As a once support tech I can tell you that a lot of companies hire people right off the street, give them a week crash course in computers and then throw them to the phones where the users sometimes know more than the tech. I can also tell you that there are smug, arrogant techs who can’t take advice and pretty much don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.
My beef is the really idiot things that users do. Not writing down error messages or even partially remembering them has to be at the top of the list. Next has to be not reading the error messages. I don’t even know how many people used to call me because they were trying to log onto the network and couldn’t because their caps lock was on (even though it clearly states in the error message to make sure your caps lock isn’t on. I mean really, what do they have to do? Put little flashing lights around the words?) and call up ranting about someone changing their password on them. Next on the list are those people who refuse to use the help feature of programs. You want to know how to insert a table into MS Word? Well really it doesn’t get any simpler, you click insert, then you click table. But do you think they could be troubled to use the help feature to find a basic command? NO! They call up the IT dept and detract time from solving larger problems to stop and deal with their idiot questions. And come on people, a monitor is not a computer.
And to set the record straight, a lawyer or a doctor is no more important to the overall business that a good IT person. I absolutely agree with you that your IT is shitty if they are playing games when work needs to be done. But to think that we are responsible for every computer problem or that we can prevent every computer problem is naive. Our job is to be able to prevent where we can, then to fix in a timely, effective manner. A lot of people in companies will treat you like your no better than the person who empties their trash cans, but the reality is we are often people with an extensive amount of knowledge in our area and often have degrees in our field. We are professionals and should be treated as such.
I’m a full time geek, an analyst for an IT consultancy. I spend an awful lot of time supporting clients after role outs of new software or integration projects, and appreciate just how hard IT support can be…
…but even so I’m still stunned by just how unhelpful some IT staff can be. When I’m working with a client company’s IT departments I can just about understand it - they often view our involvement as someone intruding on their territory. But I’ve had smug “you don’t understand this problem and I’m too busy too explain it” attitude from our own IT department. Sorry, but I’ve got to agree with Msmith and say a lot of IT departments seem more concerned with protecting their turf and their budgets than actually doing the job they’re paid for.
Well, I’m not sure you can really go this far. I’m not arguing that IT isn’t important or that it doesn’t help the bottom line. But a medical practice without doctors is a whole lot less useful than a medical practice without IT professionals.
One of the problems with this type of threads is that people tend to stake out extreme positions. IT professionals help make medical practices and law firms more profitable. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be hired. But the reason medical practices and law firms hire IT professionals is so that doctors and lawyers don’t have to deal with IT stuff. I really don’t see how resenting users is useful in IT.
I work with IT people who have no idea that the company engineers, manufacters and sells a product - they apparently think we create word documents and powerpoint presentations.
I’ve worked with IT people who think their budget is a means to new toys. The “enthusiaists.”
But msmith, I think your problem is with IT or corporate management, not the techs. Either IT management needs to motivate their techs - if they are indeed playing Doom - (in the current job market, this shouldn’t be hard), or they need more techs. (or maybe they need the same techs with some customer service skills). I can’t tell you how many big companies I’ve worked for where IT techs work their butts off, IT management knows service sucks because there are always twenty people ahead of you in the service queue, but corporate management wants to keep IT costs down. So IT can’t provide good service, customers are pissed at IT, but the real problem is corporate management, who wants great service, but doesn’t want to pay a dime for it.
Sure, it’s Battlefield 1942 and Neverwinter Nights most of the time; but every once in a while, reaching back for that old-school flava brings back memories and makes you appreciate how far things have come. Why else would emulators be so popular?
And the voice acting in Duke Nukem 3D still has no equal.
A wise man I knew when younger gave me this piece of advice:
“Never work for a company that doesn’t do what you do”. This means that if you’re a lawyer, work for a law firm. If you are an architect, work for an architect company. If you are an IT person, work for an IT company.
You see, if you don’t ‘do’ what the company ‘does’ then you are not be considered essential to the company and will be considered support. Promotions and raises will be limited.
In addition, when times get tough, you will be considered more expendable and will get layed off and salary cut more often. In my company, anyone not involved in the ‘main product line’ has suffered layoffs and salary cuts. It hasn’t happened to me yet, though it may be coming but IT has been very hard hit.
But if it was 30 above because the a/c was broken and you told him that the entire city’s power grid was offline, then he would give you attitude.
I am a professional geek as well, I develop and maintain scheduling software for the justice department in my neck of the woods. Our IT tech support work was outsourced to a big company and we have had nothing but headaches with the incompetent weasels there.
However, I do have users of my own applications and there are days where I just want to scream. For instance, when one report is not displaying a scheduled hearing (because the user-defined filters are, properly, I might add, not showing the hearing) don’t tell me that the hearing is not being scheduled at all. Take more than .0002 seconds before you panic and look at the hearing. You will see that it is there, and then can determine the true issue you need to deal with…
I know that this may sound petty, but it didn’t happen once, or even twice…
This may surprise you but there were doctors, lawyers, and accountants before computers.
Do not give me attitude - I actually know a little bit about computers (at least as much as an average help desk guy). I can’t imagine how they act towards some 40 yr old woman in marketing who doesn’t know anything about the PC.
Fix the problem - You don’t get points for trying and I can’t work with a half installed Viseo program. Either fix it or find someone who can.
Act like a professional - This is a place of business, not yo mamas basement.
Act like you are trying to work as quickly as possible - That laptop you plan to fix “when you get around to it” may have a sales proposal that needs to go out the door now.
Don’t tell me “it’s not your job” - Your “job” is to do whatever it takes to keep the company profitable. If I ask you to burn a CD because you have the only CD burner in the office its because it’s probably going to a client. It’s not because I want to copy some mp3s.
Yeah…it would be nice if i could hand pick my clients. But I can’t. And I can’t treat them like idiots either or I get fired.
No…I will set the record straight for you. A company is about making money. That’s it. The most important people in the company are the people who bring in the money. In a consulting firm, its the consultants. In a law firm, its the lawyers who bill the clients. In a manufacturing company its a toss-up between the sales people who generate business and the R&D guys who create the new products. Those are revenue centers. Cost centers are (internal) accountants, mail room, reception, legal, operations, HR and of course IT. They are all important segments of the company, however their importance lies in their ability to support and enhance the front office people who generate the revenue. You can have the best IT support in the world but if the company isn’t making money, guess what happens.
If I tell the electrician “the power is out” it is generally understood that I don’t have electricty. The next step is to figure out if the power is out in a) the room, b) the building c) the city. By the same token, if I call you and say “I can’t connect to the Internet” your response should be to figure out if it is a problem with the users pc, your server or whatever.
You can think the users are idiots all you want. You just can’t let them know you think they are idiots.
“My Microsoft is broken”. That used to be my favorite user complaint. Thanks for reminding me that, while I may have to give $10 handjobs to survive, I no longer work in IT.
Oh, and any IT worker who plays games or fucks around instead of doing their job IS a useless sack of shit. I’ve been there, and have never denied someone help when they need it because I was busy dicking around. That’s wrong no matter what job you have.
“4) Act like you are trying to work as quickly as possible - That laptop you plan to fix “when you get around to it” may have a sales proposal that needs to go out the door now.”
Your laptop ranks pretty low on the scale of things to fix when there is stuff like servers to keep running and backups to do. I hope thats what they meant.
“5) Don’t tell me “it’s not your job” - Your “job” is to do whatever it takes to keep the company profitable. If I ask you to burn a CD because you have the only CD burner in the office its because it’s probably going to a client. It’s not because I want to copy some mp3s.”
Damn right it’s not the IT persons job, if it’s outside their job description, they don’t get paid for it, they shouldn’t do it. In the case of burning a cd of non-copyright data to give to a client, that shouldn’t be a problem, it takes 5mins. Until 50 people a day come in and want a cd burned, at 5mins a shot, right then it isn’t their job. Nothing is more annoying than someone telling you what your job is, and assuming THEY are more important than the other 50 tasks on your plate.
Yes, a company is about making money, and guess what? You won’t make a fucking cent without a computer nowdays.
“You can have the best IT support in the world but if the company isn’t making money, guess what happens.”
You can have the best lawyers in the world, and without IT, guess what happens? Neither side can work without the other, thats why its a company.
I agree with you on people being professional, its a pet peeve of mine when you talk with anyone in any career or position, and they act like they are doing you a favour by taking your money or allowing you to talk to them.
They carry on going to court? Use paper documents? Faxes? Phones? Pens? Paper? (yes, I know it’s never that simple, but the reliance isn’t as even as that quote implies!)
I’ve nothing more to add (I agree with both sides on this one) but I can’t agree that IT staff are as important to revenue generation as other non-IT staff for many industries. That’s not to say that anyone in IT support is deserving of shoddy treatment, or automatically in the wrong when any kind of dispute arises, obviously.
Lawyers have been around since before the age of computers, I don’t see how they rely so heavily on them. Most legal text are available in books, rather than soft copies, and in court they prefer to use pen and paper to take down notes.
I know this because I studied law, tried to make the change over (from paper to PC) but couldn’t do it as there was not enough resources available to justify it. And it was more awkward. In the end I only used a PC to write up my notes, that’s it!
) Don’t tell me “it’s not your job” - Your “job” is to do whatever it takes to keep the company profitable. If I ask you to burn a CD because you have the only CD burner in the office its because it’s probably going to a client. It’s not because I want to copy some mp3s.
I have a CD burner at my desk and my boss has asked us not to use it to burn data for non-department staff. I use to to support my job, not yours. I don’t necessarily agree with this philosophy, but my boss has a lot more say over whether its my job than someone else does.
And you’d be surprised how many requests for the burner are to copy non-business data. You’d be surprised how often I’ve gotten pulled from solving a problem 50 people are having to helping an exec print his kid’s school project to a color printer.
I’ve seen both sides, too. And I suggest you talk to IT managment. Either, the staff needs a swift kick in the butt, or you need to find our how important your requests actually are in the eyes of the company. If its the first - whoo hoo! we get to kick uncoorporative uncourteous tech support butt (I just did a project involving kicking said butt). If its the second, you may get a realistic view of how IT operates. (I’d be interested in what your IT management says about your issues).
(I suggest you back up the sales proposals to a floppy - at least if the laptop breaks, you aren’t dependent on IT, you can grab a co-workers laptop and keep working. One of the things that causes us to roll our eyes in IT is when you have a single copy of THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD and something happens to it and its our fault.)
(BTW, the 40 year old woman in Marketing is pulling Oracle data into a Access database via ODBC - don’t make ageist, sexist or departmentist assumptions about computer use - I’m nearing 40, female, and started in Marketing)
Let’s see you type up a 80 page document on the typewriter, mess up a word and have to start the page over again. I know courts love to have you hand in your motions writen in pen on lined paper. Clients also love to see proposals written out in pen rather than typed up cleanly. Yes, you probably can do your work without us, but you know what, we probably make your work 3 times as profitable. So how are you going to say your more critical than us?
My job isn’t to help you figure out how to change your font size. My job is to read obscure error messages, research that information, and fix problems or find creative ways around them. If people would just stop to think for a half picosecond, they could figure out these problems. Rather they waste my valuable time. And what if the business is IT related and we have a legal problem? Do I get to call up the house lawyer with every question that comes to mind? Ask them what every legal term means? Ask them legal questions about personal situations? Treat them like an idiot if they don’t know a specific law verbatim off the top of their head or are taking too long researching a legal situation? Saying we are as important as doctors may be over the top.
My point is that we are all professionals and should be treated as such. I don’t waste your time with trivial things and I don’t expect you to waste mine. If I want to know something, I try to look it up. If it proves to be too elusive or complex, then I will attempt to ask an expert in the field. The rules are the same here on the Doper board. Look first, if you don’t find, then someone will be glad to help. BUT DO YOUR OWN FUCKING HOMEWORK!
If that is the case then the IT manager needs to figure out a way to provide an IT burning process that meets the needs of the company. Simply throwing your hands in the air and saying it isn’t your problem doesn’t make it go away.
Well…technically your job is to support mine, but that’s fine. As I said, if 50 people a day are bugging you to burn CDs for legitimate work, there should be some way to meet this need.
Yes…so I would appreciate it when I bring a problem to IT, they act as if it is money coming out of their pocket instead of acting as if I am distracting them. I understand that they get a lot of idiotic calls, but I do know a little about computers. I generally don’t call about not being able to click an icon because the mouse has reached the edge of the mousepad.
Technically, my job is to support IT operations, not users (I don’t do desktop support and haven’t for years). If you work here, you are responsible for your own data. Need CDs burned, in my company you’ll need to buy a CD burner. Our desktop staff doesn’t do it (we don’t know that you aren’t breaking copywrite law and don’t want to get caught in the middle - not to mention we consistantly have a support queue 20 people deep who have issues that we do support and under budget constraints can’t hire any more people). It may be different in your company - which is why I keep suggesting you talk to IT managment - you may discover IT policy is not what you think it is.
Users are actually relatively unimportant things in the industry I’m in - I don’t work for a law office or a doctors office. I support manufacturing - which means that data movement for manufacturing is far more important than if you have your sales presentation on CD - if the data doesn’t move - you won’t have anything to sell. The machines that log in to produce our product (and create the data we are moving all over the world) and far more important than any users email - even our CEO.
Lawyers without IT support > work can be done, slowly, inefficiently, less profitably. IT support without lawyers > what work? IT support acts as the business equivalent of a ‘force multiplier’, making profits larger, costs less and communications easier, but it doesn’t create revenue in and of itself. In many industries there might be no revenue generation without IT support, but in many others it would be possible, however painfully.
Absolutely agree; there is no excuse for a lack of courtesy, respect or professionalism on either ‘side’. Mind you, the auditors I work with don’t even know the basics of what they can and can’t do (no concept at all; I know one chap who treats spreadsheets as calculators and nothing more) - they don’t have the time to make educated guesses or try to figure out the basic answers. I know that makes IT support frustrating (I’ve done a limited stint myself) but I’m not sure you can always demand that the user tries to work things out for themselves first without creating more work in the long run.