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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way to Retrain Old IT Workers?
A medium-sized company just hired a new IT manager who wants advice from the Slashdot community about their two remaining IT "gofers":
These people have literally been here their entire "careers" and are now near retirement. Quite honestly, they do not have any experience other than reinstalling Windows, binding something to the domain and the occasional driver installation -- and are more than willing to admit this. Given many people are now using Macs and most servers/workstations are running Linux, they have literally lost complete control over the company, with most of these machines sitting around completely unmanaged.
Firing these people is nearly impossible. (They have a lot of goodwill within other departments, and they have quite literally worked there for more than 60 years combined.) So I've been tasked with attempting to retrain these people in the next six months. Given they still have to do work (imaging computers and fixing basic issues), what are the best ways of retraining them into basic network, Windows, Mac, Linux, and "cloud" first-level help desk support?
Monster_user had some suggestions -- for example, "Don't overtrain. Select and target areas where they will be able to provide a strong impact." Any other good advice?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way to retrain old IT workers?
Firing these people is nearly impossible. (They have a lot of goodwill within other departments, and they have quite literally worked there for more than 60 years combined.) So I've been tasked with attempting to retrain these people in the next six months. Given they still have to do work (imaging computers and fixing basic issues), what are the best ways of retraining them into basic network, Windows, Mac, Linux, and "cloud" first-level help desk support?
Monster_user had some suggestions -- for example, "Don't overtrain. Select and target areas where they will be able to provide a strong impact." Any other good advice?
Leave your best answers in the comments. What's the best way to retrain old IT workers?
If two employees haven't been used effectively for the entirety of their careers, whose fault is that -- theirs, or management's? YOU owe THEM for sticking around through decades of shitty leadership.
People honest enough to admit their shortcomings, are probably quite able to tell where they can still be a good contribution. This late in the game, they must have ownership of their tasks, or they will hold everybody else up.
Sounds like they are well liked and have excellent people skills. Use that. 1st level help desk, training new employees, vendor contact, IT intranet, etc.
You're Fired! Oh, do I have your attention now?
ABC - Always be Closing your tickets.
Coffee is for ticket closers.
Look, it's very unlikely that senior admin staff has not bothered following the evolution of the IT hardware of its own company. Because, how can you actually do your job if it does not happen?
Maybe you have another situation on your hand, such as a team of people who were working on something else and have been relocated to admin. They're probably not super happy about it, too.
Then your job is probably not to retrain them (IT staff can train itself), but to remotivate them, if that is actually possible. How to do that, I don't know. There must be a way to give value to their experience (you don't seem to feel they have any but really you don't spend a full career in a company doing nothing), to put their current skills to good use. Assess those skills, find a way to put them to good use, and only then, think of how you can get them to fit the positions they've been relocated to. Maybe the problem will sort itself out when they realize their new position has moved away from punishment, to something exciting. IT people even old enjoy new challenges. It's just you have to get them into that mindset.
Cheers,
a manager
I'd relish a change - jobs like ours is very boring and monotonous and being required to learn something new and the having the luxury of learning on the job would thrill me to death.
And folks need to remember that aside from the fact that those folks aren't keeping up - it's now a performance issue - the EEOC is very easy to get around. And I once heard of someone who actually won an EEOC suite. They got a whole $50K to split with their lawyer - after 7 years of court battles.
Old farts like the above give us other old farts a bad name. Soylent Green them.
A thing with people that's often overlooked is that different people have different values. The main ones are
traditional authoritarian
individualistic achiever
egalitarian community
and systemic integrative [1]
For example, the traditional mindset is happy so long as there is a hierarchy which is dictating what needs doing, with a sense of loyalty and appreciation. So change for change's sake is not welcome, but change in the context of stability and loyalty, can be welcome. The core point is, safety and loyalty and conforming to the norms.
Whereas, the individualistic achiever is happier being able to do independently driven, the typical "modern thinker", the self-made man, etc. Here you might be more concerned with, asking people what do they want? Where do they want to go with this job? What are their interested? What do they personally want to develop? And then just letting them get on with developing any opportunity which appeals to them and which is useful for the company.
The egalitarian community type is motivated somewhat differently to the first two. This is anti-hierarchy and is looking more for meaning and purpose in the job. This person want to work for a charity which is devoted to a good humanitarian cause. They have a need for personal meaning and a sense of being equally valued as everyone else. Their own voice matters. The group is important, and so it is about helping people to voice their own experience and do so in a way which helps them relate to the group more, in a more meaningful way.
So that's three main "values" and there is one more crucial point: people's values change over decades. So you might find that, people who were happy in the same job doing the same standard thing for 30 years -- which would suit them if they were traditional authoritarian ie. they valued stability and being told what to do -- may by now be in the achiever value or the egalitarian value, simply because as individuals, they grew as people and now have new needs.
So part of retraining isn't just swapping out one set of work tasks for another -- that may be done perfectly well, yet kinda fail -- because as a person one may now wish for a different kind of expression of values in their work, and in their training.
Another way to out this is that as people grow they tend to become more complex and have more complex aspirations.
Actually my reason for writing this is that the article description suggests that the "problem" is how to deal with people who seem stuck in old patterns and unable to change... so I thought it worth mentioning that the people may have indeed changed... they have become more complex individuals, but the work itself hadn't changed... so the opportunity here is to tap into whatever new complexities these individuals may now be capable of. Older may well mean wiser.
Hire some entry-level admins who already know what you need. This will be cheaper over the long run.
It's people like you that are destroying our society.
One word: old people. Yeah, I know. They want me to work with them.
We all know they can't be trained or communicated with.
How do I phrase this question like I will actually take any advice?
I would not attempt to train them yourself. Because now, their success or failure is yours. Just find a good training vendor, and run them through it.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but why the need to retain these people? If what you're saying is accurate these people are almost useless in the current IT environment for the simple reason that they've refused to update their skills. What value does people like this provide the organization?
If they're also required to maintain some legacy system or have knowledge about company IT systems that hasn't been properly documented I could understand the compulsive need to retain them. However as this does not seem to be the case, all of the options I can think of are likely to have the same effect as rubber room-type solutions. First of all there's just getting them to quit them using something like a rubber room, then there's just creating busywork for them which is likely to cause similar results, and finally there's re-training, which is in essence busywork considering the limited time they have to take advantage of those new skills and will probably have a similar effect to just plain busywork.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Seriously, what did the company do during the last 10 years? No training?
I'm 65 and have skills with Linux, OpenBSD and OSX. I can set up nameservers and mailservers with OpenBSD and Linux. I have also been trained on industrial aircondition and installing fibreoptics. All due to industrial training and personal training.
What is up with that company management? Why have incentives for employees to learn and widen their skills been dropped years ago? Have the employees already been branded as "old" when they crossed the line of 40?
That things got this bad. They should have provided the training from day one. And they should give them the work they were trained for.
What I would do is to give them a machine, park it on their desks and get them to install Linux on it. Tell them you want them to install and configure something that will be of use to you running on Linux. There must be something your department is missing that is sorely needed that they can get going, and at the same time pick up some skills in configuring Linux and installing software, patching, maintaining, backing up, monitoring etc. It's important that you don't give them artificial problems to solve - it needs to be real, and useful if they get it working well so there is real payback for this investment in time. Perhaps a web service like a CMDB, or a knowledge base - install Apache, Samba etc.
.. or let them use their imaginations.
Perhaps there is a production service that you want monitored; they could install Zabbix as a service, and then get them to install the agents on servers, produce the dashboard, monitor it daily and identify and fix issues that are shown up.
Perhaps you need a backup service for all of your desktop machines. Get them to install Amanda as a backup server. Install a tape drive, create a backup regimen.
Get them to install some virtualisation software - build a test model of a production service with the same software levels where you can test changes &c.
AND get them to document everything, coz when they go you will want them to hand it over to someone else as an easily maintained service. If it sticks, and they get enthused, then let them do some simple changes on the production services, and so on. If the only cost to you is to move some existing machine that isn't being used elsewhere, and all of the software is free as in beer, what harm could it do? Give them two machines each, get them to set up clustering, HA, PostGreSQL running in an active/active configuration
Not too many years ago, IT was associated with anything related to software/programming. I was working at a highly-specialised engineering consultancy closely related to software and they were referring to themselves as an IT business. In fact, I have been using that term to describe my activity (basically programming) until relatively recently. Now, IT whatever seems to be exclusively associated with not-too-specialised staff whose work is somehow related to computers?!
A so relevant, but-completely-arbitrary evolution of the meaning of a word tells a lot about the tremendous importance of context and adequately understanding the actual intention. Although this should be quite evident for almost anyone, quite a few people working on the software (development) industry seem to prefer an undoubted-meaning-isolated-word-based (mis)understanding?!
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Buy a Mac for each of these guys to use at home. Put the Linux distro you're using on the Mac in a VM. Task them with setting up the machine to run remotely on the corporate network under both OSs. They'll have fun learning, and will then be prepared to support others. The gift is also a nice way to reward them for their years of service.
Hey, I said pay them what they want to retire. We should all be so lucky. If they're near retirement this is not a bad deal for anybody.
"basic network, Windows, Mac, Linux, and "cloud" first-level help desk support" is pretty wide and vague. Specifically, what kind of issues are they unable to address? First step would be to go over all the help desk tickets and see just what tickets come up most often that these employees need to be able to address. Then, start pinning down how to fix these issues under each OS, writing up comprehensive knowledge base articles as you go along. Use this as an opportunity to implement an actual knowledge base system, that can be used and expanded on by all your IT people.
My guess is tasks like updating network settings, adding printers, and troubleshooting permissions / domain credentials would be the major issues your helpdesk encounters. Make your knowledge base very specific, copy-n-paste type of instructions (especially if dealing with the command line). Utilize the fact that your Macs are somewhat POSIX compliant, so much of the training for Mac and Linux can be dual-use at least for "under the hood" items like I outlined.
You'll need some type of lab too, with machines that mimic your environment for them to train on. As for "the cloud", your vendor should be able to provide training for this. Since these people also know many other people in the org, leverage that as well. You should probably form a cross-sectional "advisory board" (borrowing from ITIL) that includes some users too to see what issues they commonly have that need to be addressed.
Assign these people some non-technical or quasi-technical responsibilities, like writing and reorganizing documentation, coordinating efforts with other organizations, or identifying legacy systems that are no longer in frequent use. These are tasks using knowledge they probably already have that are often neglected by IT teams.
We had a not too similar situation when we decommissioned our old COBOL system. The developers were of more mature years (50+), but instead of just letting them go, they were moved into more of a BA role. They have a lot of domain knowledge built up from years of working on a monolithic system, it transferred quite well to doing business analysis and converting it into specs for devs on the new tech. They also had better people skills than green devs, which is rather important when trying to understand WTF the business wants or means
If you are a Journeyman in the field of IT, people don't train and update your knowledge, you do it for yourself. People who are good at this trade are also good at educating themselves and learning in general. People who aren't good at it might get a little better with training but they were probably not very good to begin with.
We'll make great pets
1) The company has to admit (some) responsibility for allowing this to happen. Why were these people not given training long ago when things started to shift? If they refused, why weren't they dealt with appropriately? Management done screwed up.
2) Get approval to terminate their employment if necessary. Otherwise, you may was well put a few reclining chairs in the lounge and ask them to nap through their shifts until retirement.
3) Give them a computer that meets the new standard, and give them standard tasks that the organization generally performs on that platform. Let them keep their old computer so they can google for help.
4) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard tasks completed. I'd start with "Spend a week on the new computer to familiarize yourself with the interface. Type up a report, fill out a spreadsheet, produce a presentation, browse the Internet, save your work on our cloud storage." Simplified versions of whatever the average user does, excluding any extremely specialized applications.
5) Give them standard IT tasks that you need performed on that platform. I'd give them a box and say, "Get this on the network". If they already know how to join something to a Windows domain, they already know a lot more than your summary suggests... or they're untrainable.
6) Give them a generous schedule to get the standard IT tasks completed. Don't hesitate to allow them to be mentored by whoever is doing this kind of work right now.
7) The tough bit - fire anyone who doesn't put in a decent effort.
Honestly, Mac and Linux aren't impossibly difficult to handle, but it is imposing when you have all sorts of MS-based assumptions about how things work and suddenly none of those assumptions apply. 'Cloud' is just a buzzword that for most purposes simply means you don't have physical control of the servers.
This is more about familiarization than training from scratch.
It sounds like they still have responsibilities that need done.
If they quit/retire/fired you have a hole. How do you address that hole?
Cross training, right? So do that.
Train the "old Mac" or "old Linux" IT to do their tasks and vice versa.
Don't discount the ability to build IT good will; that is a skillsets and resource you don't want to squander. Even if their tech responsibilities are down to pushing the imager button and rebooting PCs and checking cables, odds are they have mastered the art of keeping your users happy.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
"Old IT Workers". It is one more stereotype. There are weak "Young IT Workers" too.
For example, one may think that workers in advance age miss work due to illness more often than young workers. It is a stereotype too. The research shows the opposite.
It is due to such managers we have got cute baby-face puppets at about any office and counter who do not have a clue, who do not have any real life experience. And as a result the production goes away from Europe and the US.
I would start with the retraining course "Prejudice or discrimination on the grounds of a person's age" for this IT manager.
It sounds like they have loads of experience, but not practical skills for your current setup. Realistically if you were to train them to update their skills they would be just the same as any new (and potentially cheap) hire that you make - this isn't getting the best out of them.
No, what you want to do is take advantage of their experience. I'd be looking to shift their role, and only you can know what slots you have open, or where they may be able to contribute most. If they know everyone, then liasing between departments, IT and the users for example, may be good. They have probably got management skills which are under-utilised, and they will certainly be able to provide mentoring to new and inexperienced team members.
I'd start by talking your thinking through with them (individually) explaining the potential they have, and sounding out what they think they would like to do. You may find they have ideas which you haven't considered. If they want training up, then that is an option, but this is unlikely to be the best for the business.
You were hired to manage two guys who are on their way out. And you can't fire them.
Take that as a lesson in the organizational reality rather than your stated position.
You should consider that your position is not as secure as you think it is, and respond by turning these employees into niche superstars. Help them go out on their high note and you will give yourself a leg up.
They have internal cred. You are the new guy everyone 'above' is evaluating.
It's important to know that the administrative staff and others who hold goodwill toward these subordinates of yours could be your position's catapult, or it's anchor.
Would it really be more difficult to ask them on how and which training they need to be useful? Do they want to re-image machines until they're ready to retire? Or would they like to make some final impact, leaving a legacy by bringing something new to the company?
And do you need someone to re-image hard drives?
If we're talking about a few years left - why not offer some attractive part-time retirement? You will still have someone ready to do work while whatever tech they know is not completly phased out yet, but need to pay less and less while you're finally phasing it out over the next few years.
bickerdyke
I'd have them take an offsite week-long class on managing the systems you currently have. It's a good way to get some focus on learning the new system, and in my experience it's also a good way to keep somebody a little fresher at work - change is good, but sometimes you need a BIG change for a short period to get it kickstarted. Once they've been introduced in-depth to the new system, they can use google and stackoverflow to fill in details later, just like the rest of us do.
Have you read my blog lately?
Talk to them. They should be aware that things have changed and they likely will tell you what they would do if they had to make department decisions. Just because they are older and supposedly stuck in yesteryear does not mean they are dumb and clueless. Training in specific areas is one good option as is finding them other tasks within the company. Maybe they had enough of helpdesk service and rather want to be more involved on the production side of things. Looking for QA? UX design? Report design? Tech writing? Something else? Make it easy for them to find a new purpose within the company.
By all means, don't fire them. They obviously did not get the attention and training years ago when the changes came into play. Should they have been more proactive? Maybe, but it could well be that prior management discouraged such engagement and ran with a "do as I say" culture. In any case, if they are just a few years away from retirement and generally have a good standing within the company let them come in and do whatever they think they can do. The perceived issue will go away in the near future, no reason to sour your relationship with folks long term.
Old workers in mid/large companies have one incredibly useful superpower: They know people and their quirks, and they know processes better than SAP and process managers combined (especially how those processes really run, not just what's on paper) and more importantly, they know how to bypass them. They know how to cut the red tape and who to talk to to get on the fastpass for resources. They can sit down with some other old fart in another department, have a cup of coffee and get a "free" test machine for you, they know the people who know where hardware is being hoarded that isn't used (and can be put to good use). And so on.
We had one such "old guy" in our team. His knowledge was dated and we mostly needed him for the ancient servers that we just couldn't turn off yet but aside of that, he was incredibly valuable whenever we needed something and couldn't go the formal way (or when we didn't have the time to wait for official channels to clear). When he retired, we lost our main source for "free" hardware, quick access and useful "connections" to other departments. He was also very useful in deadlocked meetings where he could take someone he knew personally from another department aside, ask for the real reason why they're stalling (or give him the hint why we have to) and they could hash out an "informal" solution together that both sides can work with. Saved us literally weeks of pointless meetings.
Yes, such people are poison and bane for process managers, but they're a boon for your department, especially if you're drowning in bureaucracy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Talk to them. Explain the situation. Ask them if there are any areas they are interested in. Give them options and allow them to choose.
If they are close to retirement, the easiest and friendliest course might be to give them a buyout -- early retirement with a substantial bonus and a gold watch. Company politics may be against that, but you could make the case to management that they would be ahead over the next few years if they take this course, considering the new (and yes cheaper) talent that would replace them.
Fiat Lux.
Why is this even a question?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
An employer is as much responsible for making sure it has the proper workforce as the employee that wants to be employed. It shouldn't have been allowed to get this bad in this case but a lot of blame lays at the lazy employees.
"Given many people are now using Macs and most servers/workstations are running Linux, they have literally lost complete control over the company, with most of these machines sitting around completely unmanaged." This statement is 99.99% Bullshit. Most people in business STILL are not using macs, and the VAST MAJORITY of workstations and servers in a typical small to medium business are NOT running Linux... Who Told you this? LOL I've been in IT for 25 years, and wear a CURRENT skillset. Adding Android Tablets and Macs to the Tech landscape does not invalidate your older IT workers. This is an opinion ONLY an uninformed, CLUELESS, Lazy ass Millennial could have. You really need to pay FAR MORE attention to the world around you Slashdot. Otherwise the things you say cease to be, "News" to anyone.
It seems this question pops up every couple of months. Does the answer really change that often?
If they've been in the industry that long, they at least know command prompts and batch files. Seems like those skills can most easily be transferred to Linux or Mac CLI and scripting rather than anything else.
Anywhere else you can map analogs from Windows to the systems and applications that actually need support would be good candidates..
We are the 198 proof..
You mean you don't just take them out behind the barn and shoot them?
Assuming they aren't interested or management isn't able to pony up a package to talk them into an early retirement (this is probably the route I would lean for at least one of them, then focus on the remaining person to retrain). Getting one of them to retire allows you to double up your training money on the one person. I would probably send them to onsite training, given their age most folks in that generation prefer in-person training. But depending on the person, if they prefer online stuff then I would allow them to take as much training as they could handle and still get their job done.
LOL this was my first thought! People get their resumes circle-filed and get shitcanned from their jobs for far less. These guys must have dirt on the CEO or something.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You need to do at least three things.
First, you need to provide them with direction. They need assurance that they need to know specific skills and that the time spent learning won't be wasted.
Second, they need the time to learn. Perhaps set aside a week or so for classes or self learning. Something structured would give better results.
Third, they need the materials, be it machines, books, or classes. For vendor specific skills vendor provided class may be the best choice.
It seems strange that the company has brought in new technologies without IT ever getting involved. Are there some territorial issues at play? Sometimes when new technology is brought in there is resistance to IT getting involved and interfering.
You can't say it or do it because they're old. You will get sued.
Ask what their interests are, and build from there, leading them into "new" skills that relate. For example, if the given the summary of their current activity is their interest, see if you can leverage what they are currently doing into what's the currently fashionable term for it: Dev-Ops, but using cross-platform tools. They may not have interest in much command line work, so tools like Chef and it's heavy use of Ruby programming may not work, but their are tools like Ansible Tower that provide a GUI that they could start with to monitor and manage what Windows systems you have left, then slide that familiarity over to basic Linux systems monitoring, and management.
Regardless of all this commentary, please come back to us in a month of so and let's us know what happened to these two guys. Did they stay? Go? Get kicked out? Get upgraded? Or maybe you, as a new manager, suddenly realized you somehow DID need them for exactly whatever it is they do?
I'm also curious to find out the perspectives and follow-up from these two employees. It seems we have everyone-in-the-world's opinion here except theirs!
....for political reasons. To characterize older workers and inflexible.
In reality, a good worker evolves with the tasks his company actually does. When you stay abreast of business you figure out for yourself what new things need to be done.
It's not just a sudden thing that you don't know how to do anything.
When exactly did these people in this story start sitting around doing nothing? That's when they should have gotten fired and given the signal to wake up.
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
My company actually hires older people with a background in IT, because we do a lot of "management consulting". People who have been around a long time have seen the good and bad of business decisions. I don't know if the personalities you are dealing with would do well in those types of roles, but think about their potential in doing:
- business process documentation and optimization
- corporate standards development
- new product/service development
- agile project management for small initiatives
- etc
I'll bet your two guys could make a big difference to the overall health of the company by looking at your processes (they've been there long enough to know everything that is wrong with them). Make them project-oriented and give them more strategic longer-term corporate optimization tasks.
Hope this helps.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
I can't imagine not learning new stuff as it comes out.
I have however been employed as a temp between good jobs at places like power plants and government facilities and met people who've done tech jobs while not actually knowing how to do them. Turns out the government prizes people who can follow written instructions from actual techs but not understand them.
If they've been there that long and can't do much more than plug in USB mice, which replaced the PS/2 mice, which replaced the RS-232 mice they never knew anything to start with. Even imaging, I've seen trained monkeys do imaging and wiping, I've helped to build the stations they can use without understanding how they work. If a computer failed to network boot when plugged into one of these stations or had the wrong kind of connector on a hard drive they were at a complete loss. Literally in 2007 I heard one of these people refer to SATA as "a drive I couldn't wipe because it had a proprietary connector".
Nah, these people should be put out to pasture. I know the situation the original poster is in however. The thing I've found is long-term gofor people tend to be great at the paperwork needed to get the job done. I would do my best to give them all the paperwork and procedural stuff I didn't want to deal with, they're good for projects as long as you can write step by step instructions, which often takes more time than doing it yourself. Nah, this dudes is a near hopeless pickle, his best bet is to hire someone young who can write procedures for the other two.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Seriously, what's the point?
It seems the point has been missed. The main point of this exercise is not to transform these two older workers. The point of this exercise is to see how well "new guy" manages them. If the older workers learn new skills useful to the company, that's just a bonus.
First off, start with having them fill out a skills inventory. Just put together a spreadsheet with every IT skill you can think of with a 1-5 rating and have them fill it out. And ask them to give an honest assessment. That is the first test - to see if they are honest. If they lie and tell you they are an expert at this or that it won't take long to find out. If they fail this first basic test then you give them the shittiest most mundane job you can think of and give up and wait until they retire.
If they pass the test then on we go...
Ask them to take the same skills survey again but this time instead of skill substitute area of interest. The objective is to found out what they are good at and what they like. It doesn't matter if they rate themselves a 1 out of 5. As long as they have an interest in it you have something to work with. Aptitude is something you can deal with later on.
It sounds like these two have had shitty management along the way. Your job is to convince them that you are not just another shitty manager and that you actually care about their careers. This will not be easy given how long they have been around but you've got to try. If you don't get their buy in the whole exercise will be pointless.
Next, get a training plan put together. Your bosses seem committed so they should not balk at spending money to get them trained. Work with the two employees as you put the plan together so that they have some skin in the game. Set goals and measure progress along the way. If they are in a bonus plan they tie at least part of the bonus to the goals you set collectively. Money talks.
From your standpoint you have nothing to lose. If all goes to plan you will have two newly productive, motivated employees. If it does not at least you can tell your bosses that you tried. There is only so much you can do. Your job is to provide the tools. Their job is to learn how to use them.
Yup. Also note that these people have "60 years combined experience" and have worked there for "their entire careers". Even allowing for a degree and some time looking for work, this means they're at the grand old age of... 55 at most?
Ooooooo 55, that's soooo old! That's not even a Baby Boomer, that's early Gen X.
I'm having difficulty with the entire premise of the question. I'm pretty sure 55 year olds can figure out their way around a Mac. Anyone that wasn't brought up on Unix might have problems with GNU/Linux systems, but TBH look at the threads on Slashdot concerning SystemD: A lot of people who have that experience are scared of pretty much any version of any distribution that's come out in the last few years because of change. Nonetheless, I think most get the hang of it.
My advice to the submitter: send them on some courses and give them some time to play around with whatever distribution of GNU/Linux your office uses. And stop being a patronizing git.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, big companies that have tried this have ended up paying more then they expected when the "young, keen and cheap" make mistakes the older guys have already learned not to make.
I guess if you're all for infrastructure that's of a quality equivalent to a chinese plastic toy, then fine. If you need quality and stability, then you need your old guard, and your young blood. The old to temper the young with hard earned wisdom, and the young to keep the old guard moving with the times.
That's how craftsmanship has been working for almost the entirity of human endeavour, it's only in recent times that this seems to have been forgotten.
You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? Take em out back and shoot them.
With just a few weeks left in 2017, this thread comes along to take the lead in the 'Arrogant Thread' category.
What's next? How to turn 'Old IT' employees in to the Soylent Green Committee for Much Re-Education?
m
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
Or, the company made a poorly managed bullshit switch without any thought to training its infrastructure workers.
The problem isn't the workers, it's gaslighting fuckturds like the "anonymous coward" who blames the workers rather than whatever fucktarded managers/CEO types ordered a shift without planning anything for worker training on it.
I wouldn't put the two gentlemen in the same group. While they are both older, they are two different people who have just worked together. They may each want to learn/do different things but based on their workload, family, etc., may not have had the opportunity for additional training. This is something I understand well. Life has a way of making one irrelevant and I am sort of experiencing that now. I work on legacy systems that are in production. My day is filled with stress of keeping old shit working while also adding new features. The younger guys work on new projects that aren't yet in production so they have the luxury of low stress and have time to learn.
Give these guys the time to learn. Carve out times where they can be isolated or trained without interruptions. However, you have to make a list - together - of technology that they need training on. In other words it has to be something relevant to the business. Encourage both to become resident experts on different things too.
Don't discount them. Make the relevant again and they will most likely perform above expectations.
I doubt the article is about a real company, but let's pretend it is.
So you have these two guys that don't know anything but Windows desktop support, and now you want to train them to be admins for Linux servers?
I call bullshit. What is going on here is that you have Windows server and domain admins that don't want to learn Linux, so they're trying to escape that duty by dumping it on the Desktop guys.
You claim to be a medium size company. Are these two guys clearing their calls and keeping busy for 40+ hours a week or are they sitting on their butts all day? You did not say, but If they're putting in over 40, then adding Linux server support to their jobs means you're being a jerk. The correct thing to do is hire an another admin to manage the servers, or more likely, you need to make your server admins do their jobs.
The two desktop guys do indeed need to be able to do OSX desktop support, and probably smartphone email integration. You'll have to buy them each a OSX box and a book to learn, practice and troubleshoot.
Server admin job is a different job than desktop support (except in small business). It is a different mindset for the most part, and it's not a good idea to mix the roles.
At 42, I'm pretty much mid-career, and have spent a large amount of effort trying to stay flexible and skilled up. The problem is when you get into environments like the one described. Outside of family businesses, I've never seen private employers who can't fire their workers. But friends of mine work for the state university system and do experience this. The key factor here is that you're not going to get new workers and you have to play the hand you're dealt...and this is where that whole management thing comes in.
I guess my question would be whether they are even interested in retraining, or whether they want to coast the last few years into retirement. If they have any sort of interest, then feed it by all means. It's super-easy to get pigeonholed into one task or get so specialized in an arcane corner of technology, then wake up and realize the train's leaving the station. Those "old" people probably have a lot of institutional knowledge along with that departmental goodwill. One place where I worked had thousands of PCs in remote locations and we were replacing them with thin clients...there was a whole group of PC techs that would have a severe cutback because of it. What we did was offer them training in basic administration for XenApp and other subjects...those who took it wound up getting better jobs being our application support people and those who didn't want it had to find work somewhere else or were kept on the now much smaller PC tech group.
One thing I'd say is that there probably are plenty of people who just want to coast, but among us oldies there are plenty who would love the chance to learn another skill and do something different.
I came here to post exactly the same thing, and you worded it even more clearly than I would have. Since I don't have mod points I'll just add another voice in support of your idea...
I kind of think the original question was a bit demeaning.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hire some additional, competent employees to the team. Seeing how out-of-date their own skills are compared to the new-hires' might be the bit of motivation they need to get their own skills up to par. The new folks could even help train the incumbents.
This is really a simple economics question. Task them with the functions they know and can do best. Make them own it. While someone else might be able to do those functions better or quicker, the better-trained people are freed up to focus on tasks where they are more productive than the old guys. It doesn't even matter how much people get paid. Productivity increases when you force specialization.
Ya...I am very skeptical that these people had been there for 30 years each and didn't learn anything except installing drivers and Windows reinstall.
More likely the Tool that submitting the question has no real clue as to what they do.
"Reinstalling windows" Does he mean creating standard images that include the latest patches, implement company policies regarding installed software, access rights, etc and then loading that image on new computers and refreshing older computers? Not to mention periodic patching, etc.
Maybe these are the guys who people know they can call when something stops working. And when customers say they need help with X, these guys know what X is and know how to fix it.
Desktop support is the Red Headed stepchild of he information industry, but with out it, especially in a company with strict standards, you are doomed to be spending all your time addressing hose issues instead of your precious scripts trying to cram as much functionality as you can into one line of unsupportable code.
Ya... I be the submitter is just another asshole management puke who brings preconceptions and bias to his job.
In other words, a shitty manager.
What does this word mean, anyway?
It sounds like it primarily means nearing retirement, which in standard economic theory means that retraining efforts have a narrow window to return value on investment.
If by "old" you think "mentally slow", that entirely depends on the person in question. It's not a useful generic term.
I'm surely old, but the only important thing that's changed in my learning capacity is that I no longer like jumping into bleeding edge technologies that are 80% rough edges. Navigating through the glass vines of all those rough edges places a demand on short term memory I just can't support incidentally any longer (I can still do it, but at the cost of setting aside my 30-year map of the IT industry; I can no longer run both of these systems at the same time—which is, of course, easier early on in your career when you haven't even got a map).
My advice would be to consider how much brokenness is intrinsic to the skill you are teaching, because the benefit of a mature mind is compromised if they end up faffing around with some ridiculous "slam it out the door" product misfeature.
Let them eat cake. Give them software that actually works as documented.
I work for a major defense contractor. I mean big.
We had a guy that was here long before I arrived. He worked with the top level management and was very well regarded.
He did not re-install windows. He did not program. He did not configure switches, routers, or firewalls. He did not build computers, install servers, or anything else.
So what good was he?
He knew everyone who could do these things.
He knew all the policies and procedures and work flows.
He knew how all of these disciplines interacted.
He knew the right way to set up infrastructure for the best supportability and growth.
He knew how to get priorities changed to get support to your project.
If you had an outage of any kind and had 100 people on the manufacturing floor idle, he was the one you called. He coordinated all the disciplines and made sure the problem got resolved.
But he was an old guy who didn't have current skills, so what the fuck use was he, eh?
Maybe this new IT manager should sit down with management and find out why these two have such goodwill. Then talk to them and find out what they really do.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Slay them in the backyard.
These old guys are near retirement. Assuming they do a decent job, they probably have a lots of experience in areas where younger ones don't. It may be something as simple as knowing who to call when a piece of hardware fails, know which software have licenses and how to deal with them, or knowing what the server in the corner of the room does. They may know the tells that something will fail better than anyone else, because they have seen it.
They should be the trainers, not the trainees.
I'm saying it from experience. When I started working, an old guy trained me, and while he wasn't the best, and didn't know about the latest stuff, he told me where to look when things go wrong, or even before things go wrong. Later, the company started another project, the old guy came in and told the team about the flaws in their design, they didn't listen, and things failed as expected. I knew it too, having been trained by the old guy, and had I been part of the team, I would have avoided that particular pitfall. Experience is valuable, and people retiring without having the chance of transmitting it mean that the same mistakes are done over and over.
While it is easy to point the finger at these employees for obviously taking the easy road out the situation speaks volumes to the organization that let them skate. Sounds like the entire place has been skating along for quite a while now.
This is not a "retraining" issue. It is an organizational issue, then entire organization has failed to keep up.
Caution: Contents under pressure
If you're going to be pedantic at least try to be pedantic about something that matters.
If you are pedantic about something that matters, doesn't that mean you're no longer pedantic? Pedant, by its (not it's) very definition focuses on minor, unimportant details. That's like saying "If you're going to be a jerk, can't you at least be nice?"
This - sometimes people are unofficial IT project managers. The guys in TFA might just be a couple of losers, or they might be doing something useful every day. Certainly worth asking around.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The first thing you should do is stop treating them like dogs. They aren't property and you don't seem to know anything about what they actually do. Losers without skills aren't generally well regarded in a company. People know who's sandbagging and who's not. Figure out what they do, and show the company you're actually a good manager.
If you've ever gotten a Microsoft certification, you would know they are absolutely useless for teaching you anything about administering the system. If I'm charitable---and I'm not---I'd say that 90% of the exam covers stupid features that you either know intimately (because you use them) or will forget within the month.
Since I'm not being charitable, I'll go ahead and say that I lose respect for anyone who speaks highly of their MS certs. Spending an hour on the Technet is a better use of time. And that's true even if it's the forums rather than Microsoft-published content.
By all means, put the MCSE/MCSA/etc on your resume if you have it. Some places care about those things, and having that cert proves you're literate. But that's about it.
How do I know? An old employer decided that everyone with privileged access to servers required certification. The class was a joke, and the test was a joke. Microsoft certifications aren't a training tool at all---which what OP was asking for. They aren't even a good assessment tool.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
You could start by remembering they've been in IT longer than you've been alive so instead of thinking of them like dinosaurs show some fucking respect. Approaching my 50s I've been in IT longer than most of the people I bail out have been alive. If this had been my IT manager he would be told to piss off and sort his own problems out had that been the attitude I felt I was getting.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
I really wish this wasn't posted anonymously.
However, there's truth to both sides. I try to minimize the training required of me for my employers by staying (mostly) up-to-date on a variety of technologies. That being said, if the decision makers aren't communicating in a way that trickles down to us grunts, there's not much chance that I'll be self-training in a direction that's useful to them.
Having the initiative to update one's knowledge set is only useful if there is some guidance coming from 'up on high.'
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
If you're seeing a lot of Linux and Mac clients on the network, then that's what your frontline needs to support. Ideally, they would be allocated workstations for learning and testing.
FYI, both Macs and Linux machines can be joined to the domain. You can use an application like Centrify, or you can use native tools if your distro includes them. Centrify is extremely useful if you want to use domain accounts on Linux machines.
There are management applications that can control non-Windows systems; most of them also give you more comprehensive management than Group Policy for Windows as well. If you feel your environment is spiraling out of control, look into tools like Tivoli, BigFix, SCCM, Puppet, or Chef.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
I call that a project manager. He may not have the PMP, but he has been doing that job.
Might see if he'd night class it and make it happen, and offer a pay bump for doing it.
"real" project managers can keep projects from failing, thou there are a lot of paper ones out there.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
You don't want it anonymous so you can chase someone down ?
You need to "punish" the poster ?
The issue can be addressed without knee jerking into the blame game.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
According to HR they are not worthy of any job therefore not worthy of life if you follow the conclusion. ... semi joking sadly.
I already die my goatee to look younger when I do a job interview.
http://saveie6.com/
Sure make everyone a project manager and a chief. What can possible go wrong with that?
http://saveie6.com/
Sending a message to others by using a sharp and hungry axe as management tool.
The rest of the employees will think "who is next ?"
Some will think I need to work harder and learn more to maximize the billionaires billions.
Others will think "The grass is greener on the other side." and prepare for their "transistion".
I have gotten to the point when the "blame the workers" crowd goes ballistic I get happy,
because I might get the chance to work with good people instead of "hatchet men".
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
At the 30 year mark someone "sold them" on this idea to switch to Linux/MAC.
Meanwhile 28 years ago things were chugging along in the windows world
like it is at MOST companies.
So maybe 1 year ago there was rumors this was coming.
At the time of the change they had little to no warning and it side swiped them.
I think they will find most of the non-IT workers are also unfamiliar with MAC/Linux.
I think they will have to go thru a transitional period in this scenario.
The fact that the gender of the manager changed midstream in this anonymous post
makes me think a troll needs to polish his trolling a bit.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Meh...I started down that path.
PMP isn't about Project Management. It's about documenting Project Management the PMP way.
It isn't about how to build relationships, discover resources, understanding organizational constraints, personality driven obstacles or advantages, analysis, gathering accurate statuses, understanding how tasks impact each other beyond the concept of prerequisites, etc.
You can be a world class project manager without a PMP. But if you aren't a already a project manager, a PMP ain't gonna make you one.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm in my late 60s now and still learn new things, there's no 'hard limit' on knowledge, but they probably won't absorb as fast as the kids.
So, if you're really serious and this is not a piece of 'managing out', just take them aside and spent an hour or two discussing the immediate/medium future with them. If you can find something that they'll enjoy learning (and they probably won't both be the same, they are people), the motivation comes as a side effect. I'm an old hippie and a theory Y: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... person though.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Let them train themselves, or promote them out of the problem area. Or leverage their skills in another way. Sometimes being smart about your workers and having to re-saavy-fy people are two very different things that you;'d have to measure.
How can people who have been in the industry for so long, yet never got past the "imaging machines and adding them to active directory" first-level tech support stage?
This can't be right. Even if they didn't keep up with the absolute cutting-edge stuff, I find it hard to believe that they haven't learned enough stuff over time that they should be way beyond that by now.
I personally would go mad in such an environment. Anything I do more than 3 times in a short time period, I will figure out some way to automate, and when that's stabilized I would go on to learn something new.
If the above story is at all true, then this sounds like a potentially dangerous office politics situation and I'd be concerned about how receptive they'd even BE to learning something new. If they wanted to learn new things, they'd already have figured out how to do that themselves and this situation would never have happened.
As others have said, these works have not kept themselves relevant. So the current situation may be on them. On the other hand, the last three companies I worked for (since shortly after the beginning of this century) had no training budget and no mechanism for employees to "sharpen the saw", except on their own dime. When the company needed a certain expertise, the philosophy was "buy, not build", which meant hiring someone with that expertise rather than retraining existing personnel. In such an environment, it's difficult to get training in any product where training has significant cost, and it's nearly impossible to get certifications. (I actually had one IT director tell me that he doesn't pay for certifications, because why would he pay money to fill out an employee's resume for their next job?)
During boom.dot.bust, it was relatively easy to get training, as every tech company had money to throw around. But training received then is probably not very relevant now.
As always, your mileage may vary. Some people sink a significant part of their disposable income back into training costs, and manage to stay relevant on their own. (Companies really like this scenario.) But this doesn't work for everyone.
Moreover, it's easier to get low cost or free training in open systems software products. But that's not always true either.
The most bizarre situation I was in, two jobs ago, was being responsible for a large, complicated, expensive application, the very expensive license for which, also included free passes to all the admins for their otherwise very expensive training. The catch 22 was that the company had no training *travel* budget, so even though I could get training for free, the company wouldn't send me to the training centers or put me up when I got there. No problem, the nearest center is a little over 200 miles, and I can stay with a local friend there.
But no, that's not allowed either. Because, (as it was explained to me) if you're traveling for training purposes, the company incurs liability if you go there in your own vehicle.
So, every year when the contract was renewed, the vendor granted fairly expensive training to us for free, and we were never allowed to use it.
So, we tried to stay up on the product, but it was a struggle. A needless struggle.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
But he was an old guy who didn't have current skills, so what the fuck use was he, eh?
With the skills you described, he wasn't already in management?
"Big Men???" keep on turning
Carry on like boys of sin
Singing songs about the teen-girls
He rapes 'ole' 'bamy once again and He likes 'em young
Well I heard Mister Moore deny about her
Well I heard ole Roy put her down
Well, I hope Roy Moore will remember
A southern folk don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama
Where the guys have not a clue (apparently)
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, it's startin' smell like poo
In Ole 'Bamy they love the POTUS, boo-hoo-hoo
Now we all did what we could do
Now Pussy-Gate does not bother 'em
Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies WERE so blue
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, can not these people be true?
Now GOP has got Deniers
And they've been known to twist the truth
Lord they make nearly vomit
They lie and cheat and steal, now how bout you?
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies CAN BE AGAIN so blue
Sweet home Alabama
Lord, I promise to make it for YOU!
Yeah, those lazy ppl who are liked and respected company wide who have
shown up reliably for 30 years and kept the Winblows boxes blowing.
So lazy.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Could Anonymous Coward be one of the gofers? ^^^^^ More seriously.. yes this is excellent advice!
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
Not everyone aspires to be a manager.
Being a manager implicitly means you aren't in the trenches anymore.
You are filling out evaluations, time cards, attending endless meetings, setting priorities in your group, counseling employees if necessary, etc. etc.
I sit next to an Engineering manager with 30 people in his group. He hasn't done actual Engineering in years.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Bring in a trainer to run though a pre-certification training. ITIL, perhaps. Cream will rise.
and give them a MacBook Pro. Come back in a month. Problem solved.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Decided to fire them. In the managers mind they have little/no value. The problem is, How get rid of these 2. Without looking like a heartless A-hole Manager type that everyone always whines about.
;) Is the Company going to be loyal to them?
You are the Manager, MANAGE!
- If things start popping up that the competent IT staff can not handle. I guess you (the manager) were the problem!
- If things run smoother with a smaller staff, Good Call!
Of course you can carry/make good use of them until retirement. After all, they Were loyal for 30 years
Seems the real question is about the Company and Management.
It sounds more like the company just like IT slide while the rest of the company was expanding and changing. Then when they discover they have IT issues, they hire a new guy to fix it all. At this point, those two old guys are extremely valuable - they know what's going on in the company, they know the problems, they probably also know how things have changed and how they couldn't keep up with it or obtain any budget for training.
If those two gets dumped and replaced, then you end up with a generic IT department where zero members of the staff have any clue whatsoever about the company they work for. And believe me, a generic bunch of IT workers bought at a discount (or outsourced) won't know what to do with OSX or Linux. They'll all be indoctrinated as MSCE clones and will start recommending standardization on Microsoft products and services. (to update the old adage, no ever got fired buying sharepoint)
But consider the outfit you work for is pretty social when seen in today's context.
So, enjoy the ride and outperform yourself in defining and achieving both business and social goals!
Also consider that most organisations have significant amounts of people doing nothing. Two more will not make a difference.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
That job role is best described as systems architect. I heard about companies who fired these "pieces of dead wood". They had to be rehired as consultants within months. Fortunately for them, they could now charge what rate they wanted.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Stop thinking of these guys as "older" an "on their way to retirement". These classifications are a combination of useless stereotypes and assumptions. It doesn't matter. The bottom line is that you have people who need to be trained with new skills to do their job. If you think you have to treat them differently from younger staff members then you're approaching it the wrong way. They will respond to training and taking on of new tasks just the same as anyone else would and if they don't then you can handle it when it happens, not assume it's going to be a problem before you try. Just work out what skills they need and provide them with the resources and training to get them there. As "I.T. Manager" that's a fundamental part of your job and if I was your boss and saw this question I'd be a bit concerned as to why you have to ask slashdot how to do that.
I completely agree. If they were motivated to learn, they would have done still so on their own. That's the thing with IT, self teaching (especially when you already know the management frameworks and principles) is not only easy, but the most effective way to learn.
You are wasting your time. If the work is not there, they are redundant. Act accordingly.
(IAAL, but not your lawyer. See your own lawyer to make sure you do this right and don't risk a claim. I was in IT for 20 years before becoming a lawyer, including at executive management level, so my evaluation of that part comes from direct experience)
Give them this link: https://hiringcenter.walmartst...
I agree. I've been seeing young-up-and-comers near me totally deferring to the older-and-cunning people (and maybe I am one) because there is corporate knowledge and "executive function" being exercised.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
If they're near retirement this is not a bad deal for anybody.
Sadly, yes. But that doesn't make it a good deal.
Why, is there a societal obligation
Because that's what society is for. I don't even want to explain my point to you. This world is going down, and if I have to explain to you why the above attitude of "everything that isn't optimal profit is bad" you're part of the problem. But it's way too late to change the minds of billions of brainwashed people. Fuck the revolution. Bring on the apocalypse.
I can't tell you how pleased I am by all the positive, affirmative and supporting responses.
This is a time in a person's life when they are commonly treated like a used condom.
Gives me faith in humanity when folks can be caring and concerned about their fellow humans even when ready to put out to pasture.
Sends the message: "Don't stick around here too long".
Might as well only hire contractors. I'm not advocating for that. This just sounds like mixed messaging.
Who else finds the title of this request for comments insulting and contemptuous? "Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way to Retrain Old IT Workers?" and "gofers" Sounds like this manager wannabe is talking about livestock and is clueless to the real world as it is aptly described in other responses. "Peter's Principle" is still valid . . .
And they deserve about $50k per year for it. You just derided the product they work on, you must not think much of their skills either.
You're an idiot.
I wish they hadn't posted anonymously so I could give them points.
An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".