Slashdot Mirror
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'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.
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
...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.
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.
They've "fixed" that too in some ways. Things that used to work in init.d no longer work due to systemd breaking sequencing - the thing they were going to fix, you know. You now must write .service files and put them in one of a couple places depending on circumstances. Putting a valid service file in /etc/systemd/system and then using systemctl enable 'whatevername" gets it started now. If you setup all the variables in the .service file correctly...maybe. /etc/fstab, if you were using wireless or wired network - it would just work, waiting or backgrounding as required until network was available. For awhile it was broken and you had to write a special mount file for that and put it in a special place, but now they broke that again and fstab works again....
You used not to have to care, for example, when mounting a share in
And they say people who object to multiple breakages of their custom setups - breaking userland - more often than any other half decades of updates ever has - are haters. Yeah, it's my fault I don't like to have to redo things instead of making forward progress....
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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 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."
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I can, I've worked in IT with people like that, the general fact is that those are people that have been left behind by just about everyone else but somehow kept under the radar of continuously turning inept management, because their growing inertia it's hard to get rid of them so a lot of inept managers don't even bother in the 6-24m they're in charge.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
... 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.
-
everything is harder when you get old, except where it counts.
sudo systemctl enable rc-local
But, with packer, docker, kubernetes, and other ways of building immutable infrastructure you typically wind up worrying less about how am I going to upgrade this, as the answer is: "I'll just delete it when the upgrade comes out tomorrow"
Work bio at MMWD
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.
I can. That person does not resolve problems - and is not Technical. The HERO on the team is busy closing un-actioned unfixed problems to keep the stats healthy. No one likes a 6 month open problem. So you wait till they are sick/on holiday/Christmas ,send an automated mail saying troubleticket will be closed if no reply, and then closed is a fake non-committal resolution. Sorry - you cant open that problem is is now closed and resolved. Older workers use the voice of authority to browbeat troublemakers, and write excuse emails to keep their bosses looking good. There is usually one good older tech who knows how to fiddle reports and forge email trails when the heat arrives.
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!
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.
^^ OK, this I have seen. Please mod parent up.
- 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.
... 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
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.
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.
> 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 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
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.
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 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.
My co-admin laments the move to systemd, first because it assures him that system updates require a reboot. there go the fabulous uptimes I used to pull up just for grins. Remember the Novell days, when your client would ask why the server was only up for 240 days or so, and you'd 'splain that was the second rollover? Yeah, good times. Ignore the new epochs while Novell fixed the IDE driver...
Things are not quite yet better in my experience. Windows 10 has moved some pain points around. MacOS? um... iOS? Restrictions? Android? Do you know how to turn off sounds in the Facebook app? Why does IHeartRadio start when my phone is in my wife's 2008 MKX with SYNC2? Why does the movie theatre app keep popping notifications when I turn them off, and why does the help team keep telling me my SMS is turned off, when I specifically tell them the app notifications keep coming? Not SMS, APP! APP! APP!
I remember when you were a hero for working 80 hours a week to get the network stable, servers all responsive, and email flowing. You were the wizard. Then it became making it all work in 40 hours a week, because you had the levers and the knowledge. Now I would not want to be help desk at a SMB, security alone is an outsource unless you want to share the load with your second and third, it's not worth taking that all on by yourself. I've been in this role for 12 years now, but it's a maze. 30+ systems to use, passwords changing every 20 days, disabled access if I take more than 14 days vacation, and then the incessant releases with now using IE for some, Chrome for others, Edge for others, Firefox recommended for one but denied by corp. policy... It's different than it was 10 years ago. And I've been called to task for not recalling a known issue I see every perhaps 2 years... yeah, that and the saga of being bitten to death by ducks.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
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......
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.
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.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?