I work in IT. I usually call my job “IT support” but I’m also technically the system admin, and network admin.
Today, I had someone ask me to delete a calendar for them in Outlook. It wasn’t a shared or special calendar, it was literally just a calendar in their normal outlook.
Bear in mind, they didn’t ask how to do it. They asked me to do it.
That’s a skill issue right there. I’m not in the business of doing other people’s work for them. Now and then I’ll entertain the odd request of “how do I do x” and show someone how to get something done, mainly because it’s a lot less effort than telling them that I didn’t go to university for teaching, and all the ensuing arguments thereafter, because there’s always arguments.
But this was straight up “do my job for me”.
Lol, no, I have my own shit to do.
“skill issue” ticket closed
At a previous company, we would tag tickets in Zendesk based on the type of question it was so at the end of the year we could see which categories could use more explanation in our documentation. One of the category types was “LMGTFY”
The number of people who think that IT is supposed to know how to use every program and fix everything within those programs is a lot. I’ve had several engineers, programmers, designers, accountants, executives of who knows what consistently ask to fix their work or how to do whatever it is. I always try to point them in the right direction or help but other people in my field hate even that because it sets a precedent that the next time they need help they think they can ask again.
If I knew all of their jobs thoroughly like they seem to think, I wouldn’t be getting paid half what they are. I would need to be paid twice what they are, to support all of those positions in that way.
I’m a lot like you. For the most part, I try to look beyond the question being asked, and find the root cause. If the root cause is because of a skill issue, I’ll direct them to the next logical resource. If it’s not a skill issue, or I can’t determine that it’s a skill issue, then I’ll continue to test until I can make that determination.
9 times out of 10, if I find a solution to make a thing work in a program, I’ll share that with them, and let them take it from there.
A lot of the people I support are working in the finance space and my company has an entire support department for finance applications. I’ll either bounce the problem off of them, or just direct them to the finance support team for guidance.
This wasn’t either of those things. It wasn’t even asking how. It was straight up telling me to do a thing for them, in a program they should know how to use. It’s not a complex finance program or anything, it’s literally Outlook.
Yeah, Outlook has a lot of little things that throw people. Just getting people to find the view settings they want is tough sometimes, and font size in outlook doesn’t change with the character size of the OS being changed. Automatically disabling com add-ons that are supposed to not disable by group policy do to “slow start times” of outlook. Online calendars are a mess, sync issues, filter issues, spam issues, the spam blockers within the admin console of o365. Convincing people to get rid of .pst files. .pst files not being compatible with onedrive, importing .pst files to their online archive (which is really just a second email storage on the back end). Takes forever, then half don’t import properly, then you get them to re-run it and maybe it works but you have duplicates. Deleted emails that need recovery a month after they realized they needed it.
Sometimes it makes me realize why companies push users to just use the Webapp, but there’s always something.
Didn’t even touch the distros or shared emails/calendars yet lol
Outlook is a long list unto itself of random crap that’s probably going to go wrong.
To be fair, it’s not like word or Excel are any less complex, but people tend to know those apps way better for some reason.
The Web version is taking over. Just like they did with teams, they’re starting a webview version of Outlook. They’re very creative this time, calling it “new Outlook” 🤦♂️
It’s all very dumb.
I completely agree on the view settings too. It’s like a world unto itself just to sort and organize a single view of Outlook. I helped one user the other day, who simply wanted to see everything as conversations. It’s an easy fix, and it wasn’t the reason they logged a ticket, but it took about 8 seconds and I was already connected to their system.
Do office workers not have a requirement to learn basic MS office skills anymore?
In my experience it’s often simply expected by companys that the worker just knows this stuff because many GenX/Millenials just know their ways around that, but GenZ/Alpha are in general more knowledgeable about the functions of their smartphones than any desktop applications. It will take some time until HR departments start screening their applicants for stuff like Office knowledge (again - they used to 2 generations ago)
I hate that the Outlook Android app has ads that appear like unread emails, and as far as I know you can’t remove them (at least if you’re using a company-provided email).
Is that the Outlook coming from the Intune company portal app, or a personal install from the playstore and just adding an email they let you add? Sounds terrible. Most of the work I was doing as to had it all running through Intune, so I didn’t ever see that stuff. I could see how that would turn off most users. On our end just about every time security updates came out it would lock out the ability to access teams, outlook or anything until the updates were performed, and you logged back into the comp portal app to ensure the device was secure against whatever new threat there might be. So you’d have to set up confirm with 2 factors to get signed back in every couple months and require at least a pin to get into your emails.
Personal install from Playstore. I added my work email to Outlook on my personal phone, and I have it ignore notifications entirely outside of working hours. It works pretty great but there’s no way to remove the ads because it’s a work email, and the ads look like unread emails. It’s horrible and I can’t even do anything about it.
Look like unread emails as in like spam emails?
One of the things I had to learn quick working in IT was when to amiably tell a user to go pound sand. I’m a professional with my own work to do, not your personal assistant.
Whoa, I wonder how you worded that. Was it a straight up no? Lol
The short version is that I explained that we have a company policy that we are support, not education.
This is not a support issue because no technical issue is preventing the user from getting this completed.
I think that’s honestly worded really well.
Tell me you send them a link to the product support page
Some millionaire in my office: “Hey, Sanctus, what’s my password for my computer again?”
Me, who can barely afford to fix my car: fights the urge to use a letter opener as a weapon
That’s a really long password no wonder they forgot it.
Sick entropy, though.
Horse battery staple moment
Correct
Depends, if you treat the individual letters sure but if you look at the words as the atom of information most password crackers wouldn’t take long.
There are ~100 symbols on the US keyboard, many not permitted in a lot of online passwords (stupidly).
There are 11 words in the “passphrase”. Fight, letter, open, urge, weapon are not in the 100 most common English words. Urge is not in the 1000 most common English words (let alone fights vs fight, or opener vs open).
I think it would be a fairly strong password. You can reduce the entropy a bit by predicting likely next words in a sequence, but that would be defeated by adding some non sequitur(s). “fights the urge to use a letter opener as a scooter” or something.
Capitalization, intentional typos, spaces or not, ending punctuation? There a for sure ways to improve it as a password while still keeping the easy to remember, easy to type aspect. Overall it’s a great strategy to teach people for making passwords.
Well, I know what my next password will be! (Please don’t hack me)
With or without brackets?
I don’t blame anyone for forgetting their password—it’s a dumb system, having to memorize 100 separate 16-digit randomly generated base64 codes that change once a month. However, I do blame them for not using a password manager, and I do blame them for making their problems other people’s problems.
Ours isn’t like that at all. They dont even have to change it every three months. The insecurity is crazy here and they still can’t remember the same password they’ve had since before I started working here.
Forcing password changes too frequently is actually a security risk, as it encourages bad practices like re-use, iteration, keyboard walks and writing the passwords down.
There are reasonable limits to impose on this, and educating users with demonstrations such as haveibeenpwned have been highly effective in my experience.
“Sorry, that’s above my pay-grade.”
Your password is “giveMeFuckingRaise!1!1”
The sheer volume of people I’ve encountered through numerous jobs that are on high wages but lack basic skills astounds me.
They have other skills you don’t have, that are more important for those high paying jobs.
Like faking genuine interest in the shit their higher-ups blather on about, convincingly laughing at racist and misogynist jokes, backstabbing their peers when a position opens up, and doing the most demeaning tasks with a smile and a “thank you”.
“Soft skills”
I mean, yeah. You ever ask an average software “engineer” to have a constructive conversation with someone a different department? It’s a nightmare.
Removed by mod
Your fellow workers are not your enemy. The wealthy owning class who underpay you are your enemy.
Amen, comrade.
Removed by mod
I work in IT, and we recently hired a new “Engineer” at my company. I noticed on the form that he claimed to have extensive knowledge of Python, so I decided to meet him. The first question I asked was what IDE he uses, and he replied, “Anaconda.” Before I knew it, he was referring to the entire computer as a “CPU” and struggled to solve simple issues on Windows. To top it off, he makes 30% more than I do.
(I work as a Level 1 Service Technician, and my boss is aware that I have experience with coreboot and GNU/Linux. I just got approval to bring my own setup with it installed. Although we work in a Windows environment, I can make it work.
I also funded and helped test a bunch of hardware for coreboot, with guidance from friends I have who are experienced in the field. However, I only make $55k per year, I’m hoping I can get a nice raise. It’s just my boss and I as the two IT guys, so maybe there is potential.)
I work on a team that teaches courses on how to use specific programs. I’m at job level 1. A job level 3 guy keeps asking me to schedule meetings with him so I can teach him how to use the specific programs so then he can do the job he was hired for and teach other people how to use these specific programs.
Bruh, I’m not one for office drama, but I would recommend keeping records of that if no-one else knows he’s doing that to you.
time to switch places.
The people with the worst virtual meeting presences are the VPs and above. They expect us to shovel their shit. Like, buy a fucking mic and a light, pay for more than DSL broadband, and shut the fucking door so I can stop hearing whatever your teenage asshole kid is doing.
EDIT: FWIW managers at most levels aren’t much better, they live by the example set by the superiors they so idolize.
I had a group virtual interview during the pandemic and saw someone take a bong toke, then found out they got hired for the job.
As someone who had to struggle in a meeting because I’d never shared my screen in Teams before and they put it in some weird place, I feel attacked
Microsoft: “Here, have some shitty arcane dysfunctional software.”
Me: “Damn, this is hard to use.”
IT Guy: “Damn, I can’t believe you get paid to work here.”
Also IT Guy: low whisper “Fuck, they moved the button again. This is going to take me a minute.”
Corporate crapware changing the layout every 3 months and “streamlining the UI” is by far my biggest annoyance.
The amount of people who spend 0.12 seconds trying to figure shit out before throwing their hands up and saying “this is impossible, I can’t find it” is wild. Every time I use a new program, I go through it with excruciating depth, changing settings and finding how to do things. It usually takes 5 minutes or less.
The people who are just immediately helpless are the ones being bitched about here.
the giant share button at the top was too obvious?
My company switched from webex to teams with no transition time, the first 10 minutes of most meetings for a few weeks was “Am I audible?”, “I’m not sure how to share my screen”, “I started recording, you’ll have to unmute yourself again.”
It was agony, but it wasn’t due to anyone’s incompetence.
Fucking slack, man. And google meets, and zoom, and we bex, and goto meetings, and avaya
They get paid more because they know everything there is to know about agricultural law or some shit and you know how to screen share.
Strange judging only by how good they are with computers. They might have some other valuable skills that gets them paid highly.
Directors are known for their valuable and unique skill sets, accountability, transparency, and sense of duty and responsibility. Of course it only makes sense for them to be paid well, duh.
Yeah, it’s like judging a Ferrari owner for not knowing how to change the oil…
This is not a fair comparision imo. There is an assumption that salary is corellated with experience/knowledge/being useful. Fairer comparision would be judging Ferrari mechanic for not knowing how to change oil
I guess I’ll start screening my surgeons, attorneys, and accountants for how well they know how to use Zoom. This seems reasonable.
Open and admin window in on windows and do a deltree on C:\windows\system32
Profit
Even in IT I find that with each consecutive job that I get, my wage increases while my workload decreases. I’m literally being paid more to do less. I don’t think it’s the same for all these professionals but I feel that once most people reach a certain level, they mentally retire from learning new things.
I’ve often wondered if it was an age or even time thing. I’m 44 and I noticed at some point years ago I was getting more reluctant to click buttons and try to figure things out on my own. That’s how I learned everything as a kid and became the typical family IT guy. I had to relearn that curiosity and the willingness to learn things in that fashion, which I think shrank just from disuse. I’m not in IT, but I’ve seen that reluctance grow in other people too.
I wonder if rising to certain levels (or just gaining support staff to help with things) contributes to not doing small things. Then that can lead to an increased reluctance to do other small things. (Just out of no longer feeling comfortable with them.) I hadn’t thought about it, but it makes sense to me.
Someone with twice your salary might have another million and one things to try and remember, rather than the thing they only need to do once or twice a year.
Yes, networking skills are more valuable than service desk. It’s amazing how many service desk folks have a chip on their shoulder because they never moved on.
