Have you found out the hard way that your Company’s Computer Guy (or more likely, one of the Computer Computer Guy’s Minion Underlings) knows less about what he’s doing on the computer than you do? I’ve worked in more than one major company where a tech will come to fix something and I can tell within the first ten seconds of them picking up a mouse whether they know what they’re doing. I find this is usually the case with exceptionally young guys, or exceptionally old guys. They’re either too young to know what they’re doing, or too old to remember how to do it. Their eyes glaze over and they just start clicking in places they shouldn’t even be and before you know it, ten minutes have gone by and nothing’s really happened. I’ve had techs who click and drag things one at a time, don’t know how to highlight more than one item, don’t know keyboard shortcuts, don’t know how to get to Options in a Microsoft Office application, don’t know how to pull up basic system info, etc. The list goes on and on, and I was hoping some Dopers could help me expand it with some horror stories about techs who are so inept that you’ve had to restrain yourself from pushing them out of the way and figuring it out yourself just to avoid wasting time.
I wonder why I left the I.T. field sometimes. I know my way around a computer, but I’m no wizbang … some of these guys make me look like a genius by comparison, though. Scary.
I’m one of the computer guys. Compared to the other computer guys (and women), I know next to nothing. I’m always awed at their skills and knowledge.
Still, people come to me asking me to move their computer from the top of the desk to under the desk. They apparently can’t do it themselves. I also have to answer some pretty basic questions. (to me basic is pretty basic - I’m no guru)
Also, you have to remember that IT and computer science is a huge field and nobody can be an expert at all areas. The average person doesn’t know that much, or just a little bit about everything, but is only really good at another area. If you are having trouble with Windows, and they are not a Windows Systems Administrator or something, and the Tech that comes to help is a Networking tech that normally hangs cable and occasionally installs some switches and routers and configures them can know as much or less than you do about Windows.
Not all computer people are hackers that know everything about computers. Most are just average people that know one area fairly well.
I am the one-man IT department, as well as wearing a couple of more specialist IT hats, for what used to be a small company. I do not use fluff like Microsoft Word personally, nor am I that au fait with Outlook, PowerPoint etc. So I imagine that sometimes I come across as a klutz to users who want me to make their animated slide transitions work properly. But could they configure an IPSec VPN tunnel, eh?
Our desktop staff isn’t SUPPOSED to know applications. They are there to fix your computer when it bluescreens, to install new computers, to try and get data off your crashed hard drive. We have users endlessly disappointed - and gloating - when our desktop techs can’t teach them to do a pivot table in Excel - THAT ISN’T THEIR JOB - its YOURS.
(I have seen desktop techs unworthy of being able to image a PC - but for the most part, they are pretty darn good at what they are supposed to do - our big problem is users who assume they know what the desktop techs job is. IT has NO ONE on staff whose job it is to help you with Excel or teach you to do a mail merge or help you set up Sharepoint.
It’s true, people expect you to know everything about every aspect of operating a computer, because you’re the IT guy right? You signed up to some crappy ISP and your home wireless network isn’t working? No problem, call the IT guy and he will use his telescopic laser vision to peer inside your house from a hundred miles away and diagnose the problem.
It is even worse when they somehow extend your expected field of knowledge to mobile phones, which I really am a klutz with, and in some cases anything that runs off electricity. The photocopier’s broken! Get that IT guy.
Yep, and if they comment on your fumbling with something and you say “I am not trained to fix this Photocopier” they always point out that you fixed it in the past. Yeah, by employing simple problem solving techniques, many of which LOOK like fumbling around.
Epimetheus is right. When it comes to using my companies bespoke programs I know way more than the IT people so I’m much better at tracking down problems with it.
But some of the stuff they make the server do leaves me confused and grinning in awe like a happy house cat.
So in answer to your question. Yes, sometimes. But ever since they did the MSSC they left me standing.
Muscle Shoals Sailing Club? Montana Safety Services Council? Google is not helping much.
Anyway, I hate to come across all macho IT expert, not least because such a notion is preposterous, but I am talking about troubleshooting IPSec tunnels when you only have control over one end of the tunnel, and the other end is owned by a different company, who use different equipment whose manufacturer interprets some of the ambiguous IPSec standards differently to yours, and whose policies are such that troubleshooting involves communicating by email or, if you’re lucky, phone with some uninterested techie at the other end.
That is what I mean by “configure an IPSec tunnel”. Setting something like that up between two offices of the same organisation is child’s play, in comparison. No red tape, no incompatibilities, full access to logs etc.
I’m good at troubleshooting, have been known to be good at bug hunting in other people’s code (I got this job by diagnosing and describing the exact cause of a bug in code I had never seen, in a language I didn’t even know, just because of the way it manifest to the user). I’m fairly good with hardware and basic networking. lots of breadth, not very deep in places though.
I think so… but I have a hard time telling. Yesterday I couldn’t figure out how to burn a CD on one of our dumb terminals (for various security reasons, this is actually a difficult task). I explained my problem in detail to the guy on the helpdesk staff, who handed me a blank CD and cheerfully said “Here you go.” He had misinterpreted “I tried X, Y, and Z, and received the following failure messages” with “I can’t burn a CD because I didn’t realize that the computer would not summon one into existence.” He was pretty much a moron.
On the other hand I had one tech walk up to a terminal, click in two places, and fix a problem that had been plaguing me for days.
My employer has one of the largest intranets around and a staff of a couple thousand to keep it going. Boeing Computing Systems has a budget of over $200,000,000 a year just to support this and it’s external internet. Ehhh, no.
I work in a large data center for a company that hosts applications. We have computers all over the place in the area where we have individual offices. I think I have probably 7 or 8 in my office alone. My company’s computer guys want nothing to do with us; they’re completely intimidated by our environment. They manage our copier/printer/scanner thing and they’ll provide information to us that we couldn’t know like Exchange server names (to get our e-mail). I think we have an active directory controller in the data center that gets us connected with the rest of the corporate network, but that’s it.
So I’m in a pretty good position. I’m one of the lead technical architects in the company, but only for their client-facing systems. Not only do I never have to deal with internal users, but I don’t have to care about them. But I got here by being on help desks, doing basic network administration, managing a small office network and IT departments and on the way up. Since I’ve been using computers since I was 13 (always curious and not afraid to break anything to learn), I’ve never been in the situation that a user had more general knowledge than me. They may have had a higher degree of knowledge when it came to the specific tools, but never did I ever feel clueless, aimlessly clicking. I guess there’s a certain degree of comfort in knowing where to find the answers if I couldn’t quickly figure out the problem.
I’ve been in situations where users immediately thought they were knowledgeable than me (especially when I was younger), but it didn’t take long for them to realize that I was pro. I’ve worked in IT with people (and had subordinates) who could do little more than physically move computers and were almost never able to resolve anything, so I can see where the OP is coming from.
But to answer, the OP, I’m definitely better on a computer than any of my company’s computer guys.
