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Ask Slashdot: Do Older IT Workers Doing End-User Support Find It Gets Harder With Age?
Longtime Slashdot reader King_TJ writes: I've worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now in various capacities, from bench PC technician to web page designer, support specialist, network manager, and was self-employed for a while doing on-site service and consulting too. In all that time, I've always felt like I had a good handle on troubleshooting and problem-solving while providing good, friendly customer service at the same time. But recently, I've started feeling like there's just a little too much knowledge to keep straight in my brain. If I'm able to work on a project on my own terms, without interruptions or distractions? Sure, I can get almost anything figured out. But it's the stress of users needing immediate assistance with random problems, thrown out willy-nilly in the constant barrage of trouble tickets, that I'm starting to struggle with.
For example, just this morning, a user had a question about whether or not she should open an email about quarantined junk mail to actually look through it. I briefly noted a screenshot she attached that showed a typical MS Office quarantined email message and replied that she could absolutely view them at her discretion. (I also noted that I tend to ignore and delete those myself, unless I'm actually expecting a specific piece of email that I didn't receive -- in case it was actually in the junk mail filter.) Well, that was the wrong answer, because that message was a nicely done phishing attempt; not a legit message -- and she tried to sign in through it. Then, I had to do a mad scramble to change her password and help her get the new one working on her phone and computer. With more time to think about what happened, I'm realizing now that I should have known the email was fake because we recently made some changes to our Office 365 environment so junk mail is going directly into Junk folders in Outlook -- and those types of messages aren't really coming in to people anymore. On top of that? We're trying to migrate people to using two-factor authentication so I was instructed to get this user on it while I'm changing her account info. Makes sense, but I had to dig all over to find our document with instructions on how to do that too. I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. Am I just getting old and starting to lose it? Is everybody feeling this way about I.T. support these days? Are things just changing at too quick a pace for anyone to stay on top of it all?
I mean, in just the last few weeks, we've dealt with users failing to get their single sign-on passwords to work because something broke that only an upgrade to the latest build of Windows 10 corrected. We've had an office network go berserk and randomly drop people's Internet access, ability to print, etc. -- because one of the switches started intermittently failing under load. We've had online training to set up a new MDM solution, company-wide. And I had to single-handedly set up a new server running the latest version of vCenter for our ESXi servers. And all of that is while trying to get in some studying on the side to get my Security Plus cert., getting Macs with broken screens mailed out for service, a couple of new computers deployed, and accounts properly shut down for an employee who left, plus the usual grind of "mindless" tickets like requests to create new shared DropBox team folders for groups. It's a LOT to juggle, but I was pretty happy with my ability to keep all of it moving right along for years. Now -- I'm starting to have doubts.
For example, just this morning, a user had a question about whether or not she should open an email about quarantined junk mail to actually look through it. I briefly noted a screenshot she attached that showed a typical MS Office quarantined email message and replied that she could absolutely view them at her discretion. (I also noted that I tend to ignore and delete those myself, unless I'm actually expecting a specific piece of email that I didn't receive -- in case it was actually in the junk mail filter.) Well, that was the wrong answer, because that message was a nicely done phishing attempt; not a legit message -- and she tried to sign in through it. Then, I had to do a mad scramble to change her password and help her get the new one working on her phone and computer. With more time to think about what happened, I'm realizing now that I should have known the email was fake because we recently made some changes to our Office 365 environment so junk mail is going directly into Junk folders in Outlook -- and those types of messages aren't really coming in to people anymore. On top of that? We're trying to migrate people to using two-factor authentication so I was instructed to get this user on it while I'm changing her account info. Makes sense, but I had to dig all over to find our document with instructions on how to do that too. I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. Am I just getting old and starting to lose it? Is everybody feeling this way about I.T. support these days? Are things just changing at too quick a pace for anyone to stay on top of it all?
I mean, in just the last few weeks, we've dealt with users failing to get their single sign-on passwords to work because something broke that only an upgrade to the latest build of Windows 10 corrected. We've had an office network go berserk and randomly drop people's Internet access, ability to print, etc. -- because one of the switches started intermittently failing under load. We've had online training to set up a new MDM solution, company-wide. And I had to single-handedly set up a new server running the latest version of vCenter for our ESXi servers. And all of that is while trying to get in some studying on the side to get my Security Plus cert., getting Macs with broken screens mailed out for service, a couple of new computers deployed, and accounts properly shut down for an employee who left, plus the usual grind of "mindless" tickets like requests to create new shared DropBox team folders for groups. It's a LOT to juggle, but I was pretty happy with my ability to keep all of it moving right along for years. Now -- I'm starting to have doubts.
I don't know that it gets harder with age ... maybe one just gets more cynical. In your 20s, you feel good doing anything that pays well and gives you some money to party and have fun with.
I learned that it wasn't something I wanted to do long-term after a decade or so in the business. There's too much good to be done in the world, research to work on, things to learn to waste the rest of one's life picking up after the errors of large software companies.
I never had any patience for those.
First!
I'm not sure if providing end-user support gets harder with the age of the IT worker, but it definitely gets harder with the age of the end user.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've been around a lot of corporations but I can't think of any that kept one guy on with limited IT skills but decent English grammar doing end user tech support for 30 years. I think this post is as fake as an article in GQ.
Thought I had it all figured out.
Then they plop systemd on top of debian GNU Linux and it's so minimally documented it's useless.
Before: Add a line to file /etc/rc.d/rc.local and your daemon will start with each power-up or restart.
Now: No @#$%-ing idea!!!!
At first, concussion symptoms come on gradually; then, quickly. Like going broke. And it certainly feels like I'm broke.
It all may intensify and become bizarre, but your limits are limited. Like anybody's. Occasionally I get a chance to have glimpse where my colleagues or competitors, doing similar, are - sometimes they are better, but more often I see them doing not so good, which is reassuring.
The luxury, that I learned to have - dictate the pace at which to proceed, and pick most important bits first out of the pile, fix them - aiming for best longterm effect, this would return with. Be introducing calm professionalism, converting this chaos that you describe, where we go.
As long as you have required knowledge to do it all, you are suitable for the task, all the rest is in the details of most proper arrangement.
Servant of karma
Old is just not being used to the same boring dumb crap that keeps on happening. Eventually you give up and don't care. It happens. Then the old folks get sent out to pasture.
I was lucky, I got to be a stud. I was one of the smart old dumb asses.
...and doesn't that tell you something? MS software has always been hopelessly and needlessly complicated to administrate, and the level of complication has always been increasing with time.
Phishing, two-factor, switch swap, vCenter install, training and service repairs. This is a typical week on an IT service desk, and not even specialized knowledge is required. These same type of randomer problems occurred all the time even 15 years ago. So long as you leverage the flow of communication to users, they are generally more than accepting of timelines that are longer than 'right now'.
My ignorance is a perfect shield against your logic.
" I just couldn't remember where they told me they saved the thing, several weeks ago, when they talked about creating the new document in one of our weekly meetings. "
The problem is that every single meeting there are several of these " things " you're supposed to keep up with. The problem is every single meeting, those " things " you're supposed to remember from the last meeting gets changed to a " new " process or archived in favor of something else. Pretty soon, you have no idea which " things " are still active, which process is the current one or even what fucking day it is. . . . :|
All the while you're still putting out fires on a daily basis, headcount comes and goes and somehow it magically became your job to train the new people because when you asked management for a training budget and / or even the time to train them, you got laughed off the call.
One day, you just give up.
Eventually, you come to realize you've become the old timer you used to hate when you first started working for the company. The only difference is now you understand how they came to be that way.
I've been in the business 30 odd years too and I've all but given up.
If the objective is to screw with people you probably get better with age.
If you feel you might be going that way, tech support can give you some practice. Seriously though, if you work tech support for any amount of time, it ruins how you think of your fellow humans. There is no way you can look at people and think "they know what they're doing" anymore. Sure, they don't all need to be tech experts, but some things are easy, and after explaining them four or five times, there's only one conclusion: These people are idiots. Don't do tech support, not even if you're good at it.
I can relate to OP story after joining a company which is constantly adding and integrating new third party products, the internal knowledge base is quickly deprecated and what has worked is being replaced with minimally viable products. It's very difficult to juggle 20+ years of practical experience given the rate of change. I am finding out I can't be bothered by all of it nor take responsibility for everything.
Before you don't open a virus laden email?
Now I understand why some anti-virus programs refuse to properly disable when I want/need them too, it's because of of people like you who refuse to listen.
The idea of being able to work uninterrupted without distractions and do end user support is a fantasy. You are being asked to do two incompatible things and finding that trying to juggle such is causing you grief.
Find a new job? That's conclusion I've come to. Learn to code? Is that the path forward?
I've done everything from on-site support to large-scale Windows XP image design and deployment, but now -- due to age and disability -- I work from home, answering Help Desk calls for one of the worst companies to work for in America.Our call queue times range from 30 minutes to over an hour, partly because the team gets virtually no training: some of them can take 45 minutes to track down drivers and install a printer. (I have provided some training for them in the past, but tamping down the calls in the queue always takes precedence over actually improving how we respond to the calls).
As you can imagine, the users aren't the main source of frustration. Our IT department is easily the dumbest on God's gray Earth, and the stupid flows downhill from the very top. The business model seems to be "make a change that breaks tens of thousands of computers -- or hundreds of thousands of user profiles -- and let the Help Desk fix them one at a time as they call in." We basically work for Dilbert's PHB, and our company is circling the drain while we divest locations and cut costs by laying off staff and ditching M$ Office for GSuite... both of which are making the call queues even worse.
I cope by reminding myself that I do a good job, and take care of the callers I get. I also realize that I'm sitting in my jammies in a recliner, half-watching movies on a 55" TV while I work, that I only have to do one thing at a time, that I have almost no responsibilities that extend beyond any phone call I take, and that most of the end users' jobs are much worse than mine (hence our placement on the aforementioned list).
When I was younger, coming up, I would never have survived here. Now, I look at it as a means to a worthwhile end: my wife makes much better money, and we could survive quite comfortably on only her salary... but we enjoy new cars and cruises, and this Dilbertian hell is our conduit to such things. Besides, in our company of 50,000+ employees, I sometimes get to feel like a minor celebrity: several times per week, someone recognizes my voice and says "Thank God I got you!"
No you are not losing it, you sound fine. IT just gets faster, demands increase, somehow, end users get dumber with infrastructure but the end user tasks and expectations get more complex and grow at rates unprecedented. When you are in the trenches dealing with actual tangible things, like IP addresses, firewall policies, and the byproducts of growth it is sometimes hard to see the forest through the trees. You my friend may be getting a little old but you are wise and just fine - its not you. You are just a smart guy who is realizing that there is no real organization or plan to anything that is IT - it is all pure chaos, uncontrolled growth, and increased management and project ignorance, crappy OS's that resemble little kid menus, and not enough smart people to actually do the real infrastructure or analytical work necessary for the end user to experience.
Wait till end users start bringing in little alexa's or google homes and shit. Its just a matter of time.
You are just an experienced IT worker. Embrace the chaos, embrace humor, this is you now.
The right question is why are you still doing user support after 30 years? Most of us might start there, but that's the foot-in-the-door role, and depending on opportunities and drive, end up moving on in 3-5 years.
From the brief history you provided, it sounds like you never had a higher goal - systems engineering, network design, infrastructure support - all the many IT career paths that move you away from end-user support. It sounds, and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, like you wanted to be the best customer support specialist you could be. And here you are, 30 years later, marveling at the fact your user base never gained any IQ points and realizing that you're not interested enough anymore to keep it up.
You mention Macs, so I suspect .edu or journalism is probably the market segment you work in, and that, professionally, is soul-sucking all on it's own unless you love it and live the lifestyle.
I can't recall how many meetings I've satin where critical information was dispensed via some offhand comment in a meeting--or a brief discussion in a hallway--by some prima donna who believes they're so-o-o important that everything they utter will be immediately committed to long-term memory by everyone within earshot---they can't be bothered to sit down and write a simple email or one-page handout they can pass around at the meeting. And this goes back years and years. I'm older now and still encounter crap like this. I don't think the problem is any worse than it was back in, say, the '90s... I'm just more aggravated by still seeing it. And in all those years, I've yet to encounter a corporate intranet in use by the technical services people that wasn't an absolute disaster to navigate to find important information. Brute force searches of the intranet servers was more effective than trying to find things through the gawdawful web pages (but at least they all had the approved corporate logos on them). Ultimately, what you're able to find on the intranet is woefully outdated... because those prima donnas can't be bothered to keep it up-to-date.
Most people have always been clueless. The term luser didn't come from nowhere. The difference today is that everyone thinks they are "good with technology", and they are generally using 2 or more platforms. For example they use iOS or Android and Windows, as well as Linux on devices they don't even know run Linux. Add to that your worst issue, that Windows 10 is a major clusterfuck, and things decline rapidly. As we get older it get a bit (or byte or word :-) more difficult because the brain does degrade non-linearly but with surety. So it isn't an either or scenario. Circumstances conspire, but you can safely conclude that your abilities *are* declining, but not so much as the need pool is filling up. HTH
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Computer systems these days are orders of magnitude more complicated than they used to be with a lot more things that can go wrong.
Also, they exist in an environment that is orders of magnitude more hostile than it used to be where the poor user is constantly under attack from every direction.
You get this when you don't have good information management processes & known+published knowledge repositories - normally because you're too small to have enough people to work on these things.
Don't beat yourself up. It sounds like you're under a fair amount of stress both externally and internally generated. Stress/anxiety/depression all impair your ability to make decisions. When I'm having a bad day, I don't get done what I need to do which only makes me feel worse and the only way out is to stop, take a walk, meditate get some distance from the feelings and then give yourself permission to start over. Continuing to push will only dig a deeper hole.
I have been working in the field for 25 years and am currently the IT person for a company of 125 engineers in two geographic locations. I am the CIO, director, manager and help desk, and the learning curve never ends. It's not that you are old; it's that you understand how many of these things are interrelated, and I find it difficult to keep up too (thank god for google!).
When I was 25, ignorance was bliss. I thought I knew more than I did, and more than once, ended up making a complete mess. I am older now; I don't deploy that server until it is tested and benchmarked. The job isn't done when I get a ping through a new router and VLAN; I benchmark the connection to ensure I have my 20Gbps bonded throughput. I sympathize with my users; who hasn't felt frustrated by a computer that didn't work, or embarrassed for having broken it yourself. I take pride in the reliability, redundancy and resiliency of everything I deploy on my network.
Experience counts for something, even in IT - as long as you keep drinking from the fire hose. Take pleasure and enjoyment in an environment where you are constantly learning new things. It is a valuable, albeit undervalued, skill - especially under pressure. If they pay you well and you get to go home at 5pm most days, I figure it is worth the challenging yet rewarding day.
But in the end, the only two skills you really need are patience and a sense of humor. All the best.
I had to start telling everyone at work (and at home). "Unless I did did it yesterday I don't remember how to do it anymore. I'll help you, but I'm going to have to relearn how to do it."
For this reason, God sends them a powerful delusion(operation of wandering)(planet) so that they will believe the lie.
Hey fella, Iâ(TM)m an old fart IT fella as well. I have to say though that I have never had the patience for user support and when I was a young snot, I looked down on the help desk guy for lacking the passion and skills to do more. As I got older, I learned to appreciate that helpdesk is about so much more than technology and in many cases itâ(TM)s about psychology and customer service.
There are times where you come across a person who so completely lacks initiative that once they find a helpful tier 3 person, they stop doing their own job and instead either elevates everything or asks everything even if you have told them the same answer multiple times. I do not believe this is your case.
If the tech is getting more difficult, focus your specialties. When people call because of computer problems, they are often angry, frustrated, panicked, and even irate. When I get those calls, I am simply unable to help because I do not like that kind of pressure. Sure I can solve the problem, but I need people in your position to make that possible. It is a team effort. It is more important to me that the customer feels they are being taken care of and that they are confident that someone on the phone is there to help them. Do what you can and when the answers to the problems are too obscure, let people in higher tiers sit and grind through them and manage the problem... do not just hand them off.
I believe strongly that helpdesk done well is a genuine team effort. One person communicates with the customer and gathers the facts and makes the customer feel as if it will be ok. This is a job which requires a front line person. That person the works with people who will grind on the problem until it is fixed.
You will find many people like me who are not scared, but uncomfortable with the ticket management system. It does matter how good of a job Iâ(TM)ve done, I just cannot click closed since I need some sort of imperical proof the problem is solved and either cannot or is guaranteed to simply not come back. I also cannot close a ticket unless Iâ(TM)m 10000% sure I did not cause other problems.
A person like you can work to follow up to make sure your customers are cared for and then use your judgement to choose whether the ticket can be closed.
Contrary to the beliefs I had when I was younger, tiers are not about knowledge or skills. Tiers are about methods. Tier 1 cannot solve the problems because there is too much management and customer service involved in the position. If you have a quick answer, go for it. If not, ask in the chat. If not, elevate and follow up. Manage the work queue and manage the customer.
Do not try to wear every hat. You do not need to be an expert on everything. Allocate other resources (people) to solving the problems and make sure they do not become overwhelmed.
And, seriously consider that most of IT is about knowing what to type into Google. Use it :)
Finding documentation is part of a clutter problem. Many people can find things in moderate levels of clutter up to a point and then it becomes nearly impossible to find most things. Modern documentation tends to follow the wiki model and that invites clutter unless you also have a librarian to organize that data like wikipedia does. A search engine isn't a substitute for proper organization.
There is also something called "decision fatigue" which is related to "executive function" which limit how many goal seeking decisions you can correctly make in a day. Extra decisions before work can result in fewer correct decisions at work. Example include Obama not choosing his breakfast or suit and Steve Jobs always wearing the same black turtle-neck. By habit they were rationing the decisions they made in a day.
IT support was what saved me from an utterly worthless college degree. It was the poshest job on campus and landed me an even cushier job post college.
The work was great and paid well, but that was the problem. It support is such a dead end job. They laid off my team, kept me on for 2 years while I did bullshit project management under my old title, and then laid me off when the project was done. At least I got 2 years of work in Europe as a trade off.
I found after my layoff that I was truly stuck. Idiot recruiters wouldn't look at me unless it was for another support position. The role which was my golden savior post college became my prison.
Ended up taking a paycut and switched into sales. This was probably the hardest thing I've ever done. It took me a year and a half but I'm back at my pay I was making before.
And what I find even more hilarious is the fact I've been getting hit up for pre-sales engineering position which is IT support for sales calls. X_X
At least they pay six figures plus commission.
Ermmm no they are not. You no longer solder your own PC parts, you don't have to install your own drivers, you don't need to know esoteric command line commands, you're no longer forced to use a command line or non multi tasking operating system, you have a mouse or touch screen, you've every single program you need at a few clicks, you have immediate support via help and documentation on the internet not just a manual, if you're a programmer you no longer have to deal with low level languages, you no longer have once common hardware limits like memory problems or disk space, importantly software has become mostly standardised (jpeg, docx, MP3, common rendering of html5, CSS, etc etc). The breadth of software is arguably larger but if you're working for one company you only need to support their products.
Problem seems to be opposite. In my twenties it was "Hard" all the time. Now, in my 50's, it's only truly "Hard" once or twice a week.
Wait, what were we talking about again?
So yeah. By the time you're 40 (50 if your genetics are good) you'll start having annoying but treatable health problems. If you're lucky your job is good enough to afford to get them treated, but either way they'll slow you down and tire you out. And the responsibilities you got saddled with over the last 20+ years (kids, keeping the house maintained, wife/husband) will weigh you down.
Take care of your elders, you'll be that way too someday. And take care of the young folk. You were young one time.
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I see no problem with you. It is human to not remember a routine you aren't exposed to once in a while, considering the depth of your knowledge and breadth of topics. What I see as a problem, is your organisations disregard for proper service management. A work routine should not be created in some management meeting, but by you, the grunt, knowing every detail through such experiences as now. Managers should only set boundaries for your routine. It is you, who improves your routine when situation changes. You can read more about it in Lean, how that should be done in a good way.
And it (the routine) should not lay around in some Word or Outlook cranny. Your organisation should invest some resources in a proper knowledge management system. What works pretty well for starters, is Mediawiki. Each system, and/or team has a page they own, with a list of routine pages and whatnot you need. You do not need a whole ITIL complexity at start, read about it and take what is most critical for your company now.
Perhaps the problem isn't the field but it's you. You should've promoted yourself to manager several times over or grow in another company. If after 30 years you're still doing first level help desk, you've cemented yourself in.
I find that IT is getting simpler with my age, more and more packaged solutions to complex problems. You used to have to build and maintain a small network (Bind, dhcpd, sendmail, cyrus) with large data storage (eg. OpenSolaris, staged tape) with various layers of software (Samba, NFS, LDAP, Kerberos ...) down from the kernel (tuning sysctl) to the user interface, now you just buy a box or download some software that does it all for you and then some or simply go out and buy whatever you don't have the time for doing yourself.
Sure back then you could buy a shrink-wrapped product too, but it was very expensive and then you were locked in (eg. NT or Novell), sometimes even tied to hardware (Sun, IBM) and trying to migrate out of it was weeks of headaches. Nowadays, you just point and click or buy a cheap service contract and you can migrate between Linux vendors, between hardware (or cloud) platforms and sometimes even between Windows and Linux vendors.
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... at least most of the desktop owners realize that the optical drive tray isn't a coffee-cup holder any more....
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
But your rant is major old man complete with forgetfulness.
yes windows 10 and the cloud is making things worse in many ways, but honestly if you can't keep up then you need to switch careers out of helpdesk and triage. Try and get them to give you the hard problems or projects that take days or weeks to solve which might prove less soul destroying to you.
Or just get out of IT all together. Nothing is slowing down or getting less complex with time... Now its all hyperconverged everything apparently, back to fucking bare metal. We just go around and around, but hey I am getting paid and don't have to work weekends.
And yeah, at the very least, dont tell users to open any sort of questionable email. If by some miracle a user has flagged it as questionable to them, and cared enough to call or email you about that, there is a 100% chance that it is a virus or extortion attempt. 10 times out of 10. At least remote in and take a look for yourself man if you had some doubt for some reason in your mind. Email headers are not rocket science and havent changed much in 20 years.
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everything is harder when you get old, except where it counts.
At 45 years, I realized my concentration span was getting shorter and my learning, much slower but I think you've answered your own question. You no longer have the youth or motivation to deal with ineffective policies, dumb users and bad software.
It's not you my friend. I too have been doing the exact same thing as you for the last 30 years. It's the state of IT today ... it's an absolute mess. People have been using computers at home and in their work roles for over 40 years now and they still don't have a clue. That is not their fault, it's our fault and the IT mess that we have created. Putting an OS in front of every single user was a no-no to begin with. That all needed to be centralized from the get-go.
It's just going to get worse before it gets better (if ever).
Just passed 50 a few years ago. Still going strong. Get some excersise.
And tell the users to ALWAYS hover mouse over any suspicious link 1-2s to see where it goes before clicking.
Most mails are phishing these days.
Because as you age you become more intolerant to idiot users. The ones that can't see whats in front of them or have never read a manual and never attempt to google for a solution.
Your life is to short for such crap and now you know it.
(Yes i'm a bitter old IT guy)
Is that something that'd be viable where you are?
But... I hear ya. Pretty much in the same situation age wise, and have never had problems instantly recalling the sort of knowledge no-one else wanted to learn in the first place, 30 years later "ooo! dos 4.something and no-one knows why it's suddenly stopped working, but is essential to get the big machine thing next to it working? let me rummage around in my "BOX OF STUFF THAT WILL BECOME USEFUL ONE DAY" and see if... yes! a (maybe) working HD, let me copy stuff across, get it working, edit the config.sys, the autoexec.bat and... we're up and running again, no, wait, hmm, let me recall the serial port settings, hang on, think it's the cable, let me run up a new one, set it up, and... done. suck it youngsters". Really, soon as the keyboard's in front of me, it's near muscle memory to get old arcane command line switches recalled, to pop over to some SCO boxen that needs something sorted because the tape backup's not working for some reason etc.. Phone call out of the blue "do you by any chance remember the default password on that machine? the guy running it died and we can't figure out what it was, and we know you set it up, and maybe he never changed it" "ok, try..." "no" "in that case... wait, is this the one where the guy renamed admin to be adminlord?" "I don't know..." "ok, make the username 'adminlord' and the password 'BAABAAF1BF1BF00F00 (zeros, not 'ohs')" "IT WORKED! THANK YOU".
Then I got cancer last year, and the chemo... knocked me out, physically and mentally. The instant memory recall to anything disappeared, and /really/ worried me. "oh, it might come back, or not, but you're ok?" "not if I can't remember anything important, well, rather everything non-important to everyone else". It's one year after I finished treatment and... I'm 90-95%, it HAS returned, but things are still really hard. It doesn't come instantly without much effort, I have to concentrate for certain things to come to the forefront (anyone else who has high recall memory, uses 'mental models' to remember things, imagine being in your mind museum, knowing what it is you want, you go to the right aisle, find the shelf, take out the box. You can see the 'thing', all the attributes about it, you could DRAW the thing, and describe every single thing about it very clearly. But the name plate on the 'thing' is blank).
This really, really scared me, that so much of everything I do is remembering that I'd written the code to do that thing 15 years ago, or I read a magazine about that thing 5 years ago, the article was after the ad with the dell laptop, had a spelling mistake in the first sentence, but was a good article and I could quote the last paragraph.
But that wasn't working anymore. Then, back at work, tech support problems, code to fix. Was taking me a day wading through code I'd written 3 months ago to figure out what was going on, was incredibly slow work (and was still needing multiple naps a day as the chemo had really weakened me). Then, my boss sold a mockup of a prototype of a smoke and mirrors product to a client and I had to suddenly hit the ground running.
Would have been hard in my early 20's to get upto speed, the way I was feeling, I was fumbling around just getting the development tools knocked into shape where I could do anything, let alone code.
but, bit by bit, things started coming back, the numbness in my fingertips started to fade over a few weeks enough to get back to usual typing speed/accuracy. The feeling of "oh, I've written something like this before somewhere" was there, it just took a bit longer to hunt through old code to find it, whereas in the past it'd have been instantaneous to navigate down to the source code to cop
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Oh to be one of those young fools again who thinks he can make up rules that work every time and when his instructions fail has no problem claiming that the user must have messed them up. Who has no feelings for the potential losses to the user or the company from messing up and can be conveniently away when his suggestions hit the fan. Those were the days.
Let me be clear I'm my responsr to you, I'm in exactly the same boat as you, exactly the same. Just got back in at level 1/2/3 (it's complicated) and I'm dealing with first level users at the age of 41.
You fucked up.
So did I.
I've done second and third level only and is vastly superior. You need a new job, dealing with first level bullshit is for people under 35/40 (generally)
Not to mention, that modern IT is more about memorizing weird places to click in junk cloud-based software that isn't intuitively written. Every version of Windows seems to be designed to add more clicks and make the interface less efficient. The job used to be built upon understanding the underlying components of the system and being able to perform step-by-step troubleshooting using the OSI model. Controlling the user environment to keep them out of trouble was also a big part of the job and if done well make life easier for everyone. We've entered a period of multiple monopolies forcing their ideas on us and stifling real innovation and product improvement. Don't think that failing to immediately know where some silly function or setting was hidden in an inferior product is a sign of early onset dementia!
If you're still in support after decades in the field you're either an abject failure or such a mediocre-untalented shit that you could find nothing better. You should have career goals, by your 30s you're either team leader or you should re-evaluate yourself. By your 40s you should be in management. If you're a coder or worse tech support in your 40s it means you have never been good enough.
Like probably most of the people here, I got into computers because it was fun. So you spend your late teens and twenties building stuff, learning and helping people. But after 20 years I realised tech support has basically two driving factors - manufacturers who don't know what they're doing and end users who don't know what they're doing. It's not so much about age, but this realisation, for me at least.
Luckily, I had racked up quite a bit of development experience in the process and made the switch to full-time developer about a year ago. I will never go back. Sure, you still have to deal with end users, but because because you can change the code, you can actually exert positive change.
Good luck!
It really depends on a couple of things.
First is how invested you are in the product you're supporting. I'm happy to answer questions (even the occasional dumb ones) about my own pet projects, the ones I wrote as a hobby or side business. My tolerance level is a lot lower for stuff related to my day job. Perhaps that's the difference between taking responsibility for your own dumb mistakes, or for the mistakes of others.
Second is what level of support you are working at. I'm used to working with reasonably tech savvy people and the kind of questions I get are often challenging problems rather than stupid ones. The sort of stuff you usually send to 2nd or 3rd tier support teams. Also, are you doing it full time or is it part of a more diverse role?
I've worked on innovative projects (prototypes, field trials, proofs of concept) for over 20 years; the kind of projects that work in a way similar to what today we call DevOps. That comes with a lot of end user support. And I haven't found it gets harder with age... but that's because I set my own working conditions, and expectations about the product are generally low-ish (them being prototypes): people expect some small issues and are actually interested enough to try and find causes and workarounds themselves before reporting them. It's the difference between working for end users or working with them; the latter is a lot more fun.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"A mans gotta know his limitations"..
You've overstretched for your abilities is all, start using a tablet or notepad and pencil to write the important stuff down for easy reference. No ones brain works as good in their mid 50's as it did in their 20's, accept this and learn to work with it. On the plus side you have way more knowledge crammed into that gray matter, you just need a little help keeping it organized.
The customer base is getting progressively worse. I think that is a larger factor in this. But you do get tired of crap faster the older you get, so it is there.
Ok, anon here because the usual, but I'm in IT and 50+.
I've worked for a lot of big names doing fun stuff, worked first and second line when needed, and now I'm doing research in a fun area but occasionally help out on support to keep myself grounded if nothing else. But... It doesn't get easier on this side of the fence either.
And here's the kicker, its not the research, or the tech, I love the difficulty and new ground all the time and updating my skillsets, its the people I work with. They are STILL playing the head games, changing the rules around on what's allowed, changing things on the fly or breaking things, not fucking testing properly and pushing it out the client broke so they can close a job request quick etc.
Thing is, they see the "old guy" as cannon fodder to trample in the dirt to get ahead, its a sort of jealousy, but they can't compete on expertise or ability or experience, so they have to play office politics bullshit to get ahead, and really, I'm beyond wanting to get into that, I'd rather focus my energy onto the problem we're being paid to solve. And my boss wants to know how I cant knock out 120% of my tickets a day, but forgets that I spent two days last week squashing bugs introduced that were client affecting and introduced no new bugs myself in this quarter. His metrics don't account for quality at all, he just has his targets and that flips me off too, because our company is big on talking about high quality and customer support all the time, and I joined because I bought that kool aid line and took a lower salary because I wanted to work for a company that cared.
I love working collaboratively in a team, when you have a good team everyone brings something new to the table and you learn from each other, get a good team thing going and it gets fun, but that seems vanishingly rare of late, they're all burning for promotion and don't want to pull together collectively to make a better product as a result.
I would move, really, I have a on fire skillset, right up to date certs and industry experience, but every time I move looking for that great environment that allegedly is out there somewhere, its a dumpster fire and it takes months to get back up to speed and start delivering properly, so jumping around kind of feels like I'm short changing the companies so I want to give it time to be made to work. I've had that nirvana experience in a team maybe 4-5 places out of 30 in my time around industry and only moved on when company takeovers changed the dynamic completely overnight.
So I don't think it gets harder technically, you just get less tolerant of bullshit and office politics. But equally you just get tired of searching for the right place so knuckle down and just deliver best you can.
I would like to thank you for your post. Iâ(TM)m in my early 50â(TM)s as well, and I teach technical material. Over the past few years I have noticed that it is more difficult for me to absorb new material and and more difficult for me to switch gears between complex topics. Itâ(TM)s not easy, and in your story I found someone that I could relate to. I really appreciated your thoughts. Hang in there, friend.
How did anyone ever support IT without the Internet, when every single device had a random chance of a compatibility issue, and when there was a real lack of standardization.
The truth is IT support is now much easier than it was, so any "old guy" still working in IT support will easily be able to manage now that he can just "google" rather than having to "RTFM"
- you are overworked, have too much on your plate, perhaps your team needs to be extended, or you need to hand over tasks to somebody else in the team which can handle a bit of extra work.
- you no longer enjoy your IT job, time to find something else. if it feels annoying most of the time, if you have to drag yourself to work most of the days, those are clear signs.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
The arrogance is thick on this one.
... not your problem. What you describe is classic for "I just noticed that this never gets better" and "the novelty effect has worn off". The last time you had to adjust to changes in groupware/email policy was probably a few years ago and now you're older and probably
fatter and your frustration tolerance is tried enough as it is.
Cognitive ability declines noticeable from 45 onwards, I've been noticing this myself. This is why old guys are good managers. They're slower, but they have more experience aka wisdom.
My suggestion: start moving up the food chain and if only as a team lead or part time consultant. You don't want to toil on standard stuff at 45+, if only for the fact that it just doesn't look good.
Another important piece of advice: at 45 the latest you absolutely positively have to start regular exercise and muscle training in order to counter joint wear and increasing age related muscle degeneration. That's 3 times a week at absolute minimum! I'm not joking. Miss out on that and you'll be miserable like most old people. Get going and you'll be able to touch your knees with your forehead at three age of 80. And you'll feel awesome.
My 20 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
1. There's a ton more stuff and it's more complicated than ever before.
2. You're getting older and are less capable and possibly less willing to absorb and understand it all.
3. After 30 years, you're still dealing with Level 1 help desk issues. This may be due to a lack of drive to grow beyond such positions. But, more commonly 30 years of user support usually indicates that you have reached the extent of your capacity. The fact that you're attempting to achieve an Anything+ certification at 30 years tells us that you're severely stunted.
P.S. It's surprising, to me, that they'd have a desktop support guy doing vCenter installs. It's not that new installs are in anyway complicated, it's just that they usually don;t assign server work to desktop support peeps, for reasons.
If you are tired of your work, you may want to ask the help of a medical doctor, or a psychologist, or a psychiatrist. I did it, it helped me a lot. They reset my goals and instructed me of new way of working and living. Now I earn a lot less, but I am much more happy.
I work for myself offering the local area end user IT support services., both business and domestic, I am in my late 30s. I attend a site and get sat down in front of the troublesome PC. The owner explains the issue they are having and walks me through the problems on screen. This process usually ends with the end user asking "Do you know how to fix that?". I usually tell them "No", they look worried. The first few moments of my discussion with the end user is usually to explain that I have never even heard of the software product they have shown me, let alone even used it before. I explain that back when I started repairing PCs and providing user support - 13 years old at my secondary school - supporting the staff (I was presented with the key to the server room and left to maintain the Novell Netware system), the number of products installed on the PCs totalled around 4 including Microsoft DOS, Microsoft Windows 3.1, Microsoft Works. I explain that over the course of a week I was able to read the entire manuals so I knew the products inside out. I then explain that whilst talking, multiple new software products have been released which will likely have updates released before I leave their site.
There is no way to keep fully up to date. I explain that the job is now more of a research role, being able to find the answer and call upon previous experience as needed, rather than a knowing role. I tell the client to give me 20 minutes and I will likely have resolved their issue.
End user support is stressful, especially when going it alone. I used to work all hours under the sun, holiday? What's a holiday? I then started taking note when I started taking on more and more clients who when asked "What happened to your last IT provider?" would reply with phrases such as "Oh they had a breakdown", "they are no longer with us, keeled over at a keyboard, only 45", "went on holiday, decided not to return".
So, now I make sure I take dedicated holiday time off, falling inline with my partners allocation. I no longer take any business related IT equipment with me and and have found people locally who can cover me and vice versa when we are away - but they tend to take their business phone and laptop away with them too, so they are never really turning off and having a true break to recuperate.
Some clients are a little put off when I state I will not be contactable for 1 week and to instead call XYZ. I explain much like I have above and state that I can either be contactable all year round (minus my holiday breaks) for the next 30 years, or I can be contactable 24/7 for the next few years until I have my own overwork related health issues.
They tend to understand, if they don't they are free to go elsewhere.
As the tech generation matures, they're convinced they know enough about their computers that they're sometimes actively thwarting IT by attempting exploits to get their own admin access. And CXOs/HR won't fire them for it. On the flip side, the new younger set graduating from college (not the CS/EE ones) are really clueless, but think they know tech because they use Snapchat and eschew Facebook. They're creating an entirely new set of trouble tickets: the education ticket. We have to explain very basic computer-usage concepts, just like when we had to explain them to our parents. The new kids have barely used a computer as a word processor, and only ever browsed the web via smartphone. They think of email the same way we thought of the telegraph.
First, straight-up, you've listed at least three different job roles. Independent of the amount of your, or of your capacity, dealing with end-user service tickets is customer service, upgrading existing servers is maintenance work, and deploying new servers is design work. Sure there's overlap in reality, but that overlap is across three persons, not just three tasks.
So yes, you've been tasked with too "many" things, where "many" is three, and "things" is completely different roles. Outside of an entrepreneur of a small company, what you've described really should be three independent "departments" of one or more persons.
Second, and this is what happens when the above goes haywire, it would seem to me that you're being directed in an every-more-complicating spiral of complexity.
These days, there is a big glorious solution, managed, well-designed, SaaS, IaaS, perfect solution to each and every problem you can have. And even better, they now fit together way better than they ever used to, so you can chain dozens of big glorious systems together. That means the solution to any problem is easily deployed.
But you need to have someone keeping track of the now many big glorious solutions.
It would seem to me that whomever is telling you what to do next is forgetting that the system-of-components is now so many components that the maintenance of those components and the procedures of those systems is adding serious weight.
I think you need(ed) someone to notice that there are simply too many big glorious systems being used, and instead would choose which basic problems are actually easier to manage than to solve.
Big glorious systems are big and glorious, but they ain't ever slick and elegant. That's the hard work these days.
I think your efforts are the solution to someone else's problem, instead of you being the solution provider.
I think even younger IT workers are having trouble with things like this. Not only are things changing more rapidly than they used to, but the complexity of the systems interacting has gotten worse all while IT departments have been trying to figure out how to handle things with fewer and fewer people.
OP is not "just getting old." Systems are more poorly designed and documentation more of an afterthought than ever. The ADD-addled "security experts" chase fads and the other CXOs confuse "it's on SharePoint" with "it's easy to find on an organized file system." With the chaos I've seen my employer's IT shops devolve into over the last 11 years, I don't even want to think what it'll be like in another 11.
> Do Older IT Workers Doing End-User Support Find It Gets Harder With Age?
No, 'It' actually gets softer with age.
After a long IT career, I'm doing residential and small business IT for my fellow chrono-Americans. I have come to believe that every IT executive should be required to spend some time doing this early in their careers. If they did, our personal computing experience would be greatly improved.
The most urgent priority has to be better authentication interfaces. Please, at least get rid of the goddamned password field masks. You need a masked field that one time in ten thousand when Aunt Hattie is on vacation and logging in to her email from a busy library. The rest of the time, it just invites error. And when you mistype a password three or more times on so many of today's sites, you get locked out and have to go through a password reset. Having a 'reveal' option is creeping in, but should be an interface standard.
Finding a way to eliminate passwords altogether would be even better. Let's issue little authentication dongles that people would keep in a USB port as an alternative, backed up by something like fingerprint ID on mobile devices. Or should we build password management into operating systems?
Every old person's computer use area is a solid mass of sticky notes, mostly bearing IDs and passwords. Aha, that "error that keeps coming up on my iPhone" is a request for the Apple ID logon. I look through the Alien egg laying room nest of stickies for the Apple ID note. Here it is! But why doesn't that password work? Oops, he had to change it and forgot where he had put the old Apple ID note - and the one before that. This leads to more searches for updates to the logon, with a constant threat of exceeding a retry limit that was designed for hyper-alert young military personnel.
Whoever fixes this one problem will win the Nobel Geriatrics Prize.
Take a look at OP job history;
Bench tech, web designer, network manager, then consultant.
Sounds like this guy was promoted along, then said fuck it I'm going to go get paid consultant money. Then said I'm done being a retail store and found some random ass help desk job just to do something.
I see burn out, not the dumb.
so true. we are just as disposable as the cheap electronics we get now for nearly nothing... what's my value add? -- read my book on staying relevant. I have been at this IT thing for 30+ years and investing in all things. sounds like i converted myself to my own version of IoT...
I think this is a result of getting too comfortable with what you do. At some point you started getting lazy when it comes to keeping up to date. You are not that young one, that would scour forums and BBS every night. You are not constantly bantering with friends and going to LAN-parties, testing the new metasploits or cracking tool. Maybe you've gained a family. Grandchildren. Maybe you never were that nerd, doing those things, I don't know. What I know is that I've been a professional for almost 20 years, but a nerd for longer. I'm less of a nerd now, than I was 25 years ago. I'm not so much on-top of things I do not have to, in order to do my job. I do however know our systems in and out. But how to configure that strange home-router? Get out of here, I would probably have to look it up - but I know what I would need to look for.
Also, age is definitely a factor. Getting older will affect your ability to remember, keep up and learn new things - however, there is rarely anything that beats experience. Falling for a phishing e-mail though, that's unforgivable for an IT-professional in my opinion.
I started out being an operator on a mainframe, to becoming a programmer. When I found out that we were moving to a client server system. I built myself a BSD system at home so that I could be comfortable on a different operating system. Was able to move from a hidam db to a relational in coding. I can script on both a windows machine and also a Linux machine. I have built servers. I currently support third party application and also home grown application in c#. So no, I have been able to support anything that has been thrown at me. Am I the master at any of this, no. But I am able to support both with users and also the software that I need to as I have gotten older.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
I'm in the same boat. We also have Office 365. I opt for rewards for users instead of being a jerk and it's paid off. I also like CintaNotes. It's a portable text app that lets you search instantly for past knowledge. I dump everything there. I keep track of users and other items. I know it's not OneNote and such but man it works. i don't have to remember everything anymore. I use the portable version and put in in a cloud backup service like OneDrive or Dropbox, etc.
My users are spoiled. They can't seem to try for themselves except a few. But I guess that's better than a kid who thinks he knows best and starts trying to undermine my protocols. Hang in there. Keeping notes is your friend. No one can remember that one KB update that broke XYZ.
Most mental abilities do not decline significantly in otherwise healthy individuals as they age, but multitasking gets more difficult with age. So you need to adjust how you work to reduce interruptions when it's feasible.
.. but in my case not for the reasons author states.
It gets harder and harder because I increasingly cannot stand the continuously mind blowing stupidity, ignorance, helplessness, mindlessness, naivety, long-lost ability or willingness to learn anything, etc the users constantly display. I just gets more and more irritating every day. It makes me really angry too often. It's hard on me.
It absolutely has got harder, but it has nothing to do with your age.. the complexity of IT systems has grown.. most of these systems are now easier to support than before.. but you are expected to know them all.. and with sas/cloud they constantly change and you have no idea what’s/when is changing etc..
So instead of taking 13 incidents on product a.. a week you take 2 incidents on 8 different products.. which mostly consisted of searching through emails internal doc systems for the up to date information on a product you might not touch for 6 more months
To be successful at ones role it seems better to know where information is as opposed to knowing anything.. I feel I spend considerable time trying to find the information
After 20 years in I.T. I got tired of the technology treadmill. In my 20's it was fun staying up half the night figuring new stuff out. In my early 30's it became a huge drag. So I started sowing the seeds of change. I got an MBA and began working more on the business side of I.T. Then I went to law school, passed the bar, and became an attorney.
Now I have my own firm doing business law and general counsel work for corporations. I'm my own boss, am making bank, and work when I want to. The soft skills acquired in I.T. (handling users, general computer use, and integrating I.T. with the needs of the business) make for a combination that not many attorneys have. The ability to speak the "language of business" is a huge plus.
I get where OP is coming from. IMHO I.T. is a young man's game and doesn't necessarily accommodate aging. The environment he describes is very real. And I'd wager the pace is not going to change.
My opinion on that is not that it gets "harder" per say, But rather that other factors in my life become more important and/or distracting. The net effect being that I tend forget details that less important to my daily 'struggle' so to speak. In other words, when I was younger I would go home and get on my computer all evening, even after being on the computer all day. I kept myself immersed in that world, as such I remembered details like that because I was constantly involving myself with them. These days, I go home and often don't touch my computer. I find other activities more important to my mental health and well being and just don't think about work, at all.
Occasionally with a client I will have a hard push where I'm working 12-16 hour days and am non-stop thinking about work and that ability will resurface. The only thing I have noticed that I might attribute to my age is probably my patience for stupidity, and my willingness to adopt certain technologies or practices that I don't agree with.
There is an inevitable "complexity collapse" coming in the future. We can see hints of it now in things like this. Things will decouple that are supposed to work together. People won't be able to keep up with the changes and additions that are constantly laid on us all, even the experts. Every entity acts as if the new thing or the correction of the correction of the correction of the old thing is just something it is doing and everyone should be able to deal with it easily. But the SUM of these modifications additions and changes causes a growing feeling of being overwhelmed and the inability to understand just WTF is going on.
E Proelio Veritas.
I've found that after 20 years in IT, significant things have happened:
a) People no longer believe what you tell them or execute the advice you give them, they would rather tell you that the solution they found in Google doesn't work and wants you to change things to fit the solution.
b) People think they understand IT more because they use it more - after all, they have a smartphone and use it on the Internet all the time.
c) IT solutions are now so complicated. Legacy systems with difficult to move data, competing firms who deliberately obstruct data communication and horribly architecture by an 'expert' in Excel where end users just don't understand what is going on.
d) They do things at home with an Internet connection that exposes everything and have no idea why that shouldn't work in the office.
Is it harder after 30 years? Yes, but not because you are getting old - the system has changed.
Ermmm no they are not. You no longer solder your own PC parts, you don't have to install your own drivers, you don't need to know esoteric command line commands, you're no longer forced to use a command line...
I don't know where you work, but this is not my experience. I don't solder parts anymore, but I certainly do have to know about drivers (not everything is plug-and-pray) and I use the command line on a daily basis. You can get a lot of things done with Powershell.
Almost at 30 years in IT here... and at this point in my carreer, my company and the last company I worked with do not allow me to talk to the customers.
Reason 1 - My time is too valuable. At this point, I'm the senior systems and networking person. You don't let your senior people talk to customers until they go up the chain of support.
Reason 2 - I'm usually working on something extremely complicated. 'Ramp-up' time is a thing. Any interruption in my day means I stop what I'm doing to give you attention. Then I have to Ramp-up into the task I was working on again.
Reason 3 - I no longer have the patience to deal with stupidity. I would easily call out customers or other companies on their bullshit. They understand my value to the company is not my charming personality, but my ability to solve extremely technical issues.
I've done customer support for over two decades now (mixed in with admin level stuff; small companies can't separate the two), and it's only gotten easier over time. But I have another decade before cognitive decline is likely to set in seriously, so I'm not old enough to give a good answer yet.
Two-thirds of live support is remaining calm, supportive, and assertive. Even if I get worse at actually diagnosing complicated problems I doubt I'll get worse at reassuring the customer and keeping them entertained and calm while I work through the issue.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Next question.
I've done this work for about 50 years. In the early 1970's I know almost everything there was to know about PCs. Repeatedly over the years I have realized that the subject matter has expanded beyond what I could possibly keep track of. Each time it has been necessary to reduce the scope of my work in order to continue to function.
The problem is not you. Having to reduce the scope of your efforts is inevitable.
I manage IT for a heavy industrial manufacture. ...
When I started 15+ years ago it was just MS office, printers, a few little custom programs, and a finance system used by 4 smart people
And that is seriously about it.
Everything else was either a ad-hock excel sheet or manual paperwork.
Now we have dozens and dozens of systems to support.
We have PLC's gathering production data, reporting/BI servers..
Then there is the internet, and internet filtering, and tracking...
Wireless AP's all over the damn place.
Then we have to support every users mobile device, even if self owned.
There is a large ERP program.
Now if there is a problem with that or a printer IT gets called....
In the past it was manual bills of lading and shipping paperwork.
I went from 30 'computer users' that I dealt with to over 300 'computer users' and the company did not add any employees, just tech.
Then there are the dozens of 'one-off' Tech solutions for specific job functions...
Like digital timeclocks.. Then special scanner/software setup for the Bank so we can take care of very large checks and international money orders.
Water quality monitors, digital temperature controls, digital security system, door locks, security cameras..
Then there is the coordination of remote access for vendors... Something that we never did even 12 years ago.
We had something like 500,000 square feet of production floor that did not even have a single network drop 15 years ago.
Now that same floor space has full wireless coverage and enough hard-wired devices to use up 100+ IP addresses.
I don't know about everyone else here, but in the last 20 years the number of systems the 'average' company uses seems to have increased by more than 20x.
Instead of dealing with a few clueless managers and their knowledgeable underlings, I have to now deal with every entry level employee, cranky janitor, and demoralized middle manager , and the phones, computers, printers, and industrial controllers that they now have.
Oh... how about the big IT call for a fancy light switch in the conference room that malfunctioned in an important meeting?
Seriously..
Fucking light switches now have CPU's and network connections, so when they break IT gets called!
It is just so much more stuff!
Welcome to aging, friend. This is reality - we're not immortal, and we deteriorate after 40 or so.
That being said, it doesn't mean that you can't still enjoy a fulfilling life of work in IT.
In this particular use case, both the end-user and the IT person got socially-engineered: the end-user by the compelling email, and the IT person by having too much empathy for the end-user. If your job is to logically navigate cause and effect, empathy will screw you every time.
I'm in my sixties. Although I may not have the energy I used to have, my time management and people skills have been honed by 30+ years in this job. In some ways it's actually gotten easier. In my youth I had a difficult time getting up in the morning, and getting back to sleep after a late night call. I had trouble dealing with department drama and tended to take things personally. I'm a lot more emotionally mature now, much less likely to let drama bother me, and generally have an easier time dealing with stress.
Moreover, I have to deal with end users in their fifties and sixties who didn't grow up with computers, and can relate to them better than I could in my youth. I was a very early adopter -- online in 1982, long before "the internet" became a thing, but I appreciate that people have jobs for which computers are just a tool, not a lifestyle.
So no, I can't say it's gotten any harder. Quite the opposite, actually.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
As a typical ADHD multitasker and lead database engineer, I've struggled for months and months trying to keep up with the rapid pace of projects, etc. It wasn't until I had trouble backing up a trailer in a wide open space which is a piece of cake for me that I realized something was different.
I traced back and found a med I was put on has side effect of 'loss of concentration' and 'confusion'. Quit it cold-turkey (and suffered for two days!) and have been clear-headed since. Went back to my old med since I had plenty left.
Oh, and don't FOMO. The world will continue on if you don't know every facet that is going on everywhere. Go play some Space Invaders and relax.
RRK
CAPTCHA: epitaph
Honestly, I don't think this is the matter of juggling too many things as an inevitable part of IT. This is more just a matter of a workplace that is asking too much of a single IT worker.
I completely understand the desire to be a "generalist" in IT, but if the company is too large, it's VERY hard to carve out enough time to provide good quality work on EVERYTHING. For a smaller org where the needs are not as great, absolutely being a generalist is critical to doing the work. But if that company grows to the point where you're becoming unable to do your job because you're asked to juggle too many things, I don't think that's a case of a worker losing their cutting edge, but more a case of too many pots in a kitchen with only one cook.
I'm not sure how many times I applied for openings at larger companies? But I went through at least 4 or 5 job interviews with them inside a one year period where I made a concerted effort to job hunt, and it didn't go well.
For example, one place sat me down in a rather brutal "team interview" with 5 people taking turns grilling me with questions. It felt like every time I answered something to one person's satisfaction, one of the others would chime in, expressing dissatisfaction with the answer. They were looking for an Exchange administrator at the time, and I'd done a lot of work with Exchange as part of my last job. But they stressed how they were an international business with servers in China as well as America. They wanted to be sure I knew all the intricacies of working with foreign language character sets in email and the routing issues involved. It was way beyond the scope of what I did with Exchange before. By the end of that interview, I didn't WANT the job anymore and just wanted to leave!
At another company, I already had 2 friends working there in management and they tried to put in a good word for me. I hoped that would pan out, but after the initial interview and tour of the company, I didn't get a call back. I pressed my buddy to try to find out what my status was. He said he had even put a copy of my resume on the top of his boss's stack with a note in red ink, to take a closer look at me. But still nothing. (I would have just written it off as them finding a better qualified candidate and dropped it, but I took this one a bit personally. My other friend they hired learned most of what he knew about computers and tech from me when we were growing up....)
I even had a time when I tried to apply for a university I.T. position and nothing came of it, even though I was a near perfect fit based on their requirements. Again, I knew a guy working there so I asked him about it. He came back, telling me, "You're not going to believe this one. The hiring manager knows who you are from the years when you ran a computer BBS and he's intimidated by you. He won't hire you because he thinks you know more than he does and it would make him look bad."
Customers get dumber every year......
IT gets more complex every year. Seriously, there are just an endlessly increasing number of branches of IT.
I remember back in school, having an instructor once who said, "it used to be that you could do it all in IT. Now you cannot. Specialization is the thing now." That was 30 years ago.
Remember when networking was new? Remember how GUIs changed the world? Remember PDAs, and smartphones, and tablets, and web, and subscription-based software, and endless new things?
One comment below stated how computer systems were getting simpler. Well they can, but that takes discipline and consolidation, and self-editing, and a devotion to making systems simpler. Often that discipline is lacking and what we get is an unholy mix of old tech and new, old service models and new, old delivery systems and new. The support scenarios grow endlessly in those environments.
Another thing? Announcements that highlight the Great New Thing, always, but rarely announcements that clearly and unequivocally state that Old Thing X is unsupported, out of date, and not to be used anymore. I've been plagued by systems, procedures, documents, and services that are allowed to moulder on, quietly dying of neglect, decay, and an uncertain support status. Try to get those situations clarified? Most often the answer from management is, "can't you just fix them up quickly and quietly?"
Management by neglect is not good management.
I've been at this since 1986 and I find that I'm much more capable now than even 5 years ago. Just keep getting better.
I solve problems that vex others and I do so quickly and easily. I'm the go-to guy that everyone else depends upon to get a job done because I've done it all before or stuff like it.
I'm always reading about the latest innovations/solutions so even if I don't have the answer at my fingertips, I know just how to find it.
I suspect this is what's missing from the OP's life: Passion for the job and the immersion in the tech that follows from that. If you don't keep sharp, you're going to find one day that you can't cut it. And maybe that's alright in some cases. He sounds depressed. Maybe it's time for him to look for a new line of work.
It's pretty dumb in general to tell noobs to open e-mails without giving them some safety precautions. So that's entirely on you.
2-factor authentication is basic stuff. Only retards have problems with it.
Things are moving rather slow, tbh. So you're probably just stressing for no reason. And that kind of stress makes you not think things through.
Sounds like a place with no standard means of documentation.
If no one else is bothering to do it, make a habit of throwing stuff in a Wiki somewhere and use that as your reference.
I have been doing IT work since 73 and itâ(TM)s definitely getting harder and harder to keep up with all of the changes. We not only have to keep track of the good stuff for our employers or customers, we also have to have our eyes and ears open on the black hat side of things. All the while doing our daily âoechoresâ of renewing the smoke, polishing the mirrors and performing PMâ(TM)s on the solar flare filters. I sometimes wonder if thereâ(TM)s enough time in the day to do it all. Thankfully I will be coming to the end of my career soon, 409 days and a wake up.
I completely understand what you mean. I too was stuck in a similar bind. We had the same number of apps at my previous workplace and I could not figure out why the "manual workload" went up. After a great deal of inquiry and self-thought, I realised that the developers across all the apps had one thing in common .... they all practised Agile development methodologies. When our teams were fused into DevOps, I felt that I could have a say in such development paradigms to put more emphasis (at least double the man-hours) into testing than what was put into "feature development". I explained my untenable workload as proof for the necessity for such an alteration. Unfortunately the decision made by Directors was to prioritise feature development over Operational Integrity and Support, and basically not permit Operational needs to influence the development process. The result ofcourse was that outstanding Support Requests backlog grew, and my performance appraisal was viewed negatively. Despite my attempt to again explain the root of the problem, I was not listened to. I promptly resigned when I knew that no changes would be made to the development process.
I now work at a different oragnisation and I see the same issues succumbing to Office 365. I give the Support Staff in my new place a break by relying on Webmail only, instead of Outlook.
In a nutshell, many proponents of Agile tend to only care about software development, not software support and operations. The metric they run on is the number of JIRA / Bugzilla cases opened and closed. Attention to quality / testing is secondary - since the Agile process (assuming you have 10 day sprints) is perceived to allow a Bug to be discovered in day 1, only to be fixed in day 10, then to be re-introduced again in day 20 because of a separate feature request being implemented, and then again being fixed in day 30, only to be re-introduced again in day 40 because of yet another feature request, ad infinitum.
The Dev Team does not bother to consider the pain of the Ops/Support guys who have to work out manual workarounds to permit the end-user to reach his/her goal. Resigning / leaving the team is the only way to propagate that pain up the Agile chain, and encourage change.
Cognitive decline is just a thing, IT has nothing to do with it (except it might be more complex than other subjects.) I'm 41 and I notice it. Oh well.
It sounds that in general you make a good impression, if there is a fit with the job itself. In this case, I'd consider 5 applications not much. Continue to rack up interviews until you're ~25-30 in.
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...to the IT of the 21st century. The "profession of the future" today is nothing more than the asphalt others need to run on it.
If they find a pothole, they will complain. Today we are just responsible for delivery. If everything works, we did not do anything more than we were supposed to do. If something breaks, it's our fault. Much stress as of a Doctor and 1/5 their salary.
I am 29 years in this area, been through mostly everything: PC support since the XT ones, then Server administration then telecommunications then networking then application support then full infrastructure consulting and today I work managing third party IT services for a large European company.
But I am phucking sick of this area and I regret I did not choose Mechanical Engineering or some other area.
After 30 years, you have the knowledge to figure anything out. What you didn't bring up (because it's not politically correct to do so, so let me do it for you) is the entitled little shits you now have to deal with, who insist you solve *their* problem first.
I'll bet they're the ones driving you to doubt yourself.