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The Stigma of a Tech Support Background
An anonymous reader writes "Since the last semester of college I've been working as a first line tech support agent. At first it was just a way to earn some extra money; then it became a way to scrape by until I could find myself a real job. By now (almost two years in), it's beginning to feel like a curse. The problem I'm having is that no matter how many jobs I apply for, and no matter how well-written my applications are, I can't seem to get further than the first interview. For some reason it seems a lot of employers will completely overlook my degree in computer engineering, the fact that I can show them several personal projects that I've worked on, and that I can show them that I clearly possess the skills they are looking for. I've had several employers tell me to my face, and in rejection letters, that my 'professional background' isn't what they're looking for even when they've clearly stated that they're looking for recent graduates. In fact, a few have even told me that they decided against hiring me simply because I've worked in tech support at a call center for the last two years. I'm wondering if others have experienced similar problems and if there are any good ways to get employers to realize that my experience from tech support is actually a good thing and not a sign of incompetence."
No offense intended, but at least the tech support people I talk to on the phone just follow a script (which make you follow), so to me first line support means 'a hurdle I need to pass asap'. Last time I needed "support" they asked me to reboot my computer, then press the windows key, move the mouse to 'run', then type c-m-d then press enter, then type in the black box 'i-p-c-o-n-f-i-g', etc. This was my telco and the problem was I didn't have service. The woman on the phone said they only supported Windows and because I said I had linux she wouldn't open a ticket. I had to fake replacing the linux computer with a windows one ("luckily" I had a work laptop around) before having a ticket open.
Now, I'm not saying this is your case. But it's hard to believe that these kind of people are any good when it comes to computers. [I'm not saying they're stupid]
Two years doing that - looks like they just can't find a better job. If they didn't find another job elsewhere and they didn't get promoted in their absolutely low level job...well, it doesn't scream 'talent', does it?
You obviously had a chance to ask for more details, did you?
Anyway...this is what I'd think if I was interviewing you, but I might be completely wrong. I'd like to think you would have a fair chance to change my mind, though.
In fact, a few have even told me that they decided against hiring me simply because I've worked in tech support at a call center for the last two years.
Are you a good tech? If so, why haven't you been promoted? Or at least assigned to head tech or second level support?
No offense, but when I did the same thing as you I was in "Team Leader" training in 3 months. All call centers I have worked at (only 2) and most that I have heard of, have enough turn over that by 2 years, a "Computer Engineer" should be moving up the ranks.
I think part of the Peter Principle talks about how lower level or entry level jobs are usually done well by those that wouldn't do well in management or more difficult jobs. Also, perhaps you are not a good tech, but a great developer. This all might be working against you, to no real fault of your own.
Perhaps take a part time job as a developer... advertise that you are willing to work part-time for no benefits and that you know some modern languages; that you are willing to work the night shift doing testing; that you will work for $int_cheap_labor per hour - something to get your foot in the door and working wth professionals.
I do have a hard time believing that just becuase you work in tech support in a call center, you aren't getting jobs. There must be a little more to it. Try to advance in your current postion, or broaden your *professional work* experience (not personal projects).
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Maybe you need a dry run with an interview expert to evaluate/grade your performance.
Its very possible you are committing one or more "interview success killers" and don't even know it. It may have nothing to do with your resume.
In my experience, the best solution is to leave it out. If your experience is limited to JUST call-center work, list every responsibility you had while leaving out the fact that it was tech support. If you can dance around it well enough (And the company name doesn't give it away), you get all the benefits without any of the drawbacks. Short Version: Lie.
But clearly you have something better to say...
The person who interviewed you was the one who called you two weeks ago. They said, "the computer beep is too loud" and you said, "ok. first, we have to reinstall windows from the recovery disk."
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I started out working TS, too (I am currently a developer)...and companies offering most of the positions I was applying for understood that a couple years of experience in TS was a great boon because at the end of the day no matter how good you are as a developer, your software has to get used by people; people that get frustrated, people that have certain patterns of doing things that aren't the same as engineers - and a lot of engineers just don't understand that until they have to deal with those people day in and day out.
... i.e. Tech Support.
I am nearing the point in my career where I will have to start *hiring* coders, and one of the first things I am going to look for is a background in bridging the gap between "software systems" and "people"
If the positions you are applying to don't seem to get that then I can only offer 2 thoughts:
1. They don't understand software development that well, so you should probably not work for them.
2. *Explain* what I just said above in your interview.
People have usually decided whether they're going to hire you after the first couple of minutes. They often don't really know the reason for rejecting other than "a feeling", but still feel the need to justify their decision.
Work on interview technique.
Personally, I wouldn't hire you either - you have no experience.
"How can I get experience if no one will hire me?"
Well, you have an /excellent/ choice of career paths in computers, because you don't need a benevolent company to hire you in order to get experience. In fact, in my own hiring, it's the experience that happens /outside/ of a "job" that makes the most difference. If you really want to succeed, do something. If you are trying to be a programmer, write that project you've been wanting to do; don't wait. Once you have it written, that goes on your resume. I wrote a /HORRIBLE/ stupid graphing calculator for Windows CE and started selling it, and that is absolutely what got me hired as a coder. Don't have the werewithal to make a whole project? Contribute to existing open-source packages, and reap the same benefits.
Or maybe you're looking to become a network engineer instead of a programmer. Set up your own virtual cluster of machines running under KVM, make it do fun things, show off your ability to create a secure environment, and put it on your resume as experience. Even better, when they ask you about it, you can offer them a copy of the entire setup on a DVD, with all the virtual machines...
Either one of those scenarios would get you hired by me, regardless of the rest of your resume -- not only does it show definitively you can do what you want to do... far more important is the fact that it demonstrates you love doing this stuff; you love it enough to do it on your own. That is key.
You're lucky - you've got a field where the cost of doing it "in your garage" is absolutely minimal.
Call center experience /is/ good experience, in my personal opinion. I had early jobs at call centers. I still value that experience as a developer, because it helps me remember that people are idiots who will mess things up if you give them the slightest opportunity. This is critical to keep in mind when developing anything. But it's no substitute for actual experience in programming. I think you can sell your experience in call centers to someone who will hire you to do other things, but you'd best have some additional selling points, because while that experience has some value, it's not a hiring-value.
...and, unfortunately, I have no useful advice to offer.
I worked tech support at a (then) Fortune 100 pc "assembler" and seller, including as a member of their corporate tech support group. After I took a job on the company's web team, I was laid off, went back to school full time and got a master's in comp sci.
I tried to find a job developing embedded systems, preferably in defense industry. I had / have a security clearance, decent grades, significant work experience... and finally after 18 months, one offer from a small company which I quickly took. Nine months later, they laid off 40% of their engineering department...
I never had anybody figuratively "turn up their nose" at my tech support experience. I think they just looked at it as non-specific work experience, i.e. "could hold a job for extended period of time without getting fired."
Since then, I've found very well paying work that is still in the IT industry, but really isn't what I had hoped to find.
Now I am in my early 40s and prospects of finding the kind of work I was interested in (and still am) are quickly fading.
I am trying to find satisfaction for my itch in personal projects.
I don't know what it is, but there must be something that I have been lacking or failed to show / demonstrate in interviews.
For what it is worth, I wish you well in your search.
If I had to guess, I would say that:
1) You smoke. People who work in tech support smoke.
2) Do you drink and / or drug? My experience with TS folks is that they tend to have a higher rate of both than the norm. Do you happen to fit any stereotypes of either of these? I have long hair for example - people assume I'm a pot smoking hippie.
3) You probably spoke negatively of your current employer. This is because TS sucks. However, this is a huge warning sign for employers.
4) You probably think you are above your current job, and it comes out in the interview process. People don't like people who are like this.
If I am totally off the mark, my apologies. If even one of these sound like you, then you may want to think about what you can do about it.
PS> Being a smoker isn't ever going to be the stated reason you didn't get a job. I don't think it can be, officially. Still, it's the same as showing up wearing too much cologne - people take their sense of smell seriously. Smokers generally don't smell good (too much smoke, overcompensating mint, etc) and it does hurt their odds of success. It's not something I would consider in an interview but I've watched it happen to smart people who should have been moving ahead.
Pretend that you've been in prison for 2 years. That's far less embarrassing.
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I do have a hard time believing that just becuase you work in tech support in a call center, you aren't getting jobs.
I've experienced a similar stigma working with Big Iron: "Oh, you're a mainframe programmer? Well, we don't do much of that anymore, most of our stuff is object-oriented..." Nevermind the fact that I've been doing C++ for more than a decade. I experienced a similar stigma when I got into embedded development. My degree says computer science, not IBM mainframes.
Some people just can't wrap their head around the fact that you aren't tech support. Personally, I would not put anything on my resume that wasn't career related. The fact that you have tech support on your resume probably makes them think that you think it has something to do with the position offered. They don't need to know you worked as a tech support - sure, you might have to put it on the application, but it should stay off the resume.
The next time it happens, you might want to end the conversation like this:
Them: Well, we're interested in hiring an engineer... Not so much tech support...
You: Have you ever worked in fast food? I thought so! I'm not interested in working for a burger flipper, either...
Believe it or not, I've said worse to an interviewer...
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To be fair, though, why should it matter?
1. Most important of all, you can give the guy a test, you know? _If_ he spews the usual stuff that spells "idiot monkey who couldn't even understand that list right" -- like that rebooting solves most problems, and activating FSAA is a fix for graphics problems (hey, rendering glitches are called artefacts too, and FSAA solves rendering artefacts. Genuine piece of "advice" I've heard.) -- then, by all means, don't hire him. But _if_ he happens to know his stuff, why does it matter what job he had before?
Especially because...
2. In that race to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel to save costs, since at least the 90's I've seen less qualified people in all sorts of IT and programming jobs. Some places will not only hire a summmarily retrained burger flipper if he asks for less money, they'll _prefer_ one.
So, you know, wtf? They'd hire someone who worked at McDonalds and lied about having taken a "Java for dummies" course, but they won't even listen to someone who's worked in tech suppport? Something seems amiss there.
3. Don't get me wrong. Yes, probably 90% of the L1 tech support guys are just the cheapest monkeys who can use a phone and read a list. Badly. I'm not saying all are smart and competent, or anything equally silly. But I'm saying there is a variation in competence in any job, ya know? The trouble is the other 10% who just happened to need a job and nothing else was available. E.g., if said person was still in college, I don't see that awfully many other jobs who overlap well with that. You're not really going to take a game dev job and pull 80 hour weeks, for example, when you _also_ have to learn at the same time.
Heck, even as job descriptions go, it varies substantially between companies. You can't paint them all with the same brush. E.g., as ISP tech support goes, I've seen mine go recently from abysmal to guys who can actually solve simple problems without going through that canned list. I know, it's the first sign of the Apocalypse ;)
Even getting a promotion isn't necessarily a given, if all you have is two years. A _lot_ of support and generally IT jobs have been offshored in the last years, so in some places you'd be just happy to keep your job for two years. Because everything above you is also getting reduced faster than normal attrition. Plus, there's just plain old statistical flukes. I've worked (as a programmer) for a small company where the tech support guys just had no path to advance any higher, for example. The only job above L1 support were us the programmers, and as statistical flukes happen with small numbers of people, past a point no more programmers were hired, no more managers were needed either to promote some, and nobody quit for some 3 years at a point.
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on what you were doing and demonstrate your troubleshooting skills
I don't how it is in the US, but here in Europe no law will force you to list every single jobs that you have worked on. In fact nobody expects you to. Generally you don't give out an exhaustive résumé, instead you put focus on highlight a couple of entries that you think relevant to the job you're applying for.
So a different approach would be to just remove the Tech Support from the begin of the résumé. Focus more on the academic achievement (Titles, Awards, Publications, etc.). Also on all the various opensource/personal project that you have developed or contributed (specially the ones now in production stage), trying to highlight the diversity of tools that you master.
Of course at some point of the interview the question will come what you have been doing all this time between graduation and the present.
The best is to only mention the job then and explain that you haven't considered your current job worthy of getting mentioned on a CV for that peculiar application (so they understand that you *do* indeed work, you just have something better and more interesting to pitch about you).
Maybe mention then too, that people tend to misrepresent what your job consist and tend to focus on it instead of your actual skill, thus you choose to not mention it in the curriculum. You can subsequently jump on the topic on what you think you've done actually cool that people would misrepresent : mention the tech understanding the out-of-the-box hacking/fixing, etc. so the employer gets the point that you were not a "follow the script" drool-drone.
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That means that you're essentially the same as one of this-year's graduates, except that you'll have had 2 years to forget stuff and won't have been taught the current stuff that this year's grads.
What current stuff? Have data structures changed much in the decade since I graduated? (no) Have databases changed at all? (not appreciably). The only difference is that some stuff is now java and not c++. Whoopty frigging do.
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Honestly, I hate to be mean but you need to know the truth. If you're getting any kind of interview, the problem isn't your resume it's your interview skills. You wouldn't get an interview if they weren't ok with the tech support background.
The resume gets you in the door, the interview skills get you the job.
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