Is tech support / help desk so bad job?

In My Humble Opinion
1

It seems I will have an opportunity to move a country I want and start to work there as a level one help desk operator. This help desk is for computer issues of a large media and newspaper company. I plan to do it maybe half a year and after that move to more technically demanding IT jobs. The job is suspiciously well paid considering education level and technical skills it requires, although it might be partly because there isn’t so many people with demanded language skills.

Quite many people seem to have rather negative perception of help desk work (not everyone though).

I wonder if I could survive there. I am bright with software and hardware and good problem solver. I don’t get angry with people simply because they don’t understand immediately what I am saying or because I myself don’t understand something. I really feel empathy for people who are suffering with their computers because I know how does it feel. I have better language and teaching skills than most of the other computer guys I know.

I guess these qualities might be beneficial. On the other hand, maybe I am too proud but I’m not planning to listen to abuse from customers beyond certain point. I have no idea how often one encounters really difficult people in such job and I wonder if employers require operators just to suck it up, no matter what. I am able and willing to soothe them and tell how sorry I am they had to wait and everything but if customer continues be rude despite my best efforts, I’m afraid I might say something mean back to them. If needed I know how to be stingy and mean even without using profanities.

Also, I have no idea how exhausting this kind of job is. I am not the most energetic person in general and I easily lose my focus when doing something boring, unchallenging and repetitive (without human interaction at least). But with my limited working experience with a phone I really don’t know how it would feel.

Also, do you think level 2 is better or worse?

2

It’s tough and demanding and low-wage… But it isn’t the utter hell-hole some people imagine.

You’ll have periods of inactivity…and periods of very high volumes. And every so often, you’ll get a total asshole, and that will just be utterly stinking miserable.

Mostly, though, it’s just business as usual. You run down the checklist. “Okay, have you tried unplugging it?” It’s a McJob.

3

It is by far the worst job I’ve ever had. You have to choke on your rage at the constant flow of stupid pumped directly into your earhole all day, every day. mostly the SAME stupid, over and over and over again. I cannot take phone calls at all anymore. Every time a phone rings, even if it is from someone i know, and i already know why they are calling, I still want to dive under a desk and cry.

Empathy and patience will wear thin before too long. I was good at it, and people liked me. But man, did it kill my insides. I did it for about 4 yrs at various places. It was terrible everywhere.

4

I did this work in the early 1990s. I mostly liked it, although it’s probably gotten worse since. But what I noticed back then is that there’s two kind of helpdeskers: those who are good but soon (want to) move on to bigger and better things, and those who have no such ambitions but aren’t all that good at it. If you’re surrounded by too many of the latter category it can get tough.

5

Okay… doesn’t sound too good so far. Maybe this is the reason why the only help desk guy I know seems so passive aggressive. Maybe I should stick to the software development instead. I hate it sometimes but at least it has good moments too. Plus developers are generally treated better than those on “salt mines”, as developers are a bit harder to replace.

6

Yeah, we would get monthly “you can all be replaced” “motivational” speeches during “team meetings” at one place. Finally I let/made them replace me when I had had enough and moved to LA and became a beach bum for a few months, just to try and cleanse the ick away (it never really goes away, btw).

7

Total outsider, but I think the main problem is that most companies don’t invest a lot in professional development for their Help Desk staff. For most people, it’s a dead end job that doesn’t really build much in the way of skills.

Which may be fine if it’s a means to an end and you have a good exit plan.

8

That’s probably more true than most companies like to admit. Where I work, the 1st level help desk is kind of like a petri dish for bright young IT talent- the good ones get promoted to Level 2, and from there, they usually take advantage of the training and educational support we provide, and move into one of the more technical teams- Network, Infrastructure (server administration), Citrix, DBA, etc…

But the base job essentially combines the worst of working in a call center with the most awful aspects of IT. I’d guess that probably 50% of the calls are the same garden-variety password resets and helping the computer illiterate do something trivial. The other 50% are probably involving some higher-level problem that you know about (like a application outage or something), but can’t do anything about, but you’re the lightning rod for irate people who can’t do their jobs to take it out on. Plus you have your own management grading you by how many calls you handle, so there’s incentive for you to get people off the phone or punt it to a higher level, rather than to invest the time to solve it properly.

I did it in college; it wasn’t so bad there, in that the first 4-5 weeks of the semester were crazy with forgotten passwords, campus URL requests and an awful lot (this was 1995-1996) of explaining to people how to set up their modems with Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 to connect to the campus network. The good news was that it really trailed off as the semester went on; by about mid-October, we were generally alternating who slept, or otherwise generally fucking around during our shifts, as we maybe got 2 calls an hour.

Corporate help desks aren’t like that though- much more hectic, and people on the whole are much less cool than other college students were.

9

There’s worse jobs out there. I’m not sure of your development job (or maybe you’re freelance), but I am not sure I’d leave a pure development job for a pure support job. Development can be high pressure and hard, support can be high pressure and stupidly easy.

In the end, frontline customer-facing support for a public product at a support farm is the worst support job. A support farm sells ousourced support to someone else on a thin margin, and tries to keep the floor with the minimum number of idle workers that will get them to their service level goal. The more common the service, the more likely you are to be abused by a caller. But then again, all you have to remember is: that jerkwad doesn’t even know you, so how could they say a meaningful thing about you?*

Above that, there’s directly supporting a product that’s produced by the company that employs you. You get the best information and support in these environments, and usually have more room to get promoted if you’re looking for a technical path. They’re still public facing, and there’s still a chance forl a lot of abuse. A company that keeps it’s support in-house usually cares about their support, so there’s a better chance for of lots of idle time than at a server farm. But they’re still usually understaffed when the shit hits the fan. If you’re working for crooks, it can get particularly stressful. If’ you’re working at one of the support farms from the preceding paragraph, at least you can think “hey, it’s just a contract, maybe I can move to another support contract and get away from this awful product”. If you’re not working for crooks or at a support farm, you can usually move up pretty easily.

Internal helpdesk is probably the cushiest position, but you usually had better want to be management in order to get promoted far. The callcenter still needs to worry about the costs and availability, but they’ll usually err on the side of having too many people handy, even if it’s an outsourced provider**. Because if everyone’s waiting on hold, work’s not getting done. Internal helpdesk is usually way more strict than either of the above in what you can do with your computer and spare time. But, that will still depend on the company, and it often pays better than other frontline support jobs.
I’ve been doing some sort of tech support for nearly 20 years now. Even though I’m an “admin”, I’m still supporting someone. At my current job, I’m the whole shebang. I’m the only person answering the phone for most of my shift. At one point, if you called during my shift, your support tech was the CTO of the company***. Since then, they’ve gotten a real CTO, but even he answers support tickets occasionally. These days, I’m just development/admin/support, and not an officer. Thank god. When I was CTO, I’d check out of most meetings after half an hour saying “gonna go work tickets”. Weekly officer’s meetings are far worse than any support job.

Seriously, I’d rather listen to anyone yell at my alter-ego (I’m not using my real name on the phone, then they’ll know who they’re talking to!) about whatever service or product than listen to an argument over our proposed marketing strategy and why we can’t afford it.

  • And in the end, the best (and even some of the worst) companies ban customers that are repeatedly abusive from calling support. It’s pretty enjoyable hanging up on those fools.

** Seriously, my brother works at an outsourced internal helpdesk, and he’s been paid to browse the internet on his phone for an entire shift just in case the phone system comes up.

*** Otherwise known as the admin who didn’t bother getting another job, and decided he’d just go down with the ship. Come to find out, it didn’t quite sink.

10

And I missed the edit window, but the reason I was motivated to post in the first place was:

Internal helpdesk is the least stressful of these by fucking far. If you work for the same company, they’re you’re co-workers. Abusing co-workers is usually frowned upon. Even if you’re outsourced, they’re far less likely to treat you like dirt. People are still angry and stupid when things don’t work and they don’t understand why, but they’re usually not in “bitch at the peons” mode.

11

I have a little thing I’ve told many bosses over the years. It mostly falls on deaf ears, especially at Help Desks where the bosses are generally fixated on numbers and complaints and turnover is expected to be high.

People are only paid to take so much shit. The higher the pay, the more people are generally (though not always) prepared to put up with. People manning Help Desks put up with a LOT of shit, unfortunately from both directions. Managers seldom defend their people and often demand the physically impossible. Hell, they demand things of you that they themselves would be unable to do, are unable to coach you on how to do, and are unwilling to accept anything less than their tiny minded vision of perfection.

Pretty much told the Director at the call center I worked at; Turnover would be lower if either the pay was $1 higher, or you were less abusive.

And just wait for someone who thinks they’re too important for you to blame you for not being able to fix a really really motherfucking STUPID thing they did, that they absolutely WILL NOT accept responsibility for.

12

Yeah. I have a customer who threatens to leave our service if we don’t fix his virtual machine’s problem with running out of memory. I just force reboot it and remind him that he has 100+ vulnerable WordPress installations on the server that I have watched being used to attack other sites through a packet capture, that he has expressly refused to remedy.

Please fucking leave, so I don’t have to go through the process of terminating you due to your violations of our AUP, or listen to you blame me for a problem that has already been thoroughly explained to you.

Ugh, I’m thinking about work at home. :smiley:

13

I did some help desk work once upon a time.

90% of your issues will be with 10% of the users. They simply don’t understand how the technology they are required to use works well enough to use it, and some of them will take out their frustrations on you.

Most of the time, things will be fairly slow and boring. Every once in a while, something will disrupt work for lots of people, and all focus will be on you. No one ever praises IT when things work well. Everyone complains when they don’t.

People much higher up will ask you to do actually impossible things. Do your best to help them and don’t try to explain to them too much why it’s not possible.

If your direct manager asks you to do actually impossible things, start looking for a new job immediately. It is not possible to operate successfully if the person leading the IT staff doesn’t understand how technology works.

14

Here’s the thing, you mention your alternative is software development.

Would you rather make $90K at a job with growth potential, or $30K at a dead-end job?

The real hard part will be your “in six months I’ll do something else”. Even if you don’t get in a rut and look around in 3 years and wonder why you’re still there, if you do look for something in development, you’re going to have to answer a lot of question about why you took a helpdesk job. If you were doing QA or PM or something, you’d still get that question but you could get past it. I think you’ll have a hell of a time convincing some manager you took helpdesk because you liked people instead of taking it because you were desperate for cash and it was the only place hiring.

15

I’ve been doing it for 18 years. But that’s in a college environment, which is different from business. For one, there is no pressure to close tickets or end calls as soon as possible.

Never had to deal with customer abuse, and I do get plenty of appreciation. It’s not exhausting, though there some pressure when there’s a classroom issue (which has to be fixed immediately).

I’m making decent money at it at this point – more than enough to live comfortably and set money aside for retirement.

16

Others have talked about the job. I want to talk about the parts I excerpted above.

If the job is “suspiciously well paid” there’s some chance you don’t actually understand how taxes, benefits, and cost of living are in this new country you’re talking about moving to.

For several years I did tech hiring in a low-cost-of-living part of the US. We could not recruit people from higher cost areas even though relative to the local cost of living we were paying 10% more than they were getting. They could not see beyond the fact they were getting more money!!!1! at their current job in a big city such as Chicago.

If you find what looks like an overpaid position you may be seeing the opposite effect. It’s actually an underpaid position in a very expensive location.

Note also that even living in what folks think of as second or third tier countries can still be stupid expensive in some cases. e.g. China is cheap; Shanghai is not far from Tokyo in having insanely high costs-of-living. You can rent an apartment & eat in restaurants in Guatemala City, Guatemala or San Jose, Costa Rica very cheaply by US standards. But cars, gasoline, and imported electronics cost double to 3x what they do in the US.

17

I actually like help desk work but it gets very repetitive. The first time you solve a problem it’s very satisfying, the 20th time you’re starting to realize that the job is mostly about writing emails and tracking tickets, and the 200th time you just want to shoot yourself. Especially coming from a developer position where you’re probably used to troubleshooting being at least somewhat gratifying, it’s going to be tough.