More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

Does anyone else have experience on a team where everyone seems to be doing their own thing across the full stack/multiple systems/languages but then they're all stepping over each other, breaking other each other's code so ends up doing a lot of rework to update your code to someone else's change.

And also many wheels get reinvented in slightly different ways because no one is aware that something like ... Already exists and can be reused or refactor.... Or how to use it correctly.

Basically we're like all moving in different directions instead of in sync.

I feel maybe the team is too big and everyone is doing everything, wearing too many hats... and maybe should define roles and ownership better.

So on top of having way too many hats at work and starting my master’s studies in a few weeks, I just had an idea for a game that’s too good to not start working on. I am drowning myself in shit to do. Again.

So I'm expected to solo develop one fullstack project, support 2 guys with the backend of a second project, mentor the backend intern as he solo develops a third project (that has a horrendously poorly defined scope), fix bugs with a fourth project, figure out what's wrong with the legacy spaghetti code on an even older fifth project that has a version of the framework so old it not only isn't supported, but isn't even well documented, add a couple of features to a sixth project in two days, conduct the technical interview for the new interns or hires, code review their shit if the company decides to send them a test, handle the deployment of our projects to aws and be the acting tech lead on a team that has close to no time to write unit tests?
Starting to feel a bit hopeless.