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The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/drmonix on 2023-10-24 21:22:42+00:00.

I’m a linux admin and team of one training a new hire with 20 years of experience, mostly in Devops and AWS. I have about 9. There are other linux admins from other teams I work closely with, but for the most part, myself and this new hire are reponsible for about 600 servers, mostly on-prem and about 1/6 AWS.

Developer reaches out today and wants an web instance accessible off VPN so the client can look at it. I’ve only been here a year and this is a new one for me, so I go take a look, find the correct security group in about 2 minutes, and decide to offload this to the new hire because PM wants new hire to start getting environment exposure.

I give new hire the task in a group chat with the developer. The new hire asks the developer what the security group and instance are. I reiterate the instance name and tell him the developer doesn’t know what security group is needed, to go check and figure it out.

New hire is quiet for about 3 minutes, then asks me to call him. I ask why. He needs help. We screenshare and he pulls up the security groups, but is unable to identify which one. I ask him what he would do if the task were assigned to him and I wasn’t here. He says he sees two security groups that seem to allow public internet access but isn’t sure which one to use. I ask him what is the best way to decide between the two and he is unsure. I show him that one of the groups isn’t actually public internet access and is another group of VPN addresses, and the other group has the rules to allow access from everywhere. He applies it and states that “applying security groups are dangerous and he just wanted a second set of eyes.”

This was the situation from today, but this situation has been ongoing. Every task I assign, he troubleshoots for about 2 minutes and then wants the answer handed to him. My PM told me to document these instances, but I feel like I am essentially training someone with double my experience. He obviously knows some of what he is doing, but he is basically nonfunctional without a clearly outlined document giving him a step-by-step instruction on what needs to be done. Our environment isn’t well documented for sure, but most of the tasks he seems to have questions on are problems I had to solve myself as a new employee and I did it with relative ease with far less experience.

How do I deal with this guy and stop myself from going insane?