’t give you help, you have to make your own. This is where you lean into your skills to claw back your time and sanity. Your goal is to automate the repetitive tasks that kill your day so you can focus on what matters (including your job search).

Automate the Annoying Stuff

What’s the most common ticket? Password resets? User creation? Automate it. A simple PowerShell script can save you hours a week. For example, finding locked-out AD accounts:

# PowerShell script to find all locked out Active Directory users
# Save as Find-LockedAccounts.ps1

Import-Module ActiveDirectory

# Search the entire domain for accounts that are currently locked out
$LockedOutUsers = Search-ADAccount -LockedOut -UsersOnly

if ($LockedOutUsers) {
    Write-Host "The following user accounts are currently locked:"
    # Display the username, name, and when the account was last logged on
    $LockedOutUsers | Format-Table Name, SamAccountName, LastLogonDate
} else {
    Write-Host "No locked out accounts found. Good job, users!"
}

Warning: This approach has a downside. The better you get at automating and handling the load, the more management thinks one person is sufficient. You’re proving their bad decision right. This is a temporary strategy to give you breathing room, not a permanent solution.

Option 3: The Nuclear Option (Prepare Your Exit)

Sometimes, a company culture is just broken. If you’ve presented the risks and they’ve ignored you, they have made it clear they do not value you or the stability of their own infrastructure. Staying is no longer about loyalty; it’s about enabling their dysfunction. It’s time to leave.

But you do it like a pro.

1. Update Your Resume: Start by highlighting all the incredible work you’ve done as a solo admin. You’ve managed 300 users, handled everything from networking to cloud, and automated processes. That’s a huge selling point. You aren’t just an “IT Admin” anymore; you’re an “IT Manager” or “Infrastructure Lead” in practice.
2. Start Interviewing: Don’t just jump at the first offer. You’re in a position of power. You have a job. Be selective. Ask potential employers about their team size, on-call rotation, and their approach to work-life balance.
3. Document Everything: While you’re job hunting, create a “brain dump” document. List all the critical systems, common procedures, vendor contacts, and passwords (stored securely, of course). This isn’t for them; it’s for you. When you give your two weeks’ notice, you hand this over. It shows you’re a professional, not a disgruntled employee, and it prevents them from trying to claw you back with desperate phone calls after you’ve left.

I’ve seen too many good engineers burn out trying to be the hero for a company that wouldn’t even give them a life raft. Your skills are in high demand. Don’t let one bad situation convince you otherwise. Whether you negotiate a better role, automate your way to sanity, or find a better job, the key is to take control. Don’t just stick it out—level up and move on.

Darian Vance

Lead Cloud Architect & DevOps Strategist

With over 12 years in system architecture and automation, Darian specializes in simplifying complex cloud infrastructures. An advocate for open-source solutions, he founded TechResolve to provide engineers with actionable, battle-tested troubleshooting guides and robust software alternatives.

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