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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'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
" 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'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!"
I saw a couple of responses so far that seem to be saying the same thing....
I guess I didn't explain my career history quite well enough, or perhaps I really did screw up somewhere along the line by not trying to something different in I.T.?
I'm not sure? But the short version is, I've never really been able to find employment where user support wasn't rolled in as an expectation. I've always been hired by smaller companies -- not big corporations with thousands of employees and big departments that segment up the I.T. When I started out working in I.T., it was back in the late 1990's, working in the back room as a technician for small computer resellers or "mom and pop" type computer stores. From there, I progressed to a 7 year long stint for a mid-sized manufacturing firm that had a small department for software development (one in-house app they used as kind of an ERP system, customized for their industry), and the other small department I was employed in as "PC Support Specialist". We took care of everything that wasn't software development - including server backups, networking, maintaining the phone PBX, new deployments, customizing drive images for the workstations, etc.
After that, I helped an entrepreneur try to get his idea off the ground to refurbish older/vintage Macs as first computers for small kids. We installed a bunch of them in daycare centers and sold others at trade shows and advertisements. I was pretty much THE guy who did all the technical work, and much of the work developing sales brochures and marketing materials for that one. After a year or two, it was clear it wasn't profitable for the owner and I ducked out when it turned into a "free for all" of him trying to get me to do all sorts of odd jobs related to anything he needed or could come up with. That gave me a really good handle on Macs though, as his office machines were modern OS X machines and I worked with those a lot too.
I spent some time after that doing on-site service work for an old friend who had a business venture doing that and grew it enough to need a helping hand. Then, I spun that off into my own consulting business. But again, the corporate customers truly wanting consulting work on anything more technical wasn't enough to pay the bills. A big part of my income there was always the home user, wanting a virus or malware cleanup after little Johnny visited porn sites or hacker sites again on the family PC.
I kept that as a side job while accepting a position as "Network Manager" for a steel fabricator (again, kind of a small family owned company). The only people I really managed, though, were the outside consultants they called in occasionally, for a few hours or a 1 day project, here or there. Everything else turned into expectations I'd do all the end-user support, day to day, along with reporting to the CEO and V.P. with annual budget proposals, plans for upgrading their infrastructure and network, etc. I honestly hoped that position was going to finally be my "launchpad" into some kind of management position and out of the daily grind of end-user support -- but it wasn't to be.
At present, the company I work for has a focus on marketing, but more the internal aspects than marketing products or services to customers. The user-base is a mix of creative types, sales types, and of course your Finance staffers, managers, and H.R. They run a mixed environment that's about 50% Mac and 50% Windows 10. They have offices nation-wide and a highly mobile workforce, so we use a lot of cloud technologies -- but still have some infrastructure in house.
I've seen far too many people try to "advance their career" out of this type of work, into project management, and then whither and die on the vine doing it. I don't look forward to sitting in meetings all day, dealing with people problems and losing my ability to do I.T. hands-on. But I think I really WOULD like to get to where I could specialize on projects themselves. Things like setting up new servers for such things as system backup
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!
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."
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
47 and anything I can find on google I don't worry about. For everything else I keep notes in text files.
love is just extroverted narcissism
"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.
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.
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.
.. 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.
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."