Slashdot Mirror
Tech's 10 Worst Entry-Level Jobs
Nicholas Carlson writes "These employers (Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc), and the others hiring for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs will look good on a resume someday, but for now the only good these jobs promise the world is the pleasant feeling you and I can share knowing we're not the ones stuck in them." The story is really obnoxiously laid out, requiring many many clicks to read very little actual content. Perhaps Valleywag could afford to hire another of tech's worst jobs: the web designer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
'Sysadmin work is the new "tech ghetto," we hear.'
That makes me hope that their admins go BOFH on them.
Buncha pussies. This is the worst they've got? I had a tech job once cleaning up database applications for a "Department of Family and Childrens Services"...State social workers, basically.
First, the apps were a nightmare. Kludgy vb, massive sourcecode duplication...If the guy needed new functionality he'd make an edit to his solitary library (more than a meg of code including huge chunks of hardcoded html) save it under a slightly different name, and include it in the application. Effectively the same code linked in a dozen times, but each piece very slightly different.
Second, all the data was child abuse, spousal abuse, etc. Imagine working with that data for weeks on end, wallowing in that hell, and you really had to dig in the data because there were tons of inconsistencies.
Third, the "server room" was a closet with one tiny window, and a floor air conditioner/dehumidifier that had to be emptied by hand. The only tech job I've ever had where toting a 5 gallon bucket of scummy water out of a server room was a daily job. The real icing was the location; the server closet was right off the "visitation room"...The only way into the rest of the building was to walk through a room where child abusers got to visit their abused kids. Yee haw! I could go on about the work environment, but you get the point.
Fourth, the pay. Yea. I could have made more waiting tables. No benefits, and I was a subcontractor, and the contractor was so crooked he kept trying to pay me under the table, basically so he could pocket the chunk of my check that was supposed to go to the government.
That is a shit job. Doing sales customer service for fucking Google does not compare.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
So, if it sucks so bad, why did he submit it and why did it make it to the front page?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
quality is not a stated requirement for a story to be accepted.
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
This guy has a real honest opinion, at least from a realistic standpoint of not wanting to put up with bs. I guess if you don't care about things like fixing Vista, which I would think would be more fun; it might drive you to learn linux servers better then the next guy! Nothing like a little negative reinforcement to get you motivated! I think I want to apply for all of these jobs, as they suck more then my current one. Then after I work at year at that crappy job I would really enjoy the next one. Haha
This is a no-brainer around here (literally.) First, there are no tech companies in Ohio, so tech jobs are quite scarce. Second, if you get stuck in computer operations, it's a dead end, no matter what the corporations will tell you. They give you the run around telling you that operations is a "launch pad" into other areas, but in the end, you just get pigeon-holed and never get noticed, regardless of how many programming languages and platforms you are certified in. A B.S. degree around here is, well, B.S.
Bottom line:
If you live in Ohio (or in most areas of the surrounding states), get out of IT or get out of the Midwest (or both.) Take it from someone who routinely gets laid off and knows numerous others in the same boat.
That job is so easy to automate. Even with dialout, upload, check script, etc. Man, what a bomb.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I'd have to say that's not the worst entry-level job in tech by a long shot, ever since I started working in the wonderful area of, wait a minute some guy had to restart his DSL modem and needed me to hold his hand, tech support.
Seriously, working in tech support is about as low as it gets, you're expected to have college-level skills while everyone assumes you're some high school dropout who is barely capable of reading and writing, the pay is horrible and very few people really appreciate the work you do (most of the time the first thing you hear after helping someone fix a problem is "...and how are you going to compensate me for this?").
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
$70k\year for an entry-level position? How is that a 'bad job', exactly, whatever the actual work is?
Welcome to the abandoned land
Come on in child, take my hand
Here there's no work or play
Only one bill to pay
There's just five words to say
As you go down, down, down
You're gonna burn in hell!
Dee Snider - Burn In Hell
Suddenly a no-name site with BAD content starts getting a ton of front page articles == paid slashvertisement.
Boycott. For great justice.
Uhhh... Yeah, that's pretty much how it is.
Imagine it the other way around, though; There have been many times where I have been on the phone to somebody like yourself, having already performed ALL of the troubleshooting tips you'll go through (having done them at least three times before on seperate calls), yet you still WILL NOT proceed with escalating a call until you've been through them ONE MORE TIME to make sure we've done it right.
Too damn right you get a mouth full, you insensitive clod!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Here's my take from back when I was in IT.
Developing software can be really interesting, cool, challenging, stimulating, etc... but when the project it done, they really don't need you anymore - unless you work for a software firm. Even if it's a large company with a shitload of projects, eventually they'll be done. With the current trend of buying canned software and integrating (usually done by the canned software co.) there's less opportunity for he hard core developer.
Support, DBA, and other admin type of jobs.
Ghetto indeed! There' always something to be done and some of the scripts I've seen from you admins can rival much software I've seen. And if I could do it all over again, I would be going for an admin job/career. Why? Because there's a bigger demand for them and you're more likely to have a job. I learned the hard way that it's more important to have a steady job than to be chasing after the highest rate and the coolest project. Well, maybe in the beginning I would do that, but definitely later on, I'd switch to the steady stuff. And, invest my money a bit beter - save, save, save!
Just this old fart's $0.5.
Lists of crappy jobs are a dime a dozen. By submitting a link to a site that spreads a story out between a bunch of pages, you are only encouraging them by steering ad revenue their way. Or was that your plan?
Back in the 70's I was a student operator working on a campus mainframe. One time all the other operators happened to be on vacation at the same time, so I wound up working for 19 hours straight. Most of this time was spent changing paper on a printer every 15 minutes. Halfway through the night, the printer cover stuck open, so I spent the next eight hours listening to it clack away at 110 decibels. At least it kept me awake. I got $1.95 an hour for this job.
My sympathy for somebody doing phone support for Google is therefore quite limited. Boy, what a weak article...
Have you read my blog lately?
Being a web designer rocks. For the most part I get full artistic freedom. It's also the least mind-numbing job out there and way better than staring at text all day.
Fucking gopher. Bullshit assistant nonsense wrangler. Basically they're all the same shitty job that's too poorly defined to even be replaced by a robot or some Indians.
I'm wondering if they'd be working in Seattle.
Since when is $80K an "entry level job" in this industry?
And when is being a SysAdmin an "entry level job"?
Who writes that crap?
Seriously, what a bunch of wimps. News flash to all youngsters: yes, you may dream of running your own mega-billion dollar tech company, or coding for websites from your beach house in St. Barts, or covering Hollywood celebrities in your hot-item-of-the-moment blog, but it most likely ain't gonna happen.
What's so bad about most of these jobs? Sure, they all look kind of mundane and I wouldn't want to do them for 50 years, but when did we start thinking that every job was supposed to be so fun, fun, FUN! I realize this may sound a bit like a "get of my lawn" post, but the biggest fantasy we've hoisted onto young people is making them think that work is supposed to be glamorous and the be all/end all of life.
I'm lucky enough to be in a job that I enjoy very much, but at the end of the day I realize that it's a JOB and that if for whatever reason I have to work on some projects that are a little mundane or boring it's no big deal.
If the story is so obnoxiously laid out with very little actual content, why bother even posting it here?
If I were you, I would have scripted everything and brought a cot to work with me.
Entry level DBA for google? you've got to be sh*tting me, thats a stellar job out of univ. stop whining and get back to work.
My first job was working as a C# programmer for a large Canadian freight company (Arrow Transportation), my boss had zero idea how to develop software, consequently it was basically all up in his head what he wanted to see, the program didn't follow any particular development model, and subsequently failed. What did I learn? Only work for people who do not suffer from the Peter Principle.
Ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Large parts of the network had been strung in the production area - where nightly, a gaggle of folks would hose the entire place down with hot water and caustic cleaners, all delivered at 1500 psi. Troubleshooting a busted wire or device in a non-beaconing token-ring network got to be real fun, especially when half the automated weigh-stations' operators knew maybe 5 words in English. At one point, I drilled holes in the NEMA 4x-rated junction boxes to let the water drain out faster than it got in - just to keep things from corroding as quickly.
You had to fend off (and sometimes referee) 'manager wars', where area managers would slip into the control room and try to literally steal chickens from other managers off the pneumatic shackle lines (by twiddling the priorities and weights when they thought no one was looking).
It was an interesting sysadmin slot though... one which taught me some (since forgotten) Spanish, how to weld stainless steel, how to deal with USDA inspectors who walked about with permanent anal cramps, how to remove chicken fat from a keyboard, and how to endure some brain-melting odors every time one of the pH meters at the water treatment building went down. It was the only computer job where the combination of rubber boots and a hair net were required.
I think it was something like three years after I left before I would bring myself to eat chicken again...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This is /. so we know that that's not the case. Probably #11 is something like "creating dupes for slashdot" or something similar.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
The worst job has to be the one you can't escape. You can't make nearly as much money elsewhere but you have no chance of advancement where you are.
The guy who fixes our computers has been with us for about ten years. He got the idea that he should upgrade his education. He got a BComm. It cost a lot and it was hard work. The trouble is that he has no administrative experience so our mutual employer won't promote him to anything where he can use the degree. His only option is to quit and take an entry level position elsewhere. The trouble is that he can't afford to take a cut in pay.
That has to be the worst job. Look up 'wage slave' in the dictionary and you see buddy's face.
All of these jobs are cush compared to the 7th level of hell that was my first IT job. I worked for a local school district doing "PC Tech" type work. This doesn't sound all that bad right? Wrong, the majority of my time was spent fixing problems that students purposly created. Rich little snobby bastards had nothing better to do then stick gum in floppy drives or shove pencils into power supply fans. Of course the students never had to pay for the damage they created, it came out of MY budget. And then there was the politics. I've never met a bigger group of scumbags then those who called themselves Principal. They always want the latest and greatest, but never want to fork over a dime. Additionaly for some reason it was always MY fault that the worthless software that they lobbied the Superintendent doesn't work right (of course they never consulted me on it before they began lobbying). Of course they had no problem what so ever throwing me under the bus for this. On top of all that the pay was horrid...$10 an hour. I could go on and on, but I tihnk you get the point.
That never made sense to me. Assuming what we've learned from running tech support (almost all my knowledge of this comes from /. as I've never called them), they keep notes on respective customers, like whether or not they're a douchebag idiot. How hard would it be to agree to a quick and easy ten point scale rating? That way, when a customer calls up, you can quickly see whether or not she's a senile and foul-mouthed octogenarian or a fairly bright kid who tried recommended practices first before calling in?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Yeah, see the thing is that even though I'm not just some script-monkey I still need to check certain things with the customer and I can honestly say that any customer who knows what he/she is doing shouldn't need more than a few minutes to go through all the things I need him/her to check.
If I don't check these things before sending off a ticket then the 3rd line techs send it back to me with a note to contact the customer and get the necessary info (plus a comment about always getting all relevant info)...
Can't really type now, some guy has managed to mangle the settings for his DSL modem's built-in WAP and I need to guide him through setting everything up again... Somehow he thinks it's related to his browser proxy settings... *sigh*
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
All of them. But seriously, we all have to pay our dues.
BTW, there are people working in box stores who would love to make those sort of salaries, not to mention folks in India. So stop hanging around on slashdot and get your ass back to work!
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Comment removed based on user account deletion
having also worked tech support, i would insist upon doing that as a lot of the time (60%+), the person is lying through their teeth and that one step (usually restarting the modem/computer/etc.) is what solves the problem.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Allstate Insurance, mid-90s, manually transferring policy information from their vast paper archives into an in-house database, that required a save after each entry, not just each policy, but each field. Someone decided it would be safer that way. SuperValu, late-90s, manually entering holiday candy orders from individual stores. I sat at a terminal in a dark warehouse, with a stack of faxes that were sometimes barely legible, and entered them into another in-house ordering database. The kicker was that my shift was 6PM to 2AM, and the dress code was business formal. That means it was just me and the janitor, with me in a shirt and tie doing data entry. I don't know if you want to count data entry as a tech job, but they undeniably sucked.
Did you see their one about the worst 10 places to work? One was digg because they had spray paint graffiti on the walls and beer in the fridge, or there were people sleeping at their desks etc. Their pictures for Microsoft were of a conference and not even an actual Microsoft office.
This site was so poorly laid out that I decided not to read it, BUT these people have jobs with major companies - they should probably stop complaining. I'm sure they had both the grades and the ability to work anywhere else.
Here's a list of the jobs. It's one click each to read the idiotic blurb/explanation -- it's really not worth it.
* Online sales and operations account manager, Google
* Support engineer, Washington-Seattle, Amazon.com
* Content Acquisition Intern, IODA
* Customer support specialist, Fox Interactive, MySpace division
* Database administrator (temporary), Google, contracted through WorkforceLogic
* Support professional, product: Windows, Microsoft
* Executive admin to Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore
* Analyst, user operations, Facebook
* Operations finance, analyst intern, Yahoo
* Part-time guide, Mahalo
everything in moderation
So, now, were they networked or weren't they? Because a modem connection still is a network connection. A slow one, over POTS, but still a network connection.
It's really a shame there's no -1 Pedantic mod optionThe problem is, we on the other side of the fence, routinely deal with users who CLAIM to have done the simple tasks you requested them do before you go check the PC out (Checking to ensure the machine is plugged in, restarting the machine, restarting the application etc...) to only find out that the user didn't restart the machine or bother to check their surge suppressor to see if it was turned off.
First time it happens, you roll with it...part of the job. Second time it happens, you start to get a little annoyed about the whole thing but deal with it anyways. Now fast forward to the point where you've worked at the company for nine months, and the same users keep doing the same stupid shit. You'd be sick of it too.
Luckily, I'm at the point where no one gives me lip any more.
possibly the worst tech job I've ever had. I needed the money and they promised me that "I wouldn't have to go all the way." Probably on par with MicroSoft tech support.
The quality of the job is really how you approach it.
Often Tech Support jobs are hated by college grads because they feel the work is really below them, in many ways it is. But if you put that asside and focus on making peoples lives a bit easier then the job would be less of a pain, and letting the angry insults roll off your back.
Or you can be a software developer on actually a very exciting project but you tend to focus on the mononoty and your ideas that got rejected, making working on the project just mizerable. Vs. exciting if you focus on the interesting bits and the ideas that you contributed and got approved.
It is often the mindset of the job that makes it good or bad. Yes managers and corporate culture can effect your mindset as well. And just staying happy with your job isn't really an option. But it is not always the job itself but what you make of it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There is the widespread attitude that no matter how bad graduate work is, you've got to grin and bear it. Old IT hands will tell you every time "Thats where I started, and now I'm successful rich and happy." regardless of it thats true or not. It usually isn't because conditions in the IT industry change rapidly and most of that change is negative for people entering the industry.
It is fine explaining to young people they have to work their way up, but this bottom rung is getting fucking ridiculous. McDonalds workers have been known to get more money, respect and job satisfaction than recent IT graduates. I was advised by a career centre that it I was better off claiming benefits (reasonably generous in the UK; you won't be homeless but you won't be partying either) than taking most entry level jobs.
It is fine making people work for respect, but entry-level work these days feels more like unusually vindictive hazing rather than a job. The upper echelons seem to take a delight in torturing the fresh-faced graduates, and then moan and whinge when they can't get good people with experience. Its because most of the good people fuck off and find a more rewarding career before they get experience you idiots!
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
A level 3 tech's time is much more costly to the company than a L1's or even a L2's. It's like a pyramid. Lots of L1 techs to screen out the reboot-will-fix-it-for-now callers, some L2 techs to gather the information for the L3 and possibly script monkey away the problem and avoid escalating to L3 and then just a handful of L3 techs that handle the few calls that get through to them.
Toss in draconian call metric systems, skeleton crews and call volumes that burn out your L1 and L2 techs before they start getting raises and you've got a system that favors not promoting customers up the chain if at all possible.
Another thing to remember: when you call in you are bothering the other person on the other end as well. They really don't want to talk to you. They will make you share in the suffering. If the L2 techs can find a way to keep you in L1 hell, they will. L3 does the same.
I'm amazed that we haven't had enough incidents yet to coin the phrase "going tech support". Hitler and Stalin don't have anything on the average L2 tech when it comes to malevolence and a burning desire to rid the world of all life in the cruelest, most painful ways possible.
I do technical support for cell phones and BlackBerrys. Although I try to get a feel for each person's competency and react accordingly, it does happen that a competent-sounding person has overlooked something obvious. Better safe than sorry, I say, if the basic troubleshooting is pretty quick to do. It's embarrassing to escalate something and find out that it was a no-brainer after all.
I do get callers who are in charge of setting up other people's devices, and when I hear from them multiple times, I start trusting that they know what they're doing.
One thing's for sure, though: I don't just talk like a robot through some script. I'm a human who likes helping humans.
These articles blow more chunks than a Uwe Boll "movie." PLEASE stop posting them on Slashdot. This site is supposed to be "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters." This article is neither.
If I could mod you up, I would if only for the "human cron job" comment!
The files could have been uploaded through a video terminal emulator - something like 'crosstalk' or 'kermit'. Back in the early 1980's that was considered state of the art in PC communications.
Running two such sessions (if possible) would probably overload the CPU with interrupts.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A real pedantic would have commented on the misuse of the term "baud".
That's because you really haven't called tech support.
You're really dead and in Hell.
"Now, sir, let's just check one more time, is the power switch on the back of the computer in the "ON" position?"
GOTO 10
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Lying through their teeth, or simply not understanding or communicating the same things you were? I can't think of the first reason somebody who makes the effort to call a support center would need to lie about anything. Very curious indeed.
A real pedant would take you to task on the use of "pedantic" as a noun.
Splitting up articles into tiny chunks in the new big thing for web editors these days since it increases PVs, and thus they can charge advertisers more.
You mean a real *pedant*.
You have my vote for suckiest (yet rewarding) tech job. I visited a poultry plant once and discovered that I really needed to be elsewhere, FAST.
Worst tech working conditions I can recall was mopping 6 inches of stagnant water out of a sub-floor while the Burroughs mainframe above was still powered up. I stood on the power conduit most of the time (I knew it was well grounded).
Worst working conditions overall was walking/wading/swimming through the swamps near Moody AFB GA looking for parts from an F-4 engine. Good thing I had that yellow fever shot!
Invenio via vel creo
You forgot: Is the power working in your city? In the building? In the room the computer is in.
I wish I was kidding when I say that I had calls about about computers not working at all and the fact that there was no power in the room, building, or city (had all three cases) apparently didn't cross their minds at all.
"Is the power light lit on the monitor?"
"No"
"Is the monitor's switch turned on?"
"Hold on, I'll have to get a flashlight, the power's out in the building."
*eye twitch*
But you find out your "career path" or the box HR sticks you in is Administrative. (As in Administrative Assistant or Office Manager.) Yes, you're lumped in with the secretarial force where the pay scale is minuscule. That's when you find title means nothing--it's what HR has you coded as. It's amazing how much web work is delegated to 'administrative assistants' or equivalent rather than IT.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Users would, of course, assume you were patronising them when you asked 'is the cable plugged in' (be it network, of power, or whatever) and say 'yes' despite not knowing.
So we included a standard check of 'what kind of connector is it?' in the call resolution process. Not because we think it's likely that anyone has anything other than the standard IEC connector, and RJ45 network plug, but because that basically guarantees they'll look at the back of their machine, and probably spot unplugged cables, isolator switches toggled, or just 'stolen' gang sockets.
We have had a fairly substantial number of calls end with 'oops, nevermind' at that point.
Agreed, but sometimes there are reasons to lie.
When Dell sent me a computer with a bum DVD drive (ca. 2002), I called to have them send a replacement. The tech guy wanted me to do everything short of re-installing Windows in order to "troubleshoot" -- he was obviously reading off a checklist. After about 30 minutes I said, "I already tried all that, and it didn't work." Yes, I was lying, but the problem was clear.
So they sent a tech to my house the next day to figure out the problem. He installed a new DVD drive and everything was fine. Unbelievable.
The person who has to do user studies on a urinal-based video game.
the best designers get $5k an hour.
developers: $200
In the summer of 2000, I interned at Slashdot (remember Andover.net?). They hooked me up with a room at the geek compound, lots of pizza, etc. By day, I wrote perl code.
It's a guy thing.
"Dude, this beer tastes like crap! Here, try it."
Bearded Dragon
It not really either lying or understanding. Many times the customer calling in believes that they automatically know more than you, since you're just a "script reading monkey." Once armed with this belief, they ignore everything you say and insist that their diagnosis must be correct, even when its absolutely bollocks.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
most commonly, because they're lazy or because they think the solution has nothing to do with the problem. most commonly, the no-ip-address-assigned problem (limited-or-no-connectivity error in windows) and they figure rebooting wouldn't do anything, but it fixes it 7 times out of 10 (1.9 timea is winsock screwed up (usually some nasty spyware), 1 time is bad IP acquisition settings (set for a static IP when they're on dynamic) and 0.1 times is something actually wrong with our end. (usually a new install with the jumpers run wrong).
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
One good way I've found (as a customer) to help the tech support folks assess your technical competence is to say, upon calling in, "Before we begin, here's all the troubleshooting steps that I've already done."
This way, the tech. knows not to suggest things you've already tried, and is better able to look for things that you've overlooked.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
WooHoo! Invoking Godwin's law less than 15 comments deep in the discussion!
If someone talks to a "technical support" help line, they should just shut up and do what support say, if they know it all then the why the heck did they call in the first place?
The other time my cable connection stopped working for no reason. I did several troubleshooting to make shure it was not my cable modem, wireless router or computer. After that I was certain it was something with the cable company service.
I called the help line and was guided to perform several things which I have done. I do not get angry for doing that. After all, the help desk girl* has to fill a specific check list before escalating the issue to another matter. While we checked togheter that everything was ok from my side, she made an enquiry to the cable system. At the end, the problem was indeed that they were making some work in my area.
It may be that my girlfriend used to work in a call service center (for insurance policies at Unisys), but I am never rude to the guys in the call lines. After all, if you are rude, you will only make the guy/girl have a bad day and your problem will not be more or less solved.
* with the middle-east english accent, which I usually find more pleasant to talk with as a non-native english speaker because native british help desk people get annoyed when/if I do not understand them, whereas non-native speakers are more patient and cordial.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Come on Cmdr Taco, you even pointed out that the article is nearly impossible to navigate, and most of the /. comments have shown how stupid the content is. Is it that slow of a day that you have to post stories you know are crap?
Sky TV told my Mum to turn the coax cable around that went between the wall and the sky box when she had problems a while back (it was a faulty box though, as we thought). I guess Sky's tech support ask people to do this otherwise pointless act to actually force the user to check the cable is connected OK, and as the cable will get reseated any crud causing a poor connection will probably be wiped out too.
I bet Sky get quite a few "oops, its OK now" too when they ask people to turn a wire around.).
Car analogies break down.
I have to agree. I only skimmed the jobs, but none of them looked that bad...especially for a college grad coming out of school with no experience. I looked at 2 at random, and range was from $45K - $75K. That is fantastic....I know we have to take into account inflation, but, WOW....I started at about $20K or so....but, started quickly working my way up.
I was expecting to hear that complaints on these would be working 32/7 hours....with no AC, etc. The google dba one, the largest complaint I could see was....it was a bad cubeland...and he got mistakenly put in the wrong group....OMG!! That is a complaint on a first job for $75K/yr??
Geez, in my day, I had to wake up at 10 o'clock, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison....go down the the mill and pay mill owner for permission to work...and well, you get the idea.
YOu try to tell that to the kids of today.....and they won't believe you..
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That's why I utter the words "If you work with me, I can get you off this call faster. I don't need much help, just a little info.". If they aren't complete retards purely reading from a script with absolutely no understanding of what they're saying, it usually works pretty well for me. That, and just being nice but firm.
It's amazing what being nice will get you in general, actually.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The other frustrating thing I've found is, especially with ISPs, if you call on nights and weekends, you get an outsourced L1 tech, which is even worse. Best bet is to call someone you know who works there, if possible, because the tech support pyramid, in general, won't get you where you need.
Example: We have to DHCP Release on the old router before switching to a new one (or, really, a new MAC address) -- one thing I've occasionally called in for is simply asking someone to nuke my lease. When we call the guy we know, he calls a guy he knows, and in maybe two minutes, we're back online. When we call tech support, especially on a weekend, if I'm lucky, I can explain the situation in less than five minutes and the tech is actually competent enough to understand me -- but I'll get no real help until it expires on its own, or until I can call the guy on Monday.
Maybe I'm naive, but it just surprises me that tech support has never been tried with quality over quantity.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I haven't yet RTFA, but the worst "tech job" I've ever held was as an intern in high school, constantly changing tapes in a sixty degree mainframe room that sounded like a 747 taking off, for minimum wage.
Thank God I had lunch with the VP of IT one fateful day.
Move all sig!
insist that their diagnosis must be correct...
Don't waste my time with scripts boy!
I *know* the electrons have leaked out of my computer,
and if you would just send me a fresh jar I could refill it myself.
No, a dial-up modem is not really a network connection in the ad-hoc sense that these systems were probably using. At least to me a "network" involves two (arguably three) or more identifiable and addressable nodes and a dialup connection fails on both.
There's no identification mechanism on either side (IP address, machine name, etc) of a point to point (not PPP) dialup connection you either initiate or answer and once the handshake is complete there's no further distinction between the two nodes. There's no addressing mechanism either, you just pump stuff out your serial port and the other side gets it nor not, you may never know unless you were running a specialized transfer app/protocol like Kermit or X/Y/Zmodem. In fact you can't even tell if there is "another side" sometimes you may just be sending to the bit bucket.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
While I agree with the first part of that, and I do realize you are probably being rhetorical and not necessarily commentating on every conceivable situation, I would say the typical caller you are talking about assumes that the problem is something beyond their control such as malfunctioning hardware or something upstream somewhere at the service or good provider which even if they did know it all, they would still need to call.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
He probably meant "not internally networked".
"Little is much when little you need."
You should know the pay rates on emerging countries. They do the same jobs for less than a half of a half and even with worst job conditions.
It happens a lot, actually. They think they understand what the problem is, or what it's not, and so they make it their priority to get past all the insultingly simple steps as quickly as they can.
Or maybe it's even more pathological -- they feel like you're confronting them, and they don't want to get it wrong. Either way, these are the people who try to give the "right" answer so you'll escalate them.
I speak not from personal experience, but from having read these archives -- sad not only that so much stupidity exists in the world, but that these are the archives of one woman working tech support.
On the other hand, when I first got XP on this computer, I installed it in a VM to play with it. Later, I repartitioned to make some room, and installed it on the bare metal. It saw this as a different computer. I called Microsoft to activate, and got some poor woman in India. Spent a minute or two trying to explain what "virtualization" meant, and how it was the same computer, but also different, and I had killed the VM anyway.
I finally thought to myself "fuck it", and explained that it was the same computer, and got activated.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well everyone here seems to be complaining about how bad their first job in their industry was. What about those who got an awesome job out of school? My first gig after school was great! It was the perfect platform to develop my skill set and enabled me to jump ship for a 50% bump in salary after a year+.
:)
I just thought I would chime in from the other side of the tracks. Now do not think it was purely luck though, I earned the good first job by beating out the rest of you during the interview process
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Cavalier?
"Little is much when little you need."
I loved tech support. People call in that actually need the skills I've spent my entire life acquiring. I fix those problems or direct them to where the solutions can be found. Once in a while you get a bad seed, but I would LOVE a L1 tech support job. Even at 10-15 an hour it would make me a ridiculously happy person these days. Using my skills, making people happy, fixing problems - I don't see why people hate it so much.
Actually, the fad these days is to hire Americans at L1 and offshore the L3 so that the first thing a caller doesn't get hit with is a "#$%#$ furriner takin' our 'Murrican Jobs".
Since the main reason they hired the L3 overseas was cost, the L1 may cost almost as much as the L3.
The biggest frustration I have is when a company does not seem to keep a ticket record of my previous problems and their attempts to fix it.
Once my ISP had a switch or router or some of their equipment down the street go bad to where it started dropping packets - but only at peak load.
So every time I called, by the time I had gone through level 1, level 2, and all the waiting on hold - by the time I got to level 3 (*if* I ever got there) the problem (which at this point, all I knew on my end was that I was losing packets, somehow) had stopped.
The most frustrating thing is that every time I called to continue to resolve the issue - they started me at step one again. They actually sent a tech out to my house three times to say "huh, I don't know why they sent me out here" and for some time refused to escalate me to level 3 without sending the tech out again.
If they would have just kept some record that I had already gone through all of their earlier steps, I could have talked to a level 3, explained the problem, and worked out a solution. Eventually I figured out the problem myself and called up to tell *them* what it was - their equipment, and exactly where even. I wanted to charge them a consulting fee.
I have no problem having to go through the standard "unplug/replug" rigmarole once - sometimes it's even fixed it as I forgot one step. But when I call back, let me go straight to where I left off, please!
Because the professor's time is more expensive than the money your University paid a tech support guy to do part time student work. Sometimes I hate being on the phone too. It's not a condescending thing. It's just quicker if you get your ass over here and do it rather than explain this shit to me over and over. If I am an English professor, wtf do I care about windows drivers and reinstalling them.
I have mod points, but I have to reply here. Worst jobs my ARSE. What do people expect, a corner office, pajama dress code and regular sexual favors?
My first tech job was in the backroom of a grimy computer repair shop. I was working up to four computers at once. One or two would be some home user who had covered their system in spyware and expected it to be fixed for $100. ("Fix! Fix in two hours or we lose money! Or format system and say couldn't save it!") One or two would be testing and writing up specs for some abandoned/old system the owner has kicking around so she could try to resell them. (p2/233, with 32 megs ram. price: $200. in 2003.) The rest would be warm-bodying Windows installs and updates. For $8.00 an hour. When they expected me to get all excited about a raise to $8.25, I quit.
The second, working for an "IT Consultant" company that still showed all the signs of the garage it started in crossed with the worst of Dilbert: clueless management, sales promising the world for pocket change, and techs required to travel all over the place in their own cars, using their own cell phones, without travel compensation. We were being billed out at $100/hr while being paid $10/hr. The managers kept ranting at the techs for not doing the amount of work required to keep the doors open, while the techs ranted at the managers for not assigning it, and the whole place was owned by a completely clueless martinet. I left after six months when they fired the best tech they had and announced intentions to continue operations with a mix of unpaid college interns and foreign outsourcing. ("Indians?" "... Actually, cheaper than.")
In that light, let's go over this article:
1. Online sales and operations account manager, Google
$45k - $60k a year plus google on your resume? sign me up!
2. Support engineer, Amazon.com
$80k/yr plus amazon on your resume? SEE ABOVE.
3. Content acquisition intern, IODA
Unpaid sucks, true, but there's many more unpleasant/dangerous things to do than rip CDs all day.
4. Customer support specialist, Fox Interactive, MySpace division
Customer support sucks, no matter where you do it. 33k/year is better than $16k.
5. Database administrator (temporary), Google
70k/year. See item 1.
6. Support professional, product: Windows, Microsoft
Listening to people's Windows problems for $40k a year, plus actually having access to resources that might help you fix them? Beats the shit out of spyware fixing for 16k. Plus: Microsoft on the resume.
7. Executive admin to Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore
This isn't even a tech job, this is personal assistant territory. With commensurate pay.
8. Analyst, user operations, Facebook
Support again. Decent pay again. (Well, maybe not for Palo Alto.)
9. Operations finance, analyst intern, Yahoo
Okay, this one *might* be bad. Intern, company possibly going down in flames, $12/hr.
10. Part-time guide, Mahalo
They admit this one themselves. "Why so bad? It's not, really."
Article rated (-1, Sensational)
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
Hmm...is there a network?
Physical Layer: Check
Data Link Layer: ???
Network Layer: ???
I don't know enough about how dial-up and file transfer worked back then to be able to say if layers 2 and 3 were represented.
It must take more than the ability of two systems to communicate to be considered networked. Otherwise the ability to carry this pile of punch cards from this building to that building, or to read a bunch of numbers on a screen and dictate them over the phone to someone else, would have to count as networked as well, no?
I work in-house tech support, it's 100x better than being some phonejockey dealing with the rabble. You actually get to know the users and over time can figure out which ones are the liars, which ones can be trained to help themselves, etc.
If they are the type that dealing with on the phone is a hassle you can just go for a walk and visit them in person.
And best of all, since they all know you and see you as an actual person they rarely treat you like shit and will often bring you gifts and whatnot to show their appreciation.
Tech support isn't really a shit job in this kind of a situation. It is underpaid and you do have to deal with the occasional asshole, but if you work at it a bit you can put together a smooth operation.
Damn right "how are you going to compensate me for this?" They're losing millions of dollars a minute running their global empire on a DSL connection.
Found out that douchebag was just upset he couldn't monitor his eBay auctions. Didn't make him feel like a Power Seller.
I'm young so I've only been working in IT for a few years, but since high school, I've worked for a firm who did maintence contracts for places. Auto shops are terrible places, the dust and dirt is unbelievable, and thick as tar (sometimes I wondered). We'd get these machines in, or be on site and be coated from head to toe in dirt. Then there was the network install in a new building which they were too cheap to install a raceway so every day included fiberglass insulation covering you from head to toe.
Then, about a year ago (right after graduation), I worked at a place which was a network admin/tech support nightmare, try 2 parallel networks, addressed slightly the same, one with DHCP the other with 250 STATICALLY addressed clients, DNS that barely worked, exchange 5.5 with unlimited data stores, NT4 server, and then 8-10 different models of desktops and 8-10 different models of laptops, with no imaging in place. And to make it better every user had admin rights on their computer. Inventory was maintained in a 20MB excel spreadsheet as well as a whiteboard, and their IP address list was the same way. Nothing was documented, it was terrible, plus the day I started they had no idea what to do with me (no work plan, no workstation, no computer). It was a hell for HR, they expected you to skip your lunch, take no breaks, and work till at least 5:30 every day with no extra remittance, when the hours were 8-5, with 30min unpaid lunch and 2x15min unpaid breaks. I lasted 2 weeks.
This isn't nearly as bad as some of the stuff mentioned here by others, but to me it was a personal hell, especially after some of the experiences I had throughout college with work terms.
Straight out of college I was hired as the "manager" of technical support at a small company (2 owners + 3 employees) that wrote a web based inventory/financial/point-of-sale software in ASP for furniture companies. We had a Chinese guy who did all the programming, a high turnover sales position, and the two owners (now married) also handled sales.
First of all, I was a "manager" in name only. I was the only tech support person there. I was given the title of manager so the owners could avoid paying me overtime. I worked a lot of overtime helping my boss's father, who owned a furniture store next door to our office, with the software. I was promised to be paid for all the overtime I put in but I never saw a dime. The hours were from 10 am to 7 pm. After hours the office phones were forwarded to a company cell phone which I was supposed to have with me at all times. All day I would do nothing but answer phones and have furniture store owners call screaming obscenities at me. I also had to answer the phone while I was on my lunch break. One Saturday I got a call from our hosting facility (Vericenter) informing me that the hard drive on our database server had crashed and that they didn't know when it would be back up. My weekend was ruined as I spent the next two days answering calls from hostile customers who had been told we took nightly backups and had co-location. There were supposed to be backups, but the co-location was a complete lie that my bosses would use to help sell the software to people. My bosses refused to help me deal with the customers, even though they were the ones who lied.
I had angry people calling me on New Years Eve, during Christmas, etc, only to have me tell them that our one and only programmer was on vacation and that there was nothing I could do. I was genuinely trying to help these people solve their problems, and I sympathized with them because I knew they were being lied to. But what choice did I have? I spent any free time I had looking for jobs and arranging interviews. I started studying for my A+ cert at night (which really only helped my self confidence). I ended up being overweight and stressed out. I remember calling in sick to work one day only to have my boss tell me I would just have to answer the phone from home. I became so desperate that I almost joined the Army just to get the hell out of there. I began to really hate people and just kept wishing for an opportunity to escape. I finally got my chance, and I have never been happier. The last time I communicated with anyone from that job was when I emailed the programmer to tell him the login was vulnerable to SQL injection attacks.
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
you are most correct... i'll never forget the time i found myself with a box from Bell Atlantic containing a DSL modem, filters, and a CD... of course, i only ran Linux in the house... and of course, the CD only contained Software For Satan(TM)...
in fact, it readily became apparent that the only way to establish service (get a username and password) was through some sort of Windows extensions/js stuff for Internet Exploder...
so i called Bell Atlantic and social-engineered my way past the first tier folks, and then got a good tech... i explained that i was using Linux... he understood, got a customer service (billing) rep on the line at the same time, who then gave me a username and password right over the phone - no going through any software install or Windoze browser crapola!
i was pretty stoked when i got my first ping from an xterm on my new DSL connection...
so whoever you are and wherever you are, thank you tech rep from the now-defunct Bell Atlantic DSL support line!
Have you ever asked for a support ticket? If the company isn't using some sort of system like SugarCRM which allows them to create and manage tickets, they should be.
Where I work, I'm Level 0. I'm pretty much the secretary for the tech support department ( a position that is great for destroying sanity ). Basically all I do is get a rough description of the problem the customer is having before transfering them over to Level 1.
For the most part, having a system setup to handle cases has been a great help, and not just because it lets me transfer people quicker. It lets us know what has been tried in the past, and what other techs may have done. It's also helpful when a customer has twenty tickets with the same problem, and they call up once more needing help with something they should really be able to figure out on their own.
This isn't directed at you, personally. This little mini-rant is directed at all of the people with little to no network administration education trying to setup and run a wireless ISP ( or worse, people who think they understand wireless ).
As a side note, the company I work for manufactures wireless radio equipment, AP's and CPE's and such. What bothers me ( and all the other techs ) is when someone calls in and we could fix their problem in about two minutes... if they did what we told them to do. If you're not going to listen to what tech support is trying to get you to do, don't call. Yes, sometimes we'll ask you to do things that seem stupid or inane ( ie, power cycling ), but we're doing it for the benefit of both of us. If this is a brand new problem that you're working on, does it really matter if doing something simple like that fixes it? We're not trying to demean or make you feel stupid. We are trying to help you fix your problem. That is what we are paid to do, and why you're calling us. Where I work, we don't follow or read from scripts ( although I do, because all I do is answer the call and transfer it to level 1). Basically: if you're not going to work with us to help us solve your problem, don't call. There are other people who are willing and happy to work with us to solve their problems, and we'd rather talk to them anyways.
And no, asking for a network diagram isn't a stupid thing to ask for. If you don't have your entire network sketched out somewhere, you shouldn't be running a wireless ISP. You wouldn't believe how often having someone sketch out their network makes them realize the reason they're having a problem is because they have two or three loops going.
God is dead -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead -- God
Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
If requested, sometimes tech support will tell you the ticket or incident number related to your call/incident. If I'm not real sure the problem has been fixed, I ask for the number and note it if they will give it.
When calling back on a repeat of the problem, sometimes I find giving the past incident numbers actually gets the tech to look them up. In many/most cases where this helps, it's pretty obvious to me that they could have looked the past incidents up themselves but don't bother to look at the history of tickets associated my customer id. However, when faced with me referring to specific prior tickets and asking about them, they are motivated to actually look at them.
Mostly, this just gets me moved out of L1 and L2 faster -- perhaps because L1 realizes they are facing a long call that will impact their metrics and I've given them enough supporting info to push my call up and get on to the next call.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Worst job - ever - was being a cable guy. I worked for a cable contractor company and it was the worst 15 months of my working life. The people in charge had no people skills - the hours were crap - and the customers were gratingly annoying. I installed cable modems and digital cable for a number of cable companies. I still think that this job was the tech equivalent of working at McDonalds...
Yeah, I'm currently working in-house also. Well, sorta. Front-line support for most (health and a few other departments have their own IT guys) of the provincial government.
I don't get the visiting and gifts bit, as I talk to people strewn all over the province, but it's a good work environment, largely due to the lack of having to deal with the general public.
Lots of people curse the computers (especially the hacked together VAX system justice uses) or the need for paperwork, but never at me.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The myspace job sounds kind of awesome-look through the web all day, babysit some myspacers, accept/reject a couple of things, basically be a moderator. The csr jobs are similar, 'cept they require actually dealing with customers. Okay, so the pay will barely cover food, and the job isn't challenging, but with all that free time I can do a real job on the side, or get a masters degree.
I've worked clerical at a school-that's the best of bad customers, strange questions, and ad-hoc tech repair.
open source modern art: laser taggi
Don't get me wrong, if it was an actual emergency (they're teaching a class, finals week, etc), we had "first responders" that would be there within minutes. Nor would we bother trying advanced stuff if it wasn't necessary. I'm talking the extreme basics: Everything plugged in? Rebooted? Wireless turned on? etc.
At that point they're wasting their own time by not trying my basic suggestions. They could either wait 5 minutes for a first responder to show up to reboot their computer, or they could have their computer rebooted and running before the responder would get there in the first place.
And yes, it is a condescending thing. My favorite experience: On the phone with my own program adviser and professor (they didn't know who I was), troubleshooting their wireless connection. Several times during the call he reminded me what "retards" we were at the help desk. After a few more minutes he said "he got it working", and slammed the phone.
Later that day I had to go to his class (hilariously, Wireless Technologies), where he boasted to the whole class how much he liked being a jerk when he called the help desk, and how stupid the tech on the phone was (me). I casually asked him what fixed it, and he said something to the effect of "all I had to do was hit FN+F2 to turn it on, and the retard didn't even know about it!"
I reminded him that I told him to try that at least three times on the call. It took a minute for the realization to set in...to this day I still have never seen a face more red than his was. He was not the only professor I had that very openly complained about how dumb the people at the help desk was during class.
You're sorta screwed as an ISP customer for after hours support. You mostly likely don't have any contractual quality of service agreements that give you anything higher than the lowest priorities.
The last tech support job I had was supporting the register and back office systems for a number of national franchise restaurant chains. We'd have 15-20 people on during the day and 1 (one) on at night even though some of the franchises were 24 hours and their reporting process would usually run about 0130 local time regardless of being 24 hour or not (and the reports loved to bork the system). Low priority calls (had a day to resolved) got worked on if there was nothing else to do. Medium priority had a few hours to resolve and High priority had 30 minutes to an hour. So if you're calling in after hours with nothing that can rate higher than the lowest priority it probably won't be resolved until the last minute. The lone tech or severely understaffed desk probably has their hands full with things that will cost their company money if they don't resolve the problem asap.
The lone overnight tech would also act as a "lower than level 1" tech for a number of other desks who were contractually obligated to always have a tech available. The effectively L0 tech could do nothing more than enter in tickets for the actual techs that would arrive in the morning. A site could be completely down but there wasn't anything that tech could do about it.
No one wants to pay for quality tech support. A fully staffed and trained desk is overkill for most day to day operations. The bean counters see it as waste and the customers don't want to pay for it. They didn't want to pay for their contracts in general which made it all the more entertaining at 4am on a Sunday morning when an out of contract site would go down for the count, call in, and then yell at you for not servicing them while they are out of contract while calls from paying customers are piling up in the queue.
Also, if someone I knew called me at 3am because their internet was down and they didn't want to wait like everyone else there had better be a case of Guinness sitting on my doorstep in the morning. If you're doing stuff you know you will need to call in for, wait for normal business hours and save everyone a lot of hassle.
"when you call in you are bothering the other person on the other end as well" ??? I love a system where someone's "bothered" to do their job. It's the very reason people get paid to work.
Your job can get really bad when you are past entry-level.
Obviously you've never worked in tech support.
Yes, you get paid to work. Rarely do you get paid enough to put up with the callers.
$9.50/hour is a low wage in exchange for your humanity and will to live.
Imagine it the other way around, though; There have been many times where I have been on the phone to somebody like yourself, having already performed ALL of the troubleshooting tips you'll go through (having done them at least three times before on seperate calls), yet you still WILL NOT proceed with escalating a call until you've been through them ONE MORE TIME to make sure we've done it right.
And if they don't and they escalate it 'on your word' and it turns out your network cable was loose?
Don't say it doesn't happen, because it does, with a stunningly ridiculous frequency.
I have a friend in ISP support, and one of the worst categories of customer is the so-called 'IT expert' the one that calls up and says "My internet is down, I've already done everything at this end, i restarted the modem, the PC, I modified my MTU, reinstalled TCP/IP, manually set my ip address, updated my routers bios, and it still doesn't work...
And half the time its still a bonehead fix like a loose cable.
The worst though its when it really was just a brief outage at the ISP name servers or DHCP servers, and now this dickwad has totally screwed up his system... his routers configured wrong, his tcp/ip is configured wrong, or when by reinstalling tcp/ip he's gone and mangled up his firewall software...
My all time favorite was the moron who plugged his router into the same power strip as his lamp. So every time he went into the room with the router in it to check, he turned on the lamp (and router) on his way in checked all the cables and lights, and then turned off the lamp (and router) and his way back to the room with his computer.
"Urinal Video Game tester and hardware troubleshooter"
http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/21/1456224
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I've never worked tech support for someone else, but I have worked tech support for my own company. My tech support cost was part of the initial sale so I, essentially, got paid zero dollars an hour to sit on the phone. That's also why I got out and became an engineer.
You've heard of Sneakernet, right?
Being a System Administrator for an advanced R&D company and being told not to do any work that didn't generate revenue. Yeah, that means that the president of the company told me not to fix our bad SSL keys from the recent Debian OpenSSL debacle.
...from the folks at Valleywag. What kind of entry level job (See job #7) requires 5 years experience? Does valleywag have editors? Or writers, for that matter? One thing for sure, they have *SOMEONE* who knows how to drive the ad engines with a once-per-week slashdotting. Nothing to see here, move along.
I used to work about 10 minutes from South Beach in the Port of Miami. One of the applications I supported was the Remedy application running on an NT4 machine backed by on Oracle database. The app would run for about 8 days before locking up. Remedy support blamed NT. Microsoft support blamed Remedy. So my job, every Friday, was to wait until everyone had logged off the system and then do a reboot. So while my friends were doing happy hours and watching models on South Beach, I was sitting in a cramped data center waiting for people to logout so I could reboot the system.
This was in the days before VPNs were commonplace. At the time the only remote facility was a slow Shiva dial-in that only sales execs could use.
We couldn't script or automate the shutdown because some people couldn't be pre-empted. There were also reports that had to run.
It was a crappy way to end a crappy week.
That's the problem. No matter how tech-savvy an end user is, I never assume that they've done every last thing, or even if they think they have, that they did it correctly. For that matter, I never assume that anyone who previously handled a trouble call did their jobs correctly either. I've seen really stupid stuff slip through lower tiers because they made assumptions due to laziness or an irritable end user. The only thing that makes EVERYONE feel more stupid than going through the troubleshooting step by step when the end user thinks s/he's already done all the basics is to have a technician visit them onsite and find a loose power cord, monitor cable, or similar.
Also, they can't read. And they're idiots.
I drank what? -- Socrates
is the condom analyser intern position as described by ars technica: http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2008/05/21/robo-gigolo-discloses-the-nature-of-condom-failure
"In the latest study, researchers examined condoms that had been returned by users after they failed - can you picture the unlucky intern's face?-to pinpoint the cause of failure. "
Simply restarting anything never solves the problem. It only potentially provides a crude work-around.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
I spent 5 YEARS of my life at EDS on graveyard shift 11-7 mounting round reel tapes and babysitting line printers.
You don't KNOW hell until you've had to decolate 4 part green bar paper.
I think I may have just hit into some nasty loop where because we couldn't replicate the problem by the time I actually talked to someone with knowledge, my problem got marked as "resolved," and they wouldn't open it back up as an extension of the original.
I do a little bit of "tech-support" for our group; whenever a user is having trouble accessing their account on our application, they call me. Sometimes, they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the truth, either. I spent at least 10 minutes once trying to walk a guy through logging in. I was certain the guy was just fat-fingering his password, so I had him say it out loud to me on the phone as he typed it in. He read it out perfectly, but still no luck logging in. Long story short, he was saying "abc123" out loud, which was his password (not really, just an example), but he was typing "abc1234". Completely unconsciously. Sometimes, the users think they are telling the truth, but they really aren't.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Let's take your example of a broadband internet connection.
I've already done the troubleshooting I can and know about, then call the help line. So, I should just shut up and do exactly what they tell me? Okay, they tell me to click "Start", then "Run", then enter "cmd.exe" in the box, and so on...
Except that my Linux desktop doesn't have a start button.
See, there are situations where your system isn't exactly like the situation the tech support is familiar with and could guide you through, but your system is still fully capable of working with their system. You should still be able to get an IP address via DHCP, etc. If it has worked before and now it doesn't, it's quite possible that the problem in fact is at their end. At least that isn't completely ruled out. If it indeed is so, I can't fix it on my system no matter how well I know it. I'm not asking for support with my system -- I'm asking for support with their connection.
Guess you could just bluff and claim that you're really doing what they're telling you, and simulate the execution of their instructions as far as it's possible in your case, but when they tell me to go to "Network settings" (or whatever that would be) in the control panel and click on some settings tab I've never heard of, it may be pretty hard to figure out which piece of information they're after and give them what the corresponding tool in your setup tells you.
Tech support people shouldn't be complete retards that just read a script. Neither should the customer. It's human communication and should be done like a human to a human. There will always be difficult cases, but just because you don't start acting like a scripting engine whenever you call tech support doesn't mean that you're one of those.
And trust me, even though I've never worked in tech support, I've had my small deal of people I've tried to help who haven't been very helpful at being helped.
but it's often the best that can be done when the problem isn't actually fixable, such as when it's a known problem with windows or a recovered transient glitch that windows can't recover from without a reboot.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Speaking of state of the art in PC communications, I was tasked with something like the GF poster describes - so I rolled out a custom deployment of FrontDoor with a custom node list and automated the entire thing, including pre-packaging, package validation, multiple attempts in the event of failure, unpacking and post-processing. We had two runs per night, giving a DOS based inventory system the ability to update the other store inventory lists overnight every night.
The thought of having someone do this manually every night, even at Intern wages - crazy.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
You're welcome.
I worked for Bell Atlantic DSL support, later renamed Verizon DSL support. It was the worst job I've ever had, or ever will have. I wasn't even all that upset when they fired us all to move our jobs to Canada.
And I did help a lot of Linux users, since I was one of the few people there who used it at home.
--saint
All you guys need to get laid.
Yes there are such jobs. Lots of jobs for $35K/year that require college. Some tech jobs that do not require college pay less than $10/hour.
That is what I'm seeing here in Denver.
Why didn't you automate this? Not to bright doing the same task over and over again manually. I would never hire some to stupid to figure out how to automate something so simple by your description.
I find this whole thread to be shallow and pedantic.
I started my IT carrier setting jumpers on motherboards, in an un-air conditioned warehouse in New Orleans...in the summer. A laser printer would print an order, we would pull the board from stock, set the jumpers for clock and voltage, and pass it down. A chip puller would install ram and a cpu, and a tester would test post the board. Once you "advanced" from that area, you would work assembling the pc's with the now assembled board, then an "expediter" would dupe a windows 95 pre-install to the hard drive and finish the windows setup. Shipping would pack up the pc and load it into a big UPS trailer. I did that for 3 years, and at lunch would sit in my car and study for microsoft exams, because I knew I did not want to do that forever. I made it to inside repair (repairing what got mailed back to us). The company got bought out, I got laid off (newly married and a 6 month old child) because I made the most of all the techs ($10 an hour in 1999). Got on with a local break fix IT company and made it all the way to partner. Got my BS in CIS in 2005, and I am working on my MBA right now (at night) at a top 50 (for Business) University in New Orleans. It all worked out, but THAT was a bad IT job. A little foresight can turn a bad job into a stepping stone.
Do you actually hire people? I feel sorry for those who work for you.
You're missing something. Me, I love to do tech support. I love it even more when I get a screaming customer on the other line. I don't expect many of you to believe me thought.
The difference between me and some others is that I get to control my environment -- most other tech support people don't have that luxury. I developed a good chunk of the software we supported. I wrote a good chunk of the documentation and tutorials of the software we supported. And when some irate-angry customer called, it was probably my fault or my partner's fault or god forbid it may even have been the customer's fault, but in any of these cases -- I had enough control over my environment to do something about it.
On the other hand, if you work for a company where you're insulated from the development team, insulated from the decision-makers, chances are, you'll be given a manual, or a knowledge-base, or an Access database, which has almost every field pre-defined for you. A script to say over the phone will most likely have already been pre-written for you. Your calls will certainly be recorded as well, so as to make sure you do not deviate any way from your assigned script. And chances are, any good idea you have about triaging calls will probably be rejected/over-ridden by your boss who most likely doesn't even have the authority himself to do any changes to the procedures.
I've been on the other side too, one of my first contract programming job was to write software for sales people inside a huge corporation. The Sales director didn't want me talking to any of the future users (the sales people) of my application. As time went on, it became clearer every day that the software I wrote was a means to control his sales people, not really to help them in any way. In any case, I didn't let this bother me, I actually loved that particular, I was paid more than enough not to question my client, the sales people were paid enough not to question their boss, and I'm sure they were probably smart enough to eventually work around the software I had written for them.
I totally agree with you. The way questions are asked can be the difference between an automatic "yes" or "no" from the caller and an actual investigation from his/her side. This works better with noobs of course, since they don't really know what the answer should be, so they have to do some work to provide one.
...) ...)
Q: Is the cable plugged in? A: Yes (of course)
vs
Q: Where is the blue/yellow cable going to/coming from? A: Let's see...
Q: Have you rebooted the computer/modem? A: Yes (or course)
vs
Q: What have you tried in order to resolve the problem before calling? A: Nothing, I just assumed it was a problem with "the system"
Q: Do you see "control panel" on your start menu? A: No
vs
Q: What items do you see in your start menu? A: My Computer, My..., Control Panel, ah, there it is!
Of course you have to adapt the questioning method to the actual caller, just like you have to adapt the way you give instructions:
noob: right/left-click level instructions
some exposure: open/close level instructions (open , type this,
knows the basics: end result level instructions (what is your IP/MAC?,
higher: probably already has all the information you will need at hand
my go-to with that was always "unplug it from the one side, now plug it back in, now unplug it from the computer, and plug it back in" that allowed them to save face if it really was a loose/unplugged cable. Although that was absolutely no use when I ran up against the girl who was using a phone cord to plug into her RJ45 jack. Not even one of the straight ones, one of the nice curly ones you plug into the handdset...
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer
I have worked in IT 28 years. I don't tell new people to "suck it up" I advise them to get out of IT. IMO: it is stupid to be in a so-called "career field" where you compete with $5 an hour off-shore labor. The specializations that are not be directly affected are being indirectly affected - i.e. tons of experienced IT workers trying to get started in infosec.
I think I would rather gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon and feed them to a pack of wild dogs rather than being a product support specialist for Windows Vista,...
See, you make my point exactly. What you are calling a lie, is not a lie. He is telling you something that is factually incorrect, making your job harder to accomplish. A misunderstanding, regardless of who's not understanding correctly is not a lie. I get a little suspicious when people start throwing the "lie" tag around, because if you stop and think about it, what does a user have to gain by lying during a tech support call?
If you're an English professor, your time really isn't very expensive. Chances are, on an hourly rate, it costs the university more for a tech support person to spend 45 minutes going to an office to do something than it would cost for a typical prof to spend 10 minutes shutting up and following simple directions over the phone.
If you're the chair of a department and actually earn big boy money, you're not going to be personally calling tech support anyways.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
It's not what they have to gain, but what they think they have to gain.
I spent a few years doing tech support, too. One of the products I supported had an installer bug that required a reboot for it to work after the first time using it. It would work fine after that. It wasn't always easy to convince the customer of this, though.
It was not uncommon for a user who didn't want to "waste" time trying a solution they didn't think would work to insist they already had rebooted. In this case, I knew the symptoms well enough to tell they hadn't. (It always worked after I convinced them to reboot "again".)
Not that I can always fault the customer for lying. Unfortunately, it's too common for a tech support rep who doesn't know what they're doing to tell the client to reboot or some other time-wasting thing just to get them off the phone, especially in those places that put too much emphasis on the number of calls they take and none of customer feedback. "Please-reboot-and-call-back-if-you-still-have-any-questions-thank-you-goodbye."
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Simply restarting anything never solves the problem. It only potentially provides a crude work-around.
Sure it does. It's often the simplest way for a nontechnical user to genuinely solve a problem, like a cache issue or failed synchronization between two network resources. I mean, if you want to drop down to the command lone or use a maintenance tool to achieve the same thing, or try and modify the Windows source code to provide better exception handling so the problem occurs less frequently or is easier to deal with in some other way, feel free. But that doesn't mean the problem wasn't solved.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Lol as much as these are bad I remember my entry into the IT field as a tech/hardware support specialist for a office furniture manufacturer. Try crawling around in narrow ducts filled with sawdust to find that broken wire or troubleshooting programs written so that they could only operate with DOS based computers that were so old I would'nt use em for a doorstop.Or how about going down to the production floor in your dress clothes (that you were required to wear) and opening the case on a production machine only to have 20 lbs of fine sawdust pour out all over you. My heart truly bleeds for all these kids who get out of school now and have to settle for 50k plus a year it truly does.
Yeah right.
As a veteran of the Amazon SE circuit I can tell you that it's a fine job. You get exposed to interesting tech, work with really smart people, and get a nice stamp on your resume.
It's a blue-collar gig as far as tech jobs go, as you find yourself doing the graveyard monkey work that the developers/DBA's don't have time to automate. That lack of glamor inspires much bitching and moaning from green CSE's who think they should come in out of undergrad, get a straight 9-5, wear no pager, and be left alone to work on projects that they think are cool between foosball matches.
They're called dues, boys. Just shut up and pay them.
"Is the power light lit on the monitor?"
"No"
"Is the monitor's switch turned on?"
"Hold on, I'll have to get a flashlight, the power's out in the building."
*eye twitch*
Haha, straight from one of the old lists of classic call center jokes that's gone around.
Not that I don't believe this happened to you for real! While I've never had the misfortune to work tech support, my mother did, and I once sent her one of those lists, and she pointed out two or three real screamers that had actually happened to her in just the couple months she'd worked there up to that point.
It's sad, so so sad.
The enemies of Democracy are
How come there is more then two on that list?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I couldn't get anyone to give me Head so I hired someone under the illusion of a "tech" to clean up my database applications for my office in the Department of Family and Childrens Servicers, Inc.
I got a ol' peice of shit 386 and through it in a closet with Slashcode on it, connected to a CGI full of NNTP ascii porn. Much of the faves were on family incest stories, ie Dad'n'Daughter, Mom'n'Son, etc. The stories were essentially all the same, just with the names changed to protect the names of the Innocent(tm).
Because the tech was brought in from India, I payed him under-the-table wages and made all these work-ethics rules just to pay him for so much prime labor libel'd as though it was retard-rate fuckups. Best job that nerd ever had all summer. He always talked about "workin' wit momma's a cake walk compar'd duh tis," but I let him have it. Payed him with dollar bills when he wanted to increase his pay from $7.50 an hour to 12.00 an hour for 10 minutes of Head-job he did on my pussy. What a 'tard. Go back to school.
See, that's why it's best I don't work for tech support.
I would interpret "Hold on, I'll have to get a flashlight, the power's out in the building."
as
"Please screw with me as long as possible and distribute a recording of the dumb ass things you make me do to the entire world."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Comment removed based on user account deletion
that's definitely an issue. Anytime you're dealing with high-volume, rigorously scripted Tier 1 tech support, it only makes sense to have some sort of checklist for T1 to go through on their call log to verify they've actually done the "is it plugged in, has it been rebooted" type issues, so that at worst you can quickly run through the list again verifying they were all done when you contact someone new.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
"Why didn't you automate this?"
I'll make it multiple choice to help you answer that question:
[_] He liked doing it. No way he was going to give up that kind of fun.
[_] He might make a mistake when automating it. That would be horrible for those people who wanted to watch tv.
[_] He never tought of that. He didn't had time to think because he was to busy waiting and doing nothing.
[_] He had the job for the money. It would be pretty stupid to automate yourself into unemployment!
Good luck!
If someone talks to a "technical support" help line, they should just shut up and do what support say, if they know it all then the why the heck did they call in the first place?
Maybe because Comcast has accidentally deactivated my cable modem every 6-8 weeks for the past year and I have to call to have it reactivated. I telecommute, so I'm losing work time until they fix it, then I've already been on hold for half an hour by the time I talk to someone, so I'm simply not in the mood for "which lights are blinking?" Not only that, but I know that they are reading from a script with no understanding when they tell me to unplug/replug the telephony modem which has a battery.
The worst part is that if I explain my problem, explain that I've tried everything on their checklist, and explain that this happens regularly, they listen politely then start right at the top of the damn list as if I hadn't said anything.
Just junk food for thought...
We set our equipment for 15 minute leases now, but it used to be an hour. Funny thing, some of the equipment lets you clear a lease, but some equipment doesn't. Some will let you if you clear the lease if you do a little dance with a few commands you're not supposed to use.
Some techs and customers had a hard time understanding this.
Some techs leave horrible notes and other techs don't read the notes anyway. The ISP I work for doesn't have one continuous ticket that stays open, but each call is an individual ticket. It's stupid, but it's the way they work. Most calls are supposed to be resolved on the initial contact and if it isn't you're encouraged to take ownership and follow-up. Customers with repeat or intermittent problems tend to get burned by this.
I like it when the tech has been doing their job so long they have it down to an efficient routine, but the customer assumes they are reading from a script.
And if you don't check the basics you get burned, regardless of the customers skills, background or knowledge.
Paraphrased example:
Customer's Tech: "Our DSL light is off. I've checked the connections and our phones work. How soon can you get a tech here?"
ISP Tech: "I'll be glad to send a tech out, but can you check a couple things for me first? Locate the phone cord on the back of your modem. Now trace it to the wall. Is it plugged in securely?"
Customer's Tech: "Yeah, whoops, no. It's working now!"
A picture frame fell on the phone cord earlier and pulled it out of the jack. We could have sent a tech out to fix that problem and cost the company hundreds of dollars or we could ask the basic questions regardless of how confident the person making the call sounds.
Man I feel your pain. I already set up the wireless lan for me and the roommate. One time there was a problem connecting and he thought that pressing the little 'reset' on the router was a good idea (while I was at work that day), when all along, the red light on the router is saying it's the ISP that's having problems.
I made the roommate deal with tech support to make it clear to him that THAT particular reset isn't anything like CTL-ALT-DEL, but I felt sorry for the guy on the other end of the line too. But I didn't want the roommate to ever ever hit that button again unless told to do so.
Yep, I consider it completely reasonable to go through the standard checks once - although it does get a little old when the checklist includes things that are obviously not a problem (me: "I'm dropping 5% of my packets" - them: "ok, is the cable plugged in and the modem turned on?"). I mean, they're the first things I try to check, too, and the first things I make anyone I'm helping out do when they say they have a problem.
But I don't think I'm ever again going to put up with doing them again and again just because the phone queue was full at the level 2 direct number so they bumped me back to general support.
Replacing PCs in a car battery manufacturer. Envision pallets of lead, lead dust, and moving forklifts stirring up the dust. They did not even offer any sort of mask. I had to ask for one and brought my own the second day.
Replacing PCs, printers, servers, network equipment at a construction/Remodel site. Lots of union type construction guys cutting chunks of steel overhead who probably never made it past a week without a workplace injury. Hard hat!?! They ran out!!!
Driving to up to eight places a day (minimum 5) across three states even during blizzards. Yep, that is why I currently own an AWD vehicle. I saw so many people spinning past me on icy roads and careen into other vehicles. The looks on their faces as they passed me just can not be described. I know they had to wipe. Hell, I was involved in three wrecks (none my fault).
So yeah, going to one place every day that has A/C, at least a coffee maker, good hours, and benefits for that kind of money. Pfft! The guy that wrote this article needs to print it out and shove it somewhere. No offense.
I want my! I want my! I want my Eee PC!
No doubt that's frustrating, but it's hard to avoid.
My company has a high rate of churn for tech support, so you wind up with those situations where new techs are asking irrelevant questions or repeating the same steps because they're lost.
It takes something like six months for a tech to become efficient at their job or leave. After that six months it's hard to hold on to the good employees and still remain competitive with outsourced solutions.
You mean, a real *pedant*.
How did this get modded insightful? Rebooting often fixes the problem.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Many times the customer calling in believes that they automatically know more than you, since you're just a "script reading monkey." Once armed with this belief, they ignore everything you say and insist that their diagnosis must be correct, even when its absolutely bollocks. Add another +1 to fun when you're female too and you not only get the jerks but the sexist jerks as well. I've had more than one person hang up when they hear my voice, and then call back and get mad because they were waiting another 20 minutes and got me again. "Don't you have any male technical people working there?"
for a certain value of "fix". GP is possibly considering that nothing short of "will never happen again, ever" qualifies as "fixed".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
As a former employee of one of the "Big Four" audit companies and having a major social network of the remaining 3, I would say IT audit is one of the worst nightmares of any graduate of an IT background - especially at entry-level positions. Here is why: 1. People you work with are mostly going to be computer engineers and scientists (mostly male) and MIS majors (mostly female). A lot of the work is going to be handled by the former since management thinks they have a more solid understanding of IT concepts yet they will all get paid the same amount. Depending on your preference, you could say this is a profitable IT work environment with the higher than average female population though. 2.The position requires practically no IT knowledge, it is a simple interview-and-report job. 3.At entry-level it is a modern sweat shop.(Not due to workload, but the low wages) 4. If you are smarter or faster than other people and get your work done earlier than others, you will be blamed for quality of work by colleagues (who can not review your reports until approved by higher management) rather than be respected for your ability. (can be the case for most jobs out there) 5. Your clients - who pay your company huge per hour charges for your work for the pre-estimated man hours - want you to get out of the client site as soon as possible. 6. YOUR CLIENTS WILL HATE YOU for your high quality of work. (had i already mentioned that?) 7. You will have colleagues and managers who will have role playing character as Federal Detectives; targeting to find illegal activities within the client's organization instead of following standard methodologies. These people will be so very proud of themselves as IT auditors. 8. Annual Job Cycle: Do nothing -> Do nothing -> Do nothing -> Cram a 20 man-day project into 2-5 man-days -> Do nothing -> Cram a 20 man-day project into 2-5 man-days -> Cram a 20 man-day project into 2-5 man-days -> Study for certificate exams -> rinse and repeat. 9. Discover inefficiencies in your companies workflow in the first 3 months of your employment. Well, I could go on... Just don't do it. Once a wise man told me when i did not take his advice seriously: "Advice is the experience of others."
Yeah, my life was so much easier once I made those scripts to change the printer paper, and answer calls. Now I am working on a script to read slashdot, and I can just stay at home.
The problem is that they pay people in tech support to do just that, give customers technical support yet many times it seems like the customers have no interest in being helped which does create kind of a problem, a problem that is not in the job description but that you still have to deal with.
Seriously, if you've ever had to work tech support during a major two-day outage then you'd know what I'm talking about, clearly someone further up in the organisation is responsible, when calling in you get an automated message giving you all information tech support has avaiable about the outage and despite this everyone in tech support is tied down in calls from angry irrate customers demanding "Someone" do something NOW NOW NOW!
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
This particular one has probably happened quite a few times. In fact, I've had customers call me during power outages demanding I as a representative of their ISP get someone to fix the power for them since we are obligated to keep their internet connection working and it can't work without power...
Let's just say people who have achieved that level of stupid are not fun to talk to. As they say, the dumber the angrier.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I think my favorite call was from a guy wondering why his DSL wasn't working. He was calling from Houston DURING Hurricane Rita - I could hear the background noise and his wife yelling at him to "come down here" - and I have no idea how his phone was working at that point. After I explained that sometimes DSL can experience downtime during a hurricane, he then demanded I send a tech out that evening.
What, me? Never.
Wait a minute..I can understand your English perfectly...you never worked in tech support did you?
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
I didn't call anything a lie. As a matter of fact, I specifically said "they aren't lying, but they aren't telling the truth, either". That was kind of my whole point.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
I installed a new computer for a client a while ago, and their old system was non-recoverable. Everything went smoothly up to the point of setting up their email account. No suprise, the had lost the documentation, and didn't know their pop server (and crappy ISP has about 15 to choose from), so instead of dealing with the annoyance of going through them to try the account on each, I called the support line. me: Yes, hello. I'm Garwain, calling on behalf of $client, with the username $id. The phone number is ###-###-####. All I need is the pop server name for this account. tech: OK, open up outlook express me: It's already open. tech: please close all programs and then open outlook express me: ok, outlook express is open... could you please just tell me the POP server tech: sir, setting up an email is a complicated task. at the top of the screen, do you see a tools menu? me: yes ...
in the end, I had to dumb down to follow the script, and a question that should have taken 1 minute to verify the user, and give the information took nearly 10 minutes while he walked through the script.
Of course, I never left the account setup screen, and simply waited for him to give the server number, then had the email successfully checked by the time he said "Click send/receive"...
Then when trying to wrap up, he had the nerve to ask if there was any way they could improve the customer support services...
[too-happy-to-not-be-fake-voice]
Of course sir. No problem. Sorry for the inconvenience.
We'll throw in a refill of magic smoke at no charge.
We don't really have that problem here because there's only one support number.... the one that I answer all day long. x_x
The thing is though, that sometimes our techs will ask for something that seems silly, like a network diagram, or for a description of how the radios are setup. To some people, these questions might seem silly, but what really gets me are the people that are on the phone don't have a clue as to a) where any of that info might be or b) if they even have that info. If you don't know how your network is setup, how are we supposed to help you fix what your problem might be? People always seem to assume that the problem is the device that's failing or looks like it's causing problems, but often the problem can be two or three devices up the chain. That's why we ask for network diagrams ( and I think that's why we don't get them: because the person on the phone has already decided where the problem is, so they won't listen to us when we say the problem is elsewhere ).
You have to remember as well, the tech that you're on the phone with has no way of knowing if you've done what you said you've done. I can't count how many times someone says that the problem is with the hardware, and not how they configured the radio, yet defaulting the settings are re-doing the setup fixes the problem ( it's the magic that you get from being on the phone with tech support! ). Focusing on where you think the problem is can blind you to other possibilities, and that is part of the job of people working in tech support: to explore those other possibilities to make sure that everything is covered.
God is dead -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead -- God
Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
There isn't a high turnover where I work, but I think that's because we're not a high-volume call center. Our tech support department is just four guys, and we're not always busy. So the techs that handle the calls ( I pretty much always just answer and forward, I'm either too lazy or there are other calls waiting so I can't talk long enough to help the customer ) are pretty knowledgeable.
Although I do believe I'm going crazy, because where I work, tech support issues all the RMA's, but that's it. Once they arrive, they're handled by our production department who don't seem to care at all about radios that need to be fixed, they're more focused on getting more radios out the door. Which sucks, because when someone sends in a radio and we've had it for three months because production is too lazy to fix/test it, I'm the one that gets an earful. That by itself is enough to make me want to leave. Add in the fact that I'm stuck at Level 0 tech support ( when I really want to be doing programming or web design ) with pretty much no chance for advancement, and I think that you can see why I feel like I'm going a little bit more insane every time the phone rings.
God is dead -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead -- God
Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
Have you actually worked for any of those companies??
JPMC is a horrible company to work for, as I can attest to from first hand experience. Their mass layoffs after they outsourced to IBM were one of the shadiest layoffs I had ever seen. I have no intention of ever working for Satan ever again.
I have heard some pretty bad things about Cardinal too, but cannot speak from first hand experience. I hear through the grapevine that Nationwide is decent, but they have been going through a deal of restructuring like the others.
For now, I'm happier to stay out of Fortune 500s. They are a waste of my time, and they've done nothing but give me the run around. They either liked me too much to ever allow me to advance (ironic, I know) or they'd just ignore me. I stand by my statement that a B.S. is BS, as I have never landed a position that requires one. College was a waste of 4 years of my life, and some of my ex-employers were as well.
Don't even get me started on recruiters and head-hunters. I have only ever met one that was genuinely interested in helping me to get my career started, and that was when I learned that it is just the local market that has been the problem. (I nearly landed a great position in Philly, which is why I said "most" areas in the surrounding states.)
My mistake. Still, not telling the truth is far different than being factually incorrect, as the former implies that the truth is known, but one is withholding it. The later, well, the dude's just wrong and doesn't know any better, which is what I expect 99% of all disgruntled callers to be. I guess I have a grievance with ignorance being labeled as not being truthful.