Comment by gorgoiler

> It obviously didn’t work out so I ghosted them and just did everything myself without asking, out of my own pocket.

In my one experience in a university, this how it’s done. Just set you own stuff up, hope you aren’t discovered and ideally have a friend high up the ranks.

   >  I don’t know if it was outright maliciousness, or just extreme anxiety from the IT team lead about job security

It's probably anxiety about job security/being overworked rather than maliciousness, but it could be both. It is made more complex by the likelihood that the position pays far less than comparable positions pay elsewhere. This causes the district to hire whatever candidate they can get to take the job. The outcome of that works out one of two ways: (a) the employee leaves as soon as they have enough experience to be paid more to do less work by someone else or (b) the employee stays knowing nobody else will hire them and makes sure to only hire other people who know less than they do.

   > If I wanted to do something, I would be told that there weren't the resources.

You were told correctly, but probably not told just how bad it is. If it works like it worked for folks I know in similar situations, 80% of the job -- regardless of what you were hired in for or what your title is -- is fixing things that teachers/administration broke or didn't know how to use correctly. Tell them the laptop is for school business only until you're blue in the face, they'll visit every web site offering Flash games, some will surf porn sites riddled with malware and if your IT guy doesn't have a mental breakdown by then, the only thing they're spending the rest of the 20% of time on is blocking teachers/non-IT staff from doing things that they've been told, clearly, not to do. The rest is spent locking things down or softening security policies to keep teachers/non-IT staff from taking more of that 80% time.

   > [Volunteering my time] is against policy.

It could be against policy, but that's probably just an excuse being used because it's effective at shutting down the request. There's a very good reason to say "no" in the IT person's mind: your volunteering will still involve their time, and if you're not as capable as you claim to be, it'll involve a lot of their time. If you're one of their users and you're claiming to know a lot about IT, you're more likely to be seen as "someone who knows enough to be dangerous"--the worst kind of user. Even if they believe you, they're confronted with the reality that you deploying/using this new "unapproved thing", will cause others to ask for it -- another teacher/staff member will want it and at some point that IT person is going to end up having to deploy it, patch it, fix it, and maintain it. You'll find this thinking prevalent in most IT support organizations -- the camel can barely walk so it's easier to say "No" and hopefully keep it that way than say "yes" and add enough load to the break its back.

   > I gave myself one term to see if we could find a working relationship. 

I feel your pain. I'm not sure what you've tried and you could very well have just run into a BOFH but assuming this IT person is typical of those I've worked with when I did this work, there are some options. You may have tried these -- it's not meant as "well, you obviously approached this all wrong" but rather advice for others on what I have personally seen work (and had work on me when I did this sort of work, albeit a long time ago).

For anyone in a similar situation, there are a few ways to "hack your IT person". It's nothing magical and can be applied well beyond IT folks, but I'm aiming at folks in this conundrum. While I've not worked for a school district, I spent the first 10 years of my career in several levels of support/systems and ultimately architecture with the first few being similar to the whole "small IT with too many users who hate IT[2]". First, understand what their motivation is -- less support, more time to improve/architect (or play WoW ;) ...). If you have the expertise, approach that person and "talk shop" -- don't reveal that you "have skills", just ask a question or two in an area that teachers/staff often know little about, or go with a simple "I wouldn't do what you do ... all these teachers, many of whom haven't touched a keyboard that wasn't on their phone since 2010 or so ... it's got to be hell". If you can get them to tell a "war story" or two you'll probably find a few opportunities to say something that will reveal that you have somewhat of a clue what you're talking about. Do this outside of work, on their schedule -- Happy Hour or off-site lunch (not often possible during the school day due to time).

If things go well, say something like "I can't imagine how you get anything done with such a computer illiterate staff to babysit (aligning yourself with IT over said staff) ... I'm happy to help out anywhere I can if you can think of something I can do to reduce that grief[0]" This IT person spends their work life dealing mostly with people who are unhappy about things that are broken and the staff they support place blame for those breakages, not the resolution, at their feet[1].

You're now in the magical role of "the teacher who believes IT isn't incompetent." If you are received well, make your ask. Make it very limited -- if you need to be an admin of your laptop, insist that it be temporary and that you'll call the IT person when you are done (offer to let them watch if they want. They won't). Insist that you'll not let people know IT made an exception and will provide the required excuse if someone notices you're running something they can't: usually "IT doesn't know about it" is settled on. Maybe it's something you want every teacher to have -- don't dare explain that, and if you have to, outright lie: "I'm not interested in seeing the district adopt this, I just want to use it myself." You're not shooting your grand plans in the foot, you're giving yourself time to provide hard facts/evidence to make the case that it should be deployed. If it works out well, start planting the seeds with your IT person: "I really love this application, thanks for letting me use it on my school laptop ... what do you think the support overhead for something like this would be if every teacher had it?" ... listen to their concerns, find answers to each of them, revisit the topic. Your IT person is used to management (administration in schools) saying "this is what we need on every PC" without care for what amount of work/grief IT will deal with to sort it out. Administration doesn't care about IT griping very much -- it's seen as IT, "yet, again", complaining about having to "do work" and treating completely reasonable (in their minds) requests as though they're equivalent to scaling Mount Everest. If you have the data from your unofficial pilot to back you up, and the right person in IT (at least) not working against you, and other financial considerations/contracts aren't in the way, you'll be successful. If you're successful and your project works, the next time you may not have to ask at all.

Your IT person makes just as many judgements about you and their users as they make about IT but there's a lot more of you than their are IT folks. Having an ally/expert among the "clueless users" has a much higher value to your IT person than having that person as your ally does for you, even if it doesn't seem that way[1--(again)].

[0] How much time is IT spending doing "Help Desk" kind of support for everyone outside of IT (regardless of title/responsibilities the IT person was hired in for)? It's probably 80% "User Support" and 20% "everything else" which means all of the effort put into "everything else" centers around reducing how often teachers have to take time away from IT. Your offer, if its trusted, will reduce that burden at no cost to the IT person. Don't make that promise if you're not willing to do it, but it's unlikely anything will be asked of you.

[1] In the "Game of IT Support" (or it's variants: "The Game of Network Security Administration", etc), you can never have a score greater than "Zero". Zero is "everything works". When something breaks, you lose points. When you fix it, you gain points up to (but not always) your top score of "Zero". Roll out massive new infrastructure for WiFi? You're at Zero (or less since it probably won't work as conveniently as it does at home). You're an expense who's purpose it is to make things operate the way everyone expects they're designed/intended/meant to work. They also expect that you (IT) shouldn't be necessary -- these things should just work like my router/PC/internet service at home works and shouldn't require so much "policy" to "avoid doing things".

[2] While I was still living with my parents, my neighbor referred me to the IT job -- he was in Development. I'll never forget when my Dad called me up asking "why is IT (where I worked) at (company) so bad?" after listening to my neighbor berate my company's IT operations teams (never me, specifically). We were so hated. By everyone, especially non-Support IT. That was an impossible conversation to have.