Slashdot Mirror
What Do Geek Squad Technicians Actually Do?
Zenitram asks: "I am a lead technician at a company that repairs computers for various vendors. Many of our systems are from Best Buy's Geek Squad. Based on the systems Geek Squad sends us, it makes me wonder what, if anything, do they actually do? We get systems that have issues that we simply shouldn't have to work on, like: installing device drivers, OS reloads, and reseting CRUs (Customer Removable Units). Additionally, we get systems that are misdiagnosed such as: bad hard drive when a system has faulty RAM; no POST when it simply won't boot into Windows; or no boot when it won't power on at all. So, what is the scope of technical repair that Geek Squad techs do?"
You know somebody isn't a repair tech if they're wearing a tie.
When I worked professionally as a repair tech, I wore a tie for exactly one day. They dangle, and get stuck to the pins on the back of a PCB like velcro. Work on one machine without being careful about your tie, and it's ruined with dozens of pulls. If you're lucky, you didn't ruin whatever it is you were working on.
One thing I always wondered about. Since Macs are so easy to use, why does it require a "genius" to fix one?
The problem with "the Geek Squad" and any other computer service (including CompUSA sales for example) is that the pay is so shitty that if an individual actually knows something about computers they won't be working there.
I remember one incident where a customer had brought a network card to the support desk at CompUSA and asked "Does this card support Linux?". The tech answered "Yes, it has Windows NT drivers. Windows NT is like Linux so it will work." The mindboggled stare of the obviously more savvy customer was priceless.
Geek Squad has a great model. People pay them to fix their computers, they break it worse and wipe out the data. Then the people don't have to blame themselves for the data loss, they can blame Geek Squad.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Well, my car is easy to use, but I wouldn't want to fix it myself. I'll leave car repair to the car geeks, and most people should leave computer repair to the computer geeks.
Who cares? I, as a consumer, care. If I take my computer to Geek Squad (I wouldn't, but speaking hypothetically) I don't want to be paying $150 just so they can take it to someone else whom they pay $75 to fix the problem. I'd rather take my computer straight to the guy who only charges $75.
/., I'd care because I could, theoretically, market directly to Geek Squad's customers and raise my prices, but only to a level where my company would be undercutting Geek Squad.
Moreover, if I were the guy who submitted the ask
That's just the first two reasons I can think of. I'm sure I could think of more.
my pet machine
my question is what the 'repair' centers do. i had to send a laptop out to have the power jack replaced. laptop came back with scratches and superglue and a 'new DVD drive that didnt work and was covered in glue (my previous drive worked). i then sent it out to have a fan replaced. i used geek squad again because they said thye would replace the DVD with one that works and wasnt covered in glue. computer came back with new drive, scratches and note that says 'unit overheats and shuts down after two minutes. needs fan.' (that took 2 weeks) i sent it back out to have the fan replaced (again). laptop came back after another two weeks with more scratches and missing rubber feet. fan works.
during this time i wrote a few letters. it only took 2.5 months to get back my working, yet cosmetically damaged, laptop back. the only good thing is that all 'repairs' were free, a stack of DVD-R's and a 200$ refund on my only big purchase at best buy.
apparantly geek squad is building their own repair center.
lastly the guy there stated that when it comes to notebooks, geek squad is a glorified shipping center. they also just write down the symptoms that the customer tells them. so the customer could be wrong
always mosh clockwise
I really depends on the store and it's staff. There are some that are filled with very bright and knowledgable people. Then there are some filled with idiots. I think it depends a lot on the IT industry in your area. If your area has a booming IT trade there are less of the smart, just out of college, but smart people to work a low rung job like Geek Squad. However, if you work in an IT deadzone, what you will find a lot of times in those Geek Squads is very talented *geeks* who are working there as their first IT job because there aren't that many opportunites for IT in their area. Just my 2 cents --Former GeekSquad'er
In fact, I bet I could pick some random card off the shelf, walk up to Linus Torvalds himself, and ask "does this work with Windows?" and he wouldn't know, and would probably blow me off with the same sort of answer.
And either way, that comparison would be a complete non-sequitor, as Linus doesn't purport to sell hardware. There was a time when minimal knowledge of the product you were selling was a good thing.
There is nothing with Geek Squad, in the same way there is nothing wrong with Taco Bell. Both provide a low quality product for a low cost. If you want excellent service, you have to pay a premium... just like if you want excellent food, you have to pay a premium (or learn how to cook). For many cheap computer systems, paying a premium for a highly skilled technician just doesn't make a lot of sense... especially when, in many cases, the problem can be solved by any marginally computer literate person.
Now, there are some people who might say that Geek Squad is overpriced. I don't know what the going rate for tech support is, but it seems to me that Geek Squad is far from a monopoly on tech support, and that people are either happy with the service, or prefer the one-stop Best Buy concept than to open a phone book and look for a place themselves.
The quizzical look I got back when I asked them for a copy of their price list (so I could then go cut their prices in half for my own repair services) was priceless. Apparently "comparison shopping" doesn't ring a bell with them, even with the Circuit City half a block down the street.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Yes, but probably not for the same reasons. I wear my geek badge with pride. It's my website and my license plates... What offends me is that these folks, from the sounds of it (I have no personal experience), haven't earned the badge. To me, it's a bit like someone calling themselves a doctor when they haven't been to medical school (or even have a Ph.D. of any sort).
Nothing, 'cause you keep backups.
But there aren't many industries that are completely disintermediated, with absolutely no middlemen between the ultimate producer and the ultimate consumer. True, when too many layers exist, or when a particular layer takes too much of the value chain, opportunities arise for newer, more efficient business models (disintermediation or other forms of reorganization).
Yes, theoretically, you could market directly to Geek Squad's customers. Got ad budget? There's a big value in successful brand strategy, and Geek Squad's got it right now in this niche. For every genius who knows the guy who only charges $75, there are a dozen "idiots" who know guys who charge $300 for the same "service" and don't know any better. It's not a commodity business, by any means, so it's not surprising that prices (and quality) vary more for this than for 5-pound bags of refined sugar.
Whether or not it's good or bad at repair, Geek Squad is successful because it
- lowers consumer search costs
- provides a (perceived) uniformity of quality, much like McDonald's
- at (perceived) reasonable/low prices
Almost nobody thinks McDonald's burgers are the best in the world, or anything close. Likewise, most of us know a "better" place even for cheap, fast food. But most of us eat at McDonald's at least on occasion for one of the above reasons.You want a two-year warranty or fries with that new hard drive?
Nonsense, I say. Worse still - blasphemy! To place the nerds above the geeks is an offense of the worst kind.
There *is* a clear distinction and a value hierarchy among geeks, nerds, and dweebs, but you've got it all wrong.
What follows, I claim, is the one true classification of geekdom. It has stood up to rigorous peer review (loud arguments amongst drunken physics students) for years, and I stand by it.
A dweeb is someone without social skills who either doesn't recognize or is unable to accept that they are unusual. They constantly *try* to fit in, with disastrous results, and dedicate a significant portion of their daily lives to obsessing over how to pass as normal.
A nerd is someone without social skills or popular interests who recognizes that he or she is unlike most people and feels no shame in it.
A geek is a nerd with technical skills and passionate interests; in particular one who has a myopic dedication to a particular specialty. (This is the subspecies *true geek,* distinct from but related to the *common geek,* or nerd who is generally technically savvy and useful to have around.)
To summarize, the dweeb is the guy wearing a slightly out of fashion hipster shirt who generally creates embarrassing silences at parties by saying awkward things about pop stars or sports teams.
The nerd is the guy who skips the party in order to achieve moderately high scores on a popular video game while eating unheated canned peas with a spoon and listening to recordings of experimental music.
The geek is the guy who skips the party in order to code a popular video game, figure out the angle of repose one might expect for a pile of canned peas, or compose and record some experimental music.
On the college campus, geeks make up virtually the entire population of physics and math majors (as well as a majority in classics, many of the less trendy engineering sub-disciplines, linguistics, physical anthropology, and some of the more obscure languages.)
The nerds are the guys who drop out of school after one semester but stay in a college town working in a bookstore, where they get great discounts on whatever genre books they happen to like and talk to their geek friends about writing their own books yet never seem to actually finish any of them.
The dweebs largely end up in engineering or the quantitative business disciplines, in the hopes that they can earn enough money to buy the respect of powerful and attractive people. Those in engineering have a tough time of it, as they are publicly ignored by the normals whom they so admire while simultaneously earning the scorn and contempt of the geeks in their departments. Those in business do rather well, since they have a good chance at fooling their colleagues into thinking that they are geeks. (Normals may not invite geeks to parties, but they do like to hire them.)
You applied, never got any response, and you automatically assume it was because you're over qualified? Christ, man, it's a good thing they didn't call you in for an interview, because I don't think you could have fit your ego through the door.
Maybe it was because you were over qualified. Or, more likely, it was because they already had enough interviewable candidates lined up so they dropped your resume in the round file. Or they posted the job and then hired someone based on a current employee's recommendation. Or one of their employees knew you and mentioned that you smell bad, so they decided not to call you. Or the stack of resumes accidentally got destroyed in a freak blimp accident.
Saying a company never called you becase you were over qualified might make you feel better about yourself, but it's almost never the actual reason they never called you.
You hit the nail on the head. That's exactly the point of Geek Squad and similar repair/upgrade services. It's all too easy for slashdotters to pile on Geek Squad, since they don't do much that's very difficult (and I doubt they pay enough to to attract top-notch techs anyway, so they have to send things out a lot, duh). But the typical home or business computer user is NOT a geek.
Yes, there are lots of geeks of varying degrees, but not everyone wants to know how to par tition a hard drive, install device drivers or diagnose problems that turn out to be merely software related. My mom wants Word and Photoshop to work, and that's it. She doesn't care about overclocking for 7% better performance in a game, maximizing her server's reliability or learning Linux inside and out. She still INSISTS of using Netscape, for Pete's sake. Looke at how many people who can afford broadband still use dialup. People like them are plenty willing to pay for someone else to worry about their problems, or else wait patiently for me to have a chance to check it out. Or they buy Macs.
I'm not sure why so many tech-savy folks can't understand that they are special (although they often like to point out that they are), or that not everyone wants to be a computer expert. I like driving my neat little car around town, but I'll be damned if I'm going to freeze my butt off if it needs brakes in the winter. Bodywork? Hah! Simple and labor-intensive, but not thanks. I'm not mechanically inept, but I have a job and like to have dirty work done for me sometimes. And how is this news or "stuff that matters?"
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
That doesn't sound like a Windows problem, that sounds like an Adobe problem, or possibly a driver problem... Or possibly a Windows problem, but that wouldn't be my first assumption.
Blame where blame's due; Windows has its flaws, Office has its flaws, Microsoft has its flaws. But when comments like this are made, I envision one of two things:
If we use anecdotes as a metric to guage product quality, Windows is the most amazing OS ever. My seven machines at home that I use for audio/video/image editing, 3D modeling, gaming, development, and lab machines never crash... ever. My 1000+ user environments that I architect using Microsoft solutions almost never have an issue, and even less rarely an issue that is caused directly by an MS product. OTOH, my Linux box has never had all its hardware working concurrently, it crapped out when I tried to recompile my kernel, and I can't configure it the way I want. Clearly this means Linux is the paperweight, and Windows is, like, deus ex machina, right? No; it simply means that Windows is the right platform for my needs, and I know enough about it to make it work for me. And that I'm a clueless Linux n00b.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
Can we ban the use of Architect as a verb in IT? Those people have worked very hard and get paid very little in comparison to us. The least we can do is not steal their title and use it as a verb. Along those same lines, Architect and Engineer are registered and licensed professions. Let's not steal their titles unless you think you want to be licensed and have to work years as an intern before you even get to take the test.
You don't ever Chef something, you'd cook it. The same with an Architect, you would design something.
The two fields are not all that different. There are just as many people involved with auto repair who shouldn't be as there are "geeks" involved with computer repair who shouldn't be.
Case in point: my girlfriends father spent over $800 trying to fix a hesitation problem in their old car, before he gave it to my girlfriend. Coils replaced, wires, you name it, they did it. Three or four "techs" looked at it over the course of several months and never did solve it.
They dropped the car off at our house, I took it for a drive and saw the coolant needle drop like a brick as the car hesitated. Pulled over, had her hop in the drivers seat and tell me when it dropped again. Wiggled the wire going into the coolant sensor. *bam* dropped like a rock, and the engine hesitated.
Duh. Engines aren't that complicated these days. Anyone claiming to be an automotive technician should've known instantly what the problem was. $2 for a replacement connector, five minutes of soldering and heat shrinking and the car was fixed.
Cars are easy to use and easy to fix if you know a few basics. I don't trust the average dimwit in the "industry" to touch my cars and I don't trust them to touch my computers.
Both are good fields for everyone to know enough about to know when they're dealing with a moron, or worse are being lied to.
I'll second that.
I've spoken to a few around here when purchasing some hardware at best buy and beyond the absolute minimum basics, they know nothing.
I'll give my respect to the ONE member I spoke to who admitted knowing nothing, but promised to do some research if I needed a service call (I didn't...I can do that on my own...I was just asking a question) but the rest, it was a amazing the bull they'd spew (one of them seemed quite fond of the BOFH, not realizing I knew about it).
The problems the OP describes with systems he received do not surprise me one bit. However, I don't think this kind of service is really marketted for businesses is it? I mean, I always thought it was geared towards the ULTRA newbie who would have problem plugging in a usb mouse and such. I mean my impression is that they are no better or worse than any large chain minimum wage tech support peons... rebranded with a "cool" new image and such.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
I don't know much about cars, but when I take mine in for service, I'd like the person who works on it to be an expert mechanic.
Likewise, if a relative of mine takes their PC to Geek Squad, it would be nice if the guy who looks at it knows how to diagnose simple driver problems or hardware failures.
That's one thing I like about the so-called "genius bars" in the Apple retail stores. They are not perfect and have a lot of the same problems as any other support center, (and their wait times are sometimes maddening), but since that particular support center is owned by the vendor, and the presige of the entire fucking company is on the line every time they help somebody, there's tremendous corporate pressure for those people to know what the hell they are doing and to act like professionals.
I know several people who now refuse to buy any computer other than Macs, not because they like the OS so much or because they think the hardware is anything special, but simply because they know that if there's a problem, they can get help which is actually, you know, helpful. For a non-techie, this is far beyond worth the mark-up on Apple's computers.
Swerving back on to the topic at hand, The Geek Squad is really not much worse than a lot of other tier-1 PC support centers out there. They just happen to be the most visible. The support industry is rife with people who don't even know what defrag does, let alone when it would be useful to use it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
On another occasion I heard a Geek Squad guy tell an elderly couple that hyperthreading was "like having 2 processors in 1." I nearly flipped my lid, but that's a different story for a different day.
Have YOU ever tried explaining something remotely technical to an elderly couple? I don't blame that guy for giving a half-assed answer. It would be easier than spending an hour explaining a concept that the old geezers would still not understand or even remember the next day. Besides, as far as Windows is concerned, hyperthreading IS like having 2 processors in 1 (even though I'm sure everyone here understands the real way in which it works).
Considering a) the audience and b) the fact that HT "allows a Hyper-Threading equipped processor to pretend to be two "logical" processors to the host operating system" (per Wikipedia), I fail to see why this oversimplificaton was egregious to the point of lid-flipping.
In my opinion, this sounds like nothing more malicious than adapting the message to the audience.
On the other hand, replacing a new battery to stop a buzzing heatsink does show inexperience, ineptitude, and incompetence.
It's interesting.. I was on a business trip and realized I needed a simple USB cable. Best Buy was right by the hotel, so against my better judgement I went in. The ONLY USB cables they had were of the "monster" style with massive braided sheilds, etc. and the LEAST expensive cable was $39 for a standard 6' cable!!! WTF? The 12 year old sales boy (he looked 12 anyway) claimed that that was all they carried. I made a comment that only an idiot would pay that much for a simple USB cable and walked out.
Lucky for me, there was a Walmart (which I also detest) next to the BB which had an APC brand cable for $7.
Frankly, there is no reason to ever patronize Best(Bad)Buy. Ever.
Wow, does nobody understand his point? He's not a windows fanboy, he openly admits he doesn't know Linux well enough to use it properly. His point is, for those who either won't read the whole post or simply cannot comprehend, that it is just as wrong for him to BLAME Linux for his lack of knowledge as it is for some that BLAME Windows for their lack of knowledge. He's not REALLY saying Windows is better than Linux (nor is he saying Linux is better than Windows). He was just making a (valid) point.
"Have YOU ever tried explaining something remotely technical to an elderly couple?"
Yes, yes I have. And people don't give the "Old Geezers" much credit. After all, they are the generation that built society and technology to the level where we got it. How did the 'Old Geezers' do that? Dumb Luck?
Sheesh. If there is anything wrong with society today, it's assuming someone with 5X the life experience you have is irrelevant because of a few wrinkles.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
The key factor that most of the PE's are arguing about is that once granted the designation, Professional Engineer, they bear the sole responsibility for the accuracy and correctness of the decisions behind everything they sign off on designing or approving. Meaning that if it breaks and kills some one after completion, they are responsible. When software designers are signed up for that, then they can call themselves engineers.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.