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Ask Slashdot: Old Dogs vs. New Technology?
xTrashcat writes "I am 22 years of age and have been working in the IT field for over a year. I try to learn as much about technology as my cranium can handle; I even earned the nickname 'Google' because of the amount of time I spend attempting to pack my brain with new information. Being 22, it is, I speculate, needless to say that I am the youngest of my coworkers. If there is a piece of software, hardware, a technique, etc., I want to know everything about it. On the contrary, nearly all of my coworkers resent it and refuse to even acknowledge it, let alone learn about it. For example, we just started buying boxes from a different vendor that are licensed for Win7. A few months later, we decide that a computer lab was going to get an XP image instead of Win7. After several days worth of attempts, none of our XP images, even our base, would work, and it left everyone scratching their heads. We were on the verge of returning thousands of dollars worth of machines because they were 'defective.' I was not satisfied. I wanted to know why they weren't working instead of just simply returning them, so I jumped into the project. After almost 30 seconds of fishing around in BIOS, I noticed that UEFI was enabled. Switched it to legacy, and boom; problem solved. My coworkers grunted and moaned because they didn't have to do that before, and still to this day, they hate our new boxes. So in closing, I have three questions: What is the average age of your workplace? How easily do your coworkers accept and absorb new technology? Are most IT environments like this, where people refuse to learn anything about new technology they don't like, or did I just get stuck with a batch of stubborn case-screws?"
[...] if you have to touch *every* box to make a change, that's a significant time sink and not a good use of personnel. [...] if the boxes you guys ordered don't work with the setup you want to use, something went wrong.
This is the important part.
It's good that you figured out what was wrong so quickly. Now, which is cheaper for the company: Having you go through 30 boxes today and however many boxes tomorrow and change the settings before they can be imaged with XP or return the 100 boxes to the vendor and have them change them? That depends on the situation--will those machines, in general, be running XP or is it just this lab? Will Windows 7 boot in legacy mode? Which is the best way to go so we don't have to configure each machine we send out separately, which takes valuable and expensive personnel time?
Fun example: My roomate works for a company that makes fishing reels. They have a policy that they will repair issues with their reels for the life of the reel--send in the reel that's dirty and broken and they will fix it or send you a new one. She briefly worked fixing reels, something she really enjoyed. She loved disassembling it and figuring out what was wrong, fixing the problem, reassembling the reel and making it work like new. She was a dedicated worker, coming in and working hard all day fixing reels.
The problem was that when a reel came in, she would set about fixing it. Sometimes she would take the entire day to do so. So the company, paying her $12/hr, spent $96 to repair a reel which cost $50. Sure, the cost in parts to the company was cheap: a penny screw or rubber washer or something like that. Meanwhile, only one reel was fixed that day and there were 9 more waiting to be fixed.
She would complain about her "lazy" co-workers who would "fix" five reels in a day by guessing that fixing it "would be too much work" and would just order them a new one. She would complain about her boss that was on her case about fixing more reels in a day--didn't they understand that tearing these things down and putting them back together took time?! Even when they explained it to her that she was costing the company more money by doing what she was doing, she just couldn't seem to understand that it was sometimes cheaper to send them a new one than to fix the old one and the ability to estimate how much time it would take to fix the reel was an important skill.
Eventually, the company moved her out of fixing reels and put her in a different position where she has excelled.
So the point is that figuring out what was wrong is a good thing. But, in the bigger picture, it might have been more cost-effective for the company to return the computers and get ones that were correctly configured for their needs than paying someone to reconfigure the machines themselves.