Strap yourself in as there is a lot wrong here.
Unpaid overtime and unrealistic expectations from the role. There were quite a few times I was asked to stay in the office until midnight consulting with team members in the UK for infrastructure projects. I was not paid or given time off in lieu for most of these times.
The Level 1 IT helpdesk team were absolutely useless. My role was as an advanced Level 2/2.5 IT Analyst, however very often we were wasting our time correcting basic errors by the MSP Kennedys hired to do Level 1 helpdesk support. We basically had to do their job for them. Even though it was not in my job description, this was a daily expectation of us which was a huge waste of time and took time away from the advanced IT problems we were supposed to work on. Managers would get extremely sensitive when we would push back against the incompetent behaviour from the L1 Helpdesk, advising that they are "doing a good job" while ignoring the endless complaints from end users about poor service from the L1 Helpdesk.
Narcissistic managers and partners. This is to be expected from a law firm, however within the org structure of IT, nobody knew what they wanted and would make decisions extremely hastily which reflected poorly on everyone. The company fell extremely behind on a technical level and left their IT infrastructure stagnant for well over a decade, and then hastily pushed out a massive upgrade to all users within the span of 3 months despite not being ready for it. Suggestions to extend timeframes were ignored, and even when we ran a pilot program with select users in the company, their feedback was also ignored until the complaining was loud enough from senior partners of the firm. The senior IT managers and directors thought they knew best about everything without actually listening to feedback about what they needed to fix.
Even within my own team there was massive lack of a team dynamic. Often, I would get snarky and rude responses from one of my teammates when I would ask questions even though our manager encouraged asking questions, that's if I even got a response at all. There would often be days where the entire Teams chat history was literally just a bunch of "good morning" messages with no other communication, with the odd unanswered question thrown in the mix. When I would bring up my concerns about the rude responses I'd get from my teammate, usually the advice was "that's just how they are" and to deal with it.
On a non-IT point though, the company culture is toxic. Each team is very cliquish and stand off-ish to people outside their realm, and as my role was a newly created role for the IT team which had no presence in that office until I was hired, I found it extremely difficult to fit in. While there were a few people that were nice and I enjoyed being around, during company social events I would often be made to feel alone even when standing in a crowd of people. I feel that this was because people already had an extremely negative view of IT support due to the poor performance of the overseas L1 helpdesk and feeling like their issues were always ignored, that they did not want to make me feel welcome in general as I was an outsider belonging to a team they didn't like. There were some who saw my genuine efforts to improve things in IT and make people feel listened to, but the negativity with the rest of the IT outweighed this and made me feel excluded.
