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How Do IT Guys Get Respect and Not Become BOFHs?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a small software company (around 60 people) as the sole IT guy. It's my first time in a position like this and after about 1.5 years I'm starting to get a bit burned out. I try to be friendly, helpful, and responsive and I get no respect whatsoever. Users tend to be flat-out rude when they have a problem, violate our pretty liberal policies constantly, and expect complex projects to be finished immediately upon requesting them. My knee-jerk reaction is to be a bastard, although I've avoided it up to this point. It's getting harder. For those of you who have been doing this a lot longer, how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
I've sent a few of the tougher cases to http://lmgtfy.com/ Usually that smartens them up a bit without having to have too many words ;)
Be firm, but don't be a jerk. Be reasonable, and honest - justify and explain. In writing if it helps. Just don't promise more than you can deliver, and be explicitly clear about the complexity of solutions.
Move to a different company
If they are not nice, delay the response.
Nice people get fast turn responses.
Just check with your boss first.
finish complex projects immediately upon them requesting.
Take pride in being the BOFH. Lusers need to be kept in check. Blog about how you've made their lives miserable.
Unfortunately, IT is viewed a lot like the phones by most users. It's "invisible" when it does work, and is only a priority to them when it doesn't work (or they need something!)
I've found that the best way to make people happy is to effectively communicate with them -- especially when it comes to deadlines. Now I'm not saying to sandbag :-) but if you can over-deliver some things and/or get them done earlier than promised, then you set an expectation of success and partnership with your user base. As difficult as it is, sometimes, you MUST remain non-cranky or bitchy, or you will get stereotyped as the "grumpy IT guy" faster than you can think.
If it's really burning you out after only 1 1/2 years, then you should really look at (a) your workload (b) your choice of career and (c) your work/life balance.
If something was working yesterday and it isn't working today, you broke it.
For example, email. Why does email go down? Why? What's so hard about running a mail server? It was working yesterday, I come in this morning, it's not working.. what did you do? Don't say you did nothing, you did. It was working. You stuck your grubby little paws in there and messed with it, didn't you? Fix it.
You can't handle the truth.
How we know is more important than what we know.
What is this 'respect' of which you speak?
You have to options: slap some reality into your users and put them in their place, or burn out. Your choice.
POKE 36879,8
I'm confused. You're the only guy in IT for a 60 person software company? What do the other 59 people do? Even with 20 sales people, 5 executives, 8 accountants and 3 janitors that still leaves 23 people unaccounted for...
slavery isnt dead its just now called the IT department.
I couldn't do it, I became a programmer and now am one of the annoying people bugging our IT guy.
Hi,
You need to to develop policies for handling requests and have your manager back them. You also need to make sure the employees know about these policies and understand them. You might want to see if your manager will sponsor a QA half-day with some free food so you and your users can get to know each other and understand their requirements and what you can and can't do for them.
If employee's aren't complying with these policies politely explain it to them and CC it to their manager. If they do it again reference the original email and explain the problem to the manager and remind them that you have reported this kind of activity before.
If someone asks you to skip then ahead in the queue or go against company ask them to submit the request in writing to your manager.
If you streamline the process that fits your policies and make sure they see that following the rules is faster they will be more inclined to do it.
If you can't get your manager to back you on this your SOL and should be looking for a new job.
There is a difference between being a BOFH and following company policy.
These changes will not make them respect you as these people are likely assholes to begin with and should be treated as such. I don't do favors for people that can't be bothered to show a little common courtesy and they don't end up very high on my TODO list.
They treat you like crap because they can get away with it - that simple.
If the general behavior around your office is as you say, start keeping a clipboard with their project requests on it. They want something done, they get put on the list, and make sure they see that they're on the bottom of that list. Add a column to indicate estimated time required.
Essentially they're treating you like the janitor. They think everything's as simple as unclogging the toilet or getting more toilet paper. And your attitude seems to reinforce their perception of this.
You seem to show them that your time is worthless and that your job could be done by a trained monkey - why would you expect them to treat you differently?
Just be a bastard. With any luck at least a few of them will get the point and stop bothering you quite so much. If they can't be civil then return the same to them.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I happen to work for a company that is full of rules and policies. For those few that think they can push me around; i will be the biggest a$$ while still following company policy. Therefore most of the things they ask for i can deny with no problem...
In technology there are a lot of roles, software developers, system administrators, network administrators, project managers with technology backgrounds, etc etc etc. You sound like you might be "your company's computer guy" also known as a workstation administrator. There are as many varied roles in the workplace as there are people. Make sure not to lump it all together.
In any career there are hurdles and IT is no exception. It's important to see the path ahead of you as difficult as it may be. Most people enter into IT with a passion for computers and technology. They want to learn more, they want to be able to build bigger and better infrastructure and to knock down all obstacles in their way. You need to find your niche. Some people are software development gurus and some people understand the intricate details that bind systems together. Do you spent your evenings learning new technology and figuring out the latest and greatest?
Try not to take things personally with dealing with others. It's important not to consider anybody just a "user." You have customers. Your customers want service and it's your job to provide that service to them. Most people in IT are very standoffish, anti-social and overly opinionated. It takes awhile to adapt and adjust to actually interfacing with people. The most important attribute of any employee is communication and nobody succeeds in a vacuum. Treat your customers well and you'll get respect in return. Itâ(TM)s fine to have a preference and its fine to have opinions. Just make sure you temper them with objective thinking, facts, and (at least) the appearance of an open mind.
If this is your first IT role you may want to consider why you got into it in the first place. What's your goal? How do you see your future? I've been a system administrator for over 10 years and have made the transition to being a system architect. My goal is to design infrastructure for the biggest installations on the planet. What's yours?
Get support from your Boss and Boss's boss for this, but:
1) Everything goes in a MS Project file. Large projects get their own file, and roll it up into the big one. Items are done FIFO.
2) The only thing which takes precedence are emergencies - and only if the thing is DEAD, on fire, or totally down. No pseudo-emergencies because this customer of the company is contributing $20 Million in sales this year (if that's the case, then get another body).
3) PUBLISH the project file - read only. Everyone knows what's in your pipeline, what you're working on. So long as you hit your targets, people will tend to leave you alone and get on the list. If you don't hit your targets, then they'll treat the thing as the bullshit that it is.
4) If you have two projects that come in at the same time, ask your boss to prioritize.
5) Make your boss and your boss' boss look good. Keep them appraised of situations that could do otherwise.
6) Don't fall prey to bimbos who hang their tits in your face, or people who bring you food. Stick to your project plan.
Eventually - you'll get help, and you'll be the Team Lead/Manager because YOU'RE the guy who created the project plan methodology that works. You may get picked to do the same to other departments... After you do a few of those, someone's going to ask you to be a real manager and you might have to get an MBA - get the company to pay for it....
And yeah, I know WTF I'm talking about - I'm living proof that this works...
When they're nice to you, make an effort to fix their problem as quickly and offer suggestions. Be friendly and personable.
When they're not nice to you, everything takes twice as long. Get everything in writing. Do it all formally. REMAIN professional. Acting like a child will only make your own life stressful and miserable and ultimately get you fired.
Now there are exceptions. Anyone in a sufficiently high position is going to be able to have you fired if they think you're stalling. So do tread carefully.
The above advice might SEEM unprofessional - not always doing your best - but in the long run you're doing the business a favour. You'll be surprised how much more respect you get once your users learn that giving respects gets them the result they wanted. At which point everything runs more efficiently.
You'll never get anywhere in business by being seen as a doormat.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is a business level issue, not one specifically with your job.
I believe your best option would be to talk to your management about putting processes in place to allow you to more effectively handle your work load and communicate with the rest of the people in the office.
If the staff in the business have proper expectations set regarding how your function within the business is performed, by having procedures for both parties to follow, they'll then have to take up their issues with management, not you, as I would think should normally be the case.
Remember the other side of the equation. Users who have to sit for days doing nothing because their user accounts aren't set up right. Ridiculous security policies like being forced to change your password every month. Network configuration changes that break sofware they've been using for years. Pointless upgrades that add bloat and remove features.
It's tough being a user, seemingly toyed with by the IT guys.
worked in my case. IE when I switched companies a year ago, the people who had respect for me before, knew enough about PC's they still got by. Those without respect got to deal with your more typical corporate IT guy (not a total bastard, but at times). The guy who disliked me the most (actually accused me of sabotaging his win 95 box from the network, to our boss, just 18 months ago) publicly wished me back.
I am daily dealing with end users as I am doing computer support for a municipality. To get happy customers I usually a bit exaggregate how much time it goes for a project and describing the steps as complex. Then I am doing it faster than what I said.
Earn their respect. Use preemptive communication and most will give you respect.
Assume they don't know long a computer task takes and just set expectations. Example - Hmm...I'll need about 20 minutes to fix that for you.
I also follow the motto of Star Trek engineering officers...under-promise, over-deliver. If I said it will take me 20 minutes, it is because I believe I can do it in 5 minutes.
If I'm totally clueless and expect a lot of interrelated issues, I stroke my chin and say hmmm, This could be a big deal. Can you switch to using your laptop for a couple days?
My problem, as a manager, is to get technicians to respect me. This is despite the fact that I can delegate problems to them much faster than they can solve them!
After doing this type of work for a while, I've found that the best way to keep my sanity while keeping users happy was to implement rigorous policy regarding how and when users ask for help. It sounds like your outfit may be too small to have a dedicated "helpdesk" or front line support, but I would suggest at least setting up a helpdesk system or Sharepoint portal that is self service to allow users to send in issues.
This allows you to maintain visiblity into your workload, so you can show why something isn't getting done after the fifth time Joe User asks the status, plus is an easy sell to your management with the argument that it allows you to effectively prioritize without users in your face all day asking why such and such isn't done or that this or that is the most important thing in the world at the moment.
The best thing about a policy like this is that you can easily deflect to people that are rude or in your face. "Did you put in a ticket?" "Sorry, I'm super busy and I can't effectively prioritize this request until you submit it." "Oh, your an asshole and want to know the status every five minutes? Check the portal." Getting enforcment on this is your biggest battle. If you can't win that, then take your experience, dedication and hard work and start shopping around. There's no reason to be burnt out because of the user population if you can help it.
One thing to keep in mind is that in their eyes you are on par with the plumber. Nobody really wants to call the plumber or have him around, OTOH you really need one when the fecal matter hits the rotary air impeller. When they give you attitude they are probably angry / frustrated at their machine / server / the situation and not necessarily you specifically. If they're being really uptight when you walk in the door remind them that you've had the last 15 seconds to fix it and you're on their side.
Depending on the political situation you may be able to interject something into a company meeting explaining what's going on and get people to consider your side.
All in all, remember to keep calm and be sure this is really the right thing for you to be doing. Maybe it's time for you to make a change?
Often the frustration and pressures they feel, often get translated into rash acts, but they are people and as with many people, they respond to those they sense have empathy for them. People tend to respect those who respect them, not as inferior but as co-workers. Cultivating such an attitude, will also make it less stressful on you in turn. Also, when I was in a similar situation, I made known to the some four folks who were giving work to me, of the work the others also were asking. As a result, one person was assigned to regulate and prioritize the work given me, so they all knew where they stood, and it made things a lot easier. I dearly miss working for that company after awhile and in the end, when it was taken over and shut down, I felt great sadness, to see that company of some 100 workers go. I was there some eight years, and I would wish for nothing better than to find a similar job but am yet to find other work. Make friends among your co-workers, care about them, watch them as they interact with the program you are maintaining, and come up with new ways to make their job easier, and you may also find, that its not you verses them any more, but a team now working to accomplish something worthy. Its a terrible time to be out of work, but I remember, that when I was the sole IT/Programmer there, I did not know the value of what I had and I wish I had it back. Treasure those times, its better than you think.
www.Migrainesoft.com - Computer giving you a headache? We can fix that!
I'm not kidding. I was an IT guy in a previous life. It's a job where, if you do it right, no one notices, but if you screw up, that's another story. It sucks BY DEFINITION.
These days, I'm a software architect. Folks actually notice when I accomplish something. And my Tums budget has gone way down.
From the description of your circumstances: Do not expect respect-- ever.
Some people get it... if this is really a "software company" they should get it.
Do what you can do, deliver it on time, and within circumstance.
That said, do not allow your self to be a doormat for the ignorant-- time to prepare your resume...
Have a frank discussion with your manager. Explain what your problems are. If he has a spine at all, he'll set reasonable expectations of you, and stand up to other managers who're complaining, thus isolating you from this BS and letting you do your job.
If you don't have a manager who can do this, you need to talk to the higher-ups about remedying this situation (which should be doable in a company that size), by either moving you under a competent manager, hiring one, and optionally firing the nonmanager who you currently report to. If that problem can't be fixed, you will soon have to choose between your sanity and your job. Protip: Choose sanity.
You also obviously need more people. If there are legitimate projects that are waiting because they're low priority in your deep stack, then it's a pretty easy case to make. I've been a single IT guy in a 60 person software company, and it's simply not sustainable long-term.
They need to learn that their behaviour is not acceptable.
I have always told my techs that if someone swears or is rude to tell them their behaviour is unacceptable and to walk away and to not complete the job.
Once this occurs a few times they realise that their behaviour is the issue and take steps to correct it.
Without condescending, or blowing them off with jargon, explain why their problem may take some time to fix. Give them the best estimate of completion time you can. You can probably learn to do this. Many were surprised when I learned to do this!
Sadly, I can say pretty safely that respect is not something you get in IT. Computers are strange, scary things that most people have not a clue how it works (see: series of tubes). People who *do* understand them are treated with a mixture of awe and mild disapproval that are reserved for magicians and artists. In a corporate environment IT is always seen as a "necessary evil" as if the only thing standing in everyone's way from getting work done were these dang-blast-it-computer-things.
The computer is unique among the tools we've created and used throughout history in that you can't actually see what it's doing; "chips" are magically doing "things" that somehow present pictures and words on a screen. Open a computer and you see no moving parts, nothing that translates to ordinary life. Nothing else comes close to this; people understand basically how cars work and could point to the engine and know that's what makes 'er go. People understand phones (though cell phones are basically computers now, so maybe the analogy doesn't apply anymore). When people don't "get it", they get scared. Scared you're pulling a fast one on 'em, and since you know how it works, you must be in on it.
Though all is not lost; you can still stand tall among your peers. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson invented what I'd argue is the most important operating system in history, but 99.999% of the population could sit next to them on a bus and never know, nor care, what they did. But they rank pretty high up there in the annals of all things uber. Then there are the folks whose names scroll by in the credits for the latest Pixar movie; people who quite literally made those movies possible. Would you recognize any of them if they were sitting next to you? Probably not, but you can deeply appreciate the work they must have put in, everyone revels in the job they did, and they can say "I did that. That's me."
So forget it, ordinary folks will never understand. It's all magic and if everything is working the way it should, no one complains (a sad paradox: the most things work, the less users see the need for IT, because they're expensive and, hey, nothing goes wrong). At best you can create something that will give *you* the satisfaction of a job well done.
Really? LIfe fucking really? Like SERIOUSLY fucking really?
I don't comment here much (check my user id and history) but I feel compelled to say:
YOU are the greatest example of whiny little bitches who think they deserve a good/great living just because their mommy paid for their education.
Hey! Here's a clue: go out into the REAL world, get a job, find out that YOU are not so more important than your neighbour.
In short: you are a whiny fuck. Therefore: shut the fuck up /me has never cared about karma
Be professional
Be confident in your expertise
Don't over explain the issue if there's no need to
Don't talk down to them
Don't assume just because they don't know how to fix something that they are lazy or stupid
Don't play that "give them exactly what they asked for to the letter". Be a human.
If you honestly have too much work, let it be known to your managers. Make sure your not slacking off if you do this.
Shower
If you do all of these things and they are still "unappreciative"
1) Are you sure it's not you? Are you warranting it? Or, are you being over sensitive.
2) Maybe you work for a shitty group of people. Most places I've worked, our IT people have gotten respect. I've seen a few who didn't, and honestly, I think it was their condescending attitude and/or blame delagation that made others combative.
3) Find a new field of work. Maybe this isn't what you're cut out for. Employees are your customers and you have issues with them. Get out of the service industry.
If you can pull it off, you deserve to be as BOFHy as possible.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
I have an answer that's probably not going to be too popular around these parts, but I'm going to give it anyway: Learn to be political.
There's not a particular technique or trick. You're going to have to learn about the culture of the company you are, and observe who is getting treated decently and getting respect. Get in with one or more of those people, and that connection will help you. Learn what the "popular kids" have in common and make it your own. Experiment and learn how to complain productively, how to get what you want, how to persuade those who disagree with you, and how to defend yourself against attacks. It's strategy. It's war. It's the way of the weasel.
Now I'm not advocating that you actually lie, cheat, or do a bad job. Just understand that success takes more than doing a good job. Political savvy is a valid skill of its own.
It sucked. Software developers think they understand information systems and network admin better than you do, and they really don't. They're (hopefully) smart, well paid, probably arrogant, and often actually can do your job. That is, if they could be bothered with the administrivia that is necessary to do IT right, which they can't.
You won't get respect easily at a SW company in IT. If you aren't generally first tier skillz, hyper productive, and fun to be around, your life is just going to suck.
I would seek work at a non SW company. Non computer folk are much more appreciative.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
I found solace in drugs, booze and hookers. This worked out great for a while. After some time (about 10 hours) it started affecting my job and personal life. I have since been fired from job, so the stress is gone. The bad thing is that now I am addicted to drugs and it burns when I piss. Oh yeah, my left me and took our kids to her mothers.
--
My parents went to slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig!
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My parents went to Slashdot and all I got was this lousy sig.
Where you are a glorified, certified, educated janitor.
Hell even some of our janitors are treated better. Honestly the best way to go about it is just keep doing your job and try to make friends with the people you are working with. Eventually they will come to treat you as equals, but it will take time and not everyone will.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Here's what I did in that situation:
I put up a large white-board, and each time someone requested a job, I wrote it on a strip and put it at the bottom of the list.
When they complained about the delay, I pointed to the white-board and suggested that they negotiate with those above them for priority.
It worked well.........
Realities of IT: -You will only get true respect from other people down similar career paths. -How do you work for a software company that has only 1 IT staff member out of 60? -You "try to be friendly, helpful, bla bla bla" you mistake here is you try. Do what comes natural and beat the next person who pisses you off down to the ground. This will help you resolve your original respect issue. Real ways to get respect in the IT world: -Learn, read, break, tinker, read... read more... read till you hate reading. Then one day, you will find respect from other members of the IT community -Save your company money somehow and make it known. If we implement X solution vs. (some lame way your company does something) you will save X dollars. Your partners, chief officer, manger, director, president, types will respect you -End users love to feel special. When they feel special you will get respect. Try: -Make strict policies and enforce them. Create some justification. -Relax these polices for certain people that are "in with you". This works in two ways. One, these ppl will "respect you" simply because they don't want X feature disabled. Other people will respect you because they want X feature enabled -Which brings us to human nature. Reality check, most ppl don't get what you do, so they have no respect for what you do. Either find ways to relate to them (Save money, bring in new technology that changes their lives, or take power over them (strict polices) Lastly, shoot for making people happy about 25% of the time. Some ppl here are going to say that number is way too high. I'm so stupid burned out from yet another 14 hour day so I hope this all is coherent. Oh... about that... trust me when I tell your respect is probally the smallest problem your career choice will present you :)
I have your answer.
Users (PMs, middle management, and even developers) tend to value their own time significantly more than yours. Some (not all) often skip the step of putting thought and consideration into a request before submitting it. As you know this causes great stress on your part, but in the end stress on theirs as well.
You need a ticketing system. Spend an afternoon installing an open source one (though we use TeamTrack), and, over the course of a month or two, phase it in as the only way to provoke a reaction from you, except in cases of emergency. Be very clear about what an emergency is, and what kind of SLA you're willing to offer.
The benefit of this system is simple: it requires them to think before calling you to action. It requires a tiny but significant effort on their part. Roughly the same amount of effort as say... googling the answer, writing something down, or installing the software themselves.
The trick is selling it to them. Because let's face it - if they refuse to use it, you can either do no work at all (and risk termination), or abandon the system.
So sell it like this:
"Look - we're not a startup (anymore?). 60 people isn't an enterprise, but it also isn't a small group of people. You guys need an effective response from me, and frankly we have too many projects for me to keep in my head. It's not fair to you guys when I forget or badly prioritize something, right? (get them to nod). When I get a ticket, it's there in my queue until it's complete. I will not forget to do it. You can see my queue. You can see what's outstanding, and escalate if you need priority. Our projects will be well tracked, so nothing is left to chance."
.. and so on and so forth. Be diplomatic, but firm and confident. You're doing this for the good of the company - not just your own sake. And you really are. Because once you reach a tipping point (in my experience, around 100-150 employees) effective project management and communication become the #1 factor in company failings. More important than product quality. More important than marketing. If your people do not communicate, nothing else matters.
My $0.02.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
"Well there is your problem it looks like the BLT drive on your computer just went AWOL" says IT guy.
"Oh my is it serious, I never heard of a BLT drive" dumb anoying co-worker.
"Well see they only let the best trained guys work on them but I have special training so we won't have to send your computer away but it'll take some time."
"That's horrible I need my computer right now why can't you guys keep these things working?"
"Well we try but quatum thingamagigers from space are constanly making these thing break, it's all global warmings fault."
"That awefull I passed a guy driving a Hummer today, bastard."
"Trully terrible if everyone drove hybrids we wouldn't have this problem but its only going to get worse."
*huff* "So when is my BLT drive thingy gonna get fixed?"
"Well if I put in a little extra time tonight should have it ready for you by morning. The exhaut port on the BLT drive needs to be flushed, double enima should do but those BLT drives are tricky and if we have to send it away it might take two weeks. But don't worry i'm very good at what I do."
"You are such a hero, thank you so very much, can I get you a coffe or doughnut?"
Hey car mechanics have been getting away with it for years
I like to teach my users to read the screen and also why something goes wrong.
;)
Other than a select few users, a little bit of extra time spent with communication goes a long way towards stopping repeat 'offences'.
Also means I only really get called for major stuff now so I can actually focus on projects.
Also when I implement a restriction I make sure to point out why, and because of who it was implemented.
Offloads a lot of resentment that would be pointed at you towards the culprit
Last small software development company I worked at the so called IT group was far below the skill level of the developers. They were basically overhead to support the managers/executive/etc and to change the backup tapes every night, keep the phones working, etc.
Unfortunately they acted like total pricks since they had all the passwords.. Developer: Could you fixup the mail system please, it's just a little editing some sendmail config, here is how. IT: No way, bite me. (Translation: I'm scared of sendmail and I don't know what you just said)
Think of it this way, if I, as a developer, can do some random IT task in 10 mins and it takes the IT group days to accomplish it, then yes, they probably aren't getting any respect.
Just be thankful the developer group isn't actively working against you, running their own sekrit wireless, seperate mail servers, even a dedicated firewall box, with out you being aware of it.. Or are they?
No matter what job you do or where you do it, the default is to be treated badly.
The reality is that - excepting only a very small number of enlightened places - people are not nice to you when (they think that) they are in a position to demand what they want from you regardless of whether they are polite or not.
Don't take it personally. Or, take it personally if you prefer. It doesn't matter to anyone else.
As for myself, I have a kind of nihilist-zen attitude that lets me cope with this reality. Not that I lack the will to change the status quo - just that challenging the status quo in much more important places than politeness needs my attention.
The angrier they get, the calmer you be and then they'll get angrier and it'll be a whole lot funnier.
No one ever said being a Heretic was easy.
Let us meet again in "Less Interesting Times"
Been there, experienced that... took me a long time to learn how to deal with it properly.
If you have not create one yet, do it now! I am talking about IT policies and a ticketing system.
Create a priority system, plenty of choices. My personal choice is a 5 priorities system. Keep it simple. Users won't read more than one paragraph anyway.
1 - very low priority, I get to it when there is nothing else to do.
2 - low priority, but need to be taken care of sometime this quarter
3 - normal priority, need to be taken care of within 5 business days
4 - high priority, to be resolve within a business day
5 - burning, must be dealt with now.
Then setup a helpdesk ticketing system. Again lots of choices. Personally I'd use opensource, currently using OTRS (also used Cerberus, which I like). Let that be your records if your users want to know what you've been doing. Set it to have all incoming request default go 3 (or 4).
At first your users will scream, make lots of noise, etc. Just stick to your policies. In the beginning there will be jerks who demanded they are taken care of first. Gently steer them to the helpdesk system, create their tickets for them. I've had people call me on the phone, IM me, badger me in the hall, while I am eating lunch, etc. Just tell them to open a ticket, or that you will open one for them when you are finish with what you are doing. Put up a web page that show your queue, what the priorities of those tickets are etc... Pretty soon it will be obvious who waste a lot of time, who always made their the highest, etc.
One of a few things will happen...
* all of your tickets will be 5 :-) tell them (and show them/your boss) and ask him/her to prioritize for you.
* people learn to do things for themselves and you'll have time to handle more urgent company matters
* you found another job
I'm in a similar position. Sole IT guys for a 70-ish person company (mostly engineers), though I have access to additional techs when something major breaks.
I've only been there a short time, but it has already become obvious to most employees that the nice guys get their requests finished sooner. The ones who ask, not demand, and show basic friendliness ("Please" and "Thank You" go a long way) get top priority from me. I'll do a two-day task for them before a 5-minute job for one of the "other guys" (they aren't exactly rude, but have that condescending nature that so many engineer-types fall into even when discussing something they know nothing about).
Engineers are temperamental at best, and often are at that level of tech competency to be dangerous. The ones who recognize when they are in over their head this can be great, as they give fantastic trouble reports. Those that don't just muck things up even worse.
Now, I've seen this same pattern since high school (scrawny white nerd at a magnet program located in the middle of the ghetto). Geeky types are picked on because they let themselves be picked on. IT guys get no respect because they allow themselves to be made into peons.
If you really want their respect, here's my suggestion:
***Confront them***
A lot of the time, jerks don't really understand how they are coming off. If you discuss it with them, it can help. Don't be sheepish, don't get angry, yell, make ad hominem attacks, etc. Stand up straight, look them in the eyes, and explain your issue *as* *an* *equal*.
Having said that, some guys are just assholes. They know it, and they don't really care. In those cases, the best you can do it avoid them as much as possible. Some people can't be won over. You catch more flies with honey, but some flies are best caught with a flyswatter.
And remember the advice of the immortal Scotty: always pad your time estimates by a factor of 3 if you want to look like a miracle worker.
Be friendly , consequent and assertive :
Explain them in a friendly manner what the policies are for , and what would happen if they didn't follow them.
Also, policies , no matter how liberal , have to be enforced in a way to be effective . If breaking the rules has no consequences , the rules don't exist . So that should be straightend out first .
If users come to you with a complex project , explain them that it is complex , in a way they understand . Make a rough estimation on how much work it will be , and how much it wil cost . If they don't agree with it , don't start the project , but also be clear on it . And make your estimations large enough : it's always better to finish earlier than late .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Is being rude the general company culture? Are the top level management rude and unappreciative to those under them?
If so, you are an army of one up against quite a challenge. Changing company culture while not impossible, is very hard for one person with no authority to do.
You can try the "I'm ok, are you ok?" method. Force them to either admit you have done a good job or tell you what is wrong. Getting people to formulate what's bugging them may force them to realize they aren't really upset with you but rather the crappy meeting they just got out of. You can do it simply with "so is everything working ok and are you all set?" after fixing something or something like that.
If all else fails, I'd suggest changing companies if you can. I did because of a situation VERY similar to the one you are in and it was the single best career move I've ever made.
Maybe they are the jerks and you have nothing to do with it if they are haters people dont expect to get respect, just fuck em dont believe that it is maybe only your fault, propably you are all good at your work... some times it is better to respect you, than to like you, show them some proffesionalism, show them that you dont look for friendship, only for complex projects to be done upon requesting
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Behavioral-Deficiencies-.aspx
Been there, done that, got written warnings which then disappeared off the system.
My tips;
1) Have some old "ball" style mice around. Physcially re-wire them so the X/Y axis is swapped around. Replaced all mice on whinger users desks with these "upgraded" models.
2) Start content scanning the whingers home and local drives for material that should not be on either the network, or the company PC. Backup for your own collection, then delete theirs. When they query the missing data, email them a quickly made form asking for a legit business reason to restore each file, with each file listed by exact file name. Lack of exact details means lack of restore.
3) Go to the floor of whinging user, and have a merry old chat to someone halfway across the floor to the whinger. when they see you and come across to find out when they are getting serviced, politely inform them that its rude to interupt a conversation they have nothing to do with, and add 30 minutes to the response for each objection they raise.
4) Have a sign over your desk "Customer service depends on cutomer attitude. I respect your files the same way you respect me". One or two accidents is all it needs.
5) Quietly remind people you have no [b]LIVING[/b] enemies
6) Print out and pin up on your cube wall all the various articles from here, El Reg etc of disgruntled admins doing horrible things to users/systems/data.
If all else fails, have a roll of carpet, shovel, and bag of quicklime* in the corner labelled "User repair kit"
*acceptable substitutes: roll of chicken wire, weights, and a map of good crab/lobster/crayfish catching grounds in the local vicinity.
Many religious and philosophical systems were invented because of the situation you're in. It's not a technician problem, it's a human problem, and it's pervasive (OK, maybe more pervasive with IT people). I promise you, no matter how you present this problem to your managers or try to alter the behavior of your end-users, it will not help. Only fixing yourself can help. My sincerest suggestion to you would be to learn how to meditate. The technique known as Anapanasati seems to work wonders for calming me down and keeping me focused.
1. Sit down. Sit straight up. Close your eyes.
2. Briefly do a mental check of all parts of your body to make sure there's no unnecessary muscle tension anywhere.
3. Take a few deep breaths.
4. Start breathing naturally, without trying, into your abdomen. Breathe the same way you would if you were sleeping. This takes patience.
5. When your breathing has gone on auto-pilot, move the focus of your mind to the rims of your nostrils, where you can feel the breath moving in and out. Just keep 100% of your attention on that feeling. You should only be thinking "breath moving in" and "breath moving out."
6. When your mind starts to wander, think to yourself, "hmm, I got distracted and started thinking about Scarlett Johannson" and return your attention to your breath.
7. When it's time to stop, don't just snap out of it. Slowly bring yourself out of it and open your eyes gradually.
Do this for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. It may sound tedious, and I know this might sound nuts, but I guarantee that you will be calmer and thinking more clearly by the time you're done. I've been doing it for 4 years now and I'm pretty sure I would have probably punched someone in the face by now if I didn't find some way to calm myself.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
It's OK to be a little bit of a bastard. I've blamed sunspots for everything from corrupted code to ethernet problems. Just explain things in a manner that induces the idiot mode.
The game.
An older co-worker once told me that most Administration, Sales, Marketing etc. people still see people working in IT in a role similar to a person that shovels coal in a steam boat.
This made me modify my attitude towards work. Don't expect to get respect, people only expect you to keep shoveling fast enough so that the boat keeps running. If problems arise, it is because you are not shoveling fast enough in their understanding of your role.
As you gain experience, you will find how to diminish stress by focusing on your user perception. Just give them the impression that you shovel fast enough, that's all they expect. Retain yourself from doing all modifications that you know are good for the company unless it is asked by your users if you want to last long. Similarly, don't expect to be proud of your company configuration, do not be perfectionist unless you fulfill a specific customer Ticket.
Just keep giving your users the impression that you shovel fast enough, that's all they expect. This way you will conserve your energy and diminish your stress level so, you will last longer. In short, do like them, do your shift then go home not thinking about your work, do not try to achieve perfection, you will burn yourself out, guaranteed.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Well, it sounds like you are already trying it, but without success. Sorry if my subject line sounds flippant; I have been through something similar to you, I think. What I found is that one of the cornerstones in good relations to non-technical staff is clear communication on THEIR terms - you have to remember that even if you strive to modest about it, you are in fact far cleverer than the rest of them, and they feel that keenly. It is a natural defence, I suppose, that they try to dismiss you as a nerd or something; so you have to avoid things that underlines this impression: no nerdy jokes and learn to explain things without jargon. Another good tip is to try to take a genuine interest in people's smalltalk; that one is particularly hard, I find.
The other thing about clear communication is that you should take control of people's expectations - try to avoid things like "Well, I'll try" or "I have a lot to do, but ...". Simply say no - or yes, as the case might be - or something like "I can do it when I have finished , which I expect will be on Monday". People implicitly want you to take leadership - even that bullying boss - so they will accept when you say "This is the way we will do it" better than "Do you think we should do like this?"
I hope you can use what I said - to me it has been gold, believe me.
I must have it backwards then, I've spent my entire sysadmin career trying to be more BOFH-like. Still haven't quite gotten 'round to "replacing" the boss through a series of entirely coincidental yet unfortunate events, but that's mainly because he doesn't seem to mind that 15% of my day is spend administering to systems while the other 85% is divided evenly between light reading, Slashdot, and trips to the pub.
I had no idea what a BOFH was, so here's some google entries.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/BOFH
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
get a gun license and tell every one at work about it.
Then get a gun
My users love my boobs^W^Wme.
:) (In jest, of course.)
In all seriousness though, being a female in support role like this has advantages. The whole mothering/compassion instinct tends to take over quite frequently. "My network is my baby and I must protect it!" is the attitude I tend to take at the office, even if it means threatening to lay the smack down on my users.
(I wonder what the female equivalent of BOFH would be...)
The same way anyone else gets respect. Actually get to know your coworkers, make sure that they know you understand their concerns and needs (and it helps if it's true), be someone who isn't just the weird guy in the server room that nobody ever talks to.
Don't consider getting to know your coworkers to be 'politics'. That's an anti-pattern.
It's not a cure-all, but if at least some people start thinking of you as a human with a name, and actually trust you, it helps a lot.
And also, return the favor. They're not just users violating policies and expecting miracles - they're stressed out people with demanding jobs that need support. If you don't respect them, it's _blindingly obvious_ and they will respond in kind.
Not everyone's personality is suited to this approach, but a little bit of empathy goes a long ways.
-- Kate
This is such a stupid question. Become the BOFH! Can there be any other answer?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Set up a queue where each request is filed, categorized, cataloged and publicly visible. Now, any next prick who wants to skip ahead of the queue will have to pay 2 times the number of skipped items times a dollar (or ten, if you company is well off). Half of this amount is yours, half is deposited to the "bank". At the end of the week/2 weeks/month these money are used to buy free coffee & donuts, lunch, pizza, whatnot for those who got overstepped/your boss/everyone (you decide). This way people will only want to skip the queue if it's really important AND they won't feel bad about giving their money away (since you're buying your coworkers lunch or donuts or whatnot).
"how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
Delete their files. Steal their photos and email and cc numbers. Blackmail them.
If you don't, they'll do it to you.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Maybe you can get some of those 3d glasses...
In my support positions, I have found that the general secretary/clerical pc user whines about things being broke and then the choir chimes in and it becomes less of a tech issue and more of a bonding issue... "Oh really.. well last month my yadayada did *this* and it took forever".. "oh that's nothing My thingydoodad was out for a WEEK when blahblahblah..
It was pretty rare in my experience that the end user wasn't happy to see me, and if they're not happy when you leave, then that's usually an interpersonal and not technical prob..unless you're just plain incompetent and even then good people skills will get you a looong way..
For two places in a row. Setup meetings with management, explained the deal (in both cases, I was not the only IT staffer, btw.). We said get on your people.
See at small companies, one person tends to get very arrogant. They believe they are SO important because there aren't 10,000 people in their department. Only THEY can do their job. Sometimes it's true thanks to make it up as you go mentality. Most times it's utter self-righteousness.
Anyway, if there aren't signs of improvement over the next few weeks, I quit - found a new job. Coincidently the other IT guys also quit both places as well, both before and after me.
No sig for you!!
Don't say no. Seriously, don't tell users "No you can't do that, no you can't have that." Instead, explain to them what they have to do and/or what has to happen for them to get it.
For example suppose a user wants admin on their desktop and it is against company policy. Tell them it is against policy, and ask them if you can help them with what they need. If they say "I don't want your help, I want admin," then tell them "Well ok, but to do that you'll have to get a policy exception, here's the process for doing that." Now the process may be "Ask the big boss who is going to say no," that's fine. Just let them know what they need to do to get what they want. If it is something they can't or won't do, well then no problem. If they can, well then also no problem.
The reason is it makes you not the bad guy. You aren't telling them "No this is impossible," which they figure is bullshit, you are telling them "This is possibly, but only if preconditions are met." It really does make a difference. Also makes a difference if you have to defend yourself to someone higher up. If you said no, maybe the higher up gets you in trouble for that. If you said "Here's what you have to do," and the person didn't do it, when you explain that to the higher up they'll more likely ask the person "Why didn't you do what he said?"
Also you never know, even if you think the conditions won't be met, maybe they are. Maybe it was more possible than you thought. Like say a user says "I need 50TB of storage on the central NAS." There's not that kind of space, you've got 10GB per user and that's all. Well you go and find out what it would cost to add 50TB to it. Say with the disks, shelf, backup tapes and drives and such it is $200,000. You then tell them "Ok to get that you'll need to get a requisition for $200,000 for us to buy the necessary hardware." Week later they show up with all the necessary stuff. Turns out their project is real important and the funds are there for stuff like that, even though you didn't think so.
This falls in with the same sort of thing the GP talked about like skipping them to the top. Whatever the process is for that, tell them what they have to do. "Ok we can do that, however for that exception to be made a vice president or higher needs to send a written request to the IT manager. Once he has it, he'll have me move you to the top." Or whatever is applicable to your company. It makes you not the asshole, covers your ass and so on.
Now this doesn't deal with all cases. Some people are just pricks and will always be so, they figure you have to jump at their every word. However many people are just stressed and taking it out on you. If you show them that you are willing to work with them, that can really help. It makes a big psychological difference to many people when they feel like they are empowered and they have control. When you tell them "Yes, but..." followed with the things they need to do, it is back on them, they are in control. When you tell them "No," you are being a jerk and taking control from their perspective.
I was the IT guy for a high school with 150 employees from 2004-2007. I spent three years and two principals getting treated like shit from everyone--including the principal. The first principal retired after my first year, and I gave the new principal two years to clean up his act. Let's see what happened--and this is a limited set...
- Users developed a belief that imaging was Bad[TM], and made the principal tell me to "fix" their computers without imaging them.
- A user demanded a repair on a b&w HP DeskJet from the early 1990s.
- This same user "appointed" herself to my technology committee and spent whole meetings yelling at everyone about how evil laser printers are, since laser toner cartridges cost more than inkjet cartridges.
- I was threatened with termination for applying for another job.
- I was threatened with termination for reasons the principal wouldn't tell me.
- The principal could not say "no", and on one occasion, made me search the county T&IS warehouse for a donated piece of shit without a school district asset tag. He had promised a student a free home computer, which suddenly became my responsibility.
- The principal decided that my inventory was a free-for-all. Aside from making me check out a video projection screen for a teacher's daughter's wedding, the icing on the cake was having to check out a mixer/amp and a pair of massive Peavey speakers for the band playing at a student's private graduation party. Oh--and a lectern so the law firm across the street could hold a press conference.
- After setting a group policy to lock the console after 1 hour idle, a user went on the warpath complaining about having to press Ctrl+Alt+Del and type her password once a day. I lied and said that I "can't change the group policy" and it "must be something at the district level"--if I had admitted that I had set the GPO myself, I'd have been told to exempt her or lose my job.
- While trying to have a serious discussion with the faculty about not sharing passwords, I commented that my wife and I don't share passwords. I was laughed off the stage for saying that.
- Nobody gave a damn about accountability. Printing costs were flying off the handle, and the administration played interference to keep me from getting copiers with PageCounter terminals that would track who makes how many copies.
Explaining my situation to the principal was useless. He's a complete bonehead whose primary goal is making everyone "happy" at someone else's expense, and my complaints about coworkers' behavior fell on deaf ears.
In the spring semester of my third year, I started vigorously applying for other jobs. The beautiful part: my new job started on 3 July, but I wasn't obliged to submit a resignation letter until August. So after 2 weeks on my new job--fairly confident that I wasn't going to be "hired and fired"--I went into the school on a weekend to gather my belongings, then dropped my letter and keys on his desk that Monday. Although I did not state a reason for leaving, he knew damn well why. He apparently didn't register it though--word on the street is that my replacement has to put up with the exact same shit as I did.
My hat goes off to whoever is willing to do that work for that pay--I was on the teacher pay scale, and while I would currently be at the 3-year pay level, my current job has me on par with a 20-year teacher. So no complaints here.
I've walked this path many times. My rates are resonable. I know how to handle the Unreasonable, successfully. Respond here and I will contact you. There are solutions, but "Going It Alone" is the most risky. I can help.
If there's only one of you and you're being pulled everwhichway, there needs to be some way to prioritize your To-Do list. Years ago, I setup a help desk using a spare Mac and Filemaker. We had someone "man" the desk taking down calls. People that called me or others directly got the "Do you have the task # so I can lookup what's been done?" This way management could review the list of tasks, estimated and actual time to close, cost (if purchase was needed), etc. It also allowed me to go back a list the things I'd done objectively, but I'd started keeping a log in a spiral binder so I could refer to my day-to-day activities. It became clear that there were certain projects that just didn't get priority because management was constantly putting other stuff in front of them.
The manager finally threw up his hands and said that we all had to pull harder to get stuff done with no excuses or we'd all be out of a job. I candidly said in an open meeting that I lost my partner, my job, and my home that year. There wasn't much more he could do to me to scare me. Why not go for inspiring me instead? This went over like a lead balloon. Needless to say, I didn't last much longer there and the list just kept getting longer. But it wasn't my problem any more.
It won't solve all of your problems, but drafting a service catalog can help set expectations. If you have a list that everyone agrees to with a list of services that you in IT provide along with service level agreements (for example: a new software install will be complete within 48 hours of request, a new VM will be provisioned within 8 hours of request, a request for a new toner cartridge will be fulfilled within 1 hour, etc.) then people will have a better idea of what to expect. This requires manager approval and agreement of the customers, though.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
Unless it's a priority 1 issue, let the user sweat it out. Remember, hold is your friend - lets 'em know who's in charge. Or more seriously, take everything with a grain of salt and solve it at your own pace, if you let the user dictate your panic level, well, you're good as lost.
Encase their beloved desk items in Jell-O.
If people become too much of a jerk, start telling their manager that you can't keep going over there to fix things "they" broke. Doesn't matter if they did. If managers think their employees are loosing time becasue they are mucking with their computer, they tend to get upset. It used to work well for me when I was doing helpdesk many years ago. I was treated like crap by the engineers until I started bring ing their managers into the process. Once the manager knew the person was costing the company money, things changed.
Don't talk down to them
Don't assume just because they don't know how to fix something that they are lazy or stupid
Don't play that "give them exactly what they asked for to the letter". Be a human.
Right. Remember that your company doesn't make it's money by fixing computers.
Play Command HQ online
You are dealing with people with computer problems. Not people with problems and computers.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Make people think you're doing them an individual favor. Don't over do it and don't do it to everyone. For example, give certain people, especially those who are nice to you, slightly better equipment or peripherals and make sure they know it but convey it in a hush-hush manner. It's not so much the equipment/software/extra leniency that matters but being treated better than someone else that makes this work. That's how people are. Everyone want to be better or stand out from everyone else; people want to feel special. Those who can help them with that will be given more respect, etc. Also works well with some girls too.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
You have the authority to set policy. You do not typically have the authority to enforce policy, unless you also write the paychecks. That's your boss' job. Just generate the reports and pass them up.
Also, don't worry about respect. Nobody respects people who are looking for respect. Also, you work for money, not respect. You can't take a bag of respect to the grocery store and trade it for a pizza.
And respect won't impress a stripper either. If she thought respect was a good idea, she'd be violating someone's IT policies at an office job instead of wearing clear heeled shoes and licking her own nipples.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
According to The Ungratefulness Principle of Quantum Management, you can firmly pinpoint the space an IT professional inhabits, and you can firmly pinpoint the time that the IT professional is respected, but you cannot do both at the same time.
So how does The Ungratefulness Principle express itself in the macroscopic corporate world? What happens is that you go looking for a new job. You give your current employer the full two weeks notice. You do a great job during your final two weeks, showing no signs of "short-timer" syndrome. If there is an exit interview or survey, you explain politely and without finger-pointing that you did not feel appreciated or valued in your work environment. On your way out the door, at least one person you despise for being a complete prima donna will thank you for being so very helpful during your tenure, silently implying that he realizes how lucky he was that you put up with his douchebaggery. The "new guy" will be just as subject to The Ungratefulness Principle as you were, as former co-workers you run into after you leave will express their own thanks by bitching about how much better you were then than "the new guy" is now. This process will repeat itself until you are dead or are a BOFH.
This is the company attitude you are dealing with. Talk to your boss about how people in a (small!!) company talk and work together. It should be a nice place where people respect each other. That is what I expect from a professional employee.
Oh: don't say it can't be done.
nosig today
Don't forget, the only reason you care about things like stability and security is because the owner cares. Your job may be on the line, but it's his/her company at risk. Before you roll out a new policy or project, make sure the boss understands how it benefits the organization. Based on my experience, IT changes should be communicated by someone with authority. You'll encounter far less resistance when users understand that you're implementing a company initiative and not just acting on a whim.
I totally agree with all the others here that have been saying, BOFH to those that are being inconsiderate. Bottom line, don't take the crap. I work for a small Medical Clinic and had a doctor yell at me and tell me, "You need to fix this now and I don't have time to tell you whats wrong with it" which to my reply was something along the lines of, "Well how do you expect me to diagnose the problem then?"
You'd really think that of all people, Doctors would have half a clue. This is just not the case, and I don't think most will.
What works for me and my co-worker is having a real strict web usage policy. We already block most of the fun stuff by default, so whatever's left is for them to play with. The first time they wind up on the virus alert, they are warned with a CC to their manager. The next time, the entire internet is taken away from them. Since I've started holding to this more strictly, in some cases the virus may have been a false positive, I haven't had people be as rude to me as they were before.
I think we get this kind of bad rap because you will usually walk into an IT room and see what appears to a user as us not working. Half our job in a day can consist of waiting though. Waiting for this to complete, or waiting for an issue you've been watching to replicate. Lots of waiting though. On top of that, none of them understand the maintenance behind the scene. I think that because a lot of what we do cannot easily be understood by most, when you so happen to come and ask for help and you just see us staring at a screen reading something it's assumed that you weren't working.
So all in all, if they are asking for your help because they actually broke something and are uncivil about it, take away whatever caused the problem. Elevated rights, surfing abilities, lock them down so tight that they wont need to come ask you for help because you've tightened the leash so tight that the only problem they'll have is with whatever 3rd party business software you use and nothing you can really control besides doing updates or calling vendors.
Sometimes, the answer is to just destroy it all.
"Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."
by not becoming IT guys.
Next is have some items ready that do your job for you. Make an account that allows the user to install one application only, with a lockout of everything else. Giving them the ability to click next all by themselves.. This gives the user a sense that they're trusted to some degree. if data needs to be entered.. have a photocopy instructions ready for them. Reserve this for your buddies.. "the guys who hastily (quietly) cleaned their keyboards after a good laugh about those infidels who would type on an unclean device".
Go to lunch with the guys, and dont talk business. just work the banter. oh, and stick to the guys who understand polite conversation, religion, politics, and income.. all taboo. Those are for people you dont work with.
oh, as far as work goes be absurdly honest (just for tech stuff) if you arent sure, and need to google, and hope for the right keyword.. say it.
It comes across as confident once you feel comfortable saying it. Coders are usually on the spot and often sugar coat it, freaky honesty will drop their jaw.
Storm
Think of the problem through a user's eyes.
Its not their job to care. Its their job to HAVE THAT PROPOSAL BY NOON. Yes I would be assholish too if you would not take my request seriously too (If I didn't work tech).
Tell them I can't give you an estimate or give a very big one so here is a working laptop to work on while I fix it for you. I will let you know and email you when I can give an ETA. Need any more help let me know. Anything else I can help you with just let me know?
The problems with servers are a different matter. The problem is you can't say your boss is an idiot and is too cheap to buy a linux not NT box and use a switch. I got fired for this because it pissed me off so much that I was the scapegoat for such incompetent planning.
Learned my lesson now
Work with them and acted concern always with a sense of urgency. Run to solve each problem and be the man to save the day. Then you will earn respect.
It could be possible that you replaced someone who was incompetant. I am not sure of the situation so naturally you are getting some of the crap for now until respect is earned.
Just let them do their job and always ask if their is anything more you can do. Maybe handle requests. If they are turned down its managements fault and not yoru own. You are on their side and part of their team.
If these requests can't be completed then you need to talk to management and use some bs like lost productivity dollars and mention just having 5 backups and have users save their work on a share and you're good.
http://saveie6.com/
I think the base of the problem is that people assume you're a super-human nerd-god who can conjur the computing magic and fix everything perfectly in a second (like they do on TV!)
It's all about prevention. Before they say a single word, you have to show them you are weak, vulnerable, and human, just like them. An amazingly good way to show that you don't know is to ask them a question, as if they know as much as you. Now how to do this and keep up the balance between that and seeming professional is maybe a tough task. You don't want to look like you don't know what you're doing. Then again, it's all the more impressive when a mere mortal solves a problem that everyone understands is difficult.
First and foremost check to be sure the problem is not closer to home.
Seriously, what goes around comes around.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This is eerily similar to what i was asking
On the whole an arrogant IT management presages a failing company, like AIG.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Frankly, it sounds like the damage is already done. You were a floor mat, and they've gotten used to wiping their feet on you. You should probably review where you went wrong, learn some lessons, move on, get a new job, and start over.
But if you think you can salvage the situation, then here's my advice:
1. Get a calendar program at a minimum, an issue tracking and scheduling program if possible, one that can print reports. This is to help you stay organized, lower your stress, and cover your ass.
2. When a user asks for something, unless you really know how long it will take, do *not* tell them how long it will take. Any task outside of changing the printer cartridges requires an estimate.
3. Never, ever, ever, give them an ETA on the spot. Tell them how long it will take to get them an ETA, but do not give them an ETA. Not until you've had a chance to estimate the project, pad the estimates, get buy-off on the scope, time, and cost of the project, check your schedule, and see where you can fit it in. Then when you've done all that, call them back and tell them the ETA. No spec, no ETA.
4. At some point, someone is going to ask, "Well what's the delay? Why can't you just do it now?" Do not be afraid of rattling off the top three items on your list, who asked for them, and the priority placed on them.
5. If they get testy, facilitate. "Absolutely, I can't agree more! It's just not fair at all that you have to wait. Tell ya what, let's get Gary and Mike and Betsy together in a meeting, and you can decide amongst yourselves which of your projects is a higher priority. I'm just here to make you all happy." That's on the outside. On the inside you're thinking, "Hey, no problem, you wanna be a dick? Well then you can be a dick to these guys, and when the pissing contest is over, just let me know what you all decided. It's your emergency, not mine."
6. The bigger an ass the user is, the lower the priority they get. Just one time, when someone asks, "Why does she get a new forum site setup already, and I've been waiting for a week," reply with a straight face, "Because she's nice to me," and walk away. Yeah, they'll be pissed off, but the truth is, you can demand, expect, and get respect.
7. When the project schedule slips, be honest and let people know the schedule slipped. Give them new ETAs. And don't beat yourself up about it. It happens, and people would rather know up front when problems occur so they can reset expectations.
8. And if you kill yourself putting together some massive project and you finally get it all up and running, and no one pats you on the back, feel free to take the time to point out to your boss that you went the extra mile and that you're proud of your work. If you don't blow your horn, sometimes no one will, and getting recognition for a job well done can make all the difference.
9. The nuclear option: You can only do this one time for it be effective, and it resets the entire playing field. If someone really gives you a hard time, and you've just plain had it, tell him to kiss your ass. Loud. I mean really loud. Then turn around and yell that everyone in the joint can kiss your ass. You work hard, you do a good job, and you're damn tired of being treated like shit. You're tired of the attitudes and the disrespect. Throw something small (not at anyone, though), stomp back to your office, get your stuff, tell people to get out of your way, and walk out. Either you suck at what you do and your boss will fire you, or you are just a good employee pushed too far and your boss will try to talk you out of quitting. And if the latter, when you get back, you can bet word will have gotten around and most people (not everyone, unfortunately) will treat you with a bit more respect.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
But now I'm real BOFH. Because I found out, that if I'm not helpful at all, I'm unavailable, I sound annoyed, I make customers feel stupid... They will bother me less. If I'm really nice guy, they'll thank me by providing even more jobs. If I'm real pain in the ss... They'll bother someone else.
Read the book "How to win friends and influence people". Yeah, it's a cheesy title. But this is the book that made that title cheesy.
The point is this: we IT-types are often not that comfortable connecting with people. This book lays down some basics. Try to apply them in day-to-day interactions. Things like: know people's names. Take an interest in them: do they have kids, pets, hobbies? Connect with them on a personal level. This will make then regard you as a person as well - rather than an anonymous piece of infrastructure.
It's all stuff you can find in a lot of other books, but this is the original. For us techies, the most important stuff is in the first third - a few dozen pages, I think it's something like seven points.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I have this:
http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/216/9123/320/DSC00213.jpg
and several other similar examples hanging from the coat rack just inside my office door. That, and a copy of "WHO WILL BE EATEN FIRST" printed out across four A4 sheets on my wall, seems to work really well.
You were babysit^Wadministrating a Windows 95 machine in 2007?! Yikes!
SET EXPECTATIONS! Often people in the world think that IT people (there ARE some girls out there) know everything and can fix something within 2 seconds (even though it might take hours). However, if you constantly set expections of how/what is going on and that you really don't know the problem (even if you know exactly what it is) people tend to not expect that instant success. Then, when you fix it in 2 seconds and they are expecting 2 hours.. you look like the hero. Don't be a jerk of an IT guy though.. there's plenty of those out there. In fact, most of the profession is made of social r'tards that don't realize it's more of a teaching position than a technical position. Be a goof off and make them laugh (always telling a joke when you sit down at someone's computer helps a lot)... they'll like you a lot more and respect you even more.
Some of this may not apply to you....as you are working in a different industry but I am in a similar situation....sole IT guy for about 90 users (actually, my Boss is the lead Engineer and he does some of the help desk type stuff when he has time.)
The best advice I can give is to go out and be seen. You work for a small company so the building probably huge. Don't remote in to fix every problem....stretch your legs, take a walk, talk to the user and try to understand their problem, talk to the user to try to understand future needs, and talk to the user about their hobbies and your own. I've known many IT people who seem to think they can sit in their "Ivory Tower" and avoid actually interacting with the users. The users eventually catch on to the fact that they are aloof, antisocial jerks that think that having to help them with their computer is a hassle. They'll start to despise them.
My current environment is about 75% Office, 25% light manufacturing. I've gotten out on the shop floor, crawled around in the dust a little to reroute cables, got all sweaty and dirty......and actually gained a lot of respect for it. Again, I've seen IT workers who seem to think that going out into the shop is beneath them and if they get a little dirty or talk to the heavy machine operators that they might be infected with a virus that turns them into lowly shop grunts or something.
Act interested in not only solving their problems, but listening to their ideas on things that could make their jobs easier. Their idea to share out the crappy old deskjet installed on the computer across the way might seem nitpicky and inane to you but it very well may make their job a lot easier. Remember...you are there to make life easier for those responsible for producing the product that actually makes the money....you are not there so you can do way cool stuff with Active Directory policies that makes it impossible for them to do their jobs.
What I am presenting of course is more or less is just an extension of some other comments on here that you should "Play the politics game." By showing them that you are working hard, trying to help them in any way you can, and respect their input and opinions (Even if you really don't give a shit) you will find that they have a different attitude towards you. You really don't deserve respect just because you are an IT guy...you have to earn it. Just because you create the accounts doesn't mean that they need to follow your ideas for how the company should be run. If you do gain some respect don't expect to be constantly lavished with praise and bowed down before when you clean up some spyware on some idiot's machine.
I won't rule out the possibility that you work in an office that is entirely made up of complete jerks. That could very well be the case. It's a bummer alternative in today's job market but if I were in that sort of situation where everyone was outright rude to me all the time I would be polishing up my resume and seeing what else I can find.
There are some simple rules:
1. Don't be an asshole.
2. Learn to communicate effectively with people who do not know as much about the subject as you do.
3. Don't be an asshole.
4. When you explain something, and the other person clearly does not understand, do not simply repeat the explanation again word for word, only louder.
5. Don't be an asshole.
6. Document everything. Openly label that manilla folder "CYA."
7. Don't be an asshole.
8. Don't make promises you can't keep. Don't try to keep promises you didn't make (that's why you CYA).
9. Don't be an asshole.
10. Don't assume that decisions are made solely on a technical basis. Money does matter, and sometimes, good enough is good enough. "Because I want this kewl new toy" is a bad reason to spend ten times as much money.
11. Don't be an asshole.
And most important: Don't be an asshole.
I'm a sysadmin by day, computer consultant by night.
I started this path because I kept getting stuck as "The Computer Guy." I set everyone up with email. I kept everything in the office running. I was the guy that knew what hardware to get next. I got a LAN up and running.
I became a known quantity and all kinds of people started coming to me to fix the stupid problems. My friend talked me into starting a business on the side after fixing her computer. If nothing else I'd get a tax writeoff and at the very best my goal was to get into IT professionally and double my income.
I burnt out. I got tired of doing the same stupid fixes for different (l)users. I got sick of working on someone's weird ass-hardware. I questioned why I ever wanted into the field in the first place. Then I got in with a company that wasn't stingy on getting standardized hardware and my job got easier (even possible). Things were great, I was excited and connected with my job, and then I ran into a lead programmer who dumped the impossible on my lap and expected immediate return. I burnt out again.
Most of the company respected what I did, a few powerful people didn't. I got out, landed with a company I feel more comfortable with, and brought all my strengths with me without the baggage of a programmer dumping me in the middle of a problem and expecting me to fix it while he looked over my shoulder.
My guru is a BoFH. I am not. It just doesn't work for me, I don't enjoy being grumpy all day (even though I secretly wish that I could be..) The people that respect what I do like me because I'm positive and helpful. When I'm not, I don't like myself. I'm most important, if I can't deal with the demands something outside me has to change, I can't live with the BoFH attitude.
On the other hand, you're not a carpet to be walked on. If you have liberal policies that are getting dumped on, well, you have no policies at all. Defend and enforce your policies - you may need to explain your rationale. I'm really liberal on my network, I'm dealing with about 20 users, but my blanket policies are stupid easy to defend. (ie "Surf porn at home - our schtick is we're fast and our customers need ever bit of bandwidth we can give them." If they don't buy that, there's a dozen more excuses in my bag. If I can't get through after that, I have to decide if it's a hill I want to die on.)
I completely agree with those who say, "Look at your work / life balance." Balance is everything. You don't have to do all your planning by the Scotty principle, but do pad your estimates and give yourself reasonable deadlines plus a bit. If you finish early, fill in that extra time you've given yourself with interesting projects. If you are enthusiastic and engaged in your work, your attitude spreads to your coworkers.
Go get Thomas Limoncelli's "Time Management for System Administrators." http://www.amazon.com/Management-System-Administrators-Thomas-Limoncelli/dp/0596007833/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244613832&sr=8-1 I found it infinitely worthwhile and read it every few months when I start to feel overwhelmed again.
A last side note, I don't have to do the consulting gig on the side any longer, but I choose to because I find it most rewarding now. I do a lot of simple stuff these days and it's pleasant to have people at the end of their rope so grateful to have a professional look at their system. Treating coworkers as regular customers has helped me not bog down in the abyss of cynicism.
And congratulate yourself. The very notion that you asked the question is a pretty good indication that you will find your own solution.
When I work overtime, it's often late at night, when there are fewer distractions and I feel most productive. A few nights, I've bumped into one of our IT guys doing the same thing. Last time, I offered him a slice of the pizza I'd brought with me. I think he appreciated the gesture. I love you, IT guys! You totally have my respect.
As the IT guy, you are a mayor and a chief of police in one. You have to strike a political balance and this is easier said than done. You should definitely not be a jerk but nor should you roll over and capitulate into unreasonable demands. You might have to develop some strong policies, implement them, and adhere to them. If you can explain the logic behind the policies, most people will understand and back down and you are being a good mayor. It is the 1% asshole population that you need to take on a police chief role. It is never fun but must be done to insure the integrity and functionality of the network, its servers, and its workstations. I have found also that software engineers have little understanding of the technology side and vice versa. Opening up lines of good communication and dialogue can help build this understanding to allow both to work together more smoothly.
1.Get used to the feeling of being inadequate, no man is an island. 2.Do the best you can, tell customers the truth, if youre not familiar with error messages and whatnots, let them know that you are going to find out where the problem is and call back or revisit. 3.Do something you enjoy on your free time. 4.Dont let peoples aggressive ranting get to you , it's most often the deliverer of abuse thats the one not feeling ok. Dont take everything personal. Generalizing is very common .
ever heard the term
Customer
Unwilling
Not
Trying
?
doesn't matter how good you are, they will treat you like a door mat, the only want to keep them honest and respectful is to treat them all mean. that way they are grateful for your time and effort.
"The Practice of System and Network Administration" by Limoncelli, Hogan and Chalup has a great "read this first" chapter on organising yourself such that your "customers" are (reasonably) happy and you remain sane. It looks like in the second edition this has moved to chapter 2.
The rest of the book is great too, and I'd suggest your sanity is probably worth at _least_ $44.75 at Amazon.
If it were me my first and only goal would be to organize myself out of a job so I never had to do anything but order and replace broken hardware and even then only when it was convinent for me.
People fall into pits because they lack the drive, knowledge or creativity to redefine their environment in a positive way.
Never let deadlines and local schedules keep you from seeing and activly working twoard the larger picture of offload your manual work any way that you can.
Too many offices are driven by creatures of habbit who mindlessly plug away at their excel spreadsheets wasting countless hours of time because they are too stupid to see any better way of completing their work... Don't be stupid, don't be like them.
NOBODY CARES HOW HARD YOU WORK .. Neither should you. Its the results the outcome of that work that matter.
Above all never even think about thinking about seeing yourself as a victim. That whole line of thought is a nonsensical self fulfilling prophecy.
It's always best to 'under promise and over deliver' when they request upon you to do a complex project to be completed asap. Always overshoot the eta for a project, then complete it in half the time (which is the realistic timeframe for the project). Seems to work with getting more respect after a while.
I've had to develop not only a sense of humour, but also cultivate a slight bit of respect FORCEFULLY. It's quite good to show that we're all here to do a job - in some cases, especially if you're in a situation where you've got some management folks that have a sense of humour AND honour, you can always speak to the manager about the situation, and get the manager to assist in cultivating a bit more of a respectful attitude about the situation. However, I HAVE been in a situation where I was the sole IT person (network admin, network engineer, help desk, support engineer, etc etc etc...). In this situation, especially due to the fact that what went on at this facility was CRITICAL for shipping/inventory and the likes, there was a point where things had gotten to THAT POINT...and in keeping with the tradition of all BOFH's, I quite simply went to the central patch panel, turned off ALL the hubs, and went to an extended lunch (of course, I said I was at a doctor's appointment at the time, but that's besides the point.) Managers and workers alike were FUMING. All good. I said let's call a meeting. They did. After listening to the whinge session, I very carefully explained to the entire group that they, like me, as a worker, do not appreciate that type of treatment. I stated clearly that should I encounter that treatment again, they shall experience a tad bit more than a few hours of downtime. I was told that that was blackmail. I said yes it is. They really had no other options as it would take quite a fair hunk of time trying to train up another person for the position, and I would more than happily walk off the job and let someone else take over. They then agreed. The first few weeks were a bit rough as when someone exhibited some roughness with me, I would simply stop what I was doing and go out for a smoke and a coffee. It eventually sunk in. After the initial month, the "end users" learned to have a sense of humour and respect about the situation and quite literally, started to help me help them in whatever capacity they could. You don't have to take crap just because you're the person doing all the problem solving. In order to properly problem solve, you need to have a clear head. In order to have a clear head, you have to have peace in the environment. Nuff from me...
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
I am a software engineer working at a firm that has 50% engineering and 50% sales and administration. We use an outside firm for IT support since :
1) We can change our own printer toner
2) If something is broken on our PCs, we either don't trust anyone else to fix it for us or simply need a new PC at which point we reinstall it anyway.
3) There's no such thing as an IT guy that would even understand where to begin to install and configure our tools (which actually suck since we have to enter in hardware addresses just to get them to start)
4) We don't use much more than an e-mail server, a file server, and a Cisco. None of which requires a system administrator on site.
5) Subversion and Wiki servers are run on a separate machine that the developers take control of.
I would seriously pity any fool that would even consider being the first IT guy to start working at this company if it ever grew large enough that it should need one on site. Being the IT guy at a small engineering firm where the people on site have historically simply fixed their own stuff would be a disaster. I've seen it before as well. You just don't ever want to be that guy. The problem is, most software engineers learned a lot of what they know by grinding through these problems on test networks, home networks, school networks, etc... It is very rare they ever had to do a good job and make something that could stay live 24/7. So they don't know what it takes to make a system stable for 60 users that can be depended on, instead, they know that it's just a line in a script, what's so hard about that.
If you want a position where a system adminstrator receives more respect, then go to a non-tech company. For example, the happiest system admins I've heard of work at places like paper mills. Remember that you're working at a company where you're more of a convenience than a necessity. If you got hit by a bus, the software engineers would hate doing it, but they'd just start doing the work themselves instead. In a way, at the company you're working at, you're nothing more than a single person that asks the boss for money for new stuff instead of having 40 engineers dropping receipts on his desk. So, in a way, where you are working, you're simply a secretary.
If you want recognition for your talents, go to a company where instead of being "The guy who could have been a programmer/engineer but wasn't smart enough" and head to a company where you're "The guy who keeps the company running".
You haven't made this clear. Why would you not want to pursue such a lofty calling?
I think the happiest I've ever been as a techie was when I was a BOFH with a supportive, understanding, non-pointy-haired boss.
When HE needed something done, you bet I gave it my all.
When some random girl from marketing needed something done... she had to go through him (gruff ex-military guy) first. And if she survived that... well, I'd do it, but I did once get called into Boss^2's office and told to stop making the marketers cry.
Ah, those were the days!
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
People on the job seem to get irrationally angry when it comes to computers and networks. Some of it is justified when they are being blocked from getting their own work done, and they will absolutely take it out on you when they don't have a good explanation for why things don't work. Those stupid IT guys messed it up again. It's the department everyone loves to hate.
The professional approach is to leave your ego at the door when you clock in, and be sure to log all questions and complaints and your responses. If something escalates into a problem where your job is threatened, you can show the paper trail to your management.
If someone is constantly berating you about computer problems that really are PEBCAK, just log each and every complaint plus your response. It can become quite an amusing read after a while, and you can share it with your management. It makes the other guy look bad. Of course, your goal shouldn't be to screw the other guy, but if they are being kind of childish and vindictive, it's very useful for deflection and self-defense should you be called on the carpet later on.
Also, good communication is the key to defusing people's annoyance. When people are sitting around waiting for the network to come back up, or the departmental printer keeps not working right, or the web is really slow--if there's an explanation forthcoming quickly, people can understand that you're working like mad to fix it. When an IT department has a stand-offish attitude and refuses to answer phone calls and emails in a timely way, people will assume the worst.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
I've been in a situation like that and mostly, users don't understand that: " i would like a system that stores all customer data and automatically adds their incoming e-mails" results in months of work. They don't see the big picture and we humans don't see other issues when we are asking something ( what do you mean, you have other tasks ?)
When i was servicing a 3 site company with around 50 people, i would get that type of questions all the time. After a while and A LOT of frustration, i started making "contracts" with people. Simple helpdesk tasks were fixed asap (kept them on the phone WHILE fixing so they get a feel for how long this actually takes).. larger "projects" or requests, were thrown into a simple schedule with the biggest steps in the process written down. Then i would add estimated dates when finished. Sure it creates a little overhead on the admin level, but after a short while, it got them relaxer, me relaxer and off my back.
Since I had an "agreement" with them on paper stating what would be done when, they could not come and bug me anymore cause i would simply refer to the paper.. you do offcourse, have to keep to your word too..
As for the being rude: We had sales guys who had to go sell products in bars.. not the kindest of folks AND not most computer literate around ( So where the f*ck is that "add printer".. i need to find it so i can pickup my copies .. *sigh* ).. I would be yelled at by them over the phone when they had an issue.. and i would just tell them they could call me back when they were cooled down and hung up. Simple as that. And when person to person, tell em, and walk away. Did that to the general manager once and after the initial "more yelling", he came to his senses, apologized and gave me a raise 2 weeks later.
Nobody needs to put up with that sort of shit.. From anyone.. but most of the time, people need a little eyeopener before they understand they are being complete a-holes..
After 15 years of working in this field I can offer you some advise but you are not going to want to hear it.
1. Do some work on yourself, read books on how to communicate with difficult people.
2. If you dont like how you are treated in any situation you have two options: remove yourself from siuation. Or accept the situation gracefully and do you best to improve it.
IMHO experience after trial and error, I have learned to trust my instincts. After years of working on my personality my goal is to be my genuine best with quality service and professionalism, by setting and example of being humble and compassionate to every one I meet, and I mean everyone regardless of what I think about the person.. Then after looking at the situation and finding no fault in my treatment toward others, I have to realize that I cant change people. I can only change myself and if my qualities are not enough to reverse someones bad treatment against me, I remove myself from the situation and find another company that values what I do for them and treats me with respect. I dont have time for people that are not able to appreciate my qualities. Let the deal with people that are just as miserable as them, They can be good company for each other.
The next job you interview for, start doing some interviewing of them in return. Talk with them about your qualities, and talk about your history with the people you worked with in the past and explain how you want work with those kinds of people in the future. If your interviewers become defensive, or try to dismiss your claims, that is the first warning sign. I usually give it three warning signs before I walk out and thank them for their time. The second warning sign is an interview that is too much like an interview and offers no friendliness or balanced approach to genuine conversation along with the interview process. If its all business and no talk about personal interests or desires, its not going to be a friendly place to work.
The third warning sign is when you ask or are given and opportunity to walk around and meet some of the people that work there. Ask them what its like working there, If you get allot of pauses in their communication or sideways looks that is the third warning sign.
Meet your interviews more than once and make sure they make you feel comfortable in the work place before you make any decisions. No job is worth not feeling respected, you can always find another one.
In my own professional life I have decide that I dislike most large businesses mostly because of petty politics and peoples obsession with status which means absolutely nothing to me. so I work for myself, I started my own small business providing excellent computer, web-site and video/audio services to people who give a shit.
...is Principles of Network and System Administration by Mark Burgess. Very enjoyable read, good for IT info and also good for the "people" side of sysadmin. After having read the book from beginning to end, I now find myself frequently going back to read bits and pieces.
Seriously. Get used to it and get behind it. You are there to clean up the messes and to keep things running. To a degree, it doesn't matter what other people do or say... to a degree. But one thing is for certain and that is if you go down that "IT Nazi" road, it's just ugly.
But the really good IT guys are the ones who become IT directors and CIOs if that's your goal. IT guys see the business at all levels and maintain perspective on the whole business as a flow. (And if you can't see that much, how do you set priorities?) Programmers are "production" in your shop. Taking care of production, whatever that may be, is key to doing the IT Guy thing.
If you can't get your sense of success based on how well you do your job rather than how much respect and glory you get, then being an IT guy isn't for you. People only notice the IT guys when things aren't working. People don't think about janitors until there's a pile of trash or a puddle of puke somewhere -- same thing.
As you get more and more people in a workplace it eventually reaches a point where you will have at least one annoying selfish bastard that will want the impossible now even if it delays putting out a fire in someone's hair. You will never be able to make these people happy and you need some way to keep your cool to stop them making you angry as well. They will make all kinds of complaints about you to management and may actively try to get you sacked - but because they will be doing this to others as well it rarely has any effect other than getting the problem person a reputation as a whiner.
Sometimes they really only want someone to tell them that they are important and that you will do something about their request. Sometimes they have real problems but are too incoherant with anger to get the message across. Even people who are not actual bastards can do incredibly stupid things like storm red faced with rage into the server room in the middle of an almost complete network failure and demand that you stock the photocopier with paper or actual violence will result. When things get bad you are the cat to be kicked and when things are down and the users can't do anything they assume you are doing nothing as well. You just need to weather the brief bad times and know that people expect computers to be cantankerous beasts anyway, not many people actually lose their jobs over outages or delays. On the other hand it's easy to lose a job if you lose your temper. When it comes down to it the anger of idiots is not worth getting upset over, but it's contagious so it's hard to keep your cool unless you can find a way to keep it in perspective.
Find something to think of that will make you happy and thus make it harder for you to lose your temper. Remember that IT incidents are very rarely actual emergencies that involve loss of blood, broken bones etc.
If your the only IT guy there, then nothing puts the users in their place like "surprise vacation" or "surprise swine flu" or take up a dangerous hobby such as sky diving and pray for (only) a broken leg ;)
Im not entirely joking. They want something done yesterday, well now they'll have to wait 4 weeks to get it done yesterday, OR they get a contractor in who takes twice as long and who is half as nice.
I thought it was common knowledge by now... There's two departments you never fuck with in your company, payroll and IT. Because things can go wrong... or missing..
And if you ever surfed to that naughty website during working hours, IT know about it.
Being feared is so much better then being respected ;)
i'd suggest you start exploring other options, because i'm afraid you've already lost this battle.
i'd wager that you suffer from some combination of:
1) confusing being a bastard with having a spine. user can't follow policy? kick them off the network. they want back on? get their boss to put it in writing and then sandbox the snot out of them.
2) being hamstrung by management (not backing you in disputes over policy, not giving you adequate resources)
3) being hamstrung by yourself (not proactively seeking out management's help when you need someone to back you on policy, give you resources; not hiring or otherwise outsourcing responsibility for desktop maintenance)
4) failure to manage expectations across the board (likely due to a failure to communicate)
if you suffer from #2, i'm afraid you're done at your current place of employment, same for #4. and while it is possible that #1 and #3, with time and the appropriate resources + backing from management, can be fixed, i wouldn't hold my breath.
Like you, on my first job as a sys admin I would jump every time someone called and they just got ruder and ruder.
I started deliberately putting people off. "I can't come right now but I can come at .... 3 o'clock. Does that work for you?" Then I would put it in my calendar and make sure I was there at 3pm. Before long, when people rang, the first thing they would say was "I'm sorry to disturb you, I know you're really busy...."
Obviously genuine emergencies were not put off, and I always attended to the secretaries quickly.
I'm a programmer in a larger Software/IT company where the IT guys (admins included) are the cream and expect to be treated with respect. However, whenever I go down to our online customer managers or secretaries or to the janitor to ask for something, I am *very* polite. I'm smart enough to know a) polite is simply better in so many ways and b) these people can screw up my day big time if they are so inclined.
My suggestions:
You should do your job in such a way that you can keep the respect of others *and* your selfrespect. If somebody is being impolite, let them know politely. If they do not want to learn, let them run into a wall until they do. If I as a team organiser with quite some responseablities on my mind can take the time to be forthcoming to my admins, reception secretaries and community managers, so can everybody else. Even a departement lead has that much time (In fact, two of the most forthcoming people I know at our company are our CEO and CTO). And if your peer isn't inclined to put up with the minimum effort it takes to make the workplace worthwhile he simply is being a jerk and deserves whatever flak he gets from you. People generally treating IT (or anybody else for that matter) impolitely are just being imature and can use a fair share of forcefull lecture on manners.
My 2 Euros.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
After being in an organization that had to pass from 4 IT guys in 4 centers to an IT departament (plus a heavy increment of workload), I see two non-exclusive approachs here:
1) Manage expectations: Things break. Tell users that at any moment his PC, the network, the servers, can go down. Than IT does what they can to prevent/mitigate it with the budget it has, but it will still happen from time to time. That when assistence is needed it will come as fast as possible, but it can be that it is not immediate if someone else trouble is more important.
Also, educate them to rely less in 100% available PCs (for example, if some daily task is mandatory, recommend them to do it at the start of the day rather than at the end so if something breaks it can still be fixed)
2) Escalate the trouble. That needs that you have a half-decent boss that knows that you are doing reasonably well and that, if he tells you to do task A, you won't be doing task B at the same time. If users tell their workplace is more important, tell them to refer to your boss so he can set priorities. If they complain that response times are too long, tell them you are already at 100% and encourage them to complain to higher-ups so the management decides to hire someone more / set you new priorities. If a user is constantly causing trouble / breaking things, tell your boss so he can talk to his boss.
3) Enforce respect. Users may not be in a good mood because their PCs went down. Anyway that does not gives them freedom to be unprofessional / rude / insulting. If they are, and based in how serious is the incidence, fix it and complain to his boss or complain to his boss and, AFTER having the user fixed, fix the system. If the boss is not there or the situation does not improve, consider just walking away.
4) Not that it helps a lot, but you can get some leverage by lowering "bad" users priority. While making them wait while they can't do any job may backfire, there are plenty of IT actuations that can be delayed that are not lessive to the bussiness but annoying to the user ("my pc is slow to boot/work", "sometimes my screen shows strange colors", "I need to install a new program/version/upgrade my computer"). Just for revenge, do not expect them to be nicer with you because you delay their requests.
Of course 2), 3) and 4) may mean trouble if you are not properly backed by your bosses, but think that changing your users attitudes means just that, a change, and that it will require pressure to show them the "right" way and force them out of the "bad" way.
Why can't
I bet this is worse if they are a Java Software company because java programmers don't usually have a clue about hardware or hardware issues.
I was a development team lead at a company like yours. We had 1 true IT guy that was hired around the time we got some idiot sales people who kept taking time from us. We never needed an IT guy prior to that - even our CEO was sharp enough to run his own system and keep it patched. As we got larger and larger, we needed the IT guy more and more to do mundane things like backups and end user support for the sales guys and fix the jammed printer when a sales guy used inkjet labels in a laser jet printer gumming up the insides.
Our IT guy was 100% windows and we wrote cross platform solutions, Windows, Mac, Solaris, Irix, AIX, HP-UX. We saw the Windows versions as necessary evil and treated almost every Windows server as a lab machine. No machine was treated carefully, except the central NFS Sparc because all our HOME directories were mounted from there.
Establish protocols and make the processes transparent.
Users in general have no idea about technology and don't care. This is fine. That's your job to know, after all. But when their ignorance include how internal IT handles their tickets you have a huge problem. To solve this, you must have management on your side. If you fail at this you should look for something else (start you own business and sell your services back at a premium rate perhaps?).
Management should know their IT-investments and importance of the systems involved like the back of their hand. If they treat IT like a magic moneydrain you need a consultant to teach them another perspective. Organize the services provided by IT, delegate responsibilities accordingly, prioritize the said services, document the processes, and market the whole bundle internally. Use ITIL or COBIT or whatever suits your organization and pleases the top brass. But make it obvious to the users how things work and what can be expected!
Have management sign SLAs saying stuff like it's ok to expect a new user account in 3 days, priority printers fixed within 4 hours etc. Yes, it's a lot of paper, and no, you can't do this alone. But if they really care about their business they will do this to translate what IT do into money, which, in any commercial business is vital. With that backing users will still behave like pricks and try to sidewind the system, but you have your back covered.
Turning bitter and disillusioned takes about a year or two in IT support. After 3-4 years you will likely be permanently scarred unless the fundamentals are solid, so take control now or perish. Asking here is a good start, but at heart this isn't a personal issue, it's a management problem.
Believe me, it's the only sane road. Take it from someone who started out enthusiastic and eager to help, turned bitter and BOFH and later burned out.
Good luck, you've got a long road ahead of you.
With regard to complex projects and over-expectation of users, the answer is to drop it on the desks of the management.
That means for each project you have to produce a Terms of Reference and get the users to agree to it. Then schedule the work in and allow the upper management of the business to agree to it before you start.
That way the implementation schedule for any project is the responsibility of the business management NOT you!
With regard to policy violation .. wipe their computers clean and install a base image every time you find a voilation.
Works wonders here.
--- This meme is memory intensive
Get a job/work/project/task tracking system. ( eg: trac ) Put all requests into the system, no matter how trivial or lame. Prioritise the work, and make sure that people know that their request has been "scheduled according to company requirements/policy". Give your bosses/s access to change the priorities of your work themselves ( most of them never will, they'll let you ), and then make sure that you prioritise such that the polite/nice people get better service, and that the important jobs get done quickly, and the irrelevant crap never gets done. Be sure people know it's not a first-come-first-served system. empower people to view/change comments/details about their own job in the system, then be sure all "where's my job at" queries are answered the same way: "check the IT tracking system". After some time, release official policy to "enforce usage" of the tracking system, so you don't have to enter the jobs in there yourself, and users must use the web/email interfaces to ask for anything. problem solved. I leave the implementation details as an exercise for the student.
I suggest you have a look at ITIL best practices.
Define your service catalogue officially including operation durations.
And then define SLAs between you and your customers be they internal or external...
I used to assume when I worked in support that all users were like this across all companies.
It's simply not true. Different companies are completely different social experiences, I'm fortunate that where I work now everyone treats each other with respect, people understand that everyone is busy and try and get things done. We have had arseholes but inevitably they're always the ones that get weeded out, i.e. when we made job cuts at the depth of the recession the only people we lost were those no one really wanted there and were a mistake to employ in the first place.
I guess the problem arises when you end up with more arseholes at your company than nice people so you reach a tipping point where even the nice people have had enough and just end up being arseholes too. The problem is how do you solve that? Once the tipping point has been reached it's hard to go back, morale is lower, people are bitter but inevitably it's bad for the company so something really should be done. It's really upper management that has to realise the problem and deal with it. Of course, the other side of it is that some sectors are more prone to this than others - I work in an engineering firm and engineers seem to be a generally friendly bunch and have a mindset similar to that of IT people so perhaps that's why there is harmony in the first place. When I worked in public sector that attitude was quite the opposite, 90% of staff were simply incompetent, and so those that weren't just ended up getting pissed off at having to cover the arse of the other 90% of people, then you had those full of self-importance and so on who in reality were non-factors but treated you like you were their personal servants, it really wasn't pretty.
Really, your options are simply to discuss the problem with management, move to another company, or simply put up with it - if management aren't willing to try and resolve the situation it doesn't matter if you turn into a BOFH or not, things will end up just the same. For what it's worth, when I was job hunting last I turned down 2 jobs because I got a sense of the atmosphere in the office just from the interview stage and it was clear that it wasn't somewhere I'd want to work having had to put up with that kind of environment for the previous 5 years. Here's the main thing though, both those jobs offered me less (and wanted longer hours - 45hrs vs. my current 37hrs) than the job I ended up getting and taking, where the people are nice, so I'd imagine it really has a lot to do with how well a company treats it's staff too. Better wages, better hours, better benefits ultimately almost certainly means a happier and hence friendlier work force. I understand shopping around for a job isn't easy if it's your first job, but as you now have a job perhaps the best option is to start looking? Don't jump ship to the first that comes along, just wait until you find one that really does seem worth taking. It depends how responsive management are to your concerns I suppose.
It'd be interesting to hear from anyone who has worked at a company that had severe morale problems and that had people that just seemed like a bunch of arseholes but did manage to turn the company around into a nice place to work? I'm wondering if that ever actually happens?
and 80% psychology.
You don't need to fix every problem the user thinks they have, you just need to make everyone feel like their issue was addressed. Often the users are so ill educated that they can't ask the proper questions.
Quite often I'd come away from an issue having not actually solved the problem as stated by the user...but I'd listen to their complaint, and either teach them how to work around the issue (not how to bypass company policy, but how to work with the options open to them) or show them why what they were attempting wasn't feasible.
It's a good point, actually. What you then would need to do is attach some form of "importance rating" to a rush job, where the importance drops drastically relative to the number of rush jobs already requested over a certain time frame. Thus, if $salesrep has requested 5 rush jobs over the last month, his rating drops drastically. You have to explain it to them and let them see it, of course. That way it will force them to plan ahead and save their rushies for actual cases they can't help. (Of course, if you have an internal billing system, or you're a one-man PC Repair guy, this is even easier: triple rates for rush jobs, as mentioned elsewhere under here.) It's an old story: you have to keep a reward vs effort system in there somehow.
For the rest, I think honesty is the only way to go. Tell them when you think they're saying something that's not nice. Explain to them that IT is a difficult job and you're doing the best you can, and that they live in a world of entropy where all systems slowly break down and that IT's not your fault, and that you would appreciate a thank-you once in a while. Let the screaming people run to the boss; as long as you've covered your bases with him before that, there's nothing they can do but whine. You might even set up an internal website with a list of how-and-why's, which explains basic concepts like security, website blocking etcetera, why you do it, and what the consequences would be if you didn't. That way, they'll at least understand it, even if they don't like it.
If they still disagree or whine after that, they're self-centered emotists who should probably be fired anyway since all they care about is their own agenda's, probably far above that of the company. You know them: the women (or bitchy men) who talk trash behind your back, the drama queen, and other unenlightened humans who have yet to rise over their emotions. You can as a last resort explain the consequences of having such high maintenance fools in your company, and tell him he'd best lay them off. That will benefit you, your colleagues, and the company culture the most in the long run, and it will force the emo's to a track where they have to grow up. (Just be sure to explain the reasons to them, so they also learn where their behavior is causing such a problem, and get them to go do yoga or something.)
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
...is to always, ALWAYS say that a request will take twice as long as it will in reality. That way:
a) You always have a buffer to work within
b) Not as stressed
c) When shiiiiit really hits the fan and you manage to do some mega-urgent task in half the time (acting all stressed and have a furrowed brow), you'll be the golden boy.
Works for me! Just remember the God of doing this, Scotty...
"How long to re-fit?" -- Kirk,
"Eight weeks. But you don't have eight weeks, so I'll do it for you in two." -- Scotty,
"Do you always multiply your repair estimates by a factor of four?" -- Kirk,
"How else to maintain my reputation as a miracle worker?" -- Scotty,
"Your reputation is safe with me." -- Kirk, Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
Same position here - I found Steven Covey 7 Habits of Highly Effective people useful. Essentially, set your own values hold to them, Do your best. It doesn't matter what people think of you as long as you know what you want to do and are doing it.
As Neitzsche said do as you will but first be one who can will.
Being a BOFH is the only way to be undisturbed by regular stupidity of the users who makes the same mistakes again and again . Sorry being a BOFH works. On the other side being nice gets you dead. Better to be a living BOFH then nice dead.
Until last year we had a Windows 3.1 system being used in production. If you start out with 40 or more, one of them is bound to last an amazingly long time. Well actually if you move parts around you can create one that will last a long time.
"how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
Set rules. Follow them. Give the good example and don't let anything slip by. Don't make exceptions no matter what (what = compliment, whine, threaten, complain or try to be your 'friend'). If you show your users you treat everyone the same you will earn a modest level of respect. As soon as you make an exception, others will notice (you can count on it: people talk, you know) and you are a "jerk" towards some users and a "hero" towards others. Best to stay somewhat in the middle of these two opposites.
1. Convince your manager you need another "junior IT guy". Not necessarily full time - even a quarter time job would do it.
2. Hire a decent BOFH.
3. Profit!
Seriously, people will quickly start noticing the difference.
Lots of good advice above. Regardless of processes though, unless you can get your customers on your side and realise you are not the enemy, but are there to help, then things should go a lot more swimmingly. There will always be those who will be bastards but if you charm your users then 99% will come to see you as a friend.
Some suggestions:
1) Start a user group. Offer people to come and air their grievances. Listen to them and look for ways of improving their experience with their computers and IT services. Give Feedback!!!
2) Be open and honest. Don't lie (although bending the truth may on occasion be needed... like when you accidently bring down the server, it may not pay to be too honest here).
3) Be visible. When you can spare the time, go on a walkabout and chat with users. Ask them how they are, if they have any problems, even make quick fixes there and then on the spot. This will increase their opinion of you very quickly.
4) Ask your management to perform an independent user survey (ie: users are anonymous to you, therefore they dont have to worry about you deleting their files and backups), in order to find out what people really think about not only the IT department (you) but also the services and software provided. You then compile a response addressing the most common issues along with what you propose to do (with management support) in order to improve things.
Overall, the main things though is connecting with your users. Listen and give feedback. They are just frustrated and you are the target. Once they understand that its not your fault and that you are doing everything possible to help them (with the time and resources available) they will respond a little better.
Also be visible to your managers. Make reports for them (powerpoint does get overused but some charts may help them see how things are, rather than screaming at them you are overworked and not appreciated). This is where a ticketing system can really help.
Trust me, i've been there, done that, and got the t-shit. If you do it right within a few weeks you wont be able to walk past users without someone offering you to sit and have a coffee with them and them thanking you for your help.
PS: Final. Us IT guys... well, a lot of us dont put too much effort into our appearance (eg: wear t-shirts with geeky things on), many are overweight, shave infrequently, and baths are infrequent. If you fall into any of these categories then doing a little with your appearance to be a little more presentable will help quite a bit. Image counts for a lot.... and can lead to other things as well including no longer having to crawl under girls desks with the pretense of checking out LAN ports in order to see their pants.
HAHAHAHA .. RESPECT !!?? .. but get paid less. .. especially since I've just become a dad. .. the life I start living in 6 months.
Man - you're in the wrong industry.
In IT you will be treated like shit by incompetent, uneducated neanderthals who are convinced of their own intellectual supremacy due to their ability to wear nice clothes.
The only viable angle of attack that makes sense is to be a contractor so that you can charge more bucks and retire early.. that or Google, where you enjoy your work
I've got approx 6 months left to my retirement and I cant tell you how wonderful it will be to be able to retire before 40
Whenever they dish out the crap - I just smile and think about the rest of my life
I have worked in IT support for 22 years, and it takes time for some people to decide if you deserve their respect. Don't be in such of a hurry. The first 2 years are the hardest, as you learn to find balance in your work, methods, and communication.
I strongly advise against the BOFH routine, as it usually causes more grief, and eventually backfires. If you piss off the wrong person, they can make your job environment miserable, or push you out.
You say that users at your work tend to be rude. Every single one of them? I don't believe it. In my experience, most people are polite, caring and understanding. Some may be in a hurry to have their problems solved, but that is expected. If most of your users really are rude to you most of the time, then you let them push you too far, and treat you poorly for too long.
Even with only 60 computers to support, mostly likely you have a list of problems to solve. You can't solve them all at once, so you should have some priority, based on when received and importance. If you stick to standard schedule procedures, most of the time, and then explain to people where they are on the list, most people will understand how much workload you have. Some will always push to be next, no matter what you say, but unless they have a very good reason, don't do it.
Over time, if they believe you are making the best decisions, and solving problems well, you will earn their respect from most people. There will always be those that are still rude, because they has worked for them in the past. If they learn it does not work for them, they may change their attitude.
If you can't find a balance over the next year, either leave the company or leave this type of work, or both.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Unfortuantely I have seen many many people in this predicament. Being a sole support person is an absolutely thankless task, because while you are busy running around spinning your wheels keeping things going, it's only when the ball gets dropped somewhere along the line and they start pointing the finger AT YOU. It's an absolutely NO WIN SITUATION. Perhaps a well-timed extended vacation on your part would instill a new-found respect for your efforts and then they might realize your true value. Good luck.
Good question ! I'm network admin for 1 year and a half in a structure like your (about 30 ppl), plus ~300 persons in stores around ... the way to follow is to make understand ppl that you're not superman. I explain : it's stupid to make something in a hurry for someone, even if that someone says that's urgent (it's rarely as urgent as told, experience speak ^^). Do not learn to your users that you're the guy who do anything in no time with no questions ...
Personaly, I prefer taking time to explain ppl how to do what they want me to do that doing it for them : it's better for all parts.
I guess I'm lucky having a lot of ressourceful ppl (since I've replaced a guy who wasn't at work for 6 months) : in your case, after having given bad habits, it would be difficult to go back.
Good luck in that :)
Just for a while (until they get the hint). Announce that period in advance (enough time so everybody has the ability to read the email... 2 days or so).
The email should contain clear information. This can be achieved by using short sentences. Allow for no deviation from the IT-policy. You are the one interpreting the IT-policy. Give examples of possible punishments of IT-policy violations.
Now, here's the catch. The persons who stick to IT-policy and show signs of willingness to help you (for example: instead of announcing the need for something 2 weeks in advance (mandated by IT-policy), announcing it 4 weeks in advance giving you more space to do your work) get a less and less annoying you to deal with.
The others will notice this and will start to stick to IT-policy too. The jerks will stick to exactly the IT-policy while the nice persons will cheerfully help you along. Keep giving the jerks the BFOH, while the nice guys will get a more lenient you.
In short: turn a bit hypocrite. If people confront you about it (the jerks will probably do this), tell them there's a need for such action, otherwise it wouldn't have happened.
I'm going to be modded to Hell for saying this, so I just hope by some sheer fluke the OP reads it.
Everyone so far has made a few assumptions which I'm not going to. Specifically, they've assumed that the OP is getting all this grief for no good reason. I'm not. I'm going to ask a few questions which may be hard to answer honestly - but I'm asking them because I've been a sysadmin for years and I've seen colleagues make exactly these mistakes.
Be honest with yourself. Do your colleagues/customers (they're not users. Drug dealers have users) have a genuine reason to hate you?
By which I mean - do the systems you are responsible for work? Has there been downtime over the course of the last week|month|quarter? If the downtime was caused by someone doing something wrong, why is it your system reacts to this by breaking rather than failing gracefully? Can you fix it so that if the same "wrong" thing is done again, the worst that happens is an error message?
Do you make changes to live systems during the working day without first establishing that these changes will work? Do you suffer outages when you do this? Stop doing it. Set up a test network which replicates the live environment as closely as possible, make your changes there and only when you're happy do you make these changes in the live environment.
Can you write clearly and fluently in the language most of your colleagues use? Can you avoid jargon and explain things in lay terms? Do you write emails which say "We have identified an ongoing issue with the Pewlett Hackard SuperPhaser 3100 MegaTron Mk. 3 Printer which is causing a number of problems affecting reliability and throughput and are working with our supplier and partners to effect an appropriate solution" or do they say "The printer at the end of the corridor is broken, an engineer is expected within the next 24 hours"?
Do you fully understand the systems you're responsible for? Or are they a byzantine mix of hacks, counter-intuitive configuration options and other messes that require you to spend half a day trying to figure out how a given part of the system works before you can even hope to fix it? If the latter, why are you still using such a system?
Do you spend 8 hours a day fighting fires and/or doing dull things by rote? Why? The whole point of computers is to make tedious jobs quick and painless, why aren't you taking advantage of this?
By now you should have the idea. Good luck.
The first thing to try is actually being good at your job, the respect pretty much goes along with that. I moved into an internal IT role after several years in a field engineer position so I have been lucky enough to experience lots of different environments and deal with lots of different industries. I have worked in some places that I would never go back to and I have dealt with some people I could happily punch but now I have found a pretty sweet gig and I'm pretty set to stick about.
If the users are being rude and aggressive towards you then either you need to be able to have a quiet word to senior management about this or you're best off out of there. If the company has no respect for IT then it could just be a product of the industry you are in (a lot of manufacturing type companies see no value in IT and so don't give it any resources, compare that with industries like transport and finance who are more likely to have someone very senior responsible for IT).
Who's your line manager? Who do you report to? Surely it would be an idea to have a word with that person and try to gain some support for what you do amongst senior management. They can then come down on anyone who treats you like $h!t. The only time I ever had someone be particularly rude to me was a lass in the training department who was a little bit full of herself. I had a word with the IT director who then had a word with the HR director who then had a quiet word with the girl in question who bucked her ideas up pretty quickly and was never rude to me again. If it's a small company and you are reporting directly to the MD then you could have a chat with them and ask if they could have a chat with department heads or just generally jump on anyone who gives you attitude, companies have an interest in making sure that people like you are kept sane!
And if all else fails just mark out your problem users and work to rule with them. They'll pretty soon see that a smile and a please gets them a lot further than shouting and screaming and jumping up and down (just make sure you are firm but fair and do the bare minimum for them to satisfy your responsibilities but be warm and helpful to those who make the effort to be polite to you).
Be nice, sponsor me: http://jailbreak.ragabonds.org.uk
...and move somewhere where you'll be unreachable for the time, say a yachting trip.
When everything crashes and burns without you, return happy, grinning, in Hawaii shirt, suntan and black glasses, then prioritize problems, hang the schedule of solving them in a public place, then mercifully tick off the worst assholes a week later when you're done with all the rest.
Don't be a full-time BOFH. Just enter a BOFH mode for a month. A cheerful, friendly and polite BOFH who says "Sorry, I have other work now, maybe in 5 days".
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Actually, it does - I'm an IT outsourcer for a big company.
Does make some stuff really easy though, as you're never caught with the really stupid requests, because anything like that becomes a chargeable project.
After all ... you're looking after the company's hardware, the company's network, and the company's main equipment: the PCs. You enable the company's Human Resources to do their work. If people make your work difficult, then the company may have a problem. Flounting company guidelines on how to use computers is one of those things that may make a company loose a lot of money very quickly (e.g. if someone downloads a virus that wipes out a lot of work (or worse, gets sent to a client), if someone installs a bootleg version of a software package and the BSA comes calling).
Managers tend to be sensitive to that sort of thing. So how about having a talk with your manager and asking e.g. for backup in enforcing company policy? Once you have the authority to check up on someone and land them in trouble if they misbehave, respect will follow (unless you start abusing that authority of course).
Suck teeth, scratch head, rub chin. "You want to maximize a window... mmmm.... that's gonna be expensive - 6 weeks, best I can do - but seeing as it's you - I'm cutting me own throat here"
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
.. because most of the people there probably think they could do your job.
It's not the same problem as being IT at a finance company or other enterprise. In those places, the pain is always the stupid questions 24/7, and troubleshooting "my printer won't work".
in a software shop, the problem is usually more along the lines of locking down a guy's network access because he is using SOCKS to tunnel around the mandatory web proxy, or demanding developers wanting X or Y software available right away, etc.
It is a different set of problems. At the end, being treated with respect is the same as it is in any other customer facing job. Treat the customer with respect and they will return in kind. Understand, everyone there is trying to get a job done.
I am a developer too and most of the time I have no contact with IT at all, because I handle my own problems. The only time I talk to IT is if I have a legitimate hardware issue, or a requirement for something to do my job. As such, when I go to make thee requests in a polite way, I expect to not get an eye-roll or exasperation etc. I expect a polite response with a probable timeline. Maybe a "No problem, I can probably get that to you for Wednesday" - as opposed to "I don't have time for this sh*t right now. Come back tomorrow!"
Just remember - you are in customer service. The other employees, they are your customers.
Have you tried being good at your job? Having worked for a few small companies in the past, I've found that you can very quickly make yourself indispensable and well respected by simply doing what you've been paid to do.
From your description, it sounds like you spend all day "putting out fires" and that you've fallen way behind. Get your act together or find a different line of work.
And how on earth are you the "only IT guy" at a 60 person software company? I'm picturing you, the owner, and 58 salespeople pushing a visual foxpro database on unsuspecting customers.
Required reading for internet skeptics
supporting office environments will drive you insane. it took me about 18 months of solo admin work at a small software company to figure that out too. my advice is:
- don't expect anyone to respect your work aside from your immediate boss
- talk to your manager and see if he/she can help insulate you from tardly projects/users
- read everyone's email during your lunch breaks
- specialize your skills and get out of the office-support routine [we all start there..]
----
designing/supporting QA and production environments [in datacenters] is a lot less annoying. it sucks spending whole nights at the colo by yourself but dead switchports and fried servers are easier to deal with. and you can kick the crap out of them and probably get away with it.
Beat on the Brat with a Baseball Bat
Works every time, so I am told.
murder.
Back in my youth I worked as an onsite contractor. We handled PC installation and maintanance, in-house staff handled the network. One afternoon, the network went down, taking a couple of thousand PCs with it. Then the executive secretary to the Chairman calls, demanding to know what happened to her PC and how soon we'd have it fixed. I arrived at her desk and jiggled her mouse just in time to watch the machine reboot (did I mentioned it was Windows?). No amount of explanation in the world could convince the sainted woman it wasn't my fault. When she demanded to know what had happened to the report she'd spent the last six hours working on, my life flashed before my eyes. I explained that only the changes she'd made since her last save were lost, then steeled myself for the inevitable reply. "Save?!", she hissed. The ensuing political firestorm almost lost my compan its support contract. As it was, my manager (who fully understood the situation), was forced to transfer me to a new site (with an apologetic compensatory raise, bless his heart). The bottom line is the customer is always right, even when he (or she) is wrong. If you don't have the hide to grin and bear it, perhaps you might want to look for a new direction in your career. It's what I ultimately did.
definitely no offense, but if it has only been 1.5 years and you're already burnt out, then you might want to consider a different field.. you can stay in IT, but maybe not be as someone who serves customers. I miss the good ol' R&D jobs. there's some still floating around out there. But regardless, I work with a 5 man operation and we have about 75 business clients and about 2000 residential clients. The best way to not be so stressed out about this is to proactively monitor your networks so that YOU know about the problems before your customer does. It is the *only* way because it doesn't matter how many times you explain your policies to your customers, they will still want INSTANT service when something bad happens. It is almost impossible to avoid phone calls for minor things, but with the help of Managed Services you might very well be able to find a happy medium. Take a look at programs like Kaseya. Some people might scoff at this, but when you're growing fast, I think it is crucial for any small IT operation to use *big* software to help proactively monitor their networks instead of being reactive and just sit around waiting for problems all day and being stressed out.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
In my first job as a SW engineer, we had, in retrospect, a fantastic IT guy. At the time however, I thought of the IT department as an annoying obstacle wanting to mess with my DNS server etc. But they usually delivered on setting up networking and equipment.
First after a second job with a totally worthless IT department did I understand how well I had had it previously.
So, Set expectations and communicate, and agree on network structure. I good starting point could be that the development network is firewalled from productions, manufacturing and administration. This way you don't get in each others hair so much.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Tell 'em you're from Colombia, and you would like to meet his family.
You should get modded up. Bad behaviour generally doesn't get rewarded.
I consider myself a fairly competent IT guy. I worked for a contractor and had a chance to see the end-game for me: Working internal IT for a national company.
The regular guy was on vacation and they'd just chopped the IT department in half - they'd gone from two to one. What's more, they were using software I hadn't known existed, and that's only used within their industry. I spent each day learning by necessity while fielding complaints and issues as they came up.
Going into this, I was really excited. It was a learning experience, and I'd happily do it again (and did!). I was willing to accept some of the responsibility, but a lot of things required that I spent more time in books than resolving issues. The manager was pretty good about it, but the company heads were harder on me for it.
After seeing the extremely narrow peak at the top of the IT mountain, my solution was to look to an industry with more growth potential and the respect of people that contracts its service. I'm going to become a puppeteer.
I was a field IT guy for a couple of companies they outsourced to us plus I had to handle internal issues at times. best trick is to document everything you handle. This way when they inevitably do go back to your boss to get you fired you can point to a papertrail of cases that will show them at fault. Client who violate policies should always be documented. And in your documentation or even your ticket database always be polite and show you are the good guy. IE, fixed issue and optimized PC, user was using Kazaa removed and warned them not too etc. If you do this you are showing them that your on their side. When they inevitably go to your boss and try to get you fired because you aren't responsive enough you can come back with your cases as evidence. They will tell your boss you are "out to get them" or "jeopardizing operations" meanwhile your supervisor is looking at a paper trail that show they violated policy time and time again. You look like the nice guy and they look like the ass. When it happened to me my super asked "if they kept using kazaa why didn't you tell us" my reply was "I didn't want them to lose there job they are nice people" someone got fired that day, it wasn't me. But the big tips are as follows 1. under promise and over deliver. If you know you can fix it in an hour tell them 3. This will give you time should an emergency come up to resolve the problem. 2. Use tools like UBCD4WIN.com to automate your repairs. Automation is the key to being successful in this field. IF you are doing every repair by hand you are failing. If you can make scripts to solve your issues to do So! 3. Never take it personal. I know this is the hard one and should you succeed show me how. 4. Security is the key to success if someone keeps virusing their box you have to take this up high and let the management know that this 1 person can/will compromise the entire orginzation. 5. Web filters! web filters! webfilters! PORN = BAD 6. Firewalls block all the ports you know people will exploit Bit Torrent, KAZAA. No greater call then when someone says their Kazaa doesn't work. 7. Don't worry too much about being on the bleeding edge of technology. Windows XP is still good, 8. Active directory is GOD! and Group Policy is Jesus. use them well.
IT folks get the respect they deserve, if they think of themselves and act as "technical assistants" - help your customer get his/her job done. The customers need help, not another bossy person - they already have one. This comment applies to end-user support, IT management as well as CIOs.
1. Find out your chain of command before starting. IT is mostly a service job. If your department is run by the Finance director, you'll be serving the Finance dept. agenda and everyone knows it. They also know that your boss won't back you up when you enforce rules. Go ahead. Block ESPN on the firewall content filter. You'll find out right away where your boss's priorities are.
2. End users from senior execs to data entry people are mostly living a lie called "being computer literate". Here's your second simple test. While engaging in support calls, ask your users to open their web browser. Yep! They don't have a CLUE! They'll gaze at you with the "deer caught in the headlights" look or bluster about everything until you point to the icon and call it the "Blue E". (or "BLOOIEE!!" as the case may be.) Understand the level of right-brain focus that your users are capable of. Most of them really are faking it.
3. This is the real BOFH test. Who makes your purchasing decisions? Do you have less input than the business major who has been wined and dined by the vendor? Do you end up losing your personal life while that same person helps himself to a hefty bonus? There's only so much your self-esteem can take. If you weren't born into an aristocratic class or you aren't willing to be the bagman for an unethical suit, you aren't going anywhere and nobody will listen to you complain.
That's the way it is. Even Hollywood is part of the institution of keeping IT under the control of politically motivated empty-suits. You either keep looking for employment at a better business or you stop setting yourself up to wipe the drool off of everyone's chin. It's up to you to decide whether or not that makes you a BOFH but don't even expect your fellow IT'ers to back you up. If "Saturday Night Live" and their Jock-boy fan base think you're just geeks with an inferiority complex, well, you better just keep quiet and "play the game". Too bad your career is based on providing access to fantasy football sites.
Be like every other part of the corporation -- get a budget and track to it. if your only task is make everyone happy -- you are doomed. If you have every call go through a help desk system -- even if its just an email box -- you have a record of the calls, open tickets and can then report how many tickets a month you can get through. This will then let you have the reasonable conversation with your boss that if a department needs more service -- then you need a new hire to take some of the load. each person can get through x tickets a month -- we have 3x coming in -- we need more people. or even have the proactive conversation of -- we have 3x -- why -- what system is causing all the problems. or even --these 2 people are responsible for 70% of the tickets -- and since I made them log them all in email -- there being kind of a pain.
i worked in a simlar job for the last 2 years..
I just moved to a much larger company and serously it only gets worse!
My advice go on holidays where email and your phone doesn't make it.. they will miss you then!
and you get to have what sounds like a well deserved break
i work at a small biotech, and our programmers had to become the IT guys due to cutbacks; we do a lot of imaging, so we generate several gigs of irreplaceable data a day, plus email, etc etc
They did a good job of getting a new server up and running, but imho, there were two things they could have done better. the first was attitude: they gave off this attitue of, I'm a programmer, this absolutely vital to the company IT stuff is beneath me and a real pain in the ass.
the second is better, and more frequent communicatin. For instance, we migrated to a new RAID, and they simply sent out an email, the new raid drive is ready as drive T on your "my computer"
This was not really enough info - they didnt reassure us that the backups were in place (I had go to and bug them ) and there were several other details they could have communicated
Its about stroking people and making them feel warm and fuzzy and giving them enough info so that they are happy.
the other thing that helps is controlled breakdowns. I think joelonsoftware (hes 90% wrong about everything) say that when you show th daily build to the suits, always have a mispelt word on the splash screen, so they can make a useful comment; this will also keep them from making unhelpful commmetns about not yet done features.
similarly, you should have, on a monthly basis, some easy to fix failure - sorry, the spam filter went down
this will make people appreciate you.
another thing is to dole out helpful utilitys - like wisdom soft screen hunter, ninotech pathcopy, better file rename batch utility,
where i work, the screen capture utility is really useful to a lot of people, and i got a lot of praise for installing it
be a nice guy but you have a role. if someone approaches you in a panic, put it in perspective and calm them down about their particular issue. if the building is actually burning down, show them the door. short of that their problem is not necessarily a big deal to anyone but them. they rely on you to solve the problems they have with technology - you aren't the janitor, you don't move fax machines or clean the carpet. you make sure they can do their job with the computer issued to them on your corporate network. in the words of patrick swayze, "be nice" until it's time to not be nice (infinitive intentionally split because the fucker said it that way in the movie).
If you don't already have one, implementing a help desk system can relieve some of the problems. If someone is giving you flak about not getting immediate attention, you can always show them your help desk queue and how many hours are being spent on other people's work. It's easier to explain to people why they have to wait when they can see how long the line is. If you haven't looked at help desk packages, my company offers a web-hosted version that can be implmented quickly and cheaply. www.dhk.com For more details, please call the phone number on the web page.
Our IT guys in my last company have an unbelievable effective solution: No one knew their phone number. If you had a problem, you had to ask your department manager.
But if you were trying to call them again, you would notice the number was changed. You've got it: telephone system was managed by the IT as well.
Look, you are well within your rights to tell them "no," on any obviously unreasonable request and to request from senior management the authority to punish wrongdoers against company policy. If senior management doesn't take it seriously, then, honestly, neither should you. If they turn half the company to zombies, give them the "oh, that's unfortunate..." line UNTIL they wise up and realize that this is serious business and there are consequences to their actions or lack thereof. You are one guy, you clearly need an assistant, and if they won't hire another then they have to understand that the service level they get is what you are able to give after prioritizing reuests and general firefighting. But the most important word for an IT pro is simply "no." If someone in authority asks "why not?" explain why, be simple and honest, but there are times (a lot of them, actually) when you will simply have to refuse a request. Bummer for them. An emergency on their part does not constitute an emergency on your's.
in this economy i find most people are happy just to be employed and go out of their way to be nice and try to do their job. that is what you are there for - to help them do their job and make sure they can get back to it quickly. scrutiny of management is the best threat to anyone's well being in these times because there are ten people waiting to take everyone's job and they KNOW IT.
I have worked at two types of software companies. The first type is filled with top rate programmers that know nearly as much about IT's job as IT, and thus are VERY friendly to IT. The other type is filled with guys who have degrees from 3rd rate "technical universities". Usually, the second type is run by managers that think they know all about software, and really don't.
You my friend are obviously in the second type. Run away! Run away! (Seriously, at decent companies, IT is given respect, even if no one understands you.)
Find a new job. ASAP You cannot fix the situation you are in and it will end poorly for you. In addition you will end up a bitter a miserable person in process. It's a job not a marriage involving kids, pack it up and move along.
seem to do the trick for about 80% of my users. sure, not all users are going to read up on how to properly use it, and alot may not get the scope of the problem clearly documented on the first try, but those are the breaks as they say on the polls.
the other 20% indeed have a habit of treating me like a janitor, or plumber. i side with slashdot in saying "check your ego at the door." its just work, and people have a good deal of fear surrounding IT. they know twitter and youtube, and can write macros in office, but when it comes to the corporate lotus server or the BES...they are large and daunting pieces of infrastructure managed by usually one guy with a mohawk listening to angry music all day long (if you're me...)
fear begets anger, and they naturally want to control the situation. as you, the tech, are the only part they come close to understanding they will of course tend to be a bit firmer with you than their peers.
i dont have alot in common with my workplace comrades other than a paycheck and a parking space...eating my lunch with them as one slashdotter suggested is counter-productive as i didn't watch last nights episode of show X, play a round of golf at course Y, or see the latest movie Z. besides, they're just going to monopolize your lunch with questions about requests, or center the conversation needlessly around tech they may not understand entirely. they either perceive it as something you want, or they dont realize they wouldn't gather around accounting and wax intellectual about bank earnings.
yeah you can get burned out, and it can definitely lead to some heavy drinking if youre the all in one wonderpup for the 'computers' at work. top management always seems to get top priority, and users feel snubbed about that as though you have a special relationship with that manager.
IT can be a stressful job at times, and other times it can look like you have nothing to do. I think a healthy personal life is the key. find a city that embraces things you like, offers entertainment you seek, and holds the values you do. For me there arent alot of combichrist concerts in the deep south, but the bbq ribs are tasty.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I completely agree, if you are a jerk to the users they will retaliate and make your life hell. Your best thing is is to just do your job set limitation for the users so you can breath a little.
The arch enemy of a SysAdmin HAS to be developers/engineers. They are the most arrogant users out there. They "know it all" and will try to circumvent any policy set up and will question you on all of them as well!!
1) Be Polite 2) Be Efficient 3) Have a plan to kill everyone you meet. ...Profit?
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
Sounds like you work with a bunch of jerks anyway. Be professional but be firm. Last minute, impossible deadlines are unacceptable. Let them know that your time is planned and allocated and they need to plan ahead. There is no reason to accept abuse from co-workers.
Every person who came to this command had to sit through a face-to-face IT brief with me. I gently explained what they could and couldn't do, how to report problems, etc. They signed off on the brief so I know they got it and I had a record of it.
Occasionally, I had some assholes who insisted on being...well, assholes...and breaking the rules. My policy was to sit down with them privately and explain that they did sign a document saying they understood the rules. I would also gently confront them with the problem they were causing, and I would ask them not to do it again. Then, I'd follow up. Still a problem? Disable their account, send a report up the chain. The fireworks would usually start (especially among the officers) when I shut them down...they'd run to the executive officer and piss like kittens about their access, at which point the XO would show them my message. Then he'd call me in, and we'd have it out in front behind closed doors. I always won. One or two incidents like this usually stopped them completely.
I had a set of policies that were outside the "official" IT instructions, but they were mine nonetheless:
I've always found that violators of my rules tend to get upset when they can't get to their stuff or find their passwords being reset every six hours. Sometimes you have to get their attention.
By the way, make sure you get away from the desk for a while during the day, even if it's just to go outside for a short walk or stretch. Just getting some non-office air in your lungs and stretching the back, legs and arms will make you feel a lot better.
I don't do sysadmin stuff now. I'm a web apps developer, a contractor, I get paid very well (a high security clearance helps), and my job has little of the stress and responsibilities I had before. This is much better.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
You need to look at things, and explain things, in terms of business operations. IT exists to serve the needs of the business, not as an end in itself.
Explain what liberal policies you have in terms of how they control cost and mitigate risk. When someone insists that a request be completed immediately, explain that - as in any business - rush processing carries a cost.
People think that all IT does is spend money without returning anything to the business, and so they think that they can demand anything they like from IT on any schedule. After all, shouldn't IT be giving back to the business for all the money it spends?
Explain to management the ways that investment in technology saves money in some places (compared to not using technology at all), insures against expense in others, and provides services that allow the business to function at a higher rate of productivity. Explain to sales staff that they would not have as much time to firm up sales (or go golfing) if their sales flow weren't recorded in an easily accessible electronic medium.
When none of that works at all, change all the passwords for everything and have all the computers go on strike for a week.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
After 15 years in the field I've found that the starting a Help Desk policy is a great way to start. First, make sure you have the backing from your boos. Emphasize that this will help you track and prioritize problems. Set up a public folder/form that needs to be filled out to receive support and be adamant that only submitted tickets will be worked on. This gives you a lot of reasonable ammo as to why something is not done. If someone gets irate calmly take the time to show them your work load or your progress notes. I have found that most people back off when they find that you are not just screwing around and can prove it. As to the problem workers...have your boss speak to their supervisor about acceptable and professional communication to his people.
Dear Gen-X:
You don't GET respect. You EARN it.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I've been at it for my present company for over 4 years now. It is hard not to be a BOFH. Be good at what you do. If you are good people will respect you, unless they are an utter ass, there is no helping those people. Yes I will get stern with some of the hard headed ones. But usually after I've shown them a few times, exactly what THEY DID to cause the problem, they can fix it themselves. If after those few times you are still coming and asking for help then I might let that rudeness come out. I've only been a BOFH once, and I felt so much regret afterward that I apologized to the user and told them I was wrong for what I said. I didn't want to turn in the PHB, who are the real assholes around here.
Learn your users personalities. Learn their level of user. Then use that information when assisting them. It makes it person and real for them and they will respect you more. No matter how many times you've heard the question or been presented with the problem, the user hasn't. It's like the person at walmart being asked where the trash bags are 100 times a day. He knows, and has said it a 100 times, but when you're the 99th person asking, he might be tired of hearing that same question over and over and gets rude. But if you understand that this person hasn't been told 98 times before, those were 98 other people, and this person really doesn't know, you can keep it real every time someone asks a question that you've answered before. Patience and lots of it go a long way.
Meditate. It keeps you relaxed when even the nastiest of shit hits the fan. If you are at peace with yourself, you are at peace with all.
Lastly, work for a company with HIGH turnover so that you never have to deal with someone for more than a year. That way every user is a new user.
Just kidding about that last one.
In my personal experience, if you're always soft, then you'll get taken advantage of, and if you're always a bastard you get fired.
What you need to do is set out the policies, and enforce them, but be helpful when people do the right thing. Carrot and the stick type thing. Being a bastard isn't swearing or anything like that it's saying "I can't fix your problem until you log a job appropriately, or you're not the top of the list right now I'll get to you. Despite what most IT people think, the policies and procedures are there to protect you from this kind of shit.
If it's really bad talk to your manager, talk about how what's going on is affecting your productivity(this sort of thing always does) and how that is costing them money. Show the policies being violated or get some written.
If you're fair to people you get what you need, but if people are causing problems and violating the rules it can't go.
Do your job, don't be a prick, and remember that you are support staff and bring no money directly into the company. In a nutshell, your position garners no more respect than the people who clean the office, but at least you get paid better.
Too many of the IT lads here at my major Midwestern University have poor social skills - a faux-asperger's, if you will. They don't smile, don't look their clients in the eye, don't engage folks interpersonally. Cliche? Yes. True? Yes. I have adopted the practice of not letting these fellows shuffle past me whilst looking at the floor - I greet them by name, with a smile, slap 'em on the back and shake their hand and ask them how the rat race is treating them. The ones that start opening up and socializing get treated much better by the office tyrants and technophobes....
Has any IT person out here turned into the all encompassing fix it guy. The fuckin coffee machine doesnt work, call IT. Table is wobbley, call IT. I cant get my pen cap on, call IT. I have turned into a reboot technician as well. Thats my own fault for building a beauty of an infrastructure. I digress...Me and my staff get no respect most of the time too. The best approach is to tell them youll look into it, like a little kid they will forget all about their minor issue and move on. Dont forget the old PEBKAC and ID10T errors are the only ones you cant fix!!
In some environments, acting like BOFH is the best way to get users and coworkers to respect you, and there is little you can do about it. Some workplaces expect employees to compete "tooth-and-nail" with each other, and BOFH-type maneuvers are considered not only legitimate but also a sign of intelligence. Since changing the culture of a given workplace is extremely difficult, if you find yourself in this position and cannot (or will not) play that game, you should consider leaving at the earliest opportunity; otherwise, you will either become a BOFH... or get abused by users and coworkers until you break down and/or get fired.
Old principle I heard somewhere: The time from now till the end of the project tends to remain constant.
You, Mr. Anonymous Poster, are in a lost cause. All I can do is provide suggestions for your next job. Why?
1) Your ratio of employees to IT people is hopeless for you. Prior to our being bought out by a Fortune 500 company, the company I work for had a rough ratio of 15 employees for 1 IT person. At worst it was probably 20 to 1, but that was before I began to work here.
2) If you have to ask this question, the odds are extremely high that you will not be able to change things where you are at.
I've been in the IT industry for over 20 years. In my experience, IT has to get the upper hand from the beginning or it's too late. You can't get control of your situation after people have already learned not to respect you. I have a colleague that I've worked with twice in my career and he was great at setting up expectations immediately upon arrival. If people wanted something done that was complete b.s., he had no problems telling them to their face that they were idiots. The "Scotty approach" also can work wonders. If it will take 10 minutes to do, say it will take 1 hour or 2 hours. Do it in 20 minutes. Then wait to give them the results until towards the end of the time you specified. Sometimes do it very quickly after giving them longer expectations and you'll look like a genius for doing it sooner than expected.
Being nice and friendly can also help and if your co-workers actually start to like you and respect you, they may ease off on what they ask you to do.
The bottom line is that you have to be a jerk at some points early on and confront people and tell them that you can't or won't do what they asked for and tell them why. Don't sugar coat. If they are idiots, explain why the request is stupid. You don't have to necessarily say "You are an idiot" to them, but you definitely have to say things like "If I do this, it will take days to do and the return on my expended time is not worth it as everything else will have to wait for days until I finish this unimportant task". You have to be willing to do something like that.
It also helps if you're wiling to leave if things suck and everyone doesn't respect you. Being unwilling to get out takes away any ability to try to make changes.
From my experience, the best way to earn the respect of your customers/users is to consistently deliver good service. Do all the behind-the-scenes hard yards to ensure the systems you look after are stable, reliable, and performing well (even though the users never have any visibility of this, or appreciate just how much work it takes to do). When something does go wrong - when, not if - even if it is not your fault, be professional, polite, friendly, and above all keep the user(s) informed of progress (particularly if it takes a long time to solve the problem). If the users actually know you are working hard on solving their issues, they generally appreciate it even if they don't have a clue what you are actually doing.
Remember users are not IT people, and don't understand the complexities of IT systems. Even when a problem is entirely their fault (which is unfortunately frequent), try to explain to them in clear layman's terms the correct way to do whatever they are trying to do. Even if it is a case of colossal stupidity on their part, reserve your scorn and laughter for when you relay the story to your other IT colleagues, and not when talking to the user.
If all else fails, remember that being respected by everyone isn't a job necessity, nor is it always possible. It's very unlikely you will be able to please everyone all the time. In my job, I generally have a choice between having the users hate us (because we've allowed unstable/unreliable systems through to production), or having project managers hate us (because we won't allow their shoddy rushed garbage through in order to meet their poorly planned deadlines). I opt for the latter - my job is to provide services to the end users, not to make sure project managers get their bonuses.
The one issue with the (otherwise quite good) system of derating people who overuse urgency is that even the fuckwits that say everything is an emergency do suffer actual emergencies from time to time. And, if that should happen, the odds are good that "IT let me sit on the bottom of the ticket pile while $IMPORTANT_BUSINESS_THING went to hell!" will be heard a lot louder than "We let $LUSER sit on the bottom of the pile because he is a drama queen with no sense of perspective."
Look. They're going to be mad at you. Things stop working, and you come in and do something really simple, and then things work again. It makes them feel stupid. Yeah, there may be good reason they feel stupid, but they still don't like being reminded of it. You don't have to be consistently a jerk -- in fact, it will make your life harder -- but you need to be capable of it.
The key is consistency. Put the rules out in writing, and then enforce them. Enforce them every time, for everyone who violates them. I don't care whether it's the CEO or the janitor... the rules are there to be followed. If it's a rule that might have legitimate exceptions (use of BitTorrent, perhaps), write that in: "We understand there may be legitimate, business related uses for this technology. If you believe you have a legitimate use, contact us before using it, and we'll be glad to discuss it with you." When you have to be a jerk, do it; nobody respects a manager who is always smiling and cheerful -- but if you're ALMOST always smiling and cheerful, the occasional statement of "This is the rule, and you will follow it or be removed from the network" will have a much greater impact.
Also: don't bluff. It doesn't work. If you make a threat, carry through. If you say you'll have to take someone off the network if they don't change whatever it is they're doing, do it. As soon as people realize you're making threats you won't carry through on, you've lost.
1) You will always get the blame. Learn to accept that. Sucks, but that's the way it is.
2) Be reasonable. Explain what and why etc. If that does not help, refuse to communicate other than through written media. Start CC'ing your or their boss if they try to turn up the heat.
3) If you do not have support from your or their boss, swallow it or find another job.
It boils down to educating the intelligent ones and defending against the rest. If in doubt, refer to 1)
Be nice... a little good will goes a long way.
You're never going to deal with this until you accept this isn't limited to the IT department. They're all being difficult to each other. Is the accounts department ever not referred to as the bean counters on Slashdot? People in any one department generally have little idea what the other departments are doing or the problems they are dealing with. Learn how to deal with people. If someone is being difficult via email, go talk in person or at least on the phone.
If you're not dealing with the same individuals day-by-day then first impressions count: a suit goes a long way.
Just have to ask, How the F, are you the sole IT guy at a software company. Don't they make Software, who develops this software besides you?
Two words: Managing Expectations. If you do every task as fast as you can for everyone who requests it, you will train your users to expect instant gratification from you and will demand it each time. You have to train your users what to expect from you and how fast to expect it. This is done by simply by managing how fast you do things for them. Your goal will be to manage all tasks before you with time and thought put into managing what is priority and what can wait until tomorrow. The article makes it sound like you are fairly new to the job market in general and so also are probably working longer hours for less pay than a standard person in the industry. One IT person for 60 users sounds pretty dubious. Regardless of how well you manage your time I suspect you could use a helping hand. Make sure you manage your life and health first, (sleep 7 hours a day and don't skip lunch like a maniac) then prioritize tasks in a way that when someone asks you to do something, you can give them a reasonable timeframe for completion, even if it is not the same day or week. I've found people are much more comfortable waiting for their project to be complete if they can rely on the deadline being met. If you say it can be done by the end of the day, but then you don't get it done that day or the next day, you're training your users that you are unreliable and they will have to hounmd you to get their requests completed. Many an admin fall into this trap, which they set for themselves, which usually ends up eating into personal time (ie those weekday midnight sessions alone in the office). Remember you're the one in the control of the solutions you are providing, so you're ultimately responsible for getting them done correctly and done in a reasonable timeframe. When managing your time properly, if you cannot get all of your work done in a reasonable timeframe, it is also your responsibility to escalate to your boss that changes need to be made to the system. Either hiring someone to help (bosses rarely like this one) or fewer users are allowed access to you (although if you're the only one available who can replace a broken keyboard or something else very minor, they don't really have a choice.) It's summertime, time to pick up some cheap/free summer interns. Bosses love the word 'free'.
People only call the IT department after they've worked themselves into a tizzy with a computer problem. By the time they call you, they're already angry and irrational. Learn to diffuse their anger with humor, you'll find your conversations become much more productive that way. Also, when people ask for a project and give it an unreasonable deadline, learn to nicely but firmly inform them that you will not be able to meet the deadline and that they should give you more advance warning for complex projects in the future.
1) EVERYTHING MUST BE IN WRITING
Your first task when assuming responsability for a helpdesk MUST be to get a troubleticket system in place. It should track date, time and the actual userID of the individual submitting the ticket. It should require a minimum set of fields (user info, phone number, email address, location) which can usually be populated from LDAP or Active directory lookups once they enter their userid. All submissions get an automatic email response. All tickets should have some basic categories for the problem (outage, service request, new project, application issue, information request) and should have the ability to have both a user assigned and help desk assigned priority. Based on 3-4 levels of priority, the task will be assigned an ESTIMATED duration.
2) Report metrics. How many tickets by type. Average duration of a ticket. Number of tickets by priority. Top 10 submitters of tickets. Shine a spotlight on the issues (95% of all tickets submitted are submitted with urgent priority, as an example, or Bob submits 14 tickets a month and 7 were repeats).
3) Make sure you are immediately notified via email, SMS, pager, etc. when urgent tickets are opened. Make sure your boss is at least cc'ed on them. Make sure the text submitted with the ticket is included. Make sure the entire company understands that this happens.
4) Any helpdesk that allows URGENT helpdesk tickets must ALWAYS have a backup. If there is no backup, there can be no URGENT tickets. All tickets will immediately dropped from URGENT to High if you are a 1 man help desk. Make sure the email notification reflects this and the CC to your boss.
5) Give people the ability to check the status of their tickets and see your queue. If you are a one man shop, have 20 tickets in your queue and someone submits a sev 4 informational ticket, they need to understand its last in line and it may take a while to get an answer.
6) Inform the requestor when their ticket is closed and include a valid, clear reason why it was closed. An acceptable reason can be "Requested additional information. No response in 72 hours. Case closed." Unacceptable responses include "No response", "Closed" and "rejected".
7) If you close a ticket for inactivity, you must have the ability to reopen or to copy all the contents from a previous ticket into a new ticket in an easy to understand manner.
8) Log all activity on a ticket to the ticket. The ticket system is your log book. If you try to call, you send an email or you make a visit (or they come see you) log it. It keeps everyone honest.
9) No tickee, no service. No exceptions. Even if it means "Hold on just a second. Let me open a trouble tiket for you".
10) You MUST have a knowledge base. Index and allow searches of your trouble ticket system. Have a "search the knowledge base" box right on the "submit a ticket" web page. Before they are taken to the submission page, ask the question "Have you searched the knowledge base for your issue?" It is amazong how many problems this will solve without tickets.
With all of these in place, you will have a record with tracking on every issue serviced. You will be able to show the strengths and weaknesses of your help desk and your user community and it will highlight the offenders. It will make your boss painfully aware when there are issues and build the business case when you need assistance. It will also show when you are walking on water. Without these in place, your help desk life will be hell.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
Congrats on making it 1.5yrs before feeling that way! Many times it can go downhill much quicker than that. Most users are blissfully ignorant when it comes to the computer systems they use every day. One of the hardest parts to the job is to find a way to get them to properly report a problem. Do not tell me in the hall while I am in the middle of a conversation on another issue. Do not tell someone else to tell me. Do not ignore the problem until it gets to the point it requires a complete reinstall. If you can get them to let you know about a problem and accurately describe what they are running into (not just "it doesn't work"), then they can begin to understand there are rational steps to go through with getting a problem fixed and hopefully they will know you are not just ignoring them (hopefully).
IT Departments rarely get any respect, we're firmly placed on the 'Rodney Dangerfield' rung of the office social ladder. People seem to enjoy blaming IT for anything that goes wrong in their office. Microwave dies? IT should be fixing it (trust me, I've been ASKED to do that job... no joke). I was in your situation a few years ago. I've been doing IT for 7 years now, at first I was a happy go-lucky fellow with patients to take on the world. But... that wears thin when your co-workers treat you like another machine to do their complex tasks (or some of them do). Everyone expects technological miracle, and they expect them to cost their department $50. My advice to you is to get a good sense of humor and a thick skin, you'll need both. Make people laugh and you disarm them a bit. I always try to have some sort've amusing 1 liner to give my bosses when something is nearly an impossible task, and they get the picture. Another important thing that I've seen mentioned here is documentation. You need to document everything and anything that goes on while you're at work. Keep a log of your daily work activities, the projects you've got going, any problems that occur during the day (and the steps you took to resolve them). The most important thing to document is altercations with people that you have, and they will happen. Remember first off if someone is being beligerant towards you, keep your calm. Yelling back at them will only escalate things and get you involved in any of the negative effects. Also any witnesses available get them to write out what they saw from their perspective and sign off / date it ASAP. This is annoying, but it's saved my hide time and time again. If you've got 3 people agreeing with your side of the story, the other individual generally doesn't garner any sympathy. Lastly if all else fails? Violent video games... just don't start picturing peoples heads on your enemies and you're golden. Hope that helps -K
My first suggestion would be "face time". Understandably you've a busy schedule but you would be amazed at how much small talk makes. Be a face, not just an unidentifiable person behind emails or a phone. Typically IT professionals are considered to be somewhat aloof and self-absorbed, don't let this stereotype proceed you. The more comfortable and familiar your users are with you the more they will see you as a person.
Delegate! I can't stress this enough. There are many silly things that can be taken care of that do not actually require your expertise. While you may be the company "computer guy" there are other people who can take care the minute task of user creation etc. If you did your job correctly to begin with this should be very easy to accomplish. Granted, there might be some intricate details to attend to but overall you should be able to entrust someone to accomplish this. Someone is managing these user's at a lower level, let them be responsible for the small fixes. You'll be amazed at not only how much free time this should create, but those responsible will begin to see a side of your job and possibly gain some respect and patience in the process.
Don't let IT become the "do all". Rememeber, your position in the company is to facilitate work, keep and maintain healthy network environs, and ASSIST users with technical problems. Far too often a non IT related project is pushed off into the "computer world" because users haven't any idea what to do or where to start. "I can help you with that" > "I can do that".
Be informative. Everyone of us has run into problems that are beyond our control. Do your best to inform them before the calls come in. You should always be the first person to know if something has taken place on YOUR network! An email to those affected would do wonders, and prevent you from cleaning out your inbox or fielding a dozen calls.
And finally, people are people. You're always going to like some more than others, but this doesn't provide you an excuse to treat one any different than the other. Perceived preferential treatment will put you in hot water fast.
Have fun with it, it's your means to an end. Work to live, don't live to work. Do your very best to walk out at the end of the day and leave work at work. If you're at home and thinking about work you really aren't getting a break from it at all.
1) be a project manager
2) lead projects where you are also the lead tech guy. The architect, if you will.
It's all about being the guy SOLVING business problems. You have to get out of operations roles and move to strategic roles. Then you will be respected, or hated, depending on personality conflicts with management, and sometimes what you actually accomplish (or don't).
Want respect. Then understand that--unless IT is your end product--you are SUPPORT staff. You're there to support the people who actually "make the widgets". Understand that without you, the company would continue to run (although poorly). But without the people who actually do the work, the company won't run. Put another way (I work as an analyst at an FFRDC), I could do the IT person's job (not well, but probably at an acceptable level). Unless the IT guy has a PhD in physics and a couple decades of experience he can't do my job. Understand this, and we'll get along just fine.
Well, maybe not your exact job, but close enough. The thing is, you seem to be confusing " friendly, helpful, and responsive" with being their bitch, and "being a bastard" with asserting yourself and your rights.
Here is what I did:
As for the plan of action, consider the following:
As you can see, this requires that your boss stand behind you and back you 100%. If not, then you are better off finding a new job. But, even if your boss will over-ride you every single time, you are better off pushing problems up the chain of command. Eventually, they will stop coming to you and start going to your boss. Then, you can turn to your boss and say "Which of these four 'important projects that have to done before everything else', do you want me to do first?" You can force your boss to set priorities and then when people come asking about their oh so important projects, you can say "My boss said I am to work on these projects in this order. Your project is number y, I am on x." and if they don't like it point them back to the boss.
If you haven't gathered yet, the objective is to either get the authority you need to assert yourself and your rights, or force everything to go through your boss and make him deal with them while you look for a new and better job.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
It's not you. At 60 people you shouldn't be the only IT guy - at a minimum have a #2 to back you up so you can at least take a vacation. If management can't realize that then find another job during Great Depression 2.0.
For those of you who have been doing this a lot longer, how do you get a reasonable level of respect from your users while not being a jerk?"
Firstly, being a jerk isn't the "last resort" option to getting respect... that approach will never work.
The most important thing you can do as any service provider is build your image as the solution, not the problem. People are naturally going to treat you better if they have positive things associated with you. You can't force or coerce that sort of response, you have to build the right environment for it to grow on its own terms.
Different situations will affect the difficulty of this task. Bad management or policies can make it very hard to stay on top of things, and if that's the case where you work, you will also need to work on those problems because you can't really work around them.
1. track your work. if there isn't a trouble ticket system in place, make one. never lose a request. nothing pisses off people like forgetting about them. Every time someone has to remind you that they are still having the same problem builds your image as a part of the problem.
2. narrow your reporting to a single or a handful of methods and make sure everyone knows them. If a new person asks how to get ahold of IT for help, whoever they ask should have one or two options at most to give them. If they say "you can email support, or email rob directly, or try his manager. his desk phone is xxx, or you can page him. I have his cell number if you need it." then you need to consolidate. Having fewer, more reliable ways to get ahold of you will improve your image of reachability.
3. respond promptly. prioritize. If someone is upset that you are not helping them first, give them the option if you can. "I'm headed to set up the conference room right now, can this wait 20 minutes?" (make sure you have support of your manager on this) Nothing puts a screamer in check like their manager asking them why they pulled you off an important task (that got THEM yelled at) for something unimportant. This is the only way to handle screamers.
4. make sure the problem is fixed. Don't take their word for it. Sometimes people are embarrassed and don't want to look stupid if they don't "get it". Ask a few probing questions before you leave to make sure everything is the way they need it.
5. followup. Nothing improves your respect more than following up on a fix. Followup even if you know it's fixed. 15% of the time you'll find that the fix was either incomplete or not what they needed, and you have an immediate opportunity to correct it. (even if they didn't accurately or completely describe the problem, that doesn't matter) The other 85% of the time you get good-will points for following up and "taking good care of them". Users that have repeated problems of the same nature warrant occasional check-ins to see if anything has broken recently that they just haven't had time to call you about yet. This is a powerful way to build your image as the solution rather than the problem
I've found it's also important to read people and figure out what sort of service they are looking for. Some people want you to flash in, fix it, and disappear. Others want you to fix it and hang around. A few will want you to show them how you fixed it so they can do it again. It's very important to learn quickly which of the three types each person is. DO NOT GUESS. Guessing wrong in any combination produces bad to very-bad results. eg: someone that hints they may be interested in knowing how to fix the problem next time themselves, you explain the problem and walk them through the fix. they thank you and depart. Little did you know it went WOOSH over their head and they were too embarrassed to say they didn't understand a word you said, and feel belittled by you. Do not guess. Ask them. They will surprise you more often than not until you figure them out.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
1) Love your users. Be happy to help them. If you're having a bad day, either fake pleasantness or apologize for seeming "a little off" and explain with open sincerity about your bad day. If you can't create an atmosphere of good faith and empathy, you don't belong in IT. ..oO(That user needs training.) Not ..oO(That user is an idiot.)
2) Don't assume that because you can do something, it must be easy. Google searching, for example, is not easy. Don't assume that knowing how to do something really well means that that you can be effective at explaining it. If a user gets confused, blame yourself. "Sorry, I haven't found a good way to explain this." "Oh come on, you're not stupid; it's just not as intuitive as it should be. We're still in the dark ages of software."
3) Recognize that people need validation. In general, people hate having to ask for help. Acknowledge their need as reasonable. Any kind of hesitancy to help will create a sense of invalidation, which can poison your reputation forever.
4) Where reasonable, cultivate friendships with your users.
5) If the user seems incapable, your response should be
6) In policy disputes, be an advocate for the users. When you enforce policy, be clear that it is out of obligation.
7) Acknowledge that your role is to give other people the tools and environment they need to do their work.
Hope this helps.
Learn your users personalities. Learn their level of user. Then use that information when assisting them. It makes it person and real for them and they will respect you more. No matter how many times you've heard the question or been presented with the problem, the user hasn't. It's like the person at walmart being asked where the trash bags are 100 times a day. He knows, and has said it a 100 times, but when you're the 99th person asking, he might be tired of hearing that same question over and over and gets rude.
psssht: put up a sign.
Or how about: do not re-arrange the aisles every two weeks.
You don't read much Machiavelli do you?
"Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear."
There was another one along the lines of "It doesn't matter that they hate you, as long as they fear you in the same degree." But I can't find it in english...
Yes this is what I have been running into the last couple of years. My solutions all pretty much the same in that I will likely be leaving over the next year or so because I have had enough. It has gotten to the point that even the Scotty principal doesn't work. I do a ton of work for these guys and get zero respect for it, which incidentally is also reflected in my pay. One of my chief problems is that I am a technical person working with a bunch of technological troglodytes. Not only do they not understand what I do, they really have no interest how hard some of the things I do for them are, only that I produce. Despite me trying to train them into reasonable time frames for requests, increasingly everything needs to be done "yesterday". I do not function with a project management type arrangement, it is more like daily triage, and I take flack at times when inevitably some lower priority stuff falls off the cart. I basically work as a Data Analyst by the way. Half the time I am so rushed and pushed, that I wonder if I ever made mistakes, because sure as hell no one is checking my work. What aggravates these issues even more is the fact that I am now involved with meetings and projects where I am the lowest rung on the totem, yet somehow I am running both meetings, projects, and doing all the actual work. All this without respect, nor adequate compensation. Now I get paid ok, but when I am the lowest paid guy in the room that angers me, also I think that the amount you make also garners some respect as well. So anyway my two solutions are to A) get out of the technical field and into management. The problem being I like being technical, and I dislike being a manager. Though perhaps if I had some actual clout or power I might not mind. The second solution B) is basically stay in the technical field, but move to a business area comprised of mostly technical types that understand one another. This is a pretty specific job description so that may take awhile to find one that meets that criteria.
Anyway I am sure many of you have faced the same situations. I have been in mine for years and have done nothing in my complacency but get bitter. I hope to change that this year.
Your prestige depends on your coworkers' basis for comparison. If they've dealt with worse in past, they'll accept your policies and explanations with cheerful relief.
However if their standard is a fantasy of instant gratification with no cost or effort, you'll never measure up.
Which reminds me, I need to send my predecessor a thank-you note. His antics and excuses are still making me look good, years after replacing him.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
"Fixing the problem would be applying a patch that solves the issue, adding more memory/swap, replaced unreliable parts, etc."
if somebody is loading the world when its not needed then that can't be fixed by hardware/software upgrades
you will need to patch/replace the actual defective part
THE WETWARE
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Get a new job!
You need to lower your expectations. People aren't going to openly respect you unless you have more money than them, more knowledge than them, or you can fire them. These days 90% of people in an organization are narcissistic and 50% are on psych meds. Don't expect much in the way of professionalism or healthy behavior. Also, most people are delusional about their knowledge related to computers. You are probably dealing with people who think they know more about computers than you do. Another bone of contention I've seen in the user->IT dynamic is that users perceive IT workers as overpaid for an "easy" job. Many people dream of having your job, yet they have no idea what they'd be getting into. Good Luck!
if you swing it right then they will consider you an oracle of wisdom and
1 let you eat your lunch while you ponder the problem
2 buy you lunch as an "offering"
3 not bug you during the next disaster
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Seriously with all the books and shit you guys read one should be How to win friends and influence people. I swear its +1 to Charisma
shank 'em
"Don't let users save to their desktop... force everything to the file server (either by policy or management) and then back up your servers frequently... this avoids having to back up and restore individual machines"
if at all possible rig the needed voodoo to make everything in %user%\ either on the network to begin with or have it cloned to a network location that way you save the rare "User BrainWidth" resource.
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If you fell behind on a task (whether it was your fault or there was some issue with something/someone your work depended on, that could only be expected to occur on the 1% chance that the worst case scenario appeared, or maybe the CEO promised a new feature that he assured the project managers was "minor"), you'd throw the whole chart out of whack and cause lots of angst to the maintainers of said charts, and angst, like other things, rolls toward the guys and gals with their hands on the keyboard. People quickly learned that the best way to avoid being the latest one to have the red flag placed atop their cube (the official "recognition" of "you broke the schedule") was to double their most realistic estimate and convert to the next higher units. Two hours? Make that four days. 1 day? Two weeks. We found it disquietingly accurate in the worst and near-worst-case scenarios, although it overestimated the better and best case scenarios significantly.
This worked for a while because the client had what appeared to be(*) a bottomless budget.
* - The company was eventually replaced by an agile-methodology-before-agile-was-cool competitor who focused more on quality of software and less on quality of schedule charts, and got the job done for a lower price. (Hello Dave, Kevin and all if you're out there...)
One of the things I love about work is that I get to be a different person. I'm no longer an individual, I'm part of a hive. I'm there to do a job, and that's what I do. That's all you can do. When people around you are unprofessional, the only response is professionalism. Don't let anyone's emotion get to you. Know your role and company policy, and follow them. If someone makes an unreasonable demand, dispassionately tell them why it's not in the best interest of the company. Fall back always on the company - you're not making decisions because you're an asshole or bored or a renegade, you're making decisions because they support the success of the company. It's business. If you can maintain this focus despite the crows and clowns around you, nothing bad can stick to you. You'll be management material.
This is one that our net admin used and it really worked. It only works for offices that have access to the internet though so ymmv.
Step 1: Monitor their internet. Identify a particularly belligerent user and log all the sites they visit for a week, then grep it down to the ones that they visit the most. In this particular case it was Facebook, but you can pick just about any site that you want. The more embarrassing the better, but you still want something common.
Step 2: Wait till the user is on said site and walk over to their office area. A cubicle farm works best for this, but if there's offices then make sure to stand at the end of the hall and yell. "[insert user name] NEEDS TO GET OFF FACEBOOK BECAUSE IT'S DOWNLOADING VIRUSES TO OUR NETWORK AND BREAKING EVERYONES STUFF." You need this shout to be loud enough to be heard by the entire department. Multiple departments are a bonus.
Step 3: Casually walk away grumbling about how it's going to take most of the day to fix this crap.
This is how you create a new office scapegoat for when things go wrong.
I've been doing "the job" for almost 14 years. First 2 was all desktop support. My advice is to stick to some kind of guidelines/policy. If you have a mgr who will back you make policies and stick to them. You can always use the excuse"my manager made me do it". That is what a good mgr is there for. People will only abuse you as much as you let them on a consistent basis. You can be friendly but have boundaries. It may take time to educate your customer community, but with consistency and patients they will come around. In turn they will respect you more since they know your a professional who has standards to follow. Of course there will always be that one prick VP who thinks his shit doesn't stink...but that is a battle for someone above your pay-grade. Keep your head up and exude confidence.
When someone doesn't respect you, wait until they have to give a big presentation, then tell them you can get hold of the ACTUAL BOX that contains the WHOLE INTERNET...
N.B. Before you do this, make sure you clear it with... The Hawk.
shin phantomflanflinger
So, having the odd-timed lunch at your desk, has the following benefits:
Oh, and NEVER increase your estimate by pi. Someone will figure it out. Few will check sqrt(10)
Sh*t flows down hill and IT people/sys-admins are considered by the rest of the corporate food-chain to be at the bottom. You'll also find that you are given Herculean tasks and no money to accomplish them with. I recall when we got the first Canon CLC printer after years of working on crappy dog-slow color printers (it was a print design group). The unit was a demo/loaner to convince the powers that be to buy one. But the bean-counter Nazis refused to buy toner for it. So one Sunday morning (yes, Sunday MORNING) I get an irate phone call at home screaming that the CLC was out of toner and I "HAD TO FIX IT NOW!". "How did you get this number?" was followed by "So, you expect me to pull bottles of toner out of my a$$ and drive into work to load them?" "I DON'T CARE! I HAVE A DEADLINE ON MONDAY!"
That was when I redoubled my efforts outside of work to develop software to sell. I eventually left them in the dust and that group no longer exists. Crisis Management never works. Trouble is most people don't practice the Seven P's. Previous Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance. Start by printing those words on giant posters and stick them up all over the office.
A long time ago, I worked with my company's helpdesk. Part of that staff setup new PCs with the company's standard applications and other applications required per user. One of the early assignments I received was a run of the mill install, but the other technician who was originally supposed to do it, well, he neglected it for over a month. Needless to say the waiting user was less than thrilled... Anyway, I got the task just after lunch, say 12:30 or so, and I had the machine ready to go and arrived at the satellite office just after 2:00pm. As I carried the PC into her (the user's) office, the first thing she said was "It's about time" (very heavy on the attitude). The next sentence used expletives. I just stared straight into her eyes for about three seconds before saying "I can see this isn't a good time, I'll come back tomorrow." I turned around started to walk out. That's when the apologies started pouring out.
You don't need to be an ass, but to have respect you can't be a pushover either.
Alternatively, make a point of going for a walk around each of the departments you support EVERY day,
First of all, very subjective to the size of the company, and type of the company. In some cases doing this is going to be disruptive to others and just generally annoying. Rather than being that weird antisocial guy, you'll often end up seeming like the annoying drop-in overly social type, and/or disrupting others' work.
I've found that it tends to work out better if you just make sure to put in visible appearances when fixing issues. Sure, it's easier and faster to pop into the server, fix the issue, and fire off an email. But from a social standpoint it makes more sense to do the fix and drop in with the user to make sure everything worked properly (with the added bonus that if you didn't understand the issue quite right and it's still broken, you can fix it and not seem like a clueless dork).
If you have lunch with them, then you'll know them personally, and they'll feel a little more comfortable about talking to you about little IT problems, which have been annoying them.
Right, and you'll be lucky if you ever finish your lunch without being asked a gazillion IT related (and often enough not work related but rather "my home computer is doing X" questions).
Again, moderation is key. Grab your coworkers on a "going out to sushi day" or whatever, but daily lunches aren't necessarily as necessary or productive.
usually users will be bitching to each other about something being 'a bit flakey' long before it gets to IT as a critical fault
Usually if you're friendly enough, the users will feel free to ask about an issue in these cases. One of the big things I've found is that when addressing issues, be sure to provide feedback. Even if it's not a local issue (e.g. a website outside the company is down), a quick "hey, I checked into X and it looks like the issue is that the server on their end is down" is better than no response.
Ask them if they're rude to the plumber when they call him over to fix their shower, or the electrician, or ANY repair guy. You are no different and should be afforded the same respect. Make it clear that you don't deserve to be bitched at.
And it isn't handed out for doing your job as expected. Being friendly, honest and helpfull is the floor of any working relationship, not the ceiling. In other words it the bare minimum.
Only in IT would someone think there owed respect becasue they were 'pleasant'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OK, lots of things that need to be in place.
1) Communicate! Clear, comprehensive, concise communication is the core of success anywhere. A marginally acceptable IT guy who communicates well is usually more valuable and more respected than a tech whiz who can't (or won't) communicate clearly. /., even though it's actually relevant to my job. All it does is piss me off and make me find ways around it.) :-)
2) be professional and polite--friendly if you can manage it. Sulky or tempermental admins are feared, disliked, and avoided. This is not the same thing as respect.
3) Solve problems, not tasks. If someone comes to you and says, "I need you to open up port on the firewall," find out what they're trying to do--maybe you can solve their problem in a better way.
4) Give timelines and priorities. This is actually part of item #1. When someone makes demands on you, find out how important it is, the timeline they need it for, and the consequences of missing the deadline.
5) Be very very good at your job. This doesn't necessarily mean being the best tech in existence! "I don't know" is an acceptable answer, as long as it's followed by, "but I can find out for you by..."
6) Document everything.
7) Don't be afraid to say no if it's the necessary answer, but be prepared to back it up with good reasons. People won't always be happy, but they'll (usually) understand.
8) Restrictions suck. Don't implement webfilters, port blocking, or the like unless you're forced to (by the CEO, for instance). Rational AUPs should give you all the ammunition you need if someone is not doing their job, or compromising systems. (An example: A policy saying "no games at work" is rational, and is sufficient to deal with someone who plays games at work. A filter blocking all games-related sites may mean that I can't access
9) Don't be a zealot for or against any product. If your solution to everything is "More Linux!", people will stop asking, and start rolling their eyes.
10) Choose your fights. If you fight every issue, you won't win any of them. If you make your disagreements known but let the small ones slide, then when you dig your heels in, people will pay more attention.
11) Keep it up for 20 years!
12) Consider your role in the company. If you're a pure tech company, you may be the core business (i.e. I work at an ISP--the company doesn't exist without my team and a few others). Most likely though, you're supporting the core business, which means that you and the computing environment are tools to get a job done. Your role is to make their jobs easier.
Ultimately, you want people to feel comfortable in coming to you for requests, and know that what they want will either be done in a reasonable timeframe, or denied (for good reasons) only if necessary.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Having joined a help desk just a year ago I can honestly say I see where you are coming from. However there are those days when you truly help someone and they are glad you were there. Even though most times you hear the excuse what di you change that my computer doesn't work. But again there are those days where after you tell them what the problem is they respond back with something like this:
Original Messgae was along the lines of:
I am typing in the persons email address and have tried saving it 5 or 6 times now and the (*&^%% thing won't save everything I type in. it stops at the .c and ond not the .com part.
So I log in to see what is saved and see the person is typing the email address in the Title field. I reply back that she was typing in the wrong field and needs to type it in the email address field.
Her Response: Oh so what you are saying is I need to pull my head out of my F****n ass and read properly (She then laughed). We both laughed and she apologized for her attitude to start.
It's always great when you can show them what they did to cause the problem.
'IT Support' is at least a two fold role. First, you have a psychological problem (the user's distress at their unknown and scary tech prob). Secondly, you have their technical issue. You can probably tell which users really need the psych-work up front but when someone takes the time to contact you because their ${life:+internets} isn't working right, that probably means they are afraid and fear = defensive asshole. The additional problems happen on both sides but there are total BOFHs out there and do ruin it for the rest of us...
hmmmm
I'm in much the same boat, and one thing that has really helped around here is that I make a conscious effort to educate the users as much as I can. Now, you're not going to be able to train any of them to be self sufficient, but explaining what you are doing and why can go a long way. Now even the more computer illiterate users here are doing a better job of reporting exactly what the problem is that is arising (for example, the correct but nigh useless "The Internet is down" more properly and accurately becomes "I'm receiving an error when my browser starts up"), and whenever there is an error in some custom software, they know to check certain data entries were correctly entered first, and then gather some specific information about the error before calling on me, which allows me to fix their problem a lot faster than it would happen otherwise.
In all, explaining my troubleshooting/repair work as I perform it does take a bit longer, but an extra 15 minutes spent then can easily save hours of effort down the road. Plus, it helps the users to understand what you are doing.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
This phenomenon is not isolated to IT by any means. Any sort of internal support structure in corporate America has the same complaint about a lack of disrespect (facilities, HR, etc.), but those departments don't idle on message boards all day and manage to create cute online subcultures about their plight. It's human nature to have unreasonable demands of people that we perceive to "serve" us, and to have unrealistic expectations about what we don't understand. You should probably continue to focus on relations with the user community from a PR perspective. Managing expectations will prove to be more useful than user education or wallowing in your self-pity.
IT people are treated badly because it "works".
This kind of thing has been going on forever in human organizations. Deal with it is the same way as always; create a fair system for prioritizing things.
For example, do you have a work order schedule posted where everyone can see it?
Yes, this won't work in organizations where fairness is an ironic joke, just ask for a raise in that rare case..
I worked for a boss much like yours, barring the hygiene; loud, foreign Skyping; and PhD. Same attitudes, same lack of leadership. I had a bad feeling about him in the interview, but I was so excited to get a job in the IT world that I took it.
Even though I wasn't happy there, I didn't spend enough time looking for another job. Finally, I had enough and quit. I found another, better job in less than a month. It turned out that better job had been sitting open for a year. If I had been looking, I could have quit as much as a year earlier, with a lot less stress and bad feelings all around.
I'm posting this AC because I'm done with spearing that guy. You should learn lessons from every job. With a boss like him, it's easy to learn what not to do. Make sure you also learn lessons from his strengths. In this case, my boss wasn't a businessman, a tech guy, or a people person; but he was making plenty of money because he had the cojones to take the risk of starting a business when he saw an opportunity. (His limitations kept him from getting any further, though. Yet another reason to GET OUT!)
My most effective tool is that I'm 6'3" and 210 lbs. Never underestimate pure intimidation.
It comes down to relationships -- how do you relate to your co-workers?
I'll give you a few examples:
* A friend of mine is helpful in such a role, but he comes at it with a "Holier than thou" attitude. As a result, while people accept his help, they don't respect him.
* I used to be arrogant and expecting something in return for my help. People didn't respect me and would generally turn to other sources. While this might sound good, it always left me wondering why people didn't befriend me.
* I switched to being kind, genuine, respectful and dignified. If I had a problem with what somebody did, I told them in a clear but positive way. One example is the 'ditcher' -- the person who leaves once you start working on their computer. I used to get angry about people doing this, but instead I find the person and explain that "I can't resolve your problem unless I have you around to help guide me with what you're doing." This is generally followed by an apology and a "Oh, I didn't know." I've found that by going with this approach, people respond in kind.
Ultimately it comes down to how you see relationships. You say that you "try to be friendly, helpful, and responsive." In the great words of Yoda, "There is no try. Only do or do not." Instead of trying to be friendly, be friendly. Instead of trying to be helpful, be helpful, etc. Explain your situation. "Unfortunately I'm in the middle of XYZ, but as soon as I'm done with that I can help you out." Frequently this is difficult for IT people because they see relationships as dominant/submissive. Building relationships on mutual respect will produce much better results -- and it might even get you laid.
where there is a defined you-can't-get-around chain of command. most shops even if they have the policies and procedures don't have someone to hold feet to the fire.
I found selling computers at Best Buy to be great practice.. When someone who has never seen a computer in their life outside of a movie decides they need one (or is told by someone they need one) they come to Best Buy. (and this was '94-'98 when the internet was just coming into its own) Just when you think you've found the bottom of the computer knowledge barrel you find a hole, and a tunnel beneath it leading to the abyss.
That being said: if you're mean to the customer you will not get the sale. Trading off a paycheck vs. teaching monkeys how to throw their feces the *right* way is a good motivator.
TG sales was a temporary job but all of that patience practice was priceless (not to mention the ability to talk to *any* person's level of knowledge).
You're in the right line of work.
This situation gets tiring and can burn you out if you're not careful, always be aware of your work/life balance and your mood. If its not for you, leave and find a more suitable job. A few key things I always did though:
1. Communicate the helpdesk process when someone walks around, even if you fix it straight away get it in their thick skulls slowly.
2. Always (ALWAYS) appear happy to help and never (NEVER) put the end user down.
3. Explain everything as you go, if you need to come back to the issue later explain why as well.
4. When resolved if it was their fault, tactfully mention why. In any case give them the reason and/or solution (if it was simple) so they may never ask you about this again (hopefully).
5. Always under promise/over deliver. If the time frame is too slow for them 'free up some time' earlier but still give yourself some spare time.
You will always look good with the above points. If you still get treated like crap then you are probably in a poor work environment.
Psychotropic drugs are a start. Nine out of ten systems administrators are prescribed at least one psychotropic drug. The other 10% either quit, smoke tons of pot, use various other illicit drugs, or commit suicide. Sorry to break the news to you.
... not being a doormat.
If people are rude to you, be assertive: "I appreciate that you have a frustrating technical problem, but being rude to me isn't going to help fix it. Let's try to be constructive here." And then work on the problem.
If people are demanding complex tasks be completed immediately, be assertive: "I'm sure it is a priority, but what you're asking for is pretty complicated and it's going to take some time to get it done properly." If they don't understand that, you might try to explain it in terms of their job - "If a client asked you to put together a massive marketing campaign and have it completely ready to launch in 10 minutes, you'd tell them it's not possible, right? This is the same thing." Most people won't push it past that, and if they do, you can just be blunt: "It's not happening. It's not something that's open to discussion, it's just not possible."
Also look to your own behavior and see if there's something there that's irritating people or making them think of you as an outsider - like, do you roll your eyes or something when a person complains that their computer won't work when it's unplugged? Do you condescend when offering explanations? Do you frequently tell people you'll have something done in an hour when it winds up taking 2? Do you leave people hanging when they ask for help? Do you interact at all with your coworkers outside of immediate task-at-hand stuff (smalltalk, having lunch, etc)? Are you a fat, smelly nerd (serious question) who comes off like a parody of an IT guy?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
One fixes the problem and the other handles expectations.
If you are a lone ranger, then you inform people periodically what is going on (once an hour you have a conference call for example, and you stick religiously to that).
Not informing your users is just bad manners and there is no excuse for it.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
ITIL
When you really position IT as a solution provider to the business, in addition to not being an elitist arse.
There will always be aholes in an organization who treat IT as scum. Mainly that's because IT has treated their customers (user base) as ignorant scum for years.
Policy is fine, but it needs support from on high. If you have that, then have the upper ups send out the notes on IT policy if you have to.
If you're cordial, offer solutions and value, and still get treated like crap then fine...BOFH it is then.
You can be nice while being treated like crap for only so long. Then look for another job.
Nowadays your colleague may be in the other side of the world, and your only relationship is via phone calls and emails.
Also it is not unusual that people abuse that trust, once you have put names to faces, people that are better than you at handling social situations will know how to use the approachability to their advantage, to the detriment of other users.
I am not saying to close the door, just to be judicious and remain professional.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your company should implement policies about this to ensure the system is not abused.
One way is to put monetary value to a given problem, that way people have to justify exactly why the printer of a secretary not working is not as important as fixing the payroll server.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Any company worth its salt considers IT a service which is charged internally, that way all the departments contribute to the IT budget.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I found selling computers at Best Buy to be great practice.. When someone who has never seen a computer in their life outside of a movie decides they need one (or is told by someone they need one) they come to Best Buy. (and this was '94-'98 when the internet was just coming into its own) Just when you think you've found the bottom of the computer knowledge barrel you find a hole, and a tunnel beneath it leading to the abyss.
That being said: if you're mean to the customer you will not get the sale. Trading off a paycheck vs. teaching monkeys how to throw their feces the *right* way is a good motivator.
TG sales was a temporary job but all of that patience practice was priceless (not to mention the ability to talk to *any* person's level of knowledge).
You Bastard... Its all your fault!
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
In any properly administered network you will leave tracks somewhere.
Playing tricks on people will only work if you are hoping nobody competent checks what is going on.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You don't *GET* respect. You have to *EARN* it.
The problem:
(*) Smart people who know how to resolve technical problems aren't going to call on you often; they're going to solve their own problems. That means that the vast majority of your work will be dealing with people who don't know how to fix their problem.
(*) Sadly, non-technical folk don't know what it takes to do your job. That's why they ignore you when it all works and harp on you when it doesn't. They don't know.
Holding a grudge against non-technical people for not knowing just encourages the wrong mindset within yourself. You want respect? Be what they expect -- someone who can solve their problem -- and more. Just filling the role doesn't earn you respect; you're just a drone following orders and doing your job at that point.
Solutions:
(*) Accept the reality that the vast majority of your work will be helping those who can't help themselves.
(*) Find ways to demonstrate the effort you're putting into solving people's problems. If you say "Okay, I can fix that" and then you go off and fix it, they might as well assume you just went into the server room and flipped a switch. They don't know any better, and that's not their fault. It's up to you to reveal the effort it takes to troubleshoot and fix their problem.
(*) Non-technical peoples' eyes will glaze over if you offer technical explanations. If you think you're skilled enough to down-translate a technical issue to a non-technical person on the fly, do that as you fix it. They'll appreciate knowing what's going on and this also shows you putting effort into their problem. Otherwise, send an email. This makes phrasing your words well a lot easier than doing it on the fly.
(*) Have a happy and enthusiastic attitude. If you don't really have one, be an actor and fake it. That's not part of your job description. It's not part of anybody's, but it's worth it if you want to be someone people remember positively.
(*) Consider yourself a parent. Sons don't like dads who admonish them for being petulant and tell them what to do. Sons respect tolerant dads who show understanding and provide guidance.
No way.
No serious company would allow that.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
What I am up against, seemingly every day, is users who say with absolute conviction, "Why are we blocking all TCPIP at the firewall?" (when obviously we are not or else at least ONE of the OTHER 2999 users would have mentioned it), "upgrade me to the 3.0 Linux kernel! What? You don't know that 3.0 is out now?", "No, California is GMT PLUS 8 hours!".
They can do this with such conviction I find myself Googling to verify that, in fact, there are 24 hours in a day instead of 23, and having to cite my sources.
And, I am always, always right. How annoying.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
I work for a university in the north-east US. I am the sole IT guy for an ill-defined area. My boss's have changed every 1-2 years due to "restructuring's". Currently my boss is a fine art professor, who knows absolutely nothing about IT, me, let alone have any skills, experience or knowledge about management. You want frustrating? Try this job! The university offers effectively no raises, if you're lucky you'll get the 1-3% annual increase, which happens to be based on a very complex, new evaluation system. (However faculty who supervise staff, since tenured, can do or say whatever they want on such evaluations, with no worry of getting in trouble.) Why do those who know least, want to micromanage the most? Good grief. It's a hell of a time to be looking elsewhere for work, too! "Hey, let's schedule classes, register students, hire new faculty and schedule them to be held in a computer lab which cannot support the software which has not been purchased with funds that do not exist. And hey, it's the IT guys fault for this not working. Oh, right, maybe at some point we should let him know we've done this and that it will be his fault. Nah, let's just surprise him, he loves surprises."
I feel your pain!
you get paid to deal with people; the computer work you do for free, because it's interesting or you enjoy the puzzle of making $_THING work.
I rapidly was reaching BOFH levels of annoyance at a dial-up ISP (back in the day). I had one guy call that was completely moronic. I was fully convinced that he couldn't pour water out of a bucket with instructions printed on the bottom.
Somewhere during our talking he asked me to hold on. What he said, I don't know other than it involved some specific repair to an engine. "Put the 'something-something' on that 5.7 liter. Replace the 'something valve' using the 'doo-hicky' and 'blah blah'.
I have no idea what he was talking about, but this (now identified) mechanic was way over my head when it came to cars. It struck me that if I'd asked him for help with my ride, I'd be regarded as the idiot.
The majority of people aren't completely worthless wastes of air. They just have a different skillset than you. I'm not saying there arent morons out there, but I give everybody the benefit of the doubt now.
Several people have pointed out that communication is key. This is very true. Users think that the PC, network, servers, firewall, switch, filter, etc. are magical black boxes that are plugged in and work forever. They don't understand that these things require constant maintenance and support from YOU in order to continue to function. I get a lot of users are grumpy when something doesn't work, and worshipful when I fix something. I treat them with respect and understanding. My ultimate goal when dealing with a user is to get them up and running normally, with as little down-time for them as possible. If that means that I fix their problem while they are at lunch and take mine later, so be it. If that means that I prep a spare PC while they limp along for 30 minutes, then swap it out and do the O/S reload while they are happily working away, so be it. It may take a little more work, but users appreciate it when I show them that I know their job is important. The other thing that is really important is to knock down the worshipful praises. I knock down things like "Oh, you are magic!", and "that's amazing" very quickly. First off, users don't really mean those things. Most times they are expressing relief that they can get their job done, or summoning up their last shred of human decency and trying to make up for the way they treated me when they initially reported the problem. I tell them that it's not magic, it's just my job. It's something I went to school for (I know, I know, stop laughing) and have been doing for the last 15 years. I explain that I don't know how to do their job, and would be totally lost if I was expected to do it. Usually at the end of the conversation (all taking place while I am doing a final once-over on the problem to make sure it is truly resolved), the user is happy, de-mystified, and gives me a "thank you" that they truly mean. Also, someone suggested the "eating lunch with your co-workers" plan. This is a very good idea, but doesn't really work for me, as I often work through my users' lunchtime. The idea is a good one though, and I try to make it to pot-lucks, lame company parties, and always try to have something trivial and light-hearted to say at company meetings. Another suggestion: After working all night on rebuilding the email server, show up to work a little disheveled (glasses instead of contacts, hair uncombed, whatever). Usually someone will ask if you are feeling OK. Respond by telling them the truth; you were up all night working on the email server, making sure that it was up and running normally by the time people showed up to work this morning. Users tend to not even think of us unless something is noticeably broken. If email is working, then it obviously doesn't need to be worked on...right? Showing up tired and showing it every once in a while helps dis spell this way of thinking.
- - I'm not tense, just terribly, terribly alert. - -
Attempt to educate your users about the complexity behind the projects they ask for. Try to use simplistic terms, but it you can't, and the subject still goes over their head, at least you're giving them something to think about. Hopefully it will make them realize that what they're asking for isn't as simple as it sounds, and that they shouldn't expect it immediately.
Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays.
"I've been at it for my present company for over 4 years now. It is hard not to be a BOFH."
Come over to the dark side... We have cookies.
But seriously, Everything and I mean EVERYTHING is in writing. If you show your frustration they win. If they show frustration you win.
And last but not least, if all else fails blame Microsoft.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
one word. Fear.
IT support in a company that size is a dead-end job, you'll always be the scapegoat. If it's a software development company, figure out a path to get into development and let them get another fall guy to do support. Either that or try to find a position with a company large enough that you will have some promotion prospects. For your first IT job, support work is fine, but not for the duration. You don't want to be some middle-aged guy in level 1 support having to explain to Betty in accounting the difference between right and left click for the millionth time. It will just make you bitter and angry.
Or in other words, learn to say No.
'nuff said...
:p
There seems to be two schools of thought on this:
1: "Be honest, direct, and helpful. Make sure they know you are working hard blah blah blah..."
2: "Listen you f*cking cretins, I don't have time to help you look for your pr0n or work on your goddamn spreadsheet problem (how about you don't lock it next time)! I have mission critical sh*t to take care of so f*ck off!"
On their own, neither one seems to work well in the long run. However, supplementing either ideology with copious amounts of alcohol, anti-depressants, and first person shooters should keep you sane enough to make it another four years.
Good luck with that...
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
The Plague: Our recent unknown intruder penetrated using the superuser account, giving him access to our whole system.
Margo: Precisely what you're paid to prevent.
The Plague: Someone didn't bother reading my carefully prepared memo on commonly-used passwords. Now, then, as I so meticulously pointed out, the four most-used passwords are: love, sex, secret, and...
Margo: [glares at The Plague]
The Plague: god. So, would your holiness care to change her password?
www.wavefront-av.com
I did IT a number of years ago. Working at companies with lots of software programmers sucks because they all think they can do everything better than everyone else - as long as they don't actually have to do it themselves! So you're probably not the only guy there getting no respect. Try finding a company with fewer code jockeys if this continues to bother you.
Better yet, get a job in testing these guys' code so you can tell them all the stuff they got wrong! :) Then they usuall stop being such smarty-pantses.
Look no one can do it all. I was also in this position, about 4 years ago. Eventually, you can't keep up. The company at the time couldn't afford to hire a full time person, so I asked for an intern. Trained him, and things started getting done better and faster, and my attitude improved. The company notices things like this, and if they are smart, try to keep their employees happy. All you can do is ask for the extra help. If they want to keep you happy they will capitulate. Otherwise start looking for another job, and let it be known that the environment is a hostile one to whoever handles HR. Last thing you want is to get fired for being a bastard. In IT you need to be a team player, and if that stigma gets thrust upon you... you're screwed!
Keep plugging away. There is some very good advice here and some bad. You decide which to follow! In my current position, my predecessor was hated by most of the staff. He was a technical genius, but lacked personality and he was villified for that. If there was one bit of advice! Communication! Let your users know when changes are being made. Either to individuals or company-wide. Communication goes in line with document, document, document!! Find your rude and inconsolable users and make time to "get to know them" I have found that there are 2 types of rude people that we deal with. The ones who hate that they have to use ANY technology to do the job they were hired to do. Becuase they technically dont get it! They have bad relationships with anyone they consider smarter than them. The 2nd is the type that thinks they are the technical genius that doesnt need help. In actuality, they are the ID 10 T users that we admins have nightmares about.
If your workplace is that not too big, keep a candy jar in your office. Don't be cheap, but spend reasonable amount of money and fill the jar with bite size snickers bar or something. Eventually, your colleagues will become sugar happy and be nice to you.
Some folks will never learn, no matter what you do for them or to them, but I have found through experience that letting someone 'ALMOST' hang themselves, then saving the day, will often get the needed ooomph to cause a (L)User to open their eyes. The closer to home it is the better it works, and the more you let them dig themselves in the better it works. Just make sure to cover your hiney in ALL cases via email, and ensure that you are FULLY supported by management policy if not a manager personally. In the 15 years I've been an admin for various functions (Unix,email,network,DBA) I've been able to generally win over my most vocal opponents, and I've only had to 'burn' a few to the ground. Being known as being 'CAPABLE' of being the BOFH is a great tool in your arsenal as well, then they know you are being 'nice' to them but could easily just let them swing in the wind...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Communicating both the status of their job and it's place in a longer line is a great way to reduce your customer's concerns.
I literally use the above phrase whenever I'm asked to do something, along with a wild-ass guess about how long it will take and a request that they get back to me on a specific date "and see if I've gotten started on it".
I also change the message on my phone when I'll been told something has just blown up, to "at 4:30 PM, I'm in the machine room fixing the exploded machine". That means that when someone call to interrupt me, they'll find out I'm already fixing the problem.
Both of these are communications tricks, so that the users get the information they need in terms they understand.
A variant on the first trick is the the "Clawdette question", which I direct to my suppliers. "Thanks, when should I get back to you for a progress report?". That tells them I'll give them time, and won't bother them before, but puts them on notice I will be back talking to them when the time is up. Named for a former boss, who had to schedule a lab full of hard-to-herd cats.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Put up good scripts that simplify managing user accounts. Put up good scripts for restarting databases and other services. Put up good logon-scripts run remote jobs on their machines while they are un. Implement "always on" clients. Cut their local admin privileges. Set up a PXE-server so you do not have to install operating systems manually. Try to implement some sort of system for automatically distributing software updates. This frees up time for taking the users seriously..
;)
Draw a list of applications you support. Refuse to help with applications not on that list. Then try to make a list of what problems the users have. If a majority of the users problems are related to VPN - you attack that by buying a new system. If the problems are related to printers - you try to find a solution (cut back on the number of printers or put the ones you have on the network). Virtualize your servers and put up virtual application clients that the users can access remotely.
Remember that you work with machines. Machines can be programmed to do most of "the machine work". The more of your time you can free up for thinking - the more perfect the automatic solutions will be. Automation is the only way to go. If that means coding for a couple of evenings - so be it - it will pay for it self after a pretty short time. That free time can then be invested in freeing up even more time. You go like that until the shop almost runs itself. If the users - by this point - starts bugging you - delete every single script - destroy the backups and then *get a new job*.
At one place I worked we had a "backup" computer for when a user messed theirs up. More meant for punishment, it was a 486 - 66Mhz with 16MB RAM. It ran Windows 98 and had a program on it which I don't remember the name of that locked out pretty much all setting changes and the running of any executables not on our whitelist. This was around the time 1-2 Ghz chips were common. Users who hosed their machines by doing something stupid would get this machine for at least a week while their computer sat on our back desk waiting for us to look at it. The wait was mandatory, even if we had the time to fix it right away... it cauesed them to be more careful the next time. We just told them that we didn't have time to get to it immediately or that we were already working on it but it really took that long. With the "backup" no one could fault us for keeping them from their work.
Welcome to the real world.
Keep a small supply of chocolate (I find that the mini-Doves work best) with you at work for "desk-calls". People will be more inclined to communicate with you early and often (as opposed to after a huge disaster has started) if you bring them chocolate.
Another tip: Be specific when you are explaining you might have to deflect a call. "I have to fix something for Bob right away but I'll see you as soon as I'm done." is much better than just saying "Sorry, I'm really busy and I can't help you right now.".
Why do you want the respect of morons?
Was my answer to 90% of the questions I got from my ID10T users.
The typical response was no... So I would tell them rebooting fixes most things, especially if you run windows and haven't turned off your computer in 2 months.
Eventually I put a sign on my the outside of my cubical that simply said "DID YOU REBOOT YET?" Solved alot of problems.
Sounds like you are making a strong, dedicated effort to keep systems running, but users are still unhappy, and they take it out on you. So perhaps it is time to do a sanity check: Assume for a moment that all existing systems would be 100% functional, without problems --- Would users be satisfied in that case?
If not, you can't win by doing the best possible maintenance or upgrade job. Perhaps the company should be thinking about some serious reappraisal of requirements and solutions.
Alternatively, bring your users into contact with the victims -- err, end users -- of a "professionally managed", large Corporate IT department. Then they may start to realize how lucky they are.
The issue being violent behavior coming at you (passive agressive or rude or angry or very anxious etc.) I think there are a few different options at hand.
What you are discussing are the options of escalating the violence they came with, turning it against them, possibly with the elegance of an aikido master, making them feel miserable for f**ing with you.
That's righteous, they deserve it etc. I agree. But fear, humiliation and remorse do not equal respect, unless you strive to be a bully.
There's one more possibility, though, that addresses the respect thing.
Turn them into your friend. It may not work for every case but it will work for some and will change how you feel on the job.
The main issue with angry customers is that they are angry. They don't only have a technical issue, they also have an emotional problem. What your job description includes is taking care of the technical side of things. What your job demands, however, is taking care of both.
This calls for emotional intelligence.
The good news is that it is easy to acquire. Here's the simple formula of nonviolent communication (think defusing situations versus escalating them):
1. Acknowledge to yourself how you feel. Give yourself a moment (5 seconds may be enough, while you are listening) and mentally acknowledge what you feel. Example: I feel angry because I don't like it when people raise their voice and this woman is screaming at me for something I have nothing to do with.
The structure is "I feel ... right now, because I ... "
If you say I feel... because YOU/HE/SHE, you give the responsibility of your emotional well being to whoever is on the other side. Are they fit to be your caretaker at this moment? I didn't think so.
2. Once you get in touch with yourself, acknowledge their emotional state. You never know what's happening for them for sure, so always use a question / open ended statement allowing them to confirm or correct your perception.
"Are you upset because you lost your file?"
If you get "Damn right I am upset! &%$@#" that's good. You just made that person feel FELT. Now you and they are ON THE SAME SIDE.
You don't need to change their feelings. Just acknowledge them in a way that makes them feel understood and acknowledged.
That's it. Now you can start the technical side of your work. You can transition by:
"I can imagine how disappointing it is to lose your work. I will try to help you restore the file."
And take it from there. If you don't succeed, acknowledge their disappointment, tell them you did all you could do and tell them how disappointed you are yourself because you really wanted to help them.
You will be surprised how the taste of your job will change. You are now the IT whisperer and the war between you and your clients is over.
Cheers
Andre
Here are some of the things that I have found that keep me from getting burned out.
1) Check the cable.
2) Check the cable.
3) Seriously, check the cable. You'll feel stupid if you've been working for an hour on a problem only to find a disconnected cable.
4) Lock down your workstations. Hard. You won't win any friends right now, but when people stop having malware problems they'll eventually see the light. Tell them exactly why you are doing this; that you feel their pain; you think spamming should be a capitol offense.
4) Remember that no one loves you until something's broken (we'll fix that later)
5) Tell them there's nothing they can break that you can't fix, so don't be scared to try stuff.
6) Resist the urge to show frustration in front of others regardless of how stupid they are. They are there to do their job, not to become a computer expert.
7) When they want you show them something *always* make them drive. They are more likely to remember it that way.
8) Get off the internet, walk around the office. Find the person in each department who is always swamped with work. They've usually been there the longest and are the "go to" person. I guarantee you can streamline several of this person's procedures and give them back hours of their day. This person will be your friend forever.
9) This is one of the most important; always balance any reports you have written. If finance doesn't trust your numbers they're useless.
It may take a while but eventually you'll be hearing things like, "I know you're such a guru that this won't be a problem. Can you help me with..."
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
I'd probably go with "$LUSER flags everything as an emergency. How was I to know this really was one?"
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Definitely give this a read: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sysadmin-recovery/ (it won't help, but then nothing will). Just remember: down, not across.
Quite simply put, you don't.
Users will complain whether you have very controlling policies in place or not. If you have nothing to stop them (a policy to stop them from listening to Internet radio doesn't do anything), they'll do it anyway. You can tell them for weeks that you simply don't have the bandwidth for that kind of thing because you have remote users and they simply will not care. The only thing that will make them stop is hardware/software to control what they can and cannot do. Once implemented, you will immediately be seen as the jerk/asshole/dickhead/insert whatever adjective necessary.
The simple fact is that users do not care if their actions impact somebody else (by and large). Sure, there's the 1 in 50 guy that'll respect and understand what you're saying and won't do it, but the rest will simply ignore you. I have learned after many many years that being nice is simply an invitation for them to break the rules. In fact, the 1 in 50 guy, in my experience, is also the guy that does IT work on the side and understands the reasons you're doing everything and doesn't need an explanation. That guy also understands that his work computer is just that, a work computer. That guy won't install all kinds of bullshit on his system without asking. He will also likely fix any trouble he encounters with his system because he knows you're busy with other people. You don't have to worry about that guy, it's the other 49 people that are causing trouble. That guy will not give two shits if you decide to block half the Internet and keep him from installing crap. He's either got all the programs he needs or will simply ask you to install them when you can. He's also one of the only people that will store all his important work documents on the server without having to bug him because he knows that the server is backed up and his workstation is not.
We implemented software policies and really strict internet filtering recently and my support calls have dropped. I use to hear complaints all the time from both office and remote users that our IP phones sounded like crap. I haven't had a single complaint since implementing major filtering (only during office hours). It has pissed off a fair number of people, but if I try to be nice and let them have access, they'll just abuse it. I also happen to have two people around that "get it" when it comes to surfing the net, installing bullshit, and keeping important files on the server. No one else does. That's in a company with about 45 computer users and about 55 employees total.
I still get the occasional call from someone that's trying to install something from CD. I either log in to their computer and install it for them (adjusting policies as necessary) or I simply copy it to their desktop. They haven't quite figured out that they can install things from their desktop (not that they could run it afterwards anyway) without getting blocked, and that's even after watching me do it (it must be magic, right?).
The trick is to hold conversation with said people while working, and tell jokes, break the ice, it also helps to work for a company that isnt full of typical corporate drones.
We have ONE corporate drone where I work, you cant joke with him and he's very cold. So if that's what you're referring to, consider looking at a friendlier, smaller company that will still pay well.
Honestly, part of the problem is simply losing perspective. Take some time off (yes, seems impossible when you're the only guy) or more regular breaks will help YOU not freak out over other people being jerks. Also, work with folks when they don't have a problem to help them understand how to get the best service from you. Reality is, you're an extremely limited resource and when they have a problem, it is in their best interests to understand how to get the most out of you. So, do some training with them, have small meetings, etc. explaining that you're one guy, actually NOT out to ruin their life (it does help if this is a true statement), and want to help them (again...), and this is the best way to make it all work.
Was to list the situation on my voicemail, then send all calls to it while working on the problem, as well as an "away message" in Outlook. My boss has my pgr #, my users don't. This makes it so the people who NEED to get ahold of me can, and the others can get a quick 2 min version of what's going on.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
No really, you took a job where everything is your fault.
It's your fault that emails are delayed, it's your fault people can't view their html emails properly, it's your fault Windows is crashing, it's your fault the network is slow, it's your fault the sky is cloudy and it's your fault we're in a recession.
Just figure out the answers to all of the worlds problems and you'll be ok.
Ave Molech Setting
If it's really super duper important, bringing a bottle of the good stuff along with your request really goes a long way to showing me just how high on your priority list the task is. That then allows me to re-prioritize my tasks such that this new, and previously unknown, information from your side of things is taken into consideration.
I've found it works rather well (in both directions; I've brought in more than a couple bottles in my time). After all, a ticket is just a ticket. There are all kinds of whisky...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
This is a well thought out post with good advice.
Well said.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
You want to add a user? Fill out form A, B, B-2, and C-3 People tend to take paperwork seriously (ie. they take user setup into consideration when hiring new people if they have to fill out paperwork). HELP DESK: Have users fill out a dynamic form that also functions as a helper. Some of these can be designed in such a way as to have the user solve a lot of the simple problems on their own, while filling out the form, without it ever being completed and sent in. I call it formalization... works great in big organizations where people are used to filling out paperwork... not so good in small-medium sized orgs where you are in close proximity with the others in the company... Also...and most importantly...well designed forms will provide you with all the information you need, while being realistic to what information the users know how to find...
Huh? [devShell.org]
I'm sorry to say that users will always be users. They will never change. They will never learn. They don't want to or need to. If your customers are coworkers, you should be able to expect a certain level of professionalism from them. If your customers are external, you're pretty much stuck with however they treat you, unfortunately. The burn out rate on that job (for me) was at about seven years, n00b to vet, entirely due to lack of respect from customers and lack of support from the person to whom I reported. I recommend you grow your skills, start thinking about the next level, and be aware that, unless you are able to accept the abuse of your customers, you may not be wired for that job. I certainly am not. Every job in IT involves a certain level of customer support; in some other IT jobs, however, you may have a more informed and professional-behaving customer base. I've been programming / webbing for a few years and really like it. Be well. Get lots of sleep. Eat right. Exercise. Floss. Take good care of yourself during this time of stress. Good luck. katie
How to look someone straight in the eye and tell then that their problem has cropped up alot lately in their department... and it is a PEBKAC or ID10T error... and it will be fixed as soon as possible... To not become the BOFH be sure to talk to other Tech guys over a few brews and laugh at the idiocy of (L)users... the L is silent.
A short tale to illustrate this... back in '97 I had a co-op student from one of those "Get your IT credentials here in 6 months" schools... one morning we were walking throught the front office where the lowest IQ's but highest egos sit... and the secretary to the VP Sales asks to have one of those hand help manual scanners setup on her pc. Well the scanner wasn't company property and wouldn't work worth a dam (that's why I wouldn't buy one). I said we didn't have time to setup her toy, but the PFY co-op chirped up and said he'd give it a try. So I left him there and went outback and got the first aid kit out... He found me in about an hour and was next to tears. The whole time he was graciously trying to setup the illegal equipment for this "Bitch" she was walking up and down the hall in front of all the exec offices bitching about how "IT was preventing her from doing her job" and "IT was all fucked up"... After explaining to him that she is naturally a bitch and will do whatever she can, hurt whoever she can, lie, steel, kill to advance her career... he started to feel a little better.
I then pointed out to him a few basic rules.
1. If the more senior person answers the question keep silent. Ask in private why the answer was given. You can always go back later and be a hero.
2. If the job takes more than 10 minutes. Take it back to your desk to do. Don't sit in their office and be fodder for their ego development.
3. Listen to what I say. I know what is going on.
4. Finally, never listen to crazy people and get the f*ck out of my way.
Get some adhesive tape, and make a square some distance away from your work station. Then ask people to stand in the square and refuse to reply to questions asked outside of the square :p
This is an excellent time to document your IT support policies and processes for handling requests (or create them if there is no such policy) and get them approved by the relevant managers. Then when someone asks you for something informally, just tell them to please follow the documented process. If you start building a backlog of requests, you can point to the backlog as justification for hiring additional IT people. You'll still get "emergency" requests, but the process for those should include approval by managers to justify the emergency. If too many people abuse the emergency process, managers will be active in assisting you to filter out the BS.
Or else they'll abdicate and you can just reject emergency requests unilaterally. In which case, you've become BOFH despite your best efforts.
We are the 198 proof..
1. Be polite.
2. Be efficient.
3. Have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Come to the dark side
The man has already tried the hard work and diligence approach, and it isn't working. Therefore, the only option other than quitting is to use a different approach.
The "Atlas Shrugged" method CAN work in situations like that, as long as you have support from your boss. It doesn't matter whether you like the book or not.
Good list, but let me add something: learn the corporate cost of your users.
Where I work, "software" is done by engineers, and IT only manages email and the servers. FWIW, the burdened cost of an engineer is more than $100/hr, or something close to $2/minute, and the engineers are keenly aware of their pay rate -- for senior engineers you can double that. My IT department tells me that I get 200MB of Outlook space. It follows that, twice a month, the corporation gives every engineer $20 (10 minutes) to clean out less than 20 cents worth of disk space, because IT won't fork over another TB disk this year.
And then there is the red tape when IT insists on managing a licensed software package for schematic entry, FPGA development, or any of the other high-level tools that our department requires.
You treat your customers with respect *consistently*, speak to their language and their needs, learn their business inside and out and provide validated return of value on your existence and they will learn to respect you in return. Remember, respect for you as an entity must be earned, and that doesn't happen over night. It takes even longer if your predecessor was an ass, and will take patience and understanding on your part.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Be professional
Be confident in your expertise
Don't over explain the issue if there's no need to
Don't talk down to them
Don't assume just because they don't know how to fix something that they are lazy or stupid
Don't play that "give them exactly what they asked for to the letter". Be a human.
If you honestly have too much work, let it be known to your managers. Make sure your not slacking off if you do this.
Shower
What a bunch of stereotyping bullshit. most of these things should be said to these so-called 'customers' as well. It's a two way street.
The truth is that most users are idiots. Not only that, but they don't give a shit about technology, and don't want to be bothered to because it's hard. If it wasn't hard they wouldn't pay us to fix it when it breaks.
They teach math in school, and most people still can't add two numbers together, or simplify an equation a year after they graduate. They don't even teach tech in schools (at least not to any level worth mentioning).
Also - you can't just tell the users that management didn't give you the budget to buy the tools you need to actually fix the problem quickly, so their down time is a result of management's penny pinching, and that's IF you have clueful IT staff, which is rare because the job is shit and the pay sucks, and they are the least important piece of an organisation simply because they are a cost center and don't generate revenue, so they are often the first to go when the times are tough, which makes the remaining people's jobs suck even worse.
Tech staff are the lowest of the low. They are only there because they can't do without you, and they resent that. You represent their stupidity, they have to call you when they can't figure it out and are therefore stupid. You will never be treated well.
Users will always be bastards to you, and the only human response is to be a bastard back. If you can do better, then bully for you, but you are wasting your effort, and should find a new line of work. in fact I encourage any IT worker to find a new line of work if they are smart because it will burn you out, chew you up and spit you out.
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
I've found Phil Agre's tips http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/how-to-help.html to be extremely useful. I re-read it every 6 months just to be sure I'm headed in the right direction.
you quit.
At 53, I stopped giving a sh*t long ago. I now try to get along by claiming to be lost, just like the users.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Don't assume they're stupid, just assume they know nothing..
Uhm let me explain how this works: You can't. IT people don't really get respect.. I am not even sure they deserve respect.
I'm confused how you can work in a company that produces software, but you are the "sole IT guy". Shouldn't there be a couple more "IT guys" in a software company of 60?
If you are your own boss, you need to become one and stop taking orders. Their demands should queue to you like any other call or incident and you should start prioritizing them on importance.
If you have a boss, ask them to prioritize. Continue being nice because you are good at that, just make sure your work load is illustrated clearly to the company when people complain.
If you can, hire another person. If you're that swamped with morons, get help.
Just keep doing you job well and leave your updated CV on your screen more and more. R.
Welcome to IT.
I've found it often depends on the company you work for, but once a company has a hostile culture towards IT it doesn't change.
I used to get people turning up at my desk asking me what I'D DONE that caused their computer to stop working. And that was in a software house with programmers who should have been more IT savy.
Quit your whinning and get back to work!
Wow, what a timely question. As a 20+ year veteran and one who's made my share of mistakes along the way, allow me to offer you some advice.
The only way to gain respect is to show it and to earn it. If you ever want (or get) a position of leadership, you should remember this every day. Pound it into your head with a ball ping hammer.
I know too many assholes, in positions of power, who don't understand this. They think they deserve respect because of their position alone, and then just expect it to happen. When they don't get it, they pound their fists, wave their dicks in the air and MAKE it happen. They somehow think that complaining more loudly will get a problem fixed sooner.
Needless to say they still aren't respected; even less so. But they get the appearance of respect, so they keep doing what they think works. They don't care that it's really fear, and not respect, that they're gaining.
What results from this atmosfear is that they become surrounded by babysitters. These babysitters (yes men/women) become preoccupied with placating their boss, rather than doing what's best for the company. They only express their real opinion if they think it lines up with what the asshole wants to hear. This leads to bad decision-making. Any good leader needs people around him/her that will challenge their ideas (though not publicly). Without good consultants who aren't afraid to tell the King that he's not wearing any clothes, he's bound to go out in public that way.
So, my point is, just follow the Golden Rule. It sounds quaint, but it's the right thing to do. You'll learn how to sway people you disagree with (if you're right), but NEVER make them feel inferior to you. Not even the janitor or a waiter at a restaurant. Treat everyone as an equal and then you'll be in a position to earn their respect.
Another thing. Don't just stay in your cubicle and 'do your work'. As hard as it may be, and as much as it feels like "kissing ass" (and to some degree it is), you need to make yourself available to those who need you. At LEAST once a week, get up and go talk to your users. Even if it's just talking about the weather. If you don't, you'll seem unapproachable to them, and that's also a very bad thing. I've made this mistake and have paid a significant price for it. To some degree, life is political. Ignore that fact at your own risk.
A couple of years ago this story came out in ComputerWorld
Someone posted it in our Company IT Forum, and this is the response I gave which I think applies to this situation:
These categories are pretty good. But every single user you will work with is unique in their behavior when dealing with computer related problems. Interestingly enough, depending on how you handle these situations, you can use some of these personality types to your advantage in working with the problem.
For example:
Know-It-Alls - These people are more difficult to accomodate, as they're always asking for unusual requests, but the advantage is that if you go out of your way to help them, they usually don't need much follow-up help at all.
Know-Nothings - Ironically, I think this type of user is easy to work with. I find that people who have little or no experience with computers hardly ever call for support. As long as they can get what they need done, they tend to follow the same patterns (check email, enter work orders, etc.). Also I tend to find a lot less junk installed on their PCs.
Mr. Entitlement - Luckily this type of person is pretty rare. I think this person is more appropriately called "Mr High Expectations". I have users that expect a lot of hand holding, and feel neglected when you give them detailed instuctions. But again, like Know-it-alls, if you can bite your tongue and go a step out of your way, often they will be more flexible about working with you, sometimes waiting longer for you to make time for them, etc.
I could go on, but my point is that each user behaves differently, and it's not as important on how to categorize them as it is to understanding how to work as well as you can with them. I think the most important point of the article is that you have to maintain a working relationship with these people despite how you feel about them, or how difficult they make your job. Here's what works for me.
Be honest. - You have to honest about what you can and can not do for someone. If you let them know the limitations of what you can do for them, they are much more likely to meet you halfway to finding solutions. Also, you have to be honest about when you make mistakes. Admitting when you are wrong is pretty difficult sometimes, but most people are much more understanding and easy to work with when you do, rather than hiding behind your pride
Communicate - Let your users know what is going on. With so much to do as an admin/support technician, I think this is the hardest to do. But when a request goes too long before there are any answers, it causes the most stress that can easily turn to uncomfortable confrontations. Simply letting someone know that you are working on their problem relieves a lot of tension.
Empathize - Showing the people that you care about their problem helps tremendously. If you can get yourself "on their side", and that you are working together to solve their problem, it will make things easier for both of you. Also it will help you figure out the best way to help them, no matter what category of user personality types they fall into.
Respect - This is a double-edged sword. If you don't respect the user, and they don't respect you, the above three things are not going to be easy. But it is important that you stand up for yourself when someone is being disrespectful. In those cases, being honest, communicating, and empatthizing are even more important. If you don't handle those situations by being the better person, you'll make it impossible for anyone to support your side of the situation.
When it comes down to it, most people just want to do their jobs, not spend all day on the phone with you. Complaining about the users that turn your day sour makes you feel better, but at the end of the day, you still have to work with th
And send in postcards & emails from a fine beach somewhere. When you get back they'll be happy to see you and your attitude will have improved.
This is a rule that I learned very early on and can't emphasise enough:
Don't assume that someone less knowledgeable about computers than yourself must be stupid. Neither in front of them nor behind their backs.
Very simple, but nevertheless a trap that many computer support folks seem to fall into. I suspect there may be some tie in here with the link between technical nerddom and Aspergers syndrome, but not heeding this is a very quick way to alienate your clientèle.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Yes, you are asking for something unbelievable. As a long term IT contractor, our job is to make sure that no one knows we are doing our job. If something goes wrong, then we aren't. As a front facing IT guy, the best you can do is work out what is reasonable and what isn't. Set these boundaries and stick to them. It doesn't mean you have to be a jerk about it. Just explain openly and honestly what is involved and where everyone stands. Some people are just jerks, nothing you can do about that. Try not to let it get to you. You are the only one who knows how good a job you are doing. Show it.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/18296/
Just take a vacation. They'll be super nice when you come back in a week or two.
I've been doing this for 5 years, and I learned 2 things helped me cope the most while everyone else around me were having breakdowns with each other. Apathy and thick-skin.
The only thing important to me was doing my job, doing it well, and fulfilling my responsibilities.
Unfortunately I let my supervisor take most of my heat, if there's a conflict in projects, I ask him to coordinate with the other department heads and tell me what's my priority and I will do it. But I also hold true to organizational hierarchy like a military. Superiors work it out with superiors. If I have interdepartmental problems, that can't be solved through normal conversation, than it's up to the officers to take care of things.
There are many ways to achieve respect as an IT guy, but they are usually user dependent. Some users will never respect whatever you do to them, but the majority can be manipulated: ... than you are doomed. ... users like the impression to be considered the most important people in the world.
- on a first problem for a user, react immediately, solve it very fast and talk twice as much so he/she get's the point
- never, ever jump immediately on other occasions, if the user gets used with the fact if he/she just rises his/her hand the you appear from thin air and solve the problem in no-time
- harden the IT policies, good policies can save you lot of headaches ans if something goes wrong you can point your finger on the user and easily escape with a "I told you"
- if a user ignores policies and screws up his computer, but on the same time another user has a genuine problem (even if it is not high priority) always solve the genuine problem first. People learn best from their own mistakes.
- and remember, you will never please all the users, it's impossible.
- and last but not least, talk with them. Every time you solve their problem try to explain them how to avoid it in the future, and every time you work, talk about what you are doing, even if they don't understand
PS: and if all these can't help you, just take the easy way ... consider each end every person in front of a computer a (L)user.
Go find an IT job at a different company. I worked at a software development company and it was the same story. Most of the employees were developers who had no respect for support people. They were scary smart and walked around all day with their zippers down. It's not like that everywhere though. I work at a manufacturing company now. Most people here are really nice. And they think I am scary smart.
XANAX!!!!!
There is no other way. i have been doing this for 10 years and 3 years ago i learned about this wonderful man made drug. It has saved my life and my marriage...