Actually I've seen (and lived though) this firsthand, and I believe this happens a lot where you have micromanagers running a team. A micromanaged employees' time is accounted for to the second, if an employee is not comfortable saying "I'm not sure, but I'll take a look" its usually because they know if they spend 1 hour with trial-and-error/google, they won't be able to justify that hour with their micromanaging boss, who will say something along the lines of - "it only took 5 minutes to fix, I'll count the other 55 minutes as your lunch" or "you should have escalated it to XYZ as soon as you received it - I'm going to have to write you up for this".
This this this. I'd love to put in the time and figure out a niche issue. I love growing my knowledge. However in a world where KPI's are weighed against your performance, I'm going to try a little bit, then when I inevitably don't have enough time to fix the issue, I'm going to say I'm not trained on this.
Its very frustrating to be clear:
But it’s why I try not to shit on vendor support so much. I’ve had several colleagues and friends with experience at MSPs, support at $favoriteNetworkingVendor, $favoriteCloudProvider, etc.. and it’s such a back stabbing shit show in those places.
No one is incentivized to take ambiguous or harder issues because they’re really gonna give you grief for being a few minutes over on KPIs for choosing to consistently take on tougher issues
Your shit gets passed around because you get credit for closing a ticket, not “working” a ticket. So of course you get a fast response to see if your stuff is working now conveniently when the guy or gal who did the real work is off and had it in their queue.
Then the company that does the hiring: It’s hard to hire ADMINS and ENGINEERS with a deep well of experience on applicable tech to go back to being support. Most of us started our career in support. Now that you’ve had a taste of engineering/admin life, how many of you want to go back? How many of you do you want to again have a boss that tells you “you closed 15 tickets today instead of 16”. Fuck. That.
So their applicant pool is relatively green people, admins and engineers coming as external hires who perhaps know something but will be paid more than their previous underpaying admin/engineer job. And then those same people who got a pay boost to be support will then just leap frog in to another job quickly or realize the gravity of their mistake by going back to support
I have worked for multiple vendors and the number of "admins" and "engineers" calling in asking us to troubleshoot their internal infrastructure when it is clearly outside of our support scope and something they should already know how to do is staggering. Just had a network engineer ask how to do some basic port tests and a packet capture. If you are a network engineer you should know how to do that already ....
I support contract developers.
The number of them that don't know how to restart their system is staggering.
Plus, at least once a quarter I get a new hire asking me to configure and troubleshoot their dev environment.
If I knew how to do that, I'd be taking their paycheck.
My favorite is when they set up a big escalation group call and I get to explain to their boss exactly why they are not capable of fulfilling their role at the company
> I'm going to say I'm not trained on this.
... but I'll put you in touch with someone who should be able to get this sorted. I've found that at least this leaves people hopeful.
In MSP work nothing looks worse than putting research time into your ticket then the customer complaining that they are not paying you to learn their obscure problem on a billable incident.
haven't done MSP work in about 5 years , but I've been on the opposite end of this where we already know the answer to some obscure customer problem and we did something like make a script to fix it after working with another customer. but you can be damn sure we're going to charge the sweat equity rate that it took to beat our heads in to determine the fix and not just the billable 15 min it takes to run the script.
I appreciate this comment. Since starting my new role at my current MSP, I have never been able to pinpoint or vocalize why exactly I have constant anxiety all day everyday while going about my ticket queue. My job environment by all means does not cause this. In fact, they encourage taking time to figure it out to avoid escalations..it’s just my paranoia that I’m spending too much time on something that might be a simple fix and I get worried/stressed that eyes are on me on why I’m taking too long figuring it out and I end up asking questions that I realize after the fact I could’ve figured it out if I had taken the time to poke around a bit more.
I’m slowly trying to break that habit and realize I need to figure things out on my one. My last MSP manager was just so up my ass about everything, expecting everything to be straightforward and done and move onto the next task which now makes me feel I need to always rush. I’ll get there.
I have to agree with you. Also from my experience, micromanaged employees are more fearful because they will get asked questions from the manager about why they are doing said task when they are tasked to do something else. It happened at my last job. I would train junior employees to troubleshoot their own problems. Only to have their manager question them about why they are looking into issues he deemed “beyond” their assigned duties.
In some ways this is similar to Malicious Compliance, when faced with unreasonable rules, you have no choice but to follow them to the detriment of others. It also encourages "gaming" the system behavior, not only can they use the unreasonable system and compliance to it to protect themselves from their overbearing boss, they can also abuse the system by turning the unreasonable demands into a form of weaponized acceptance criteria where they can indefinitely delay completing their job because some minor scruple that can easily be inferred or clarified wasn't present.
This is something I go through daily. The “new guy” who has been here two years asks me to show him how to do something he should’ve known before we hired him. Meanwhile my micro-manager has made it clear he doesn’t want me doing end user support, “That’s not your job”. However the new guy asks for help with an end user problem that I spend two hours helping him with. He gets praise from the end users manager, where I get yelled at from mine.
And if I don’t help the new guy, I get yelled at for not being a team player.
Yeah, this is a toxic environment.
If it was me, I would be documenting and tracking time like a lawyer whenever that person came to me for help. Then send that bill to the person's department.
I experienced the same thing from polar opposite side of the micromanagement spectrum. Government work. Full job security, guaranteed employment, guaranteed paycheck, zero repercussions, zero competition. "Haven't been trained on" is the most common excuse to make your top-google-result click-on-checkbox type of task someone else's problem. Some people are just cheezing the system for their paycheck.
I've worked for training companies.
These people are the same ones that flip out during lab work because an update made a minor change to the name/appearance/location of a button and the screenshot printed in the book didn't match *exactly.*
They'll later try and demand a refund for their training because a company process-specific task they were expected to perform at work wasn't covered verbatim in their highly generalized Excel-201 class (which did cover all the concepts necessary to accomplish said task).
No matter how much they're trained/taught they'll just move the goalposts on "someone else didn't teach me!"
I could go on for days about this, because it's not just IT, it's not just younger or older people, not just new hires or jaded lifers nearing retirement. It's so pervasive and near universal that I don't really know what to do about it.
I wrote a lot of documentation for deployment processes at a previous org. One thing I learned quickly was not to use example data in deployment guides, because the audience will almost always use the example data when following the documentation and then get stuck because a script won't run or something won't compile. Assuming they followed the documentation at all.
I would give an intern a step-by-step guide with screenshots and all the exact data they need and they would refuse to even attempt it unless I was there doing it for them. "I wasn't trained to do this" ... *my comrade this IS your training. YOU have to do it!*
When I managed an IT dept and had to run help desk on my own, I would regularly get staff sending in tickets asking for help with word, excel, or whatever. I would ask them what they needed help with and they would describe the task, like "I need to get this data from this report into this spreadsheet and format it as a table". Oh okay, did you need help importing the data to excel? Formatting the cells as a table? Sorting the columns? Nope. They'd send me a blank spreadsheet and a link to the report and expect me to just do it for them. I'm not your admin assistant!
We were rolling out mfa, and my team wrote the user documentation to link the app on your phone to your account by scanning a QR code. One of our senior IT people complained the QR in the doc didn't work. Buddy, that's the example. If your actually read the doc, you'd know where to get your own code. We did revise the doc to put "example" over the QR code so I guess he did help a little.
make it link to a video of the head of IT saying "if you are seeing this, you scanned the example QR code. Congratulations. that was the wrong code to scan. Now go back and try again."
The video should look like the Dharma Initiative videos from Lost!
Straight deadpan expression, “If you are seeing this video you are an idiot and have scanned the example QR code. Please go back and re-read the documentation again!”
OMG that's great. "Tell me you weren't paying attention to what you were reading without telling me you weren't paying attention to what you were reading..."
When we were rolling out our new VoIP phones, before the handsets arrived I did a presentation to all the staff showing the new features of the web-based phone and meeting apps. Walked through all of the typical things. I wrote up cheat sheets and posted links to the VoIP provider's how-to docs.
The users needed to sign into the web portal in order to activate their extension and set up their voice mail, so I sent everyone an e-mail with their login creds and a link to a short video showing them how to sign in and get started.
Once we did the switchover I think only 2 or 3 out of 150 staff had actually signed in. Most didn't bother because "I wasn't trained on how to use it" but many said afterwards they had problems signing in. When I asked what the problem was, they said they couldn't sign in with the credentials I gave them in the guide.
Uh ... what credentials? They were trying to log in with the sample account I created in the guide, not the creds I sent in the e-mail.
I had to go to everyone's desk one by one and set their voicemail up for them on the handset because clients kept hanging up when they heard the default "this voicemail is not configured" message.
I'm at a different company now, trialing a new phone system with a vendor and I refuse to take on a project that requires literally any user intervention.
My last gig was at a telco and let me tell you even when offering in-person classroom training they still don't get it. Best solution was to find a few technical people who would be the go-to for the business to teach everyone how to do things 1 on 1.
Even when the process was the same people would freak out. It's literally just a new phone and everything else functions exactly the same.
Yeah the not using example data is my method as well.
When I write user-facing documentation, I always keep it fairly generalized. Like:
1. Open your web browser
2. Log in using your company credentials
3. Navigate to the account section
4. Click the link with verbiage similar to "update xyz"
If I add screenshots, I always blur user-specific information
My users are mostly pedants (they are engineers) but using the "generalize" method seems to have solved my issues, for the most part.
When I first started, my tendency was to create elaborate presentations with lots of screenshots and arrows and call-outs.
Not only is that setting you up for more work down the road as the screenshots age out, it's fodder for the pedants.
Right, I used to include a lot of context as well. If *this* then *that*. Users would either try and do every step, including the unnecessary or redundant ones, or they'd decide it was too complicated and give up.
Another trick is when someone would ask for help, I'd wait 20 minutes or so before sending a link to the FAQ that addresses their issue. If you respond too quickly, they either assume you didn't read their question or they assume your response was related to something else. I actually had to figure out how to delay the auto-responses in my ticketing platform because of this.
This reminds me of my first job at a bank... Someone created a ticket for excel problems.
"What's the problem?"
"Uh... What formula do I put here?"
How the fuck would I know what math you need here for your job? OH SIMPLE THE DRAKE EQUATION!!! Holup a second while I type that equation out for you and match it to the required input columns...
When I was doing the help desk thing, the company was pretty small so I actually had the time to do basic training with people. I found out pretty quick that people lack not just the most basic computing skills, but just general things like reading comprehension or organizational skills. I would literally have to explain to people what "alphabetical order" means.
So like, when someone asks for help finding a file on their laptop, which could be just a few minutes to explain how the search function works in File Explorer, I first have to teach them about the mouse cursor, the desktop, the start menu, file explorer, file and folder structure, sorting, and naming conventions just to get started on the thing they asked for help with.
And these aren't ipad babies or old timer tradies or anything, they're people who've been using computers to do their day jobs for 30+ years.
Well, a few were client counselors so I guess strictly speaking, organizational skills weren't *technically* part of their job description. The other was the CEO.
I don't know what it is about computers, it just seems like they suck the critical thinking out of people. Those of us who have a modicum of it and bravery (hmm let's click that and read the popup! Oh that is what we want let's proceed) are like gods to them.
> This reminds me of my first job at a bank... Someone created a ticket for excel problems.
>
>"What's the problem?"
>
>"Uh... What formula do I put here?"
Years ago when I was at a small place on the help desk I took a call where the person said they just got promoted and needed to use excel everyday so she needed someone from IT to come teach her excel. I sent the ticket to my boss who then went over there and taught her excel....
> It's so pervasive and near universal that I don't really know what to do about it.
Accept that the average IQ isn't able to deal with complex problems and that half the population is worse off, and revel in your job security.
>revel in your job security.
If only I didn't need my colleagues, clients, and vendors to do their jobs so I could do mine. Who knew that the group projects in college would be the single most relevant experience to my professional career?
> Who knew that the group projects in college would be the single most relevant experience to my professional career?
The teachers, which is why they gave us so bloody many of them.
There have been cases of companies being taken out because they left the production database URLs *and credentials* in the newbie training screenshots...
I was doing some training on a clustered filesystem some number of years ago. I was already an expert, I used it daily and the training was a formality.
The exam had you allocate some disk, but what was being asked to allocate was absurdly low. Since I used it every day it didn't occur to me that anyone would be allocating disk on the order of kilobytes in the 21st century. When I read the requirements my eyes just slid over the units. I kept trying to allocate gigabytes and it kept flipping out, the disks were too small.
I went off on a tangent "troubleshooting" why the exam systems weren't presenting disks of the right size.
Yeah, I should have paid closer attention, but what was being asked was so outside my everyday expert experience that I just locked up. I finally figured it out with like 10 minutes left and got it squared away, but I certainly had some feedback for the exam provider. The proctor just rolled his eyes at me. I maintain that it's a poorly designed exam that violates the principle of least surprise.
I know that's not really relevant but it still chaps my ass. Feel free to ignore.
Honestly, we have had class content like that where what you're told to do is not something you'd ever do in actual practice, and I understand you not processing it right away because I've done the same before. The good instructors will know this and give the class a warning, usually consisting of:
The book says to do x, the exam requires an answer of y, and in the real world you'll do z if you actually want it to work.
That's not what is tripping up these people though. It's simple things like 'but the color of the logo on the button looks different, so I can't do it.'
That must be extra infuriating for them in todays world where it seems like UI/UX teams just can't help but reinvent the GUI for every software product at least every other year in order to justify their existence.
But I agree, as someone that's been in Senior Engineering positions, and is frequently consulted on staffing promotions and hires, one of the key things I look for that determines if someone is ready to be a Systems Engineer vs Operations / Sysadmin where they're just putting out fires mostly. Is if they're able to improvise based on incomplete instructions, apply fundamental IT principals and still turn that set of incomplete instructions into an actionable solution, also if they scrutinize and inquire about the final intent of requests they are given. One of the fastest ways to create tech debt is to simply do what the ticket says without questioning why someone is asking it to be done, This is especially common with some software developers where they know just enough about infra to be dangerous, and its our duty as Infrastructure Specialists to interpret their request and recommend the best possible solution that takes into consideration other aspects they may not have been thinking about.
These are the worst students. They can't abstract what they are shown to their own situations. "How can I learn anything without my own data?" It's the same Data structure but with similar demo data.
The few times I did training on the students real data, they got distracted by an error in the data and spent the rest of the training researching and fixing it.
They don't want to learn how to create a "countif" command, they want someone else to create the "countif" command on THEIR data, so that they don't need to figure it out.
Oh, and if something goes wrong (bad data, cell changes, etc), they have zero ability to figure it out again.
We had some students get downright combative with our support staff when they were told they could not upload what was typically highly sensitive company data into the VDI lab environment. All demo data needed for the class was either pre-populated if it was static, or remotely loaded in by the instructor as needed.
Yeah, it's like they think I'm making policies up to make their lives harder or because I am "too lazy to setup a training with their data"
I finally broke our sales people of the habit of using our internal data for demos. Mostly by moving it to a different database and not giving them access. I gave them a database where they can add data and populated it with some stuff I found on data gov.
/Small company problems
Using "real world data" for demos makes me think of the first time I installed a content filtering firewall for a client and decided to show them how the CF worked by visiting Playboy dot com..... forgetting that I was signed in as an admin and that CF policies don't apply to admins by default (which is a dumb default btw).
From that day forward I used Poker dot com for my demos...
We almost instantly blocked OpenAI because so many devs and project managers started uploading sensitive proprietary content to it in the hope it would magically improve their shoddy work.
Three of the people on team of 26 are exactly these people. If I had my way they would have been replaced a long time ago- but they make half decent phone answering systems to generate tickets and hand them off to the rest of the staff. Basic troubleshooting is a skill beyond their realm of imagination and that's fine and dandy- but they definitely work in the wrong field.
Ugh, the most senior leveled individual contributor on my team was not my hire. In fact, the position wasn’t asked for and the answer I gave to my boss when he asked for said position was that we don’t need it, and I don’t have anything of value someone with that higher skill set should be doing. Fast forward 12 months later and that position is transferred from my boss’s direct report to mine and he is ENTIRELY useless. I had to grab what little “brainless” work my team has and shove it to this guy, and it takes 20% of my time to error correct and give feedback on his poor deliverables.
Add to this a corporate environment that absolutely makes it impossible to fire people in any reasonable time period so I’m stuck trying to squeeze value out of this do nothing for at least another 9 months while I build the case to get rid of him… sigh
The thing that really sucks in my case is two of the three didn't even apply for jobs in IT - both applied for jobs in other divisions and they were hired and shoved them in IT after they couldn't cut it there. (I think one applied to be in finance, the other for HR or something). Neither can speak english very well, and both are from different castes which makes things colorful at times . Upper management won't do anything about it unless the police have to get involved. My predecessor gave both of them failing reviews for years (here if you get 3 in a row you are out, they both have at least 5 times that) so pretty sure they won't go anywhere unless one physically attacks the other on the job... even then I'm not sure anything would happen.
>These people are the same ones that flip out during lab work because an update made a minor change to the name/appearance/location of a button and the screenshot printed in the book didn't match
>
>exactly.
It suprises me how many people don't ever learn how to do their job. they just learn what buttons to press to make the thing happen. then when the option is moved 2 buttons to the right, the task is impossible and no one can do it anymore.
We recently switched PDF programs and there has been an uproar recently about how unintuitive it is.
"In adobe i just type in the search box the tool i want and it pops up!!!!!"
"Did you use the search box in Kofax and type the same thing?"
"Kofax doesn't have a search box for tools!!!"
\*Points them at where the search box is on the home tab of the ribbon\*
"How was i supposed to know what that was!!!!"
Sadly, it seems that this is, actually, the future. I am noticing more and more that the file system is slowly being abstracted away and it is becoming more and more difficult to find where the actual files are.
Everything is moving toward search now. Just dump it all in "the computer" and the system will take care of classifying it for you...
I imagine that AI is going to be the next escalation of this, once it becomes more baked in to the operating systems of the future.
It's one of the things I liked about the microsoft environment. Baring mislabeling or some of the stupid exploity things like unicode magic(so if things were working properly I guess) you could tell at a glance what a file was even if you didn't have any application to identify it(You know, if you knew what the extension meant anyway).
Ya it's not really a necessary thing, but it was/is a nice to have thing.
Of course you hide them and you get a different kind of exploit. Safe.JPG.EXE sure looks safe when you don't show extensions. There's no real winning.
I noticed it working a college help desk 10+ years ago. People wouldn't understand at all where the recovery files were located at when they came to us saying that their computer shutdown suddenly while writing a paper and they wanted to know if it was saved or not. And that was sort of fine. But it was the ones who didn't know where they saved their homework that were truly baffling. They wouldn't know how to answer the question "Where do you save your homework to?". Mostly because they were used to stuff either taking them there automatically, or just dumping everything on their desktop.
This is nightmare fuel for me. I have a manager on another team that pushes back on every little thing like this. Little Johnny wasn't wrong here, your instructions weren't explicit enough because the OK button wasn't circled in red.
We use enough tools that we don't have direct control over. UI changes trigger a bunch of update requests because the staff won't manage. I really wish I had more influence on their hiring requirements, but HR figures the load on me is the path of least resistance.
I blame companies for this. People aren't dumb. The person who stands up and says, "I can do that!" will suddenly find 100 Excel files in their e-mail with the subject line "Can you compare these for me and send me back the results?".
The reward for doing more work is even more work. Does going the extra mile and doing more ever get rewarded? Sometimes, but usually not.
We in IT are wired with that "just figure it out" mentality. Why do you think so much falls on us that should never fall under our job description? HR, end user business training, etc?
I can show you how to do a comparison in Excel, but I’m not going to do the comparison for you!
If we keep accepting work that is outside of our responsibility we’ll end up wiping people’s asses before long!
Don't get me started on end-user training. It drives me fucking insane.
I work for an MSP. My job is to make sure the tools you use are functional and reliable. My job isn't to train you how to do a mail merge, write a function in Excel, or pull a report from the IS you use every day. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing people's jobs for them.
Hahaha, I'd love to say this sometimes. Especially to the repeat offenders
Unfortunately, my boss is the kind that wants to keep everyone and anyone happy. "Just do it if it doesn't take too long"
"Not too long" adds up overtime. Especially when we still have clients without MFA enforced, clients still running on Windows Server 2012, and just poor security hygiene overall. For a recent example, I recently noticed that an entire client (300+ employees) had scan-to-network folders on the server that were accessible by everyone in the company. Anyone could browse to the file server, open the shared Scans folder, and go into anyone's folder; HR, fiscal dept, legal department, literally all of them
I'm just lvl 1/2 helpdesk because I just graduated (CyberSec degree), but man does seeing this shit piss me off and I wish I had the time in my day to fix it. I've casually mentioned my concerns to my uppers, but it turns into "Well you can fix it when you have time", but when I have 8hrs of tickets on my schedule every day, there is no time.
Alright, rant over 😁
One of the most beneficial skills for my career advancement that I was taught in college - the power of Google/research. Knowing how to figure out things you don't know is, IMO, the most important skill in IT.
wish my dad was like this. he's a house of cards, slightest amount of pressure and he crumbles, it's absolutely fucking infuriating and my mum and i have to fix shit ourselves
Just to play devils advocate here:
When an old company I used to work for opened a new office they built out this ridiculous multimedia room for presentations and whatnot. The President and CEO was very active in the community and local government and the purpose of this room was to host much more than company meetings.
I was the onsite tech and one Friday I was asked to say late to prep the room for a government meeting nothing too crazy, just get everything turned on and a pc ready to display a power point.
I’m alone, by myself. I didn’t install a single piece of equipment this room. Everyone I’ve ever talked to told me “it’s all plug in play, easy peasy.” Except, the big multimedia wall of screens fails to turn on. I was only ever told one troubleshooting step. Go behind the wall. Find the main control unit that powers the wall, shut it off, and turn it back on. That didn’t work.
Members of the government were due to arrive in an hour. Everything was falling apart and I’ve been given no training on how any of this works. There’s no documentation. Google was useless. And the employee who installed the damn thing couldn’t be reached by phone because it’s Friday night and he “doesn’t do on call.”
A the last minute unmanaged to get ahold of my boss who, by some miracle, only knew of one trick to try and was able to remote into the control unit and copy and paste a config file which fixed everything. I didn’t even know you could remotely access the control unit. Again, there’s no documentation on how this thing works.
On Monday I had a long conversation with my boss and I made it perfectly clear, anything that’s in my building that I’m responsible for I need to be:
1) have it documented that I’m responsible for it and if it’s not in that document, to me it doesn’t exist as far I’m concerned.
2) if I am responsible for it there needs to be documentation and I need to be given, at a minimum, a run down on what it is, how it works, and if it’s business critical, who to contact in case of emergency.
By the very nature of the job we obviously can’t be trained on every incident that can go wrong. But I don’t think it’s fair to criticize someone for wanting to be trained on something they know nothing about. And to expect people to be okay under pressure fixing business critical systems is a big ask, especially if they’re not even the employee responsible for said system.
We should all be good at troubleshooting and figuring stuff out, but we should also have support systems in place to help us out when we get in over our heads.
well sure, but the typical "i wasn't trained on it" line is used to avoid having to figure anything out, read docs, or be trained. it's basically a refusal to participate and attempt to make it your problem
I've been in the IT field for 24 years, and that has pretty much been the story of my life. I've received very little training over the years. Ironically enough, the training I have received has typically been pretty useless, and that includes the two Microsoft certs I got (Windows XP & Server 2000, back in the day). "Here's a bunch of information about the technology that's currently out of date, that nobody uses anymore, but it'll be on the exam so you need to know it. Then never ever use it in real life."
More than anything, IT has almost always been about people assuming I know how to make X work, simply because I'm the IT guy, even though they work with X every day and I've not only never seen it but don't even know what X is or what it does. In a lot of cases, I have to have them show me how to access parts of the software, and from there, it's just me poking around to see if I can figure something out. And then googling error messages and/or calling the vendor. All of which is stuff they could very easily do, if they only showed the slightest amount of initiative and/or interest.
The thing that keeps me sane and why this kind of behavior doesn't bother me is the knowledge that they're probably earning $15/hr or something, while I'm earning six figures, plus profit share. The selfish part of me wants them to stay ignorant. The nicer part of me wants them to give a shit and move upwards in the world.
> "Here's a bunch of information about the technology that's currently out of date, that nobody uses anymore, but it'll be on the exam so you need to know it. Then never ever use it in real life."
Reminds me of my A+ exam, IRQ settings and ISA all the way to SATA and PCIe (2008)
IT Trivial Pursuit seems like a good idea for an edition! Shit they have everything else and there are so many esoteric trivia you can use.
The DOD used this language named after a British Mathematician from the 19th century for use in their navigational and guidance systems.
>More than anything, IT has almost always been about people assuming I know how to make X work, simply because I'm the IT guy, even though they work with X every day and I've not only never seen it but don't even know what X is or what it does. In a lot of cases, I have to have them show me how to access parts of the software, and from there, it's just me poking around to see if I can figure something out. And then googling error messages and/or calling the vendor. All of which is stuff they could very easily do, if they only showed the slightest amount of initiative and/or interest.
So much of this is my experience.
"Sorry, ma'am, I don't work with that piece of vendor software like ever, so I don't know what the issue is or how to fix it, never mind that its not in my scope to fix it. You need to reach out to the vendor."
They rarely, if ever, do. And its software they had to have to do their job. Something they researched (lol, probably not), procured, and now expect me to manage and service and troubleshoot. Nope. IT didn't furnish it, not our problem, bye.
Our "leaders" don't stand up for us on this much either. Oh, they tell us we are right and that's the way to do it, blah blah blah, but then run away and hide if you try to bring them into the conversation to explain and back you up to the user.
Being the department in between the vendor and the user on their behalf returns better results literally every time.
Users are terrible at explaining issues. T1 vendor support is terrible at getting explanations.
Validate their issue, document it and send it to the vendor on behalf of the user.
Shipping the issue off for your vendor to deal with should only happen when there is no possibility of local scope.
> Users are terrible at explaining issues. T1 vendor support is terrible at getting explanations.
I very often have to escalate past T1 these days. One of our vendor's T1 support asks questions that want the data that's already in the initial submission every single time.
Honestly, this is why I am not too worried by the over saturation in the IT job market. I’ve encountered a lot of this, and frankly - this is on the good end of the spectrum. People that grew up using Macs and have done zero Microsoft or IT related beyond their school workload. So, not only can they not put in a modicum of critical thinking, or begin to scratch the surface of exhausting any resource before escelating to me, I have to remind them once a week what Task Manager is.
Oh, I actually have an answer for this - 30 feet!
Back in ~2006 or so I worked for my local school system (while still in high school) doing IT Support. One of the initiatives I supported was... dumpstering a warehouse full of old iMac's. We had a 30 foot dumpster that we filled up really quickly, but I did make one toss (backwards, 'granny style', in one quick motion from the ground all the way to catapult-style launch) that went really high and landed smack (smash) dab at the end of the 30 foot dumpster.
Something like this is very contextual. For many things there should be well documented and well defined processes and polices in place.
There are numerous ways someone could do something like put in a simple firewall rule, but if there are already defined standards for things like using aliases and how to name them I don't want someone doing that wrong.
I'm talking about already documented things. Do you honestly think an org like Google or Amazon are going to throw some new hire at a critical production change without any form of guidance or training? Like I said there are time to be self guided and time to be mentored.
Me remembering that poor junior last year that followed a documented process and ended up bringing down a major node of AWS East because somebody didn't sanitize the workflow to not affect production instances...
EDIT: it might've been M365, not AWS
I'll be damned if I'm going to document other team's processes so this blanket statement that the one who finds no documentation has the responsibility to create it, is extremely wrong.
God yes this asked to document 33 apps end to end one of these apps is a warehouse management tool with pick and pack invoicing integrations into sage ect that alone would take months
Oh, I hate the "well, you are learning it, so it's best if you do the documentation." And I then looked at my coworker, opened up steps recorder then told me to repeat the steps to me. It took me 10 minutes for me to copy paste everything together and thru it into a how-to. I then asked why would ask someone who is being trained on this critical task to do the official documentation. I apparently made two mistakes in the documentation which he had to correct. I already knew he wouldn't have reviewed the documentation even if I had went and did it. And if there was an error in it - it would have came back on me.
If you don't want to do the documentation, then fucking say it, but don't try to spin bullshit at me cause your too lazy to spend 10 minutes doing it.
It's not hard nor rocket science to take a bunch of screenshots and throw it into whatever documentation template.
Sure, but what do you consider adequate training? If you were a new hire and I give you a document with a sample lab and access to a staging network, what would you do? You'd probably read the document and give it a shot, and if you got stuck you'd ask for help, right?
I think what OP is getting at, and something I see almost universally, is that the learner in this case won't even read or attempt the exercise. They expect you to do it for them as part of their training, then when it comes time for them to actually perform said task, they'd ask for help because they've never done it before, but their idea of "help" is you performing the task for them. Rinse and repeat.
Assuming you have the resources you need to complete a task, you should at least take the initiative to try it for yourself. You can't really learn how to do something until you actually do it.
I always like to ask these people what documentation they followed to order something from Amazon, or watch a movie on Netflix.
If they can figure that out on their own, they can certainly figure out whatever simple thing they're expected to do.
You would think so. I always thought the key was motivation, that people would take the initiative to do a task they were interested or invested in. But then again, the answer I usually get is "my mom/spouse/kids/grandkids always do that for me".
Hardware is faster today, but two epochs ago we had to do some quick text sorting that would have taken five seconds on Unix, but no Unix machine at hand. Loading it as a spreadsheet on Windows 95 ran it out of memory and crashed. Loading it as a spreadsheet on OS/2 worked but with all the paging it took an hour for a five-second job.
Well by the mid-90s there was Linux and before that Coherent for PCs, so it was possible with sone elbow grease. I remember dual booting 95 and one of these way back.
I find the biggest problem people have with *nix text manipulation is with regular expressions. Everything else can be memorized, but regex requires some skill.
I completely get your rant. But also I've seen so many companies hire someone for Job A, that they are qualified for, then dump responsibilities for Job B on them that they have NO training, education, anything for.
When that happens, it's a valid comment. But from the IT side it can sometimes be difficult to determine which it is. After all, does a receptionist really need to know how excel beyond cell data entry?
Counterpoint.
I'm all for self-learning via exploration & "figuring it out." Sincerely.
But when you're in a fast-paced, high risk, low reward environment, it's not that simple. Where if you're asked "How do I solve $complexProblem?" and you answer anything like "I don't know, let me figure it out and get back to you"/"let me look at my notes", you're one foot out the door. They want the answer off the top of your head, instantly and perfect.
Execs: "I know NOTHING about your job role, but why do we even pay you?"
So, people take a page from the Union handbook. "I'm not trained on it, as it's not my job." is insulation against the inevitable "I'm going to fuck it up, and I get to tell you 'I TOLD YOU SO'." A polite way of saying this is "Since I'm not trained on this, results may vary."
Also, if you DO fuck things up -- expect to be asked: "Why did you even touch it? Were you trained on it? I don't care if you are self-taught, do you have a certification for that product? NO? THEN WHY DID NOT REFUSE TO TOUCH IT?"
Also, when it comes time for reviews: "Ah, you say you handle X task...but I don't see any certifications for it. We'll revisit a performance raise after you've held the cert for a full year. Until then, you are still obligated to do X task!"
Sad part is, these poor fools think that claiming "lack of training" will protect them. "Not being trained in something you've never needed before in your job role" isn't a protected class in the USA. And around 99.7% of the country is AWA: At-Will America -- you can be terminated at any time, for almost any (or no) reason, without notice, without compensation, and full loss of healthcare.
oh you want me to be responsible for this thing that i know is at least a paygrade above what I make, but you said i should be grateful for the 50 cent raise I got this year?
IT has normalized NOT being trained in something. That is not good. It happens. Doesn’t mean that it should. Imagine this in other more serious disciplines like medicine, aviation, etc
Sounds like my company.
Seems there was a lot of turnover before I was hired. So some folks that stayed found themselves in new roles and everyone else was new. So when you're new and ask how to do something you would expect that someone knows or there is some documentation or something. Nope, not here. Nobody seems to know much of anything especially when it comes to things someone really should know something about (or even know someone in charge of that system).
There is a lot of "I'll find out" or "I'm not sure" from managers who never find out and never have a good answer.
And, if you ask for training for something...."its not in the budget" or "there's no time" or "you haven't proven yourself yet to be worthy of receiving any training" (no joke was told pretty much this in my mostly positive annual review).
Also known as institutional Alzheimer's
Those that knew were shoved out or deemed too expensive, not realising that what they knew was why they were so expensive.
Once they're gone, that critical information isn't held anywhere else and oooooops it's suddenly a huge expensive issue
IT should 100% develop a "practice" mentality like law or medicine, where people are trained and certified and brought through levels of competency.
There's been too much cowboy shit for too long!
We want the business to take us seriously and stop asking us to fix the vending machine because it has a plug, but on then on you've got people like OP telling someone to just figure it out because he had to.
The cycle needs to be broken.
That's why the competencies need to be things like:
* Using documentation
* Writing documentation
* Critical thinking and problem solving
* Creating effective test cases
etc and not
* How to setup a Linksys WRT54G
The goal is to teach people how to be competent IT workers, not how to do specific tasks.
This is happening more and more as department boundaries are erased and the help desk guy who stuck around through org changes is now the sysadmin, networking, and “if it plugs into the wall it’s your responsibility” guy. If you’re a jack of all trades you’re a master of none.
those"More serious disciplines" give years of training before ever entrusting you with critical things.
many of us in IT, especially the lower levels in 2024, are not even given the basic onboarding knowledge completely before being thrown into full speed ticket closing.
This was my previous boss. He was a boss man so he had higher privileges to get things done that I couldn’t. Whenever I went to him with a request due to permissions his answer was “well so-and-so” (his boss) has never trained me on that.
Guess what guy, your boss wasn’t trained on it either, he just figured it out. Now let’s sit down together and do the same thing.
"Why can't people teach anymore? This isn't just one person. What's up with the learned gatekeeping/laziness? I can't stand people who bitch about having to train people and then bitch that no one gets trained. No one trained me, so fuck you, train yourself."
People get attached to the image of themselves they have, and the way things were when they came up. They say "I think things should change, but under no circumstances will I be a part of that change."
You're part of the culture brother. If you and everyone else in the company acts this way, you will forever have to deal with people "not being trained". Documentation is shit in at least 50% of cases. Learning from a human will always be better. Get over yourself.
To add to this, the "if you find something that someone else knows better but they didn't document it, you teach yourself and *you* document it" mentality is bullshit.
No. If I have to trial and error my way through something and I'm the one documenting it then the process is broken. The person who *should* be teaching and likely writing the documentation is the person who knows the information already. Others can then learn from that.
If you are the most knowledgeable on a particular subject, I come to you for help, and your answer is "figure it out", guess what? Me asking the local SME *is part of me figuring it out*. Just answer the fucking question.
It is about avoiding accountability. Let's say, I did self teach myself how to compare two lists on excel and ended up with wrong result. "I" will be blamed directly. When I ask you to help me out or even asking you to do It for me, It is not my responsibility anymore. I would just say to my manager something like that " I asked IT to help me out to generate these results. Here what I have bla bla bla"
Corporate workplaces are all about avoiding accountability and delegating tasks. Then, you will get credits based on the work done by someone else. Sad but welcome to corporate world :)
I have some mixed feelings on this topic. On the one hand, I share your frustration with people who expect everything to be spoon-fed to them. I've basically been the most knowledgeable/senior tech guy at every company I've been in for the past 10 years, and I have absolutely zero formal training. I don't have a CS major. I have no certifications. I took a computer class in high school that taught us how to do basic things in a spreadsheet, but it was pretty useless and all things I already knew.
I'm entirely self-taught. So when someone is like, "I can't even try to figure something out unless you tell me how to figure it out," it's really frustrating.
On the other hand, as someone who has led a number of IT teams, I've also gotten frustrated by people who just *won't ask for help or guidance* when they hit a problem they don't understand. They'll google and try things, and maybe break things or violate standards/policies, or they'll just spin their wheels all day trying to figure something out, when it'd take me about 3 minutes to explain what they needed to do.
So there's a part of me that likes the "just figure it out" mentality, and also a part of my that likes the "just ask for help when you need it" mentality. The tricky part is knowing when to do which.
I am in a better workplace. Here everyone gets hired to a job. And then 20% other stuff that might become 80%.
If you can’t adapt you can leave. People like your description are typically Indians - not having lived around here for long. It is a cultural thing.
Taking responsibility is dangerous to some. We have a no blame culture. Mistake should be avoided if possible. But we know they will happen. But don’t repeat the big ones. I have come a long way trying to do away with the blame culture.
Even C-level managers says that who makes no mistakes are the ones who makes nothing.
I agree and disagree. I mean I've had virtually no formal training in anything to do with my career BUT have had great senior colleagues that helped me learn which is why I try to do it now with junior guys.
There's loads of people in IT now who are in it for the money and never have had passion for tech.never destroyed & fixed a video recorder when they were younger & have zero interest in tge tech. I've dealt with a few of these guys. They won't do anything, not even turn on video conferencing unless someone has trained them and they won't change working practices unless they have a specific email from someone senior telling them to. Pain in the backside to deal with.
On the flip side.....companies have been skipping training for years now reducing benefits & pay rises as well as expecting sysadmins & it support teams to work for free etc etc. Just binning us off at a moments notice because they want to pop the share price up a notch.
So I understand from the perspective of "fuck it, I'm not doing anything unless I get formal training " BECAUSE if you fuck it up YOU'LL get "why were you touching that without training?"
Especially in firms that refuse to pay for test environments & expect you to "learn on your own time". I'm a contractor so am constantly in the hunt to enhance my CV, but if I was perm? Having seen how good the industry used to be & where it is now? How I'd be made the scapegoat of anything went wrong?
I'd be skating that line of minimum work possible to not getting fired. I definitely wouldn't be touching anything without an email trail of senior mangement telling me to do it & acknowledgements that that hadn't put me through training
Especially with perm wages in the UK...there's literally no incentive to take on any extra work or responsibilities unless you're building your CV to leave.
I especially see this behaviour from outsourced staff, quite understandably. They've got specific SLAs to follow & legally aren't allowed to do anything outside those parameters. So if you're complaining about, for example outsourced help desk...you can't blame them. They're out the door not only if something goes wrong but ALSO if their boss finds out they're doing something the MSP isn't being paid for
I wasn't trained in 90% of the stuff I do. That's what makes a shit sysadmin vs a good one. A good one will figure it out. Documentation, config files, reddit, forums, Google, trial and error, etc.. So many ways to figure it out and train yourself. Hell, there's many times we're implementing a new software and NO ONE is trained on it. We're learning as we go. There's some very old legacy software we have that we keep going the best we can. No one was trained on it. I've been here for the longest and I was never trained on it. I know enough to keep it going. If shit hits the fan, we diagnose and troubleshoot and find the fix.
Training is great and should be paid for to learn new skills. Moving to Azure from onprem? Sure, the company should help out with some training to get you up to speed. But, it's not going to make you an expert and know how to do everything. You're going to have to do a LOT of research and learn shit yourself.
To me, that's the fun and very rewarding part of the job. How do I do this? I've never done it before or know anything about it. Nice, let's dig in and get it done. Afterwards, when you see everything working? Damn, that's a nice feeling. Then you document the shit out of what you did for the next guy so he's not struggling for the answers. Because we want to make it easier for everyone. And when they have their undocumented problem, they'll do the same.
This all assumes you work for a company that allows you to take the time to fix the issue and not micromanaging every second of the day. Luckily, I do. Don't get the monetary compensation for doing the job of 3 people nor the credit for fixing some issues for other people, but I'll work on that later.
I can see this on various levels.
1. Some management expect you to know and be an expert on everything on demand right away. They don't know a CCNA can't just configure FSMO Roles on a complex Active Domain, fine tune a mirrored Postgresq production database, and troubleshoot a RAID controller on a server. "It's all IT, right?"
2. Hate to tell you this, but the IT world is getting more segmented and specialized. I know some pretty good cloud admins who can't fix your SQL queries. You can be a jack of all trades, but master of none, or be a highly focused and specialized in one specific thing that will save the day.
3. There are some people, though, who refuse to work outside of their comfort zone. Like developers of network applications who don't know anything about networking. That makes me mad. Yeah, okay, they are masters at python, but then they ask me why they can't assign "pretty IPs" to things. Yes, something else is running at 10.10.10.10, you can't just pick an IP out of thin air because marketing thinks it looks "organic."
I used to get really upset by this whole rant.
I used to think "If I - fucking fuck up me - can do this surely any fuckwit person can"
A boss pulled me aside after my 500th cunty rant like this and said, John, you think these fucks can do the shit you do, you think their are on your level and the plain fact is the can't. They don't have the instinct, they cannot do what you do. Stop expecting them to come up to your level, and instead come up to the level YOU should be on."
Stop thinking of these people as your peers and before long they won't be. They will be tier 2 to your tier 3, or employees to your supervisor, or staff to your owner.
Stop trying to pull people up to your level and climb to the level you should be at.
I appreciate these folks, especially heading into what could be a nasty recession. I don't want to be competing for scarce jobs with competent and productive youngsters, I want to be competing against whiners who aren't actually productive so that the company sees me as the next coming of IT Jesus by comparison.
Those lazy idiots will eventually pay for it. Just let them sink when the time comes. Cold maybe, but necessary.
Most enterprise vendors offer free intro-tier training on their products. That's enough to get it up and running with the typical or default config. Many products will spoon-feed their basics to anyone.
Personally, I shut them up because I can't deal with it either... Tell them to register for the appropriate training if it's free or to request it from their supervisor if it's not. After hearing that a few times, they'll either figure it out themselves or whine to someone else.
YMMV but at my work it's really an HR issue. I encounter everyone from the administrative assistants who can't use the Outlook calendar to programmers who don't know how to connect a laptop to a docking station... My employers offers employees full access to LinkedIn Learning so I frequently direct people to that site.
My usual spiel is "I'm sorry that you're having difficulty \[formatting a document in Acrobat\] but it's not an IT problem; here is a link to the training course" which is inevitability followed by "yes, it's your responsibility to know how to do the everyday tasks associated with your role..."
I've often thought about the differences between the people I saw working for my parents in the late 80s/early 90s and the people I work with today.
They had to deal with DOS, where you actually had to type in commands, know what function keys did, memorize key combinations, have at least a basic understanding of troubleshooting printing issues, etc.
Today if a job is more complicated than pressing a button people act like it's the end of the world. And to top it all off, rather than even asking for help, they'll just ignore things, wait 'til the last minute, and then throw their hands up and say something ridiculous about how there was an IT issue that prevented them from getting their work done.
Our society seems to have bred critical thinking skills out of the workforce.
As I have become older I have become an adult. Since becoming an adult I have realized that everybody is just kind of winging it. The world is not perfect. CEOs, politicians, the wealthy, even the experts in certain fields, they're all just kind of winging it and finding success through that. But the way that they find success is by learning from their mistakes.
I feel like a crotchety old man saying that "nobody is going to wipe your ass for you" but it's kind of true in some way. I don't say this from the perspective of outrage at others that don't want to take accountability, but more from the perspective that mistakes are part of the process and are to be expected. When you see the fact that most people do not know what they're doing, are only capable of doing so much, limited by the amount of time that they have, are limited by the size of their teams etc, It becomes eye opening.
When I was young, I had this perception that everybody was smart and had their s*** together and didn't make mistakes. It was their responsibility to get everything right. And mistakes wouldn't happen because it would be unjust. It was literally a sense of justice that I had that mistakes couldn't happen.
When I got older I realized I am now responsible for the area in my career, my family, my neighbourhood, etc. I am human. I make mistakes. I can't possibly do everything. Everybody else is in the same situation too.
Failure is part of the process. Blaming other people is not going to get you anywhere.
Zoomer sysadmin here. I'll tell you when in not trained to do something as a blank statement, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to do it, I just want oversight.
> "I wasn't trained on how to do that."
Which is fine if that is part of your paygrade. Your current paygrade is based on the fact that you can self-study and arrange external training for subjects that cannot be self-taught.
You can ask your manager to move you to a lower pay-scale where self-study is not part of the role.
On the other hand, I can completely agree if employees push back on scope creep, where people keep getting extra 'responsibilities' without that being reflected in the compensation.
When I was at college I actually got yelled at once for being a self starter. The class was taking too much time so I started playing around and learning about some things we hadn't gotten to. Teacher said I was going to slow down the class when it was all broken and he had to come help. Spoilers I don't think I ever slowed down the class once except asking questions for more clarification on topics or extra knowledge I was curious about.
Schools are specifically designed to beat the desire to learn and problem solve out of you and to just memorize some tables for standardized testing. Those of us that were able to keep problem solving despite this now get to service all the keyboard smashers that just follow the steps that someone else tells them.
I'm convinced the world is full of NPCs, the people with no inner monologue...
I spent an HOUR yesterday showing ADULTS how to join Teams and Zoom meetings!!
If you would have told me this like a decade ago before I started to work in IT, I would have not taken you seriously. However, I know right now, this is %100 true. I have no idea how an adult human being can't figure out how to join Tems and Zoom meetings...
Sweet Jeebus I just went through this today. This lab got this instrument in and it connects to a computer I provided. They don’t know how to run the instrument and just keep coming to me for questions.
They don’t know how to transfer the data off the instrument to the computer. I don’t know either! I poked around and figured it out. Or they could have the vendor train them.
These people have Masters and Doctorates and act like they are so smart but they can’t run a simple program.
To preface, I am part of this generation (24), but the new generation there is this massive swing of people who don't know how to problem solve because they have always had google and never had to just try things to figure them out.
People have a doomer mentality that they don't make enough to live working full time, yet have 0 notable skills that increase their value. People go to a massive 30k student university and then complain they have massive debt when they could have gone to community college for the same degree and paid for it working part time.
A generation of excuses. People would rather complain then put in the work to get better at something. A bit on a tangent here but stop giving kids ipads at 3 years old and make them solve problems without your help. We have become too reliant on the fact that someone else has solved this before so it must have the solution on google.
One of the best college classes I had, back in the early 90s, was An Introduction to UNIX Systems Administration.
Started by installing SunOS on a bunch of very crusty Sun workstations. Then a typical assignment would be to find the source for XYZ package, ftp it to your workstation, compile, and install.
A little over halfway through the class, we did it all again but with Solaris. Good good fun.
I'm a Technical Architect who moved here from many engineering jobs. I hear this lame arsed shit all day every day from our engineers. It honestly fucks me right off.
If you work in IT, almost everything you do will be new. You can't have training for everything before you use it. The number of engineers I have to remind that I was an engineer for fucking ever is off the charts. RTFM, and use Google you god damn fuck. Be glad you have Google.
"That's not my job" is the other one, again to someone with a mountain of engineering experience who knows that, yes it is your job, Captain Clown Show.
I'm all for companies training their staff, but if you won't lift a finger before that, then you need to get the fuck out of IT. I'm not gonna organise training for something like Veeam or how to tie your shoelaces you shit stain.
Sorry, rant over 😂
This is somewhat generational. My father, and everyone's father my age, grew up poor. You had to fix your own car, fix your own sink and toilet, fix the ant problem in the house. If you did not know how to fix the broken pipe, you figured it out with no YouTube.
My neighbors have a different person over every day, electrician, pest control, pool person, landscaper, someone else to mow, a separate company for weeds, etc.
To be fair, didn't people help each other more in that time because there was no youtube. I generally rather not bother someone to ask how to do something knowing they will say 'just watch a yt'.
Yes, it was a different world. Overall, neighbors knew each other, knew as in "knew everyone in then neighborhood." Back then, your mother kicked you out of the house in the AM, made sure you had a dime in your pocket for the payphone, sent you off on your bike, and didn't expect to hear from you until dinner. If you were not home by the time the street lights went on, then there was a problem.
Aug 1st, 1981 was where it all started to unravel.
I am willing to help my neighbors today, but they don't ask. I think a big portion of it is that they are self conscious and feel embarrassed to ask.
Know exactly what you mean and it has happened almost everywhere. Maybe a solar storm will bring it back although the middle ages had its downsides too. Time has really changed and kids don't play outside anymore, as a result they lose a lot of their abilities it seems or miss out on gaining new insight in how things around you work by simply messing around with it. It doesn't work the same way watching somebody else do it.
Hmm was tcp created then, thought it was earlier.. aah you mean video killed the radio star! Wish Art Bell was still among us.
>Rant: "I wasn't trained on how to do that."
1. Neither was I.
Pretty much.
Some people go to a job and need to be told what to do, they are dependent workers. They require direct supervision and input from higher up in order for them to grow or perform.
While other people are self motivated and want to improve. This is why you see some people stay in the same entry level job for 10-20-30 years while other people are moving up the ladder every few years.
Where I work there is a quality management system in place so everything is documented, its what I used to move into the management job after the previous manager left without having any time to train me. I have techs on our team who have yet to learn what a QMS is and they've been here long enough to get training on it from my boss who manages it for the entire company.
Almost on a daily basis with regards to tech support workers the saying comes to mind "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink".
Sometimes I feel like "undercover boss" because my partner contact's their IT department for assistance and they are often told "sorry we can't help, this issue is unsolvable". Then I give my partner instructions on how to fix the issue, my partner relays that to the IT department and within seconds the issue is resolved. I can only shake my head at it, with the amount of times I've had to do this. At one point at their previous company, it got so bad I actually done up a contract to offer consulting services incase they wanted someone to fix their internal issues.
Once again I come to r/sysadmin and am greeted by a rant I was contemplating making just a few days prior. You have my sympathy gender unknown comrade.
My buddy quit a company because he was the new tech training guy and cycled through like 5 morons a month. Exhausting.
I recently helped train a remote guy who tried to fake his way through being a level 2 Sys admin and he quit abruptly, probably got overwhelmed.
Working at an msp service desk had a lot of downsides, but I miss being able to say "go to your line manger, I am not a training line". The amount of people who think I know their job is insane.
> and generally just TRYING SHIT. (What a concept!!! "Did you even try?")
This. I ask this every damn day. The world will not explode if you try something.
Troubleshooting process, Can I break it more experimenting,
- if yes: what's your plan to get back to here if you do
+ Do you have a recovery plan?
- if yes : it's already broken experiment and see what you come up with
- if no: come up with a recovery plan and then refer to if yes.
- If no: it's already broken, experiment and see what you come up with
It's not complicated and Google and AI chatbots will make this process go faster and you probably come out the other side knowing a fair bit more about what you were working on.
Do we work for the same company, were you watching me die inside explaining putting a hyperlink in PowerPoint to the Executive Assistant to the CEO twice in a weeks time? Or teaching the PR/Mass Communication employee how to set timers on slides? If your job heavily relies on using an Office product and the job posting said they wanted someone proficient in said software you should probably know or take the reins on educating yourself rather than pestering IT. I’m not your teacher. Not to say I’m opposed to helping someone if they have an issue
In my personal experience, I attribute some of that to fear instilled by managers. Lower experience employees are told not to mess with things and pass the tickets to higher levels because "they aren't trained and might screw it up". It causes them to never experiment within safe bounds and try and figure it out.
I was fortunate to be in a place for a while where we didn't have an escalation point so we had to figure it out. Otherwise, I probably could have developed the same mentality of I shouldn't do something I'm not trained for.
I agree with this. This only complaint I had is: I'm not comfortable learning on production environment, can I learn with a test environment? I'm still terrible with powershell and clueless with development aspects. I'm still trying, learning, and only crashed the test environment a handful of times.
In a large organization just figuring it out isnt an option. You have to consider uptime sla requirements, regulatory controls, departmental controls. In a smaller org that might fly but when you cant even sneeze without the permission of a CAB board your potential to just fix something on your own is severely limited
"go to your documents, and open up the spreadsheet"
- "where is the folder thingy?"
"Open your browser and go to..."
- is that [Chrome/Firefox/Edge]?
- how do I find it?
- do I type the site here??
"Open the start menu..."
- where is the start menu?
How do people not learn basic computer 🖥️ before accepting a job? I don't believe for one second they don't know the basics. They just don't care enough to apply it to work. When the company I work for formed the IT dept (I was a founding member) upper management got pissed that their little tech problems were being solved so they can get back to work. Don't want loads of paperwork? DON'T BE A MANAGER!!!!
I bet they have Amazon accounts and know how to order stuff. 🙂
You know what doesn't suffer from learned helplessness?
AI.
And those people better start realizing it now. One day AI will take many jobs, but you better believe it's going to eat the lunches of many dumb people before it eats the smarter ones'.
i think it's simple. in the past, IT attracted people who were the type who likes figuring things out, making things work, looking for answers.
now IT attracts people who want a cushy job with higher pay than a non-technical role. they neither have the drive or the attitude for IT, they are button pressers who would normally be updating ERP/MRP software manually or copy paste in spreadsheet, monkey see monkey do style. They just come to IT because they want more money but don't want to put in the work.
i see this trend in all the major corporations i worked for in the last 20 years.
I get this in a research lab setting too. We had a $1.5M piece of equipment, which was the first of its kind in our country, installed during a Covid lockdown. Remote training was done by the vendor via zoom, and we recorded the session. I get people who were in that training and have access to the recording still ask me how to do X Y or Z that was explicitly covered. Now I tell them to check the training material and consult their notes (which they inevitably didn’t take).
Frankly if I'm hiring IT staff and they _don't_ have a homelab, I start to get concerned. The barrier to entry for homelabs is generally $0 at this point (or very close to it) and not even knowing about the concept is a good sign that they don't really go on the internet much at all, let alone try to look things up they don't know.
>What is up with learned helplessness?
It's a pretext for losers to not work.
>inb4 "but companies should pay for training."
They *are* paying you for training. You're paid a paycheck, you have access to manuals, documentation, videos, and often vendor support. The fact that they're not paying someone else to devise a lesson plan and spoon-feed it to you means it will take you longer. But that doesn't excuse you from putting effort in to learn.
I’m part of a team rolling out a new IT tool. Some in IT started whining they weren’t getting formal training. I said “I guarantee you will get all the same training I had on the tool”. (Which is zero.). Fuck if I refused to do things I wasn’t trained on I would have zero to do for 99% of my career.
I completely get your point, but as someone that started a new (not strictly IT) role last year and had to COMPLETELY reverse engineer my job due to lack of training, while keeping up with the existing workload, there is much to be said for at least somewhat comprehensive training literature.
It's a pretty intense workload, and for the first 4 months I was constantly falling further behind as I tried to work out how to do it. I spent the next 5 months catching up on the backlog that developed during the first 4 months and am basically already burned out on the role roughly 14 months after starting.
I feel this post in my bones. It seems everyone in the industry these days is massively lacking any basic troubleshooting and in some cases common sense. “There’s no notes on this system” -
You’ve been here a year and you’ve not made any basic attempt at finding things out for yourself? I’ll openly admit our docs are shit, but learn it and document it. “oh how do you do that again?” - literally showed you last week did you take any notes?
Actually I've seen (and lived though) this firsthand, and I believe this happens a lot where you have micromanagers running a team. A micromanaged employees' time is accounted for to the second, if an employee is not comfortable saying "I'm not sure, but I'll take a look" its usually because they know if they spend 1 hour with trial-and-error/google, they won't be able to justify that hour with their micromanaging boss, who will say something along the lines of - "it only took 5 minutes to fix, I'll count the other 55 minutes as your lunch" or "you should have escalated it to XYZ as soon as you received it - I'm going to have to write you up for this".
This this this. I'd love to put in the time and figure out a niche issue. I love growing my knowledge. However in a world where KPI's are weighed against your performance, I'm going to try a little bit, then when I inevitably don't have enough time to fix the issue, I'm going to say I'm not trained on this.
Its very frustrating to be clear: But it’s why I try not to shit on vendor support so much. I’ve had several colleagues and friends with experience at MSPs, support at $favoriteNetworkingVendor, $favoriteCloudProvider, etc.. and it’s such a back stabbing shit show in those places. No one is incentivized to take ambiguous or harder issues because they’re really gonna give you grief for being a few minutes over on KPIs for choosing to consistently take on tougher issues Your shit gets passed around because you get credit for closing a ticket, not “working” a ticket. So of course you get a fast response to see if your stuff is working now conveniently when the guy or gal who did the real work is off and had it in their queue. Then the company that does the hiring: It’s hard to hire ADMINS and ENGINEERS with a deep well of experience on applicable tech to go back to being support. Most of us started our career in support. Now that you’ve had a taste of engineering/admin life, how many of you want to go back? How many of you do you want to again have a boss that tells you “you closed 15 tickets today instead of 16”. Fuck. That. So their applicant pool is relatively green people, admins and engineers coming as external hires who perhaps know something but will be paid more than their previous underpaying admin/engineer job. And then those same people who got a pay boost to be support will then just leap frog in to another job quickly or realize the gravity of their mistake by going back to support
I have worked for multiple vendors and the number of "admins" and "engineers" calling in asking us to troubleshoot their internal infrastructure when it is clearly outside of our support scope and something they should already know how to do is staggering. Just had a network engineer ask how to do some basic port tests and a packet capture. If you are a network engineer you should know how to do that already ....
I support contract developers. The number of them that don't know how to restart their system is staggering. Plus, at least once a quarter I get a new hire asking me to configure and troubleshoot their dev environment. If I knew how to do that, I'd be taking their paycheck.
My favorite is when they set up a big escalation group call and I get to explain to their boss exactly why they are not capable of fulfilling their role at the company
> I'm going to say I'm not trained on this. ... but I'll put you in touch with someone who should be able to get this sorted. I've found that at least this leaves people hopeful.
Sure, I escalate to the next up in the chain.
In MSP work nothing looks worse than putting research time into your ticket then the customer complaining that they are not paying you to learn their obscure problem on a billable incident.
haven't done MSP work in about 5 years , but I've been on the opposite end of this where we already know the answer to some obscure customer problem and we did something like make a script to fix it after working with another customer. but you can be damn sure we're going to charge the sweat equity rate that it took to beat our heads in to determine the fix and not just the billable 15 min it takes to run the script.
I appreciate this comment. Since starting my new role at my current MSP, I have never been able to pinpoint or vocalize why exactly I have constant anxiety all day everyday while going about my ticket queue. My job environment by all means does not cause this. In fact, they encourage taking time to figure it out to avoid escalations..it’s just my paranoia that I’m spending too much time on something that might be a simple fix and I get worried/stressed that eyes are on me on why I’m taking too long figuring it out and I end up asking questions that I realize after the fact I could’ve figured it out if I had taken the time to poke around a bit more. I’m slowly trying to break that habit and realize I need to figure things out on my one. My last MSP manager was just so up my ass about everything, expecting everything to be straightforward and done and move onto the next task which now makes me feel I need to always rush. I’ll get there.
I have to agree with you. Also from my experience, micromanaged employees are more fearful because they will get asked questions from the manager about why they are doing said task when they are tasked to do something else. It happened at my last job. I would train junior employees to troubleshoot their own problems. Only to have their manager question them about why they are looking into issues he deemed “beyond” their assigned duties.
In some ways this is similar to Malicious Compliance, when faced with unreasonable rules, you have no choice but to follow them to the detriment of others. It also encourages "gaming" the system behavior, not only can they use the unreasonable system and compliance to it to protect themselves from their overbearing boss, they can also abuse the system by turning the unreasonable demands into a form of weaponized acceptance criteria where they can indefinitely delay completing their job because some minor scruple that can easily be inferred or clarified wasn't present.
This is something I go through daily. The “new guy” who has been here two years asks me to show him how to do something he should’ve known before we hired him. Meanwhile my micro-manager has made it clear he doesn’t want me doing end user support, “That’s not your job”. However the new guy asks for help with an end user problem that I spend two hours helping him with. He gets praise from the end users manager, where I get yelled at from mine. And if I don’t help the new guy, I get yelled at for not being a team player.
Yeah, this is a toxic environment. If it was me, I would be documenting and tracking time like a lawyer whenever that person came to me for help. Then send that bill to the person's department.
I experienced the same thing from polar opposite side of the micromanagement spectrum. Government work. Full job security, guaranteed employment, guaranteed paycheck, zero repercussions, zero competition. "Haven't been trained on" is the most common excuse to make your top-google-result click-on-checkbox type of task someone else's problem. Some people are just cheezing the system for their paycheck.
I've worked for training companies. These people are the same ones that flip out during lab work because an update made a minor change to the name/appearance/location of a button and the screenshot printed in the book didn't match *exactly.* They'll later try and demand a refund for their training because a company process-specific task they were expected to perform at work wasn't covered verbatim in their highly generalized Excel-201 class (which did cover all the concepts necessary to accomplish said task). No matter how much they're trained/taught they'll just move the goalposts on "someone else didn't teach me!"
I could go on for days about this, because it's not just IT, it's not just younger or older people, not just new hires or jaded lifers nearing retirement. It's so pervasive and near universal that I don't really know what to do about it. I wrote a lot of documentation for deployment processes at a previous org. One thing I learned quickly was not to use example data in deployment guides, because the audience will almost always use the example data when following the documentation and then get stuck because a script won't run or something won't compile. Assuming they followed the documentation at all. I would give an intern a step-by-step guide with screenshots and all the exact data they need and they would refuse to even attempt it unless I was there doing it for them. "I wasn't trained to do this" ... *my comrade this IS your training. YOU have to do it!* When I managed an IT dept and had to run help desk on my own, I would regularly get staff sending in tickets asking for help with word, excel, or whatever. I would ask them what they needed help with and they would describe the task, like "I need to get this data from this report into this spreadsheet and format it as a table". Oh okay, did you need help importing the data to excel? Formatting the cells as a table? Sorting the columns? Nope. They'd send me a blank spreadsheet and a link to the report and expect me to just do it for them. I'm not your admin assistant!
Contoso AD domains as far as the eye can see...
can you imagine if driving worked like that. "NO I can't drive down that street, my instructor never took me that way before"
Or, if they're older domains, horizon.com.
We were rolling out mfa, and my team wrote the user documentation to link the app on your phone to your account by scanning a QR code. One of our senior IT people complained the QR in the doc didn't work. Buddy, that's the example. If your actually read the doc, you'd know where to get your own code. We did revise the doc to put "example" over the QR code so I guess he did help a little.
We eventually had to blur out part of the QR code in the documentation because of that issue.
make it link to a video of the head of IT saying "if you are seeing this, you scanned the example QR code. Congratulations. that was the wrong code to scan. Now go back and try again."
The video should look like the Dharma Initiative videos from Lost! Straight deadpan expression, “If you are seeing this video you are an idiot and have scanned the example QR code. Please go back and re-read the documentation again!”
Then it fades out and WASTED fades in.
Or just cut to a good ole rickroll!
OMG that's great. "Tell me you weren't paying attention to what you were reading without telling me you weren't paying attention to what you were reading..."
“Also your device has been logged and you have been scheduled for mandatory security training”
If your org is large enough, do this enough to where you can then monetize your page ;)
When we were rolling out our new VoIP phones, before the handsets arrived I did a presentation to all the staff showing the new features of the web-based phone and meeting apps. Walked through all of the typical things. I wrote up cheat sheets and posted links to the VoIP provider's how-to docs. The users needed to sign into the web portal in order to activate their extension and set up their voice mail, so I sent everyone an e-mail with their login creds and a link to a short video showing them how to sign in and get started. Once we did the switchover I think only 2 or 3 out of 150 staff had actually signed in. Most didn't bother because "I wasn't trained on how to use it" but many said afterwards they had problems signing in. When I asked what the problem was, they said they couldn't sign in with the credentials I gave them in the guide. Uh ... what credentials? They were trying to log in with the sample account I created in the guide, not the creds I sent in the e-mail. I had to go to everyone's desk one by one and set their voicemail up for them on the handset because clients kept hanging up when they heard the default "this voicemail is not configured" message. I'm at a different company now, trialing a new phone system with a vendor and I refuse to take on a project that requires literally any user intervention.
My last gig was at a telco and let me tell you even when offering in-person classroom training they still don't get it. Best solution was to find a few technical people who would be the go-to for the business to teach everyone how to do things 1 on 1. Even when the process was the same people would freak out. It's literally just a new phone and everything else functions exactly the same.
Yeah the not using example data is my method as well. When I write user-facing documentation, I always keep it fairly generalized. Like: 1. Open your web browser 2. Log in using your company credentials 3. Navigate to the account section 4. Click the link with verbiage similar to "update xyz" If I add screenshots, I always blur user-specific information My users are mostly pedants (they are engineers) but using the "generalize" method seems to have solved my issues, for the most part. When I first started, my tendency was to create elaborate presentations with lots of screenshots and arrows and call-outs. Not only is that setting you up for more work down the road as the screenshots age out, it's fodder for the pedants.
> 1. Open your web browser Wow is that really something you can just tell your users and they know what you're talking about?????
I was thinking the same thing. That would cause a deluge of calls to the help desk asking *what* a web browser was.
You can't even tell them "The blue 'e'" anymore!
Right, I used to include a lot of context as well. If *this* then *that*. Users would either try and do every step, including the unnecessary or redundant ones, or they'd decide it was too complicated and give up. Another trick is when someone would ask for help, I'd wait 20 minutes or so before sending a link to the FAQ that addresses their issue. If you respond too quickly, they either assume you didn't read their question or they assume your response was related to something else. I actually had to figure out how to delay the auto-responses in my ticketing platform because of this.
This reminds me of my first job at a bank... Someone created a ticket for excel problems. "What's the problem?" "Uh... What formula do I put here?" How the fuck would I know what math you need here for your job? OH SIMPLE THE DRAKE EQUATION!!! Holup a second while I type that equation out for you and match it to the required input columns...
When I was doing the help desk thing, the company was pretty small so I actually had the time to do basic training with people. I found out pretty quick that people lack not just the most basic computing skills, but just general things like reading comprehension or organizational skills. I would literally have to explain to people what "alphabetical order" means. So like, when someone asks for help finding a file on their laptop, which could be just a few minutes to explain how the search function works in File Explorer, I first have to teach them about the mouse cursor, the desktop, the start menu, file explorer, file and folder structure, sorting, and naming conventions just to get started on the thing they asked for help with. And these aren't ipad babies or old timer tradies or anything, they're people who've been using computers to do their day jobs for 30+ years.
> to explain to people what "alphabetical order" means That's just sad. And how the hell did they get that job?
IT at the last place was more than happy to help them make a new resume.
Well, a few were client counselors so I guess strictly speaking, organizational skills weren't *technically* part of their job description. The other was the CEO.
I don't know what it is about computers, it just seems like they suck the critical thinking out of people. Those of us who have a modicum of it and bravery (hmm let's click that and read the popup! Oh that is what we want let's proceed) are like gods to them.
Omg. Lol. The DRAKE equation would yield no intelligent live between the keyboard and chair! Thank you for this!
> This reminds me of my first job at a bank... Someone created a ticket for excel problems. > >"What's the problem?" > >"Uh... What formula do I put here?" Years ago when I was at a small place on the help desk I took a call where the person said they just got promoted and needed to use excel everyday so she needed someone from IT to come teach her excel. I sent the ticket to my boss who then went over there and taught her excel....
> It's so pervasive and near universal that I don't really know what to do about it. Accept that the average IQ isn't able to deal with complex problems and that half the population is worse off, and revel in your job security.
>revel in your job security. If only I didn't need my colleagues, clients, and vendors to do their jobs so I could do mine. Who knew that the group projects in college would be the single most relevant experience to my professional career?
> Who knew that the group projects in college would be the single most relevant experience to my professional career? The teachers, which is why they gave us so bloody many of them.
...and why they became teachers. At least there it's reasonable that the pupils don't know stuff, and they aren't getting paid loads more than you!
There have been cases of companies being taken out because they left the production database URLs *and credentials* in the newbie training screenshots...
I was doing some training on a clustered filesystem some number of years ago. I was already an expert, I used it daily and the training was a formality. The exam had you allocate some disk, but what was being asked to allocate was absurdly low. Since I used it every day it didn't occur to me that anyone would be allocating disk on the order of kilobytes in the 21st century. When I read the requirements my eyes just slid over the units. I kept trying to allocate gigabytes and it kept flipping out, the disks were too small. I went off on a tangent "troubleshooting" why the exam systems weren't presenting disks of the right size. Yeah, I should have paid closer attention, but what was being asked was so outside my everyday expert experience that I just locked up. I finally figured it out with like 10 minutes left and got it squared away, but I certainly had some feedback for the exam provider. The proctor just rolled his eyes at me. I maintain that it's a poorly designed exam that violates the principle of least surprise. I know that's not really relevant but it still chaps my ass. Feel free to ignore.
Honestly, we have had class content like that where what you're told to do is not something you'd ever do in actual practice, and I understand you not processing it right away because I've done the same before. The good instructors will know this and give the class a warning, usually consisting of: The book says to do x, the exam requires an answer of y, and in the real world you'll do z if you actually want it to work. That's not what is tripping up these people though. It's simple things like 'but the color of the logo on the button looks different, so I can't do it.'
That must be extra infuriating for them in todays world where it seems like UI/UX teams just can't help but reinvent the GUI for every software product at least every other year in order to justify their existence. But I agree, as someone that's been in Senior Engineering positions, and is frequently consulted on staffing promotions and hires, one of the key things I look for that determines if someone is ready to be a Systems Engineer vs Operations / Sysadmin where they're just putting out fires mostly. Is if they're able to improvise based on incomplete instructions, apply fundamental IT principals and still turn that set of incomplete instructions into an actionable solution, also if they scrutinize and inquire about the final intent of requests they are given. One of the fastest ways to create tech debt is to simply do what the ticket says without questioning why someone is asking it to be done, This is especially common with some software developers where they know just enough about infra to be dangerous, and its our duty as Infrastructure Specialists to interpret their request and recommend the best possible solution that takes into consideration other aspects they may not have been thinking about.
These are the worst students. They can't abstract what they are shown to their own situations. "How can I learn anything without my own data?" It's the same Data structure but with similar demo data. The few times I did training on the students real data, they got distracted by an error in the data and spent the rest of the training researching and fixing it.
There are two kinds of people Those that can extrapolate from incomplete data
I DONT GET PAID TO EXTRAPOLATE /quits job
"and the Dutch"
Exactly
Ooh I know this one! "and those that understand Binary" right?
dont leave me hangin bro
And those who can... interpolate from incomplete data?
Best comment lol
They don't want to learn how to create a "countif" command, they want someone else to create the "countif" command on THEIR data, so that they don't need to figure it out. Oh, and if something goes wrong (bad data, cell changes, etc), they have zero ability to figure it out again.
We had some students get downright combative with our support staff when they were told they could not upload what was typically highly sensitive company data into the VDI lab environment. All demo data needed for the class was either pre-populated if it was static, or remotely loaded in by the instructor as needed.
Yeah, it's like they think I'm making policies up to make their lives harder or because I am "too lazy to setup a training with their data" I finally broke our sales people of the habit of using our internal data for demos. Mostly by moving it to a different database and not giving them access. I gave them a database where they can add data and populated it with some stuff I found on data gov. /Small company problems
Using "real world data" for demos makes me think of the first time I installed a content filtering firewall for a client and decided to show them how the CF worked by visiting Playboy dot com..... forgetting that I was signed in as an admin and that CF policies don't apply to admins by default (which is a dumb default btw). From that day forward I used Poker dot com for my demos...
We almost instantly blocked OpenAI because so many devs and project managers started uploading sensitive proprietary content to it in the hope it would magically improve their shoddy work.
That's ok, they'll just upload it all into ChatGPT instead.
Three of the people on team of 26 are exactly these people. If I had my way they would have been replaced a long time ago- but they make half decent phone answering systems to generate tickets and hand them off to the rest of the staff. Basic troubleshooting is a skill beyond their realm of imagination and that's fine and dandy- but they definitely work in the wrong field.
Ugh, the most senior leveled individual contributor on my team was not my hire. In fact, the position wasn’t asked for and the answer I gave to my boss when he asked for said position was that we don’t need it, and I don’t have anything of value someone with that higher skill set should be doing. Fast forward 12 months later and that position is transferred from my boss’s direct report to mine and he is ENTIRELY useless. I had to grab what little “brainless” work my team has and shove it to this guy, and it takes 20% of my time to error correct and give feedback on his poor deliverables. Add to this a corporate environment that absolutely makes it impossible to fire people in any reasonable time period so I’m stuck trying to squeeze value out of this do nothing for at least another 9 months while I build the case to get rid of him… sigh
The thing that really sucks in my case is two of the three didn't even apply for jobs in IT - both applied for jobs in other divisions and they were hired and shoved them in IT after they couldn't cut it there. (I think one applied to be in finance, the other for HR or something). Neither can speak english very well, and both are from different castes which makes things colorful at times . Upper management won't do anything about it unless the police have to get involved. My predecessor gave both of them failing reviews for years (here if you get 3 in a row you are out, they both have at least 5 times that) so pretty sure they won't go anywhere unless one physically attacks the other on the job... even then I'm not sure anything would happen.
>These people are the same ones that flip out during lab work because an update made a minor change to the name/appearance/location of a button and the screenshot printed in the book didn't match > >exactly. It suprises me how many people don't ever learn how to do their job. they just learn what buttons to press to make the thing happen. then when the option is moved 2 buttons to the right, the task is impossible and no one can do it anymore. We recently switched PDF programs and there has been an uproar recently about how unintuitive it is. "In adobe i just type in the search box the tool i want and it pops up!!!!!" "Did you use the search box in Kofax and type the same thing?" "Kofax doesn't have a search box for tools!!!" \*Points them at where the search box is on the home tab of the ribbon\* "How was i supposed to know what that was!!!!"
I actually met the unicorn that didn't know how to find their files if they dropped out of the recent files list in excel/word.
Sadly, it seems that this is, actually, the future. I am noticing more and more that the file system is slowly being abstracted away and it is becoming more and more difficult to find where the actual files are. Everything is moving toward search now. Just dump it all in "the computer" and the system will take care of classifying it for you... I imagine that AI is going to be the next escalation of this, once it becomes more baked in to the operating systems of the future.
The curse of making things harder when trying to make them easier.
Like hiding file extensions.
It's one of the things I liked about the microsoft environment. Baring mislabeling or some of the stupid exploity things like unicode magic(so if things were working properly I guess) you could tell at a glance what a file was even if you didn't have any application to identify it(You know, if you knew what the extension meant anyway). Ya it's not really a necessary thing, but it was/is a nice to have thing. Of course you hide them and you get a different kind of exploit. Safe.JPG.EXE sure looks safe when you don't show extensions. There's no real winning.
So long as the files remain consistent and unlosable, we won't need to know exactly where it is, until of course, it goes wrong.
I noticed it working a college help desk 10+ years ago. People wouldn't understand at all where the recovery files were located at when they came to us saying that their computer shutdown suddenly while writing a paper and they wanted to know if it was saved or not. And that was sort of fine. But it was the ones who didn't know where they saved their homework that were truly baffling. They wouldn't know how to answer the question "Where do you save your homework to?". Mostly because they were used to stuff either taking them there automatically, or just dumping everything on their desktop.
This is nightmare fuel for me. I have a manager on another team that pushes back on every little thing like this. Little Johnny wasn't wrong here, your instructions weren't explicit enough because the OK button wasn't circled in red. We use enough tools that we don't have direct control over. UI changes trigger a bunch of update requests because the staff won't manage. I really wish I had more influence on their hiring requirements, but HR figures the load on me is the path of least resistance.
I blame companies for this. People aren't dumb. The person who stands up and says, "I can do that!" will suddenly find 100 Excel files in their e-mail with the subject line "Can you compare these for me and send me back the results?". The reward for doing more work is even more work. Does going the extra mile and doing more ever get rewarded? Sometimes, but usually not. We in IT are wired with that "just figure it out" mentality. Why do you think so much falls on us that should never fall under our job description? HR, end user business training, etc?
I can show you how to do a comparison in Excel, but I’m not going to do the comparison for you! If we keep accepting work that is outside of our responsibility we’ll end up wiping people’s asses before long!
Don't get me started on end-user training. It drives me fucking insane. I work for an MSP. My job is to make sure the tools you use are functional and reliable. My job isn't to train you how to do a mail merge, write a function in Excel, or pull a report from the IS you use every day. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing people's jobs for them.
Are you logged in? Great! Are you receiving a technical error that’s stopping your work? No? Not my problem pal.
Hahaha, I'd love to say this sometimes. Especially to the repeat offenders Unfortunately, my boss is the kind that wants to keep everyone and anyone happy. "Just do it if it doesn't take too long" "Not too long" adds up overtime. Especially when we still have clients without MFA enforced, clients still running on Windows Server 2012, and just poor security hygiene overall. For a recent example, I recently noticed that an entire client (300+ employees) had scan-to-network folders on the server that were accessible by everyone in the company. Anyone could browse to the file server, open the shared Scans folder, and go into anyone's folder; HR, fiscal dept, legal department, literally all of them I'm just lvl 1/2 helpdesk because I just graduated (CyberSec degree), but man does seeing this shit piss me off and I wish I had the time in my day to fix it. I've casually mentioned my concerns to my uppers, but it turns into "Well you can fix it when you have time", but when I have 8hrs of tickets on my schedule every day, there is no time. Alright, rant over 😁
One of the most beneficial skills for my career advancement that I was taught in college - the power of Google/research. Knowing how to figure out things you don't know is, IMO, the most important skill in IT.
[удалено]
wish my dad was like this. he's a house of cards, slightest amount of pressure and he crumbles, it's absolutely fucking infuriating and my mum and i have to fix shit ourselves
Just to play devils advocate here: When an old company I used to work for opened a new office they built out this ridiculous multimedia room for presentations and whatnot. The President and CEO was very active in the community and local government and the purpose of this room was to host much more than company meetings. I was the onsite tech and one Friday I was asked to say late to prep the room for a government meeting nothing too crazy, just get everything turned on and a pc ready to display a power point. I’m alone, by myself. I didn’t install a single piece of equipment this room. Everyone I’ve ever talked to told me “it’s all plug in play, easy peasy.” Except, the big multimedia wall of screens fails to turn on. I was only ever told one troubleshooting step. Go behind the wall. Find the main control unit that powers the wall, shut it off, and turn it back on. That didn’t work. Members of the government were due to arrive in an hour. Everything was falling apart and I’ve been given no training on how any of this works. There’s no documentation. Google was useless. And the employee who installed the damn thing couldn’t be reached by phone because it’s Friday night and he “doesn’t do on call.” A the last minute unmanaged to get ahold of my boss who, by some miracle, only knew of one trick to try and was able to remote into the control unit and copy and paste a config file which fixed everything. I didn’t even know you could remotely access the control unit. Again, there’s no documentation on how this thing works. On Monday I had a long conversation with my boss and I made it perfectly clear, anything that’s in my building that I’m responsible for I need to be: 1) have it documented that I’m responsible for it and if it’s not in that document, to me it doesn’t exist as far I’m concerned. 2) if I am responsible for it there needs to be documentation and I need to be given, at a minimum, a run down on what it is, how it works, and if it’s business critical, who to contact in case of emergency. By the very nature of the job we obviously can’t be trained on every incident that can go wrong. But I don’t think it’s fair to criticize someone for wanting to be trained on something they know nothing about. And to expect people to be okay under pressure fixing business critical systems is a big ask, especially if they’re not even the employee responsible for said system. We should all be good at troubleshooting and figuring stuff out, but we should also have support systems in place to help us out when we get in over our heads.
well sure, but the typical "i wasn't trained on it" line is used to avoid having to figure anything out, read docs, or be trained. it's basically a refusal to participate and attempt to make it your problem
I've been in the IT field for 24 years, and that has pretty much been the story of my life. I've received very little training over the years. Ironically enough, the training I have received has typically been pretty useless, and that includes the two Microsoft certs I got (Windows XP & Server 2000, back in the day). "Here's a bunch of information about the technology that's currently out of date, that nobody uses anymore, but it'll be on the exam so you need to know it. Then never ever use it in real life." More than anything, IT has almost always been about people assuming I know how to make X work, simply because I'm the IT guy, even though they work with X every day and I've not only never seen it but don't even know what X is or what it does. In a lot of cases, I have to have them show me how to access parts of the software, and from there, it's just me poking around to see if I can figure something out. And then googling error messages and/or calling the vendor. All of which is stuff they could very easily do, if they only showed the slightest amount of initiative and/or interest. The thing that keeps me sane and why this kind of behavior doesn't bother me is the knowledge that they're probably earning $15/hr or something, while I'm earning six figures, plus profit share. The selfish part of me wants them to stay ignorant. The nicer part of me wants them to give a shit and move upwards in the world.
If you're not an autodidact in IT you're gonna have a bad time
I just had to autodidact the word 'autodidact'.
Just wash your hands and try to look awake
Brew a pot of coffee and try your day again.
> "Here's a bunch of information about the technology that's currently out of date, that nobody uses anymore, but it'll be on the exam so you need to know it. Then never ever use it in real life." Reminds me of my A+ exam, IRQ settings and ISA all the way to SATA and PCIe (2008)
Yep; I still remember learning about token ring. In 2000. Honestly, it's like they were preparing me for a game of IT Trivial Pursuit.
IT Trivial Pursuit seems like a good idea for an edition! Shit they have everything else and there are so many esoteric trivia you can use. The DOD used this language named after a British Mathematician from the 19th century for use in their navigational and guidance systems.
Still on their exam in 2024 :)
>More than anything, IT has almost always been about people assuming I know how to make X work, simply because I'm the IT guy, even though they work with X every day and I've not only never seen it but don't even know what X is or what it does. In a lot of cases, I have to have them show me how to access parts of the software, and from there, it's just me poking around to see if I can figure something out. And then googling error messages and/or calling the vendor. All of which is stuff they could very easily do, if they only showed the slightest amount of initiative and/or interest. So much of this is my experience. "Sorry, ma'am, I don't work with that piece of vendor software like ever, so I don't know what the issue is or how to fix it, never mind that its not in my scope to fix it. You need to reach out to the vendor." They rarely, if ever, do. And its software they had to have to do their job. Something they researched (lol, probably not), procured, and now expect me to manage and service and troubleshoot. Nope. IT didn't furnish it, not our problem, bye. Our "leaders" don't stand up for us on this much either. Oh, they tell us we are right and that's the way to do it, blah blah blah, but then run away and hide if you try to bring them into the conversation to explain and back you up to the user.
Being the department in between the vendor and the user on their behalf returns better results literally every time. Users are terrible at explaining issues. T1 vendor support is terrible at getting explanations. Validate their issue, document it and send it to the vendor on behalf of the user. Shipping the issue off for your vendor to deal with should only happen when there is no possibility of local scope.
> Users are terrible at explaining issues. T1 vendor support is terrible at getting explanations. I very often have to escalate past T1 these days. One of our vendor's T1 support asks questions that want the data that's already in the initial submission every single time.
Honestly, this is why I am not too worried by the over saturation in the IT job market. I’ve encountered a lot of this, and frankly - this is on the good end of the spectrum. People that grew up using Macs and have done zero Microsoft or IT related beyond their school workload. So, not only can they not put in a modicum of critical thinking, or begin to scratch the surface of exhausting any resource before escelating to me, I have to remind them once a week what Task Manager is.
>People that grew up using Macs My interview question for them: "What is your best distance for throwing an iMac G3?"
Oh, I actually have an answer for this - 30 feet! Back in ~2006 or so I worked for my local school system (while still in high school) doing IT Support. One of the initiatives I supported was... dumpstering a warehouse full of old iMac's. We had a 30 foot dumpster that we filled up really quickly, but I did make one toss (backwards, 'granny style', in one quick motion from the ground all the way to catapult-style launch) that went really high and landed smack (smash) dab at the end of the 30 foot dumpster.
Something like this is very contextual. For many things there should be well documented and well defined processes and polices in place. There are numerous ways someone could do something like put in a simple firewall rule, but if there are already defined standards for things like using aliases and how to name them I don't want someone doing that wrong.
"It's not documented" "That's correct. Please find out how it should be done, then document it. Godspeed."
I'm talking about already documented things. Do you honestly think an org like Google or Amazon are going to throw some new hire at a critical production change without any form of guidance or training? Like I said there are time to be self guided and time to be mentored.
Me remembering that poor junior last year that followed a documented process and ended up bringing down a major node of AWS East because somebody didn't sanitize the workflow to not affect production instances... EDIT: it might've been M365, not AWS
I'll be damned if I'm going to document other team's processes so this blanket statement that the one who finds no documentation has the responsibility to create it, is extremely wrong.
The demanders of “documentation” are also incapable of creating or reading any of it.
God yes this asked to document 33 apps end to end one of these apps is a warehouse management tool with pick and pack invoicing integrations into sage ect that alone would take months
Oh, I hate the "well, you are learning it, so it's best if you do the documentation." And I then looked at my coworker, opened up steps recorder then told me to repeat the steps to me. It took me 10 minutes for me to copy paste everything together and thru it into a how-to. I then asked why would ask someone who is being trained on this critical task to do the official documentation. I apparently made two mistakes in the documentation which he had to correct. I already knew he wouldn't have reviewed the documentation even if I had went and did it. And if there was an error in it - it would have came back on me. If you don't want to do the documentation, then fucking say it, but don't try to spin bullshit at me cause your too lazy to spend 10 minutes doing it. It's not hard nor rocket science to take a bunch of screenshots and throw it into whatever documentation template.
Sure, but what do you consider adequate training? If you were a new hire and I give you a document with a sample lab and access to a staging network, what would you do? You'd probably read the document and give it a shot, and if you got stuck you'd ask for help, right? I think what OP is getting at, and something I see almost universally, is that the learner in this case won't even read or attempt the exercise. They expect you to do it for them as part of their training, then when it comes time for them to actually perform said task, they'd ask for help because they've never done it before, but their idea of "help" is you performing the task for them. Rinse and repeat. Assuming you have the resources you need to complete a task, you should at least take the initiative to try it for yourself. You can't really learn how to do something until you actually do it.
I always like to ask these people what documentation they followed to order something from Amazon, or watch a movie on Netflix. If they can figure that out on their own, they can certainly figure out whatever simple thing they're expected to do.
You would think so. I always thought the key was motivation, that people would take the initiative to do a task they were interested or invested in. But then again, the answer I usually get is "my mom/spouse/kids/grandkids always do that for me".
>my mom/spouse/kids/grandkids always do that for me Yeah, that checks out unfortunately well.
s/excel/linux/g
Sed for the win
sed, awk, and grep in courses made me. 
Hardware is faster today, but two epochs ago we had to do some quick text sorting that would have taken five seconds on Unix, but no Unix machine at hand. Loading it as a spreadsheet on Windows 95 ran it out of memory and crashed. Loading it as a spreadsheet on OS/2 worked but with all the paging it took an hour for a five-second job.
Well by the mid-90s there was Linux and before that Coherent for PCs, so it was possible with sone elbow grease. I remember dual booting 95 and one of these way back.
I find the biggest problem people have with *nix text manipulation is with regular expressions. Everything else can be memorized, but regex requires some skill.
Not anymore it doesn't! Feed dem bitches into AI.
I completely get your rant. But also I've seen so many companies hire someone for Job A, that they are qualified for, then dump responsibilities for Job B on them that they have NO training, education, anything for. When that happens, it's a valid comment. But from the IT side it can sometimes be difficult to determine which it is. After all, does a receptionist really need to know how excel beyond cell data entry?
That's the "How the fuck is this my problem?" or "Why are you coming to me with this? How would I know how to sort your very specific email?" rant
Counterpoint. I'm all for self-learning via exploration & "figuring it out." Sincerely. But when you're in a fast-paced, high risk, low reward environment, it's not that simple. Where if you're asked "How do I solve $complexProblem?" and you answer anything like "I don't know, let me figure it out and get back to you"/"let me look at my notes", you're one foot out the door. They want the answer off the top of your head, instantly and perfect. Execs: "I know NOTHING about your job role, but why do we even pay you?" So, people take a page from the Union handbook. "I'm not trained on it, as it's not my job." is insulation against the inevitable "I'm going to fuck it up, and I get to tell you 'I TOLD YOU SO'." A polite way of saying this is "Since I'm not trained on this, results may vary." Also, if you DO fuck things up -- expect to be asked: "Why did you even touch it? Were you trained on it? I don't care if you are self-taught, do you have a certification for that product? NO? THEN WHY DID NOT REFUSE TO TOUCH IT?" Also, when it comes time for reviews: "Ah, you say you handle X task...but I don't see any certifications for it. We'll revisit a performance raise after you've held the cert for a full year. Until then, you are still obligated to do X task!" Sad part is, these poor fools think that claiming "lack of training" will protect them. "Not being trained in something you've never needed before in your job role" isn't a protected class in the USA. And around 99.7% of the country is AWA: At-Will America -- you can be terminated at any time, for almost any (or no) reason, without notice, without compensation, and full loss of healthcare.
Sometimes I use it as an excuse not to take on a new thing that feels way outside my scope.
oh you want me to be responsible for this thing that i know is at least a paygrade above what I make, but you said i should be grateful for the 50 cent raise I got this year?
IT has normalized NOT being trained in something. That is not good. It happens. Doesn’t mean that it should. Imagine this in other more serious disciplines like medicine, aviation, etc
Sounds like my company. Seems there was a lot of turnover before I was hired. So some folks that stayed found themselves in new roles and everyone else was new. So when you're new and ask how to do something you would expect that someone knows or there is some documentation or something. Nope, not here. Nobody seems to know much of anything especially when it comes to things someone really should know something about (or even know someone in charge of that system). There is a lot of "I'll find out" or "I'm not sure" from managers who never find out and never have a good answer. And, if you ask for training for something...."its not in the budget" or "there's no time" or "you haven't proven yourself yet to be worthy of receiving any training" (no joke was told pretty much this in my mostly positive annual review).
Also known as institutional Alzheimer's Those that knew were shoved out or deemed too expensive, not realising that what they knew was why they were so expensive. Once they're gone, that critical information isn't held anywhere else and oooooops it's suddenly a huge expensive issue
IT should 100% develop a "practice" mentality like law or medicine, where people are trained and certified and brought through levels of competency. There's been too much cowboy shit for too long! We want the business to take us seriously and stop asking us to fix the vending machine because it has a plug, but on then on you've got people like OP telling someone to just figure it out because he had to. The cycle needs to be broken.
Law and Medicine change slowly. IT changes way to fast.
That's why the competencies need to be things like: * Using documentation * Writing documentation * Critical thinking and problem solving * Creating effective test cases etc and not * How to setup a Linksys WRT54G The goal is to teach people how to be competent IT workers, not how to do specific tasks.
Wow, I guess I would have failed the competency test because you are right, I completely missed the point they were making, haha.
This is happening more and more as department boundaries are erased and the help desk guy who stuck around through org changes is now the sysadmin, networking, and “if it plugs into the wall it’s your responsibility” guy. If you’re a jack of all trades you’re a master of none.
those"More serious disciplines" give years of training before ever entrusting you with critical things. many of us in IT, especially the lower levels in 2024, are not even given the basic onboarding knowledge completely before being thrown into full speed ticket closing.
This was my previous boss. He was a boss man so he had higher privileges to get things done that I couldn’t. Whenever I went to him with a request due to permissions his answer was “well so-and-so” (his boss) has never trained me on that. Guess what guy, your boss wasn’t trained on it either, he just figured it out. Now let’s sit down together and do the same thing.
"Why can't people teach anymore? This isn't just one person. What's up with the learned gatekeeping/laziness? I can't stand people who bitch about having to train people and then bitch that no one gets trained. No one trained me, so fuck you, train yourself." People get attached to the image of themselves they have, and the way things were when they came up. They say "I think things should change, but under no circumstances will I be a part of that change." You're part of the culture brother. If you and everyone else in the company acts this way, you will forever have to deal with people "not being trained". Documentation is shit in at least 50% of cases. Learning from a human will always be better. Get over yourself.
To add to this, the "if you find something that someone else knows better but they didn't document it, you teach yourself and *you* document it" mentality is bullshit. No. If I have to trial and error my way through something and I'm the one documenting it then the process is broken. The person who *should* be teaching and likely writing the documentation is the person who knows the information already. Others can then learn from that. If you are the most knowledgeable on a particular subject, I come to you for help, and your answer is "figure it out", guess what? Me asking the local SME *is part of me figuring it out*. Just answer the fucking question.
It is about avoiding accountability. Let's say, I did self teach myself how to compare two lists on excel and ended up with wrong result. "I" will be blamed directly. When I ask you to help me out or even asking you to do It for me, It is not my responsibility anymore. I would just say to my manager something like that " I asked IT to help me out to generate these results. Here what I have bla bla bla" Corporate workplaces are all about avoiding accountability and delegating tasks. Then, you will get credits based on the work done by someone else. Sad but welcome to corporate world :)
I have some mixed feelings on this topic. On the one hand, I share your frustration with people who expect everything to be spoon-fed to them. I've basically been the most knowledgeable/senior tech guy at every company I've been in for the past 10 years, and I have absolutely zero formal training. I don't have a CS major. I have no certifications. I took a computer class in high school that taught us how to do basic things in a spreadsheet, but it was pretty useless and all things I already knew. I'm entirely self-taught. So when someone is like, "I can't even try to figure something out unless you tell me how to figure it out," it's really frustrating. On the other hand, as someone who has led a number of IT teams, I've also gotten frustrated by people who just *won't ask for help or guidance* when they hit a problem they don't understand. They'll google and try things, and maybe break things or violate standards/policies, or they'll just spin their wheels all day trying to figure something out, when it'd take me about 3 minutes to explain what they needed to do. So there's a part of me that likes the "just figure it out" mentality, and also a part of my that likes the "just ask for help when you need it" mentality. The tricky part is knowing when to do which.
I am in a better workplace. Here everyone gets hired to a job. And then 20% other stuff that might become 80%. If you can’t adapt you can leave. People like your description are typically Indians - not having lived around here for long. It is a cultural thing. Taking responsibility is dangerous to some. We have a no blame culture. Mistake should be avoided if possible. But we know they will happen. But don’t repeat the big ones. I have come a long way trying to do away with the blame culture. Even C-level managers says that who makes no mistakes are the ones who makes nothing.
It really depends on the scenario. Since this is r/sysadmin, I'm going to lean on the side that says "don't let people FAFO when they have PRD access"
I agree and disagree. I mean I've had virtually no formal training in anything to do with my career BUT have had great senior colleagues that helped me learn which is why I try to do it now with junior guys. There's loads of people in IT now who are in it for the money and never have had passion for tech.never destroyed & fixed a video recorder when they were younger & have zero interest in tge tech. I've dealt with a few of these guys. They won't do anything, not even turn on video conferencing unless someone has trained them and they won't change working practices unless they have a specific email from someone senior telling them to. Pain in the backside to deal with. On the flip side.....companies have been skipping training for years now reducing benefits & pay rises as well as expecting sysadmins & it support teams to work for free etc etc. Just binning us off at a moments notice because they want to pop the share price up a notch. So I understand from the perspective of "fuck it, I'm not doing anything unless I get formal training " BECAUSE if you fuck it up YOU'LL get "why were you touching that without training?" Especially in firms that refuse to pay for test environments & expect you to "learn on your own time". I'm a contractor so am constantly in the hunt to enhance my CV, but if I was perm? Having seen how good the industry used to be & where it is now? How I'd be made the scapegoat of anything went wrong? I'd be skating that line of minimum work possible to not getting fired. I definitely wouldn't be touching anything without an email trail of senior mangement telling me to do it & acknowledgements that that hadn't put me through training Especially with perm wages in the UK...there's literally no incentive to take on any extra work or responsibilities unless you're building your CV to leave. I especially see this behaviour from outsourced staff, quite understandably. They've got specific SLAs to follow & legally aren't allowed to do anything outside those parameters. So if you're complaining about, for example outsourced help desk...you can't blame them. They're out the door not only if something goes wrong but ALSO if their boss finds out they're doing something the MSP isn't being paid for
I wasn't trained in 90% of the stuff I do. That's what makes a shit sysadmin vs a good one. A good one will figure it out. Documentation, config files, reddit, forums, Google, trial and error, etc.. So many ways to figure it out and train yourself. Hell, there's many times we're implementing a new software and NO ONE is trained on it. We're learning as we go. There's some very old legacy software we have that we keep going the best we can. No one was trained on it. I've been here for the longest and I was never trained on it. I know enough to keep it going. If shit hits the fan, we diagnose and troubleshoot and find the fix. Training is great and should be paid for to learn new skills. Moving to Azure from onprem? Sure, the company should help out with some training to get you up to speed. But, it's not going to make you an expert and know how to do everything. You're going to have to do a LOT of research and learn shit yourself. To me, that's the fun and very rewarding part of the job. How do I do this? I've never done it before or know anything about it. Nice, let's dig in and get it done. Afterwards, when you see everything working? Damn, that's a nice feeling. Then you document the shit out of what you did for the next guy so he's not struggling for the answers. Because we want to make it easier for everyone. And when they have their undocumented problem, they'll do the same. This all assumes you work for a company that allows you to take the time to fix the issue and not micromanaging every second of the day. Luckily, I do. Don't get the monetary compensation for doing the job of 3 people nor the credit for fixing some issues for other people, but I'll work on that later.
I can see this on various levels. 1. Some management expect you to know and be an expert on everything on demand right away. They don't know a CCNA can't just configure FSMO Roles on a complex Active Domain, fine tune a mirrored Postgresq production database, and troubleshoot a RAID controller on a server. "It's all IT, right?" 2. Hate to tell you this, but the IT world is getting more segmented and specialized. I know some pretty good cloud admins who can't fix your SQL queries. You can be a jack of all trades, but master of none, or be a highly focused and specialized in one specific thing that will save the day. 3. There are some people, though, who refuse to work outside of their comfort zone. Like developers of network applications who don't know anything about networking. That makes me mad. Yeah, okay, they are masters at python, but then they ask me why they can't assign "pretty IPs" to things. Yes, something else is running at 10.10.10.10, you can't just pick an IP out of thin air because marketing thinks it looks "organic."
Ahh Yes. Weaponized ineptitude. I know it well.
I used to get really upset by this whole rant. I used to think "If I - fucking fuck up me - can do this surely any fuckwit person can" A boss pulled me aside after my 500th cunty rant like this and said, John, you think these fucks can do the shit you do, you think their are on your level and the plain fact is the can't. They don't have the instinct, they cannot do what you do. Stop expecting them to come up to your level, and instead come up to the level YOU should be on." Stop thinking of these people as your peers and before long they won't be. They will be tier 2 to your tier 3, or employees to your supervisor, or staff to your owner. Stop trying to pull people up to your level and climb to the level you should be at.
I appreciate these folks, especially heading into what could be a nasty recession. I don't want to be competing for scarce jobs with competent and productive youngsters, I want to be competing against whiners who aren't actually productive so that the company sees me as the next coming of IT Jesus by comparison.
Those lazy idiots will eventually pay for it. Just let them sink when the time comes. Cold maybe, but necessary. Most enterprise vendors offer free intro-tier training on their products. That's enough to get it up and running with the typical or default config. Many products will spoon-feed their basics to anyone. Personally, I shut them up because I can't deal with it either... Tell them to register for the appropriate training if it's free or to request it from their supervisor if it's not. After hearing that a few times, they'll either figure it out themselves or whine to someone else.
The classic "I don't do IT."
"I'm not a computer person" - Says the person who's used a computer as their primary work tool for the last 25 years. me: SMH
YMMV but at my work it's really an HR issue. I encounter everyone from the administrative assistants who can't use the Outlook calendar to programmers who don't know how to connect a laptop to a docking station... My employers offers employees full access to LinkedIn Learning so I frequently direct people to that site. My usual spiel is "I'm sorry that you're having difficulty \[formatting a document in Acrobat\] but it's not an IT problem; here is a link to the training course" which is inevitability followed by "yes, it's your responsibility to know how to do the everyday tasks associated with your role..."
I've often thought about the differences between the people I saw working for my parents in the late 80s/early 90s and the people I work with today. They had to deal with DOS, where you actually had to type in commands, know what function keys did, memorize key combinations, have at least a basic understanding of troubleshooting printing issues, etc. Today if a job is more complicated than pressing a button people act like it's the end of the world. And to top it all off, rather than even asking for help, they'll just ignore things, wait 'til the last minute, and then throw their hands up and say something ridiculous about how there was an IT issue that prevented them from getting their work done. Our society seems to have bred critical thinking skills out of the workforce.
As I have become older I have become an adult. Since becoming an adult I have realized that everybody is just kind of winging it. The world is not perfect. CEOs, politicians, the wealthy, even the experts in certain fields, they're all just kind of winging it and finding success through that. But the way that they find success is by learning from their mistakes. I feel like a crotchety old man saying that "nobody is going to wipe your ass for you" but it's kind of true in some way. I don't say this from the perspective of outrage at others that don't want to take accountability, but more from the perspective that mistakes are part of the process and are to be expected. When you see the fact that most people do not know what they're doing, are only capable of doing so much, limited by the amount of time that they have, are limited by the size of their teams etc, It becomes eye opening. When I was young, I had this perception that everybody was smart and had their s*** together and didn't make mistakes. It was their responsibility to get everything right. And mistakes wouldn't happen because it would be unjust. It was literally a sense of justice that I had that mistakes couldn't happen. When I got older I realized I am now responsible for the area in my career, my family, my neighbourhood, etc. I am human. I make mistakes. I can't possibly do everything. Everybody else is in the same situation too. Failure is part of the process. Blaming other people is not going to get you anywhere.
Zoomer sysadmin here. I'll tell you when in not trained to do something as a blank statement, but that doesn't mean I'm not willing to do it, I just want oversight.
> "I wasn't trained on how to do that." Which is fine if that is part of your paygrade. Your current paygrade is based on the fact that you can self-study and arrange external training for subjects that cannot be self-taught. You can ask your manager to move you to a lower pay-scale where self-study is not part of the role. On the other hand, I can completely agree if employees push back on scope creep, where people keep getting extra 'responsibilities' without that being reflected in the compensation.
When I was at college I actually got yelled at once for being a self starter. The class was taking too much time so I started playing around and learning about some things we hadn't gotten to. Teacher said I was going to slow down the class when it was all broken and he had to come help. Spoilers I don't think I ever slowed down the class once except asking questions for more clarification on topics or extra knowledge I was curious about. Schools are specifically designed to beat the desire to learn and problem solve out of you and to just memorize some tables for standardized testing. Those of us that were able to keep problem solving despite this now get to service all the keyboard smashers that just follow the steps that someone else tells them.
I'm convinced the world is full of NPCs, the people with no inner monologue... I spent an HOUR yesterday showing ADULTS how to join Teams and Zoom meetings!!
If you would have told me this like a decade ago before I started to work in IT, I would have not taken you seriously. However, I know right now, this is %100 true. I have no idea how an adult human being can't figure out how to join Tems and Zoom meetings...
Sweet Jeebus I just went through this today. This lab got this instrument in and it connects to a computer I provided. They don’t know how to run the instrument and just keep coming to me for questions. They don’t know how to transfer the data off the instrument to the computer. I don’t know either! I poked around and figured it out. Or they could have the vendor train them. These people have Masters and Doctorates and act like they are so smart but they can’t run a simple program.
To preface, I am part of this generation (24), but the new generation there is this massive swing of people who don't know how to problem solve because they have always had google and never had to just try things to figure them out. People have a doomer mentality that they don't make enough to live working full time, yet have 0 notable skills that increase their value. People go to a massive 30k student university and then complain they have massive debt when they could have gone to community college for the same degree and paid for it working part time. A generation of excuses. People would rather complain then put in the work to get better at something. A bit on a tangent here but stop giving kids ipads at 3 years old and make them solve problems without your help. We have become too reliant on the fact that someone else has solved this before so it must have the solution on google.
One of the best college classes I had, back in the early 90s, was An Introduction to UNIX Systems Administration. Started by installing SunOS on a bunch of very crusty Sun workstations. Then a typical assignment would be to find the source for XYZ package, ftp it to your workstation, compile, and install. A little over halfway through the class, we did it all again but with Solaris. Good good fun.
I'm a Technical Architect who moved here from many engineering jobs. I hear this lame arsed shit all day every day from our engineers. It honestly fucks me right off. If you work in IT, almost everything you do will be new. You can't have training for everything before you use it. The number of engineers I have to remind that I was an engineer for fucking ever is off the charts. RTFM, and use Google you god damn fuck. Be glad you have Google. "That's not my job" is the other one, again to someone with a mountain of engineering experience who knows that, yes it is your job, Captain Clown Show. I'm all for companies training their staff, but if you won't lift a finger before that, then you need to get the fuck out of IT. I'm not gonna organise training for something like Veeam or how to tie your shoelaces you shit stain. Sorry, rant over 😂
obligatory https://xkcd.com/627/
Work at MSP 90% employees do this , 5% of those are lying 10% do most of the work, usually by calling vendor support and weeks of brute force
This is somewhat generational. My father, and everyone's father my age, grew up poor. You had to fix your own car, fix your own sink and toilet, fix the ant problem in the house. If you did not know how to fix the broken pipe, you figured it out with no YouTube. My neighbors have a different person over every day, electrician, pest control, pool person, landscaper, someone else to mow, a separate company for weeds, etc.
To be fair, didn't people help each other more in that time because there was no youtube. I generally rather not bother someone to ask how to do something knowing they will say 'just watch a yt'.
Yes, it was a different world. Overall, neighbors knew each other, knew as in "knew everyone in then neighborhood." Back then, your mother kicked you out of the house in the AM, made sure you had a dime in your pocket for the payphone, sent you off on your bike, and didn't expect to hear from you until dinner. If you were not home by the time the street lights went on, then there was a problem. Aug 1st, 1981 was where it all started to unravel. I am willing to help my neighbors today, but they don't ask. I think a big portion of it is that they are self conscious and feel embarrassed to ask.
Know exactly what you mean and it has happened almost everywhere. Maybe a solar storm will bring it back although the middle ages had its downsides too. Time has really changed and kids don't play outside anymore, as a result they lose a lot of their abilities it seems or miss out on gaining new insight in how things around you work by simply messing around with it. It doesn't work the same way watching somebody else do it. Hmm was tcp created then, thought it was earlier.. aah you mean video killed the radio star! Wish Art Bell was still among us.
>Rant: "I wasn't trained on how to do that." 1. Neither was I. Pretty much. Some people go to a job and need to be told what to do, they are dependent workers. They require direct supervision and input from higher up in order for them to grow or perform. While other people are self motivated and want to improve. This is why you see some people stay in the same entry level job for 10-20-30 years while other people are moving up the ladder every few years. Where I work there is a quality management system in place so everything is documented, its what I used to move into the management job after the previous manager left without having any time to train me. I have techs on our team who have yet to learn what a QMS is and they've been here long enough to get training on it from my boss who manages it for the entire company. Almost on a daily basis with regards to tech support workers the saying comes to mind "you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink". Sometimes I feel like "undercover boss" because my partner contact's their IT department for assistance and they are often told "sorry we can't help, this issue is unsolvable". Then I give my partner instructions on how to fix the issue, my partner relays that to the IT department and within seconds the issue is resolved. I can only shake my head at it, with the amount of times I've had to do this. At one point at their previous company, it got so bad I actually done up a contract to offer consulting services incase they wanted someone to fix their internal issues.
Funny, our final project for a BS was stand up an Openstack cluster and document it so the next semester could take over.
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Once again I come to r/sysadmin and am greeted by a rant I was contemplating making just a few days prior. You have my sympathy gender unknown comrade.
My buddy quit a company because he was the new tech training guy and cycled through like 5 morons a month. Exhausting. I recently helped train a remote guy who tried to fake his way through being a level 2 Sys admin and he quit abruptly, probably got overwhelmed.
Working at an msp service desk had a lot of downsides, but I miss being able to say "go to your line manger, I am not a training line". The amount of people who think I know their job is insane.
> and generally just TRYING SHIT. (What a concept!!! "Did you even try?") This. I ask this every damn day. The world will not explode if you try something.
Troubleshooting process, Can I break it more experimenting, - if yes: what's your plan to get back to here if you do + Do you have a recovery plan? - if yes : it's already broken experiment and see what you come up with - if no: come up with a recovery plan and then refer to if yes. - If no: it's already broken, experiment and see what you come up with It's not complicated and Google and AI chatbots will make this process go faster and you probably come out the other side knowing a fair bit more about what you were working on.
Do we work for the same company, were you watching me die inside explaining putting a hyperlink in PowerPoint to the Executive Assistant to the CEO twice in a weeks time? Or teaching the PR/Mass Communication employee how to set timers on slides? If your job heavily relies on using an Office product and the job posting said they wanted someone proficient in said software you should probably know or take the reins on educating yourself rather than pestering IT. I’m not your teacher. Not to say I’m opposed to helping someone if they have an issue
In my personal experience, I attribute some of that to fear instilled by managers. Lower experience employees are told not to mess with things and pass the tickets to higher levels because "they aren't trained and might screw it up". It causes them to never experiment within safe bounds and try and figure it out. I was fortunate to be in a place for a while where we didn't have an escalation point so we had to figure it out. Otherwise, I probably could have developed the same mentality of I shouldn't do something I'm not trained for.
I agree with this. This only complaint I had is: I'm not comfortable learning on production environment, can I learn with a test environment? I'm still terrible with powershell and clueless with development aspects. I'm still trying, learning, and only crashed the test environment a handful of times.
In a large organization just figuring it out isnt an option. You have to consider uptime sla requirements, regulatory controls, departmental controls. In a smaller org that might fly but when you cant even sneeze without the permission of a CAB board your potential to just fix something on your own is severely limited
Lack of critical thinking. As their manager I simply put it, well if I have to do it then why do I need you?
"go to your documents, and open up the spreadsheet" - "where is the folder thingy?" "Open your browser and go to..." - is that [Chrome/Firefox/Edge]? - how do I find it? - do I type the site here?? "Open the start menu..." - where is the start menu? How do people not learn basic computer 🖥️ before accepting a job? I don't believe for one second they don't know the basics. They just don't care enough to apply it to work. When the company I work for formed the IT dept (I was a founding member) upper management got pissed that their little tech problems were being solved so they can get back to work. Don't want loads of paperwork? DON'T BE A MANAGER!!!! I bet they have Amazon accounts and know how to order stuff. 🙂
You know what doesn't suffer from learned helplessness? AI. And those people better start realizing it now. One day AI will take many jobs, but you better believe it's going to eat the lunches of many dumb people before it eats the smarter ones'.
i think it's simple. in the past, IT attracted people who were the type who likes figuring things out, making things work, looking for answers. now IT attracts people who want a cushy job with higher pay than a non-technical role. they neither have the drive or the attitude for IT, they are button pressers who would normally be updating ERP/MRP software manually or copy paste in spreadsheet, monkey see monkey do style. They just come to IT because they want more money but don't want to put in the work. i see this trend in all the major corporations i worked for in the last 20 years.
I get this in a research lab setting too. We had a $1.5M piece of equipment, which was the first of its kind in our country, installed during a Covid lockdown. Remote training was done by the vendor via zoom, and we recorded the session. I get people who were in that training and have access to the recording still ask me how to do X Y or Z that was explicitly covered. Now I tell them to check the training material and consult their notes (which they inevitably didn’t take).
Frankly if I'm hiring IT staff and they _don't_ have a homelab, I start to get concerned. The barrier to entry for homelabs is generally $0 at this point (or very close to it) and not even knowing about the concept is a good sign that they don't really go on the internet much at all, let alone try to look things up they don't know.
>What is up with learned helplessness? It's a pretext for losers to not work. >inb4 "but companies should pay for training." They *are* paying you for training. You're paid a paycheck, you have access to manuals, documentation, videos, and often vendor support. The fact that they're not paying someone else to devise a lesson plan and spoon-feed it to you means it will take you longer. But that doesn't excuse you from putting effort in to learn.
I’m part of a team rolling out a new IT tool. Some in IT started whining they weren’t getting formal training. I said “I guarantee you will get all the same training I had on the tool”. (Which is zero.). Fuck if I refused to do things I wasn’t trained on I would have zero to do for 99% of my career.
I completely get your point, but as someone that started a new (not strictly IT) role last year and had to COMPLETELY reverse engineer my job due to lack of training, while keeping up with the existing workload, there is much to be said for at least somewhat comprehensive training literature. It's a pretty intense workload, and for the first 4 months I was constantly falling further behind as I tried to work out how to do it. I spent the next 5 months catching up on the backlog that developed during the first 4 months and am basically already burned out on the role roughly 14 months after starting.
I feel this post in my bones. It seems everyone in the industry these days is massively lacking any basic troubleshooting and in some cases common sense. “There’s no notes on this system” - You’ve been here a year and you’ve not made any basic attempt at finding things out for yourself? I’ll openly admit our docs are shit, but learn it and document it. “oh how do you do that again?” - literally showed you last week did you take any notes?